We occasionally post less formal "site updates" that help bring everyone up to speed on what's going on.
As many of you likely know, the AMD events pertaining to RX Vega and Threadripper just ended, and so we're already working on test planning for these products. Release is the 10th for Threadripper, and so it'd be reasonable to assume review publication around that time. RX Vega is mid-August, with rumblings that August 14 is the release target. Those are our major items right now, but aren't the only things we're working on.
Now that we're back in the office, Noctua testing is underway and being finalized over the next few days. We've got an anemometer, noise meter, and fan controller on the bench to help test for quality control variance between the Taiwan- and China-made fans. Noctua supplied a few, readers supplied a few, and we bought some. This larger sample size, although tedious to test, will help ensure that there's not just one fan with a manufacturing defect. We just locked-in testing for the first fan; honestly, it's pretty exciting to see the results come in. This is a new type of testing for us, and something that we can apply to other fans in the future.
Beyond this, we just got in a Xeon 12C/24T CPU from the X79 era for our render machine. Benchmarks are underway on it -- because why not? -- and we'll soon move over to this process for Andrew's primary machine. That'll happen this week. We're hoping to do some sort of coverage on the performance uplift, if there is any, from moving to this higher thread-count CPU. If there's no change, well, we'll find a use for it elsewhere. Maybe Handbrake transcoding for our videos.
We've got a few mice in for review, theoretically, and are also working on other small side items. The EK WB Fluid Gamer kit is built (and was built on live stream), but hasn't been run through the test battery yet. It was leak-tested for two days and found to be free of leaks, though!
More to come, as always. Stay tuned. We're still getting back into gear following the trip.
- Steve.