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The Matrix is one of several pieces of sci-if media in which those who die inside a virtual world also die in real life, a trope Luckey discusses in his blog post. He references an incident from Sword Art Online (SAO), a mid-2000s series of Japanese novels that spawned anime, video games, and more. According to the fiction, an “SAO Incident” took place on November 6, 2022, in which 10,000 players were trapped in a VRMMORPG, 4,000 of whom died in real life after their characters perished in the game....

Having seen some phenomenal transfer rates in our file copy tests, we are keen to see how the RevoDrive 350 handled our application tests. Installing Red Orchestra 2 took just 80 seconds with the RevoDrive 350, 15 seconds (16%) faster than its predecessor. The RevoDrive 350 really impressed us when scanning the Windows System32 folder with MSE. Whereas the fastest SATA SSDs all seem to be bottlenecked at the 43 second mark, the RevoDrive 350 finished the task in just 27 seconds, 37% faster than the RevoDrive 3 X2 and other high-end SSDs....

The Vector 256GB is currently in one of our office PCs which is used heavily on a daily basis and it has been there for around 9 months now without a problem. Had we had more time (we had less than 48 hours to get this review on time for you) we would have pulled the Vector from the office PC, updated the firmware and re-ran all the tests, though this is still something we plan to do....

There are lots of products that at one point were so popular, we believed they would never fade into obscurity, but even something that seems irreplaceable can be pushed aside, just ask Blockbuster. In this feature, we look at some of those one-time favorites – and products that were set to become the next big thing – but are now only something we over-forties talk about in drunken conversations that start with, “Hey, do you remember…” Whether you look upon this once-beloved tech with warm nostalgia or a combination of amusement and slight pity, it’s worth remembering that the miniature computer you call a smartphone can trace its origins to several items on this list, some of which it helped make obsolete....

Video game publisher Paradox Interactive just announced a program that allows fans to develop, publish, and profit from video games set in their World of Darkness universe. Paradox acquired the rights to World of Darkness in 2015 when it purchased White Wolf Publishing and all of its intellectual property. It started as a series of tabletop role-playing games with the most well-known being Vampire: The Masquerade. These were eventually adapted into other media including a line of video games....

Moving on from our last round of testing, we have an epic battle between Radeon and GeForce graphics cards. Before going any further, we should note that PUBG is an Nvidia supported title and during the game’s early access phase it heavily favored hardware from the green team. For whatever reason, AMD almost always gets the rough end of the stick when it comes to hugely popular titles – actually, the reason is money, and Nvidia simply has more of it to throw at developers....

The results from a recent study that surveyed 400 US-based IT decision makers about their current and/or planned usage of private cellular networks confirm those thoughts to a degree. However, they also make it clear that the challenges facing companies currently deploying or planning to deploy these types of networks are bigger than many realize. Ultimately, it seems the real-world opportunities and benefits of private 5G are much more nuanced than many have been led to believe....

With your storage in place, you’ll want to run the Quick Setup Wizard to install the firmware (supplied on a CD or downloaded from QNAP’s site), followed by a six-step setup process. The first step requires you to assign the TS-412 a server name – we went with QNAP. Next, you must create an administrator password using any combination of characters (there are no restraints on how complex the password must be)....

Third-person roguelike Returnal arrived on the PS5 last year to praise from critics and consumers alike, earning several nominations and prizes from various video game ceremonies. A Steam DB listing in May hinted at the game losing its PS5 exclusivity, and the port was confirmed at the Game Awards a few days ago. “You want how much RAM?” But those who plan on getting the best out of Returnal will need a fairly beastly rig....

Since 2014, Roku has collaborated with numerous TV manufacturers to implement a Roku streaming box into televisions, making for a convenient all-in-one package. Due to these partnerships, Roku saw its software installed on approximately one-third of all televisions sold in the U.S. At CES 2023, Roku confirmed two different lines of TVs: a lower-end “Roku Select” and a “Roku Plus” series. The televisions will be available in various screen sizes ranging from 24 to 75 inches....

While the 6GB model costs $400, the 3GB model can be had for $300. Given there are no other differences between these cards other than the memory buffer size, we highly recommend gamers go with the much cheaper 3GB version. There is no instance where a Radeon R9 280X will require more than 3GB of memory. While a 6GB buffer is ideal for multi-monitor setups or even 4K displays, the 280X cannot provide playable performance at these resolutions, in fact even two cards would struggle and likely fail....

We heard reports last year claiming the RTX 4000 cards would use some of the most power-hungry GPUs we’ve ever seen. That’s especially true of the AD102 that’s rumored to have a TGP of 800W or more. The latest rumors come from prolific leakers Kopite7kimi and Greymon55, both of whom say they’ve heard claims that the AD102 GPUs will have scarily high TGPs. The former thinks the RTX 4080 will carry a 450W TGP and the RTX 4080 Ti will be 600W....

But without question the most popular question we received afterwards was: should you buy the Ryzen 5 3600 or the 3600X? Before going into in-depth testing though, here’s a quick run down in regards to how these two CPUs compare on paper. The Ryzen 5 3600 comes clocked at 3.6 GHz for the base and 4.2 GHz for the boost, the 3600X runs 200 MHz faster at 3.8 GHz and 4....

Although we see the same frame time performance at 720p the 8700K did pull away quite considerably for the average frame rate. However this advantage wasn’t seen at 1080p or 1440p, here performance was much the same. Here we see a massive discrepancy in the CS:GO benchmark between the frame time and average frame rate performance and this is mostly down to the fact that the benchmark is very diverse....

There are a large number of Galaxy Note 4 models on the market, larger than the number of SoCs Samsung has used, so the model numbers seen in the benchmarks that follow may not correspond to what you’ll see in your country. However, the vast majority of the hardware between the Snapdragon variants and the Exynos variants is the same, so you should expect near identical performance. The Exynos model we used is the SM-N910U, which is the model on sale in Asia....

I’m not a huge fan of the Galaxy S6 Active’s design. It’s big, it’s chunky, and the classic ‘rugged’ look is nowhere near as appealing as the sleek metal body of the standard Galaxy S6. But what it lacks in class it makes up for in toughness: the S6 Active can easily handle bumps, shocks and drops without a case, making it the perfect option for people who would have slapped a case on the Galaxy S6 anyway....

For most markets, including the United States, the Galaxy S7 Edge will be sold with a Snapdragon 820 inside. This is Qualcomm’s latest flagship SoC, packing four in-house-designed ARMv8 cores known as ‘Kryo’, split into two 2-core clusters. The more powerful of these clusters is clocked at 2.2 GHz for high-performance tasks, while less intensive tasks will be performed on the 1.6 GHz cluster. The Snapdragon 820 is also equipped with an Adreno 530 GPU clocked at 624 MHz, as well as a new Hexagon 680 DSP and support for HEVC decoding at 4K 60 FPS....

As expected, the Extreme Pro maxes out the SATA 6Gb/s bus when measuring sequential read performance. The sequential write performance of the Extreme Pro also sees it max out the SATA 6Gb/s bus. Like the SanDisk Extreme II, the newer Extreme Pro offers poor random 512K read performance with a throughput of just 326MB/s. Although this is a 20% improvement over the previous model, it makes the Extreme Pro over 30% slower than the 850 Pro....

This is something that’s been asked since the introduction of consumer-level processors bearing the “x64” nomenclature. It feels like just yesterday that Intel and AMD fanboys were at odds over the Athlon 64. At that time and even as recently as the introduction of Windows Vista, software and drivers for 64-bit setups were slim-pickings. Analogous to the shift from 16 to 32-bit computing, the jump to 64-bit has been a slow one....