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The PCI-SIG consortium finally unveiled the full 1.0 specification for PCIe 6.0 this week after going through multiple draft specifications over the previous few years. The last was in October. The PCIe 6.0 specification will be backward compatible with previous generations. The main benefit is that it doubles the data rate to 64 GT/s and doubles maximum bandwidth to 256 GB/s on x16 lanes compared to PCIe 5.0. Other new features include Pulse Amplitude Modulation with four levels (PAM4), Lightweight Forward Error Correct (FEC), Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), and Flow Control Units (Flits)....

LG first revealed the DualUp 28MQ780 monitor last December in the runup to CES. It’s essentially two high-end 21.5-inch 16:9 QHD monitors stacked on top of each other, giving it a 27.6-inch diagonal size, a 2,560 x 2,880 resolution, and a 16:18 aspect ratio. The DualUp, which uses a Nano IPS panel, is positioned squarely at content creators, streamers, designers, and workers who want to increase their productivity. The monitor is designed to be more comfortable as users don’t have to move their heads from side to side, as is the case with most dual monitor setups and ultrawides/super-ultrawides....

When cranked up to 1680x1050, Low Spec becomes a bit more demanding, but most of our budget cards managed to make the 30fps cutoff while the HD 5830 and up delivered consistently lag-free performance.

The HD 5870 struggled in Sleeping Dogs with FXAA and SSAO enabled, only hitting 23fps at 1080. The 6970 was 35% faster than that with 31fps while the 7970 was 52% faster than the 6970. The 7970 GHz Edition offered 11% more performance than the standard 7970, while the R9 290X was 33% faster than it. Boosting the resolution to 2560x1600 crushed the HD 5870 and its 1GB frame buffer limited performance to just 5fps....

Nvidia AIB partners including Asus, MSI, Colorful, and others—not EVGA, obviously—have been showing off their takes on the RTX 4090, RTX 4080 16GB, and RTX 4080 12GB, formerly known as the RTX 4070 (probably). In the case of the RTX 4090, even Nