In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, and Adam Patrick Murray review the next-gen Intel laptop chips and NUC mini-PCs released this week, then talk about what to expect from the beta version of Minecraft that will add real-time ray tracing to the legendary game. It’s coming out this week, too.
We kick things off with Gordon’s review of Intel’s “Comet Lake H” 10th-gen Core laptop processors, as championed by the fantastic Gigabyte Aero 17. The Core i7-10875H brings 8 cores and 16 threads to the mobile Core i7 lineup for the first time ever, resulting in a kick-ass, enthusiast-class chip that’s both loaded up with cores and blazing along at 5GHz-plus clock speeds. It’s easily the best Core i7 chip ever. But how does it stack up against the game-changing Ryzen 4000 laptop chips released at the end of month? We dig in.
After that, Brad explains everything you need to know about the Minecraft beta that brings ray tracing and Nvidia’s DLSS 2.0 technology to the game. When we filmed the episode, Brad was restricted from talking about his impressions, but now the review embargo’s lifted and we can say ray traced Minecraft is face-meltingly (and GPU-meltingly) awesome. Look for the beta to drop at 10 a.m. Pacific / 1 p.m. Eastern time today to try it yourself!
Finally, Alaina goes deep in her review of Intel’s new Ghost Canyon NUC, which is versatile enough to hold a discrete graphics card and revolves around a radical “Compute Card” concept. The first modular NUC heralds a new future for mini PCs, and Alaina explains why, complete with a visual history lesson of the ever-expanding size of Intel’s compact computers.
And as always, we fielded questions from you, our viewers, listeners, and Discord members. What long-dead tech would each of us revive? Tune in and find out.
You can witness it all in the video embedded above. You can also watch The Full Nerd episode 135 on YouTube (subscribe to the channel while you’re there!) or listen to it on Soundcloud if you prefer the audio alone.
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