38 PCWorld JULY 2019NEWS MONSTROUS HARDWARE FROM COMPUTEX 2019
eight cores to 5GHz
while boosting.
Yowza. Often, boost
clock ratings apply
only to a single core.
The Core i9-9900KS
also maintains a
higher 4GHz base
clock. Further details
weren’t released.
You might be able
to push it even further
with Intel’s blessing.
The company
announced a new Performance Maximizer
one-click overclocking tool (go.pcworld.com/
maxm), which puts your 9th-gen K-series chip
through a series of automated tests to find its
upper limits. To coincide with the Performance
Maximizer’s enthusiast focus, Intel also
announced the return of the Performance
Tuning Protection Plan, which will replace your
Core processor if you blow it up during your
overclocking adventures. It costs $20 for three
years of protection.
On the storage front, Intel announced its
2nd-gen Optane Memory M15 drive (go.
pcworld.com/m15d), an upgraded version of
the company’s caching technology that pairs
with your primary storage to supercharge the
speeds of your most-used files and apps. The
latest version gets an overdue update from
two to four PCIe lanes, making Optane
Memory even faster.- NVIDIA RTX STUDIO
LAPTOPS AND ADAPTIVE
SYNC REVELATIONS
Nvidia had a quieter Computex than its rivals,
but still made some announcements of its
own. Most notable: RTX Studio laptops (go.
pcworld.com/rtxs), a new program that
matches fully loaded, performance-oriented-
yet-sleek laptops—with dedicated ray-tracing
hardware, natch—and specialized Nvidia
Studio drivers optimized around content
creation apps. The antithesis of Intel’s slim,
long-lasting Project Athena laptops, RTX
Studio laptops are built for people who need
to get hard work done fast.
On the consumer front, Nvidia revealed
why its G-Sync Compatible program flunks
over 94 percent of FreeSync monitors (go.
pcworld.com/94pc), and it’s an interesting
read. The company also said it’s launching the
6.