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HIS R9 290X iPower IceQ X² Turbo 4GB Although the R9 290X was released roughly six months ago now, HIS has held off from releasing custom versions using their IceQ technology, instead pushing reference cards all this time. That’s unusual, but given the limited supply of Hawaii XT GPUs and the absurd pricing of 290X cards due to crypto mining, there has been limited demand from gamers. As pricing nears the original MSRP of $550, gamers are once again interested in the mighty R9 290X and HIS plans to capitalize on that with its special iPower IceQ X² Turbo version....

Using the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB HDD we saw OS boot up times reduced by 33%. Going from 27 seconds with Windows 7 to just 18 seconds with Windows 8 is obviously a significant improvement and it means SSD users will be able to load Windows 8 in a matter of a few seconds. A similar improvement is seen when measuring shutdown time. Windows 8 took 8 seconds versus the 12 seconds it took an identically configured Windows 7 system....

Crossword-Solver recently put together an extensive report highlighting the most popular emoji from around the world. The face with tears of joy is the top emoji globally (it is number one in 75 countries) on Twitter followed by the red heart. The face with tears of joy is used nearly 19 percent more often than the second-place red heart. In countries where the face with tears of joy or red heart isn’t number one, that country’s flag almost always reigns supreme....

When getting our first taste of the Sandy Bridge architecture we were also given the opportunity to check out some rather impressive looking Gigabyte motherboards in the P67A-UD4 and H67MA-UD2H. For those building a new high-end rig from the ground up, the LGA1155 platform looks like the way to go and there are already quite a few exciting new P67 motherboards to choose from. Therefore we decided to put together a roundup featuring many of the very best P67 motherboards available....

The main menu feature five large icons that read “Green Power”, “Utility”, “OC”, “Game” and “Setting”. The “Utility” menu has another four icons which provide access to “Memory Test”, “Live Update”, “HDD Backup” and “Boot Screen” menus. The OC menu is quite compact and all the overclocking options can be viewed together. The OC menu also offers a feature that allows the user to save up to six different UEFI configurations....

Nowadays, Activision Blizzard should really be called Activision Blizzard King. If you haven’t heard of King, you’d be forgiven. It’s the maker of Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, Bubble Witch, and little else. But it’s also a money printer. King made $685 million for Activision Blizzard last quarter, when the two namesakes only made $600 and $296 million, respectively. Activision made the most in the console market, with $360 million. It generated $100 million from the PC and $135 million from mobile sales, a good portion of which would’ve come from the evergreen Call of Duty Mobile....

The pictures are of a good enough quality to be used as the wallpaper on your desktop background and if you’ve seen one recently that’s worth adding to your collection, there’s a chance the image is still stored locally. However, accessing the cached lock screen photos isn’t so simple. Among other hindrances, they are saved to an unfrequented location in Windows 10’s user files… Shortcut: Use an App Originally this article detailed where to find Windows Spotlight images, batch rename them, and get them locally....

While the top end Alienware 15 models are very expensive, mostly due to SSD pricing, you can get a system that’s much better than the base model by simply spending a few hundred dollars. With the GTX 1060 variant, it’s well worth spending an extra $150 to net yourself a faster Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor, 16 GB of RAM, and an additional 1 TB HDD. All three of these purchases will make a significant difference to the gaming experience for just an 11% increase in price....

The base specs are very similar: it’s the same 34-inch 3440 x 1440 QD-OLED ultrawide panel from Samsung with an 1800R curvature. Naturally, it’s a true HDR product with DisplayHDR TrueBlack 400 certification, and it has rated 0.1ms response times. On paper, the only main spec difference is a slight refresh rate decrease at 165Hz for the DWF vs 175Hz on the DW, though practically speaking this makes next to no difference while gaming as it’s only a 6% reduction....

Far Cry 3 is not dual-core friendly and therefore the AMD A4-4000 and A4-5300 APUs really suffered. Despite also being dual-core parts, the Celeron G1610 and Pentium G2020 performed much better, with the former outclassing AMD’s A4-4000 by a 33% margin. The AMD A10-6800K on the other hand averaged 53.2fps and was able to roughly match the performance of the Core i5 processors. Tomb Raider is the perfect example of how these CPUs and APUs perform using high-end GPUs in graphically demanding games....

Compared to the A8-7600 (65w), the A10-7850K was just 5% faster in the 3DMark 06 benchmark which meant that it was 4% slower than the A10-6800K which was tested with slightly faster memory. The A10-7850K finished the Excel 2013 workload in 16, half a second faster than the A8-7600 but more than a second slower than the A10-6800K. The A10-7850K was just 4% faster than the A8-7600 when testing with 7-zip’s benchmark, which was also 7% slower than the A10-6800K....

Please note all discrete graphics cards have been tested with the Core i3-8100 using 16GB’s of DDR4-2400 memory. Then for comparison the Raven Ridge APUs have been tested using their Vega 8 and Vega 11 integrated graphics and they’ve been paired with 16GB’s of DDR4-3200 memory and the Althon 200GE with 8GB’s of DDR4-2666. As you can see the 200GE was good for an average of just 32 fps at 720p using the medium quality settings....

First up, we have SPECviewperf v11’s SolidWorks test, in which the FX-8350 delivered virtually the same performance as its predecessor, the FX-8150, despite featuring an 11% clock speed advantage. The FX-6300 was just 4% faster than the FX-6100, a smaller margin than would be expected of its 6% clock lead. Regardless of these minor improvements, we found the FX-8350 to be capable of matching the Core i7-3770K while beating the Core i5-3470 by an impressive 18% margin....

When it comes to CPUs, AMD keeps humming along as Intel delivered a strong Alder Lake lineup for consumers and even went to great lengths to make its Xeon Scalable processors more appealing when compared to Epyc offerings for the data center. According to the latest market report from Mercury Research, AMD continued to erode Intel’s dominance in the x86 CPU space throughout the first quarter of this year. Mercury president Dean McCarron says that almost all processor market segments experienced a decline during the quarter, with shipments of desktop processors seeing the largest quarterly drop ever — 30 percent....

That’s certainly exciting and is something that will keep us busy in the weeks and months to come. Except that we’ve got a tough choice to make. You see, these new graphics cards will support PCI Express 4.0, but our GPU test system which we just recently upgraded to a Core i9-10900K, doesn’t, rather it’s limited to PCIe 3.0. So we can either stay the course and do what we’ve always done, test with the fastest gaming CPU available at the time, and then investigate PCIe 4....

For the second time in this review, the Radeon HD 6870 edged ahead of the Radeon HD 5870, offering 3% more speed at 1920x1200. The Radeon HD 6870 was also 11% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 and 8% quicker than the GeForce GTX 460 (1GB), but it did slip behind the GeForce GTX 470 by 13%. World in Conflict Soviet Assault World in Conflict has a solid built-in benchmark tool, so we used that for testing this game, which was run at “very high” quality with 4xAA/16xAF....

Crysis 2 scaled very well as the HD 7770 and HD 7750 Crossfire setups delivered playable performance at 1920x1200 – though the latter pair cut it close at 30fps. The HD 7770s were 91% faster than a single card, 75% faster than the HD 6870 and 50% faster than the GTX 560 Ti, while the HD 7750s were 67% faster than a single card, 25% faster than the HD 6870 and 7% faster than the GTX 560 Ti....

In China it appears to be selling as a regular retail product that comes in a box with cooler and all. In Australia, you can only purchase the 3500X in a pre-built PC. Which still begs the question, how well does it perfom and what’s changed from the R5 3600? We’ve heard through channels that in order to acquire the 3500X from AMD to use as a system integrator, there are quite a few hoops to jump through....

When looking at Blender, the Threadripper 1950X delivers the best performance as it’s situated the furthest right on our scatter plot and as you can see it also sits lower than the Core i9-7900X since it’s also cheaper. To give you a better idea of what’s going on, here is a linear guide from the Ryzen 7 1700 to the Threadripper 1950X. CPUs positioned left of this line represent poorer value while anything to the right is better in terms of price vs....