[PC Hardware Portal Article Discussion] garwynn:
Hey everyone! I've been silent for a while for personal reasons. But we're at a point where things are about to heat up... literally!

Many things have changed since my last update, so I'll give a rundown of those changes here.

This should also help readers know where we're headed in the next 3 months for coverage, reviews and other content.

The Move

Most of you that read our articles may have seen some strange activity last month.

In a very condensed version, I am back in the US for the time being.

But due to the conditions of that return not all of the testing hardware made it back.

The test bench, power supplies, AIO cooler, Ryzen-G build and a 512 GB m.2 drive all stayed behind.

And yes, the PC-O11 Dynamic stayed behind as well.

The test bench has been replaced already with the plans that I had for a second.

It now uses the Lian Li PC-T70 instead of its predecessor. PSU is now 1000W, not 750W.

This will have relevance as we start digging into the new hardware we have.

HEDT CPU Update

I've been vocal at how I thought we didn't get enough of a look at high end desktop CPUs last year. And now, that goal is going to happen.

Thanks to help from AMD and Intel we now have a Threadripper 1950X and Core i9-7900X!

The Threadripper arrived first so it went in the test bench first.

After that I'm likely going to buy another PC-O11 Dynamic case out of pocket and finish that build with it and the Powercolor Red Devil Vega 56.

But if I want to run it and the 7900X at the same time, I think I need some more RAM as well.

There is no embargo on these so we can be a lot more interactive on this coverage.

At a minimum I'm going to start up a new thread for testing these. If readers want to add some ideas or request tests in particular, let us know!

GPU Update

I often look at our peers (other sites such as Phoronix) to help gauge if our benchmarks are accurate or not.

And what I'm finding is that we may want to re-think that. My performance results were far lower than expected.

I'm working on this right now while I'm working to source other GPUs that we don't have.

We're also hoping to be considered for the RTX 20-series when they come up for review. We'll share more on that when we can.

4K Testing and Stream Capture

I mentioned before that I'd like to stream more of our testing. I also needed some way to test in 4K.

Pengo has sent us a capture device for review. May try testing a stream this weekend to my personal Twitch account.

Steam on Linux - More games

We normally don't cover games, but there are exceptions.

The recent beta for Steam on Linux is one such reason. So expect us to look at it.

We'll want to know how games that didn't run before perform.

We'll also want to look at games we have used in benchmarks and how they perform in Linux native versus the new beta.

The results of this may have us change our testing methodology. So it's a good thing to look at.

Other Reviews Coming Up

We still have the ZOTAC Zbox and a mITX Intel motherboard from GIGABYTE to look at.

I'd like to do the mITX as a build suggestion with the Intel Core i5-8400 and the RX 580 we have handy. May work as a on-the-go build.

We have two new storage products from Intel to also look at.

Team Updates

You may have noticed that TK and [MENTION=1329052]altimax98[/MENTION] are now joining in the coverage, as well as others on the news side.

Daniel (altimax98) is looking at a system from Dell and I'm looking forward to seeing what he found.

TK is helping me set up again for filming while he works on other content.

I want to thank all of our portal team members and you - our readers - for the continued support.

And by all means, please feel free to contact me here by PM or reply in this thread with any feedback!