Posts

In the XPS 13 we’re seeing a 15W Intel Core i5-5200U, which is a mid-table part with reasonable clock speeds designed primarily for efficiency. The nominal TDP (15W) is identical to Intel’s last-generation Haswell-U processors, such as the popular i5-4200U/4210U, but with better efficiency. Intel targets power consumption of 7.5W in the 5200U’s ‘down’ state of 600 MHz, a decent improvement on the 4210U’s 11.5W/800 MHz down state. Naturally power consumption will be even less when the CPU enters a low power, idling state....

The north bridge heatsink is connected to another heatsink featuring 36 fins which cools the phase power circuitry for the CPU. The south bridge or ICH10R is also passively cooled by a much smaller heatsink. Showing off hardware inside a Micro ATX case is difficult and not often done. However the LANParty JR X58-T3H6 will no doubt inspire a few custom mATX designs, as it features the same ‘out there’ green and yellow fluorescent slots and connectors that come to life under a UV light....

For the first time in ages, we decided to shelve Fraps in favor of the in-game benchmark. Although the built-in benchmark doesn’t have all cars follow the exact same path every time, we’ve found it to be highly accurate and a perfect representation of how the game performs. We’ve tested the game at three resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. Besides setting antialiasing to 4x, we maxed all quality settings. It’s worth noting that Dirt 3 doesn’t have quality presets such as low, medium and high, so you have to manually tweak the settings....

According to the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, between January 2020 and April 2022, a group of eight social media influencers conspired to target companies buying up thousands of dollars in stock. They then promoted those buys as hot tickets on their social media accounts. The indictment states that the stock scammers collectively had around 1.5 million Twitter followers. They also used the Discord server “Atlas Trading” to spread the bogus stock advice....

But Musk’s fortunes have taken a downturn in recent times. Much of his wealth is tied to ownership of Tesla shares, which have fallen from $381 in April to their current price of $123. It meant Musk lost his title of the world’s richest person to Bernard Arnault, chairman of French luxury conglomerate LVMH, in December. And as Bloomberg notes, Musk’s current fortune of $137 billion means his wealth has dropped by $200 billion, the first time in history this unwanted feat has happened....

Engineers from the University of Washington have developed a set of earbuds that achieve almost complete noise cancelation using machine learning. The earbuds, dubbed ClearBuds, were recently demonstrated at the Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. Besides the obvious application in audio-wear, the AI cancelation technique could be used in home speakers and to help robots with location tracking. A short video (below) shows the earpieces silencing a vacuum cleaner and even another person’s voice....

Epson contends that inkjet technology can reduce energy consumption compared to laser printers due to the latter’s need for heat during the printing process. Epson also said its new inkjet printers help limit resources used during production and shipping, and that high yield ink cartridges reduce material usage, shipping and storage requirements. Furthermore, Epson said inkjets utilize fewer moving and consumable parts over their lifetime compared to lasers. This, the company claims, substantially reduces service and maintenance needs, resulting in less printer downtime, improved productivity and heightened end-user satisfaction....

Ethereum has finally switched its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). The upgrade, known as the Merge, has been in the works for the better part of a decade and brings several noteworthy improvements to the network. The first phase of the Merge started on September 6, when the Bellatrix hard fork went live, which prepared the blockchain. Afterward, all that was left to do was wait for the Terminal Total Difficulty block to be mined, which would set off the so-called Paris upgrade....

Eve did offer us a monitor review unit, but we wanted to assess whether they would actually deliver a monitor to us after pre-ordering, and to see what the whole process is like. We were somewhat concerned that the product could be a scam - if they took pre-orders and never shipped units to customers beyond the first wave and to reviewers. So we secretly shopped this monitor to a different address and details so Eve wouldn’t know it was us....

Increasing the resolution to 2560x1600 dragged every single-GPU solution below 60fps, with the R9 290X falling just short with 57fps while the GTX 980 was slightly slower at 55fps. The R9 290 or GTX 780 Ti are about as low as you’ll want to go at this resolution. Disappointingly, the GTX 970 averaged just 44fps, being only marginally faster than the old HD 7970 GHz at 41fps. We believe this massive reduction in performance is due to the GTX 970’s partitioned memory configuration....

