The European Commission was recently in the news for imposing a huge €4.3bn anti-trust fine on Google. The Commission has also take a firm decision against four electronics firms for price fixing. ASUS has received the biggest fine, but three other companies are being caught imposing fixed or minimum resale prices on their online retailers.

We are into the third quarter of 2018 and we have another Backblaze hard drive failure report to discuss. The report includes 100'254 spinning hard drives in Backblaze's data centers. The number includes 1'989 boot drives and 98'265 data drives. This review unveils several results and shows the score of 14TB HDD too.

Based on financial data from Gigabyte, Tul PowerColor as well as rumors that NVIDIA might be sitting on a rather large pile of GPUs, Computerbase.de have put together an interesting theory. It appears likely that the GPU vendors shiny financial reports from the past months were the result of the mining boom.

According to a recent report from Prad.de, some manufacturers have been using 4K (2160p) panels for their 1440p monitors. The reason behind this move is pretty simple, the 27-inch 4K panel often costs the same price than a 27-inch QHD (1440p) panel. If the reports are true, several manufacturers are offering QHD monitors with 4K capabilities.

A few months ago, the USB governing body published the specifications for USB 3.2. According to the specifications, the upcoming USB standard features two 10Gb/s channels that together can achieve up to 20Gb/s of throughput. That's half the speed of Thunderbolt 3, which is USB's better competitor.

Buying a monitor with HDR capability can be very confusing. In an effort to make things easier, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has released a DisplayHDR testing tool. This new software includes test specifications for luminance, color gamut, bit depth, and rise time. At the moment the tool is designed for LCD panels but will be soon available even for OLED displays.

A big treasure of information just appeared on Bluechip's (a German PC OEM) website. During a webinar, the German PC OEM has shown several slides about upcoming Intel and AMD chipsets. According to the pictures, AMD should release a Z490 chipset and Intel will add Z390 chipset as well.

A few days ago the well-known overclocker der8auer has delidded AMD's latest Ryzen CPU. After having run several benchmarks he concluded that delidding offers no meaningful temperature decreases or overclocking benefits at least when using a traditional CPU coolers.

The European Commission has delivered another fine to tech companies and in this case we are talking about capacitor companies. According to the Commision, several Japanese capacitor manufacturers have created a cartel association and price manipulation between the 1998 and 2012. The European Commission has issued a total of €254 million fine.

During the last year we have seen a massive cryptocurrency boom and plenty of people trying to take advantage of it. For example the UK government site has been hacked to mine, nuclear russian scientists tried to use super computers for mining and several torrent websites had Javascript-based cryptocurrency miners loaded.

A few years ago, the first version of the A4-SFX mini-ITX case from DAN Cases has gone live on Kickstarter with only 1500 samples available. The goal has been reached in just few hours and, a few months ago, the company has released a second version. During the last days, we have spotted the third generation of this little gaming PC that is available for pre-order.

If you are looking for a mid-tower case which is compatible with high-end graphics cards, E-ATX motherboard as well as watercooling setup, Kolink's Observatory RGB enclosure might be just what you've been looking for. This case shares the same chassis of the Kolink Stronghold.

Kolink has announced the Stronghold case, which offers support for E-ATX motherboards and two 240mm radiators. The Stronghold is a mid-tower chassis that's been made from steel and ABS plastic. Although there is a well-thought internal layout and a very reasonable number of features, the Kolink Stronghold comes at an attractive €39 price tag.

A coumple of months ago SUMCO, one of the largest silicon wafer producers in the world, was planning to increase prices during this year. In addition the company is planning to increase the price again in 2019. According to the latest rumors, Silicon wafer manufacturers are confirming this price increase.

Taipower just announced the new Mirage NP900 NVMe SSD, which is the first product to use the new SM226x controllers from Silicon Motion. According to latest rumors, Silicon Motion will released four controller that we should see during CES in a few days.

Buying a monitor with HDR capability can be very confusing. In an effort to make things easier, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) is rolling out DisplayHDR testing tool. This new software includes test specifications for luminance, color gamut, bit depth, and rise time. At the moment the tool is designed for LCD panels but will be soon available even for OLED displays.

Earlier this year, we first began hearing about the upcoming HDMI 2.1 specification which is set to support up to 4K/120Hz and 8K/60Hz. Now after several months, the HDMI Forum has finalized its specification, making HDMI 2.1 official. TV/monitor makers can start making good use of it.

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) has released the specifications for USB 3.2. The new standard is supposed to allow for up to 20 Gbps (gigabits per second, not gigabytes per second) transfer speeds, thanks to two more sets of SuperSpeed pins. In order to get those speeds you need a USB Type-C connector.

As Virtual Reality is obviously the next big thing, it does not come as a surprise that some companies will try to make products that will be additions to VR gaming and one of those is the RotoVR, the Interactive Virtual Reality Chair that should bring a new experience to VR gaming.

Meanwhile AMD board partners have come up with their custom RX 470 cards. So far we have an ASUS Strix, a Gigabyte Gaming and a XFX Black Edition version in the card deck.