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Netbooks In the late 2000s, if you wanted a very low-cost portable laptop and didn’t care about speed, computing power, storage, screen size, playing games, etc. then you bought a Netbook. I was part of this fad, and have terrible memories of squinting at my Intel Atom N270-powered machine as it took several minutes to load Windows XP. Netbook specs improved slightly as the decade drew to a close and for a while they were even hailed as the savior of the laptop market....

Given our first impression with the first entry, we didn’t hesitate to take BioShock 2 for a spin a couple years later. However, as is often the case, the second title was less of a technical showpiece. It also used a modified build of Unreal Engine 2.5 and looked similar to its predecessor with no major improvements. In turn, the game could be run on max quality at 1920x1200 with a relatively affordable graphics card....

Since the rise of fobs that automatically unlock and start cars, car thieves have developed ways to circumvent their digital locks, and security measures have evolved in response. The situation resembles the cat-and-mouse game between hackers and security throughout the IT world. Recently, cheap electronic devices have emerged that let thieves duplicate a fob’s proximity sensor signal from within a few meters. They can then boost that signal to an accomplice standing next to the car, allowing them to open and start it....

Rendering 57fps at 1680x1050, Nvidia’s GTX 460 was the quickest card tested in Crysis, edging ahead of the HD 6790 about 3fps. Performance declines quickly after the 6790 with the 6770 averaging 47fps, which is about 2% faster than the more expensive GTX 550 Ti. The GTS 450 and HD 6750 managed to average 40fps and at $110 they were 30% slower than the GTX 460 while being 27% cheaper....

The peak write bandwidth numbers for the OCZ Agility 2 and Vertex 2 40GB SSDs are impressive with both drives topping out at 268MB/s. The next fastest drives were the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB and Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB with both cracking the 100MB/s mark. However, while the 32K and 128K performance of the hard drives was impressive they suffered when measuring 1K, 2K and even 8K performance. Perhaps the most consistent drives in this test other than the OCZ Agility 2 and Vertex 2 40GB SSDs were the Onyx 32/64GB drives....

Building a system like this primarily for gaming is somewhat pointless, mostly due to the fact that no game really uses more than 4 cores effectively, and this is the same reason that Core i5 and Core i7 processors always seem to deliver very similar numbers in all our gaming performance benchmarks. Therefore, it stands to reason that a Sandy Bridge Core i5 processor will deliver similar performance to the Xeon E5-2670, rendering the Xeon(s) overkill and thus somewhat pointless....

The Maya benchmark revealed a similar trend. AMD’s FX-4170 seized the throne, while the FX-8150 trailed with a 55% lead on the Phenom II X6 110T and a 7% jump on the Core i7-2600K. CINEBENCH R11.5 broke Bulldozer’s momentum as the FX-8150 rendered an average of 48.96fps, which was 9% slower than the i5-2500K and i7-2600K. Nonetheless, it was 4% faster than the Phenom II X4 980 and 6% quicker than the Phenom II X6 1100T....

The trial will feature two maps from season two – Casablanca and Gondola – as well as classics like Shipment and Das Haus. A new large-map objective mode, meanwhile, is set in the Alps. This team-based mode can be won by being the first to capture all of the bases. Once a stronghold is captured, players can choose to spawn at it or any other captured point. Friendly posts also have stations where you can pick up additional armaments including vehicles to get across the map faster....

The project, from the duo of zel and vertigo, is said to feature widescreen and upscaling support. In the video’s description on YouTube, zel said the game is nearly fully playable although there are still some minor glitches that will be resolved soon. This PC port is not associated with Harbour Masters or any other group. Vertigo told Video Games Chronicle that the two groups’ design philosophies and middleware were simply too different for them to work together efficiently....

For Honor is heavily GPU bound and we see that here with all configurations providing roughly the same average frame rate. That said, the minimums do differ a bit and the overclocked 7700K provides the best results. Wildlands is another heavily GPU bound game so the margins here are quite close, but the 7700K was able to deliver a few extra frames. Mass Effect Andromeda is another game that isn’t that heavy on the CPU despite the fact that it will spread the load quite evenly across a large number of threads....