Israeli company Electreon has announced that it’s planning to build the first US road with wireless-charging capabilities for electric vehicles. The pilot project is set to be finished next year in Detroit, Michigan, and it’ll initially only be one mile long. The road will work by having an underground network of charging coils that connect to the energy grid, with EVs needing to have a receiver to charge while driving over them....

Foxconn today announced plans to manufacture batteries in the near future as part of its strategy to become the Android of the EV industry. Apple’s largest supplier says it wants to build new facilities in Taiwan where it will make battery cells, battery packs, and grid energy storage systems. As governments around the world push for the electrification of everything, the company seems determined to diversify its business and become a major supplier of key components for the auto industry as it transitions away from internal combustion engines....

The GeForce GTX 770 averaged 71.8fps at 2560x1600 in DiRT 3 making it slightly slower than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition which managed 74.2fps. However the overclocked Gainward GTX 770 Phantom was 6% faster than the standard GTX 770 which was enough to get past the 7970 GHz Edition by a slim 2% margin. The Gainward GTX 770 Phantom wasn’t able to beat the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition when measuring frame time performance in DiRT 3 as it was 4% slower....

It seems that an overwhelming majority of game developers are also against NFTs and their use as a monetization method in video games. According to the Game Developers Conference’s 2022 annual report, 70 percent of developers surveyed said their studios have no interest in implementing NFTs or cryptocurrency into their titles. That statistic may not be damning in and of itself. However, the comments left by some of the respondents are more telling....

Microsoft shocked the industry with what would be the Windows-maker’s largest deal to date, beating the $26.2 billion it paid for LinkedIn in 2016, the $19.7 billion Nuance Communications deal, and nearly ten times the $7.5 billion it paid for Bethesda parent company ZeniMax. For consumers, the acquisition will see many of Activision’s current and future games come to the Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass subscription services, though not until the deal completes in 2023....

Gamescom will be held in the Cologne exhibition halls in Germany from August 24 through August 28. Producer and host Geoff Keighley will once again kick off the festivities on August 23 with a special Opening Night Live broadcast that’ll no doubt produce plenty of world premieres and updates on existing projects. Organizers are taking steps to ensure the safety of visitors. For example, they will be utilizing an improved admission management system with a digital queue system and wider aisles on the show floor....

Here we see that the GTX 980 Ti SLI cards were just 1fps slower than the R9 Fury X Crossfire setup when comparing average frame rates. However, overclocking the R9 Fury X Crossfire cards only gained an extra 2fps while the GTX 980 Ti SLI cards became 13fps faster once overclocked, making them 13% faster than the Fury X cards. Despite seeing similar performance between the Crossfire and SLI setups when looking at minimum and average frame rates, we see that the Radeon R9 Fury X Crossfire configuration is considerably faster than the GTX 980 Ti SLI setup when comparing 99th percentile performance....

The G1.Sniper2 offered respectable reads and writes in our program copy test as well, regaining its fractional lead over the Extreme4. CrystalDiskMark confirms the G1.Sniper2’s strong USB 3.0 performance, showing that it can match the Extreme4.

Interestingly, the GeForce GTX 570 was only 6% slower than the GTX 580 when testing with Just Cause 2 at 1920x1200. That said, it was also just 2% faster than the GeForce GTX 480, which is a narrower margin compared to other games, while it managed to lead the GTX 470 by a 32% margin and the Radeon HD 5870 a 36% margin. Mass Effect 2 We again relied on Fraps to test Mass Effect 2, recording 60 seconds of gameplay from the level “Lazarus Research Station”....

The Titan averaged 54.2fps when testing Hitman: Absolution at 2560x1600, placing it a healthy 20% ahead of the GTX 660 Ti SLI cards, 67% over the GTX 680 and 33% above the HD 7970 GHz Edition. Accompanying its strong fps results, the Titan topped our latency chart with an average of 34.5ms between frames, a 24% better than the GTX 660 Tis and 17% better than the HD 7950s, despite the latter producing much quicker fps results than the Titan....