The EMEA PC market returns to growth in Q2 2019, Gartner reports, as shipments are up by 1.7% Y-o-Y thanks to "strong" business demand brought about by Windows 10 deployments and PC refreshes from companies and government organisatsions.

The same cannot be said about consumer demand though, since it remains "very weak." According to the analyst mainstream users are not seeing enough innovation outside of gaming and high-end mobile PCs, leading to longer PC life cycles and a "very negative" impact on midtier PC vendors used to selling more to the consumer segment.

From a global perspective, Q2 2019 PC shipments total 63 million units, a 1.5% Y-o-Y increase from Q2 2018 shipments of 62m. Gartner points out demand from the Windows 10 refresh in the business market, as well as "strong" desktop PC growth offsetting a decline in mobile PC shipments. Furthermore, the Intel CPU shortage appears to be easing. The shortage mainly impacted small and midsize vendors, since large vendors took advantage and continued to growing, taking market share from smaller vendors struggling to acquire CPUs.

Cooler Master announces the European launch of the MasterCase H100, a compact mini-ITX chassis customers can configure as a portable gaming rig (complete with built-in handle) or miniature living room PC.

First announced back in May at Computex 2019, the H100 carries a large 200mm RGB fan within a recessed mounting. The front panel and part of the top panel feature Cooler Master Fine Mesh, a means to filter out dust, allows for unrestricted ventilation and makes for easier cleaner and maintenance. In total the chassis measures 312 x 216 x 301mm, with construction in steel, plastic and steel mesh.

Intel announces the availability of the NUC 8 Mainstream-G (aka "Islay Canyon") mini PCs, all packing 8th gen Intel Whiskey Lake processors and, thanks to a deal with AMD, optional Radeon 540X graphics.

The range offers 4 models in all, with a choice of low-power Intel Core i5-8265U and Core i7-8565U processors. The chassis remains the standard 12 x 11cm number, and all carry 8GB of soldered-down LPDDR3-1866/2133 DRAM. As mentioned earlier Radeon 540X discrete graphics (codenamed Lexa, based on Polaris architecture) are an option, but customers can also go for Intel UHD 630 graphics.

Nvidia announces "Super" editions of the RTX20-series graphics cards-- an update promising a performance boost of up to 25% together with all the features found in the regular versions, such as real-time ray tracing.

Launched less than a year ago, the RTX 20-series graphics cards are the first consumer products from Nvidia based on Turing architecture. The technology features dedicated ray tracing cores for ray tracing acceleration, together with Tensor cores to accelerate AI tasks and game performance and super-fast GDDR6 VRAM.