Since launching its first mechanical gaming keyboard, Cougar has continued releasing PC gaming devices ranging from the ultra affordable to the relatively expensive. Its most affordable keyboard is the 200K at just $30, though the company’s mechanical options begin at $85 with the Attack 2. On the upper end of things, Cougar’s flagship 700K has been commended for everything from its sturdy aluminum construction to its heavily customizable software, and while $150 might not be outrageous for a mechanical keyboard with so many features, it’s too expensive for most gamers....

While many of the AMD processors struggled with the MonteCarlo test, they performed rather well in the BigNumberCrunch test. The Sempron 140 bummed out completely providing very poor performance in both ocassions. Using WinRAR we conducted our own real-world testing, with two different test samples. The Phenom II X2 555 did very well delivering by far our best results, followed by the Athlon II X4 630. The Pentium G9650 was the fastest Intel processor when compressing the larger 700MB single file....

The m4 mSATA delivered the same performance as the m4 2.5" and Kingston HyperX in PCmark 7’s importing pictures test with a throughput of 26.9MB/s. The compact m4 slipped behind Crucial’s larger drive in PCmark 7’s video editing test, though it was still ahead of the Samsung 830 Series and Vertex 4 with a throughput of 22.7MB/s. We recorded a considerable difference in performance between both m4 drives for the first time, with the smaller version scoring 49....

Better yet, CEO CEO Kris Marszalek told the publication he expects to reach 100 million users by the end of this year. Marszalek’s company is a bit unique in the space in that they’ve never taken an outside investment. “We’ve obviously had a tremendous amount of interest, with some very generous offers, but cash hasn’t been a limiting factor given the amount of revenue the company produces,” the executive said....

The dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590 sailed along without any problems averaging 95fps, proving that SLI is working fine. We found that the single-player portion of the game requires an average of at least 40fps for smooth playable performance. Most of the graphics cards tested will provide satisfactory performance at 1680x1050. However for perfectly smooth gameplay 50fps+ on average is warranted, which means you will need a very high-end graphics card....

The Log4J zero-day vulnerability surfaced in early December and quickly morphed into a major problem. Amit Yoran, head of cybersecurity firm Tenable, described it as the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade - and perhaps even the biggest in modern computing history. Check Point Research in its latest report said education and research industries experienced the highest volume of attacks in 2021 with an average of 1,605 attacks per organization each week....

And this is a shame, because when it comes down to it, the Inspiron 13 7000 2-in-1 is actually a pretty neat convertible laptop, packing the latest Intel 8th generation Kaby Lake-R processors. It’s not as cheap as the most basic Inspiron notebooks, but the 7000 series comes close to offering what Dell’s premium XPS line provides, just at a lower cost. Aside from Intel’s latest Core i5 or i7 CPUs, this Inspiron 13 convertible packs 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD as standard, along with a 13....

GPU performance is where we see much higher gains for Intel’s 5th generation Core processors over the previous generation. On average the i5-5200U is 20% faster in the graphics department, a very good result for Broadwell. This corresponds pretty neatly to the increase in the GPU’s execution units (20%), but as there was also a 10% decrease in clock speeds across those execution units, slight improvements to architecture and CPU performance played their part....

From a little-known Scottish studio called Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) comes a somewhat mysterious new game titled “Everywhere.” Everywhere premiered on Opening Night Live with a strange trailer that raised more questions about the game than it answered. If you didn’t already see it in our trailer roundup, watch it (above) before reading further so you can understand what we mean. While you may have never heard of Build a Rocket Boy, the studio’s founder Leslie Benzies might be familiar to you....

More than a dozen games have been built using CryEngine 3 but none look quite as nice as Crysis in our opinion, while the fourth iteration of CryEngine has only really been used by late 2013’s Ryse: Son of Rome, which largely bombed but not because it was ugly – its graphics were among the only positive qualities that reviewers could find. We’ve been eagerly anticipating more games based on the latest CryEngine – which is now referred to without a version number – and that wait is now over: From the creators of Left 4 Dead, Evolve launched this week on PC, Xbox One and PS4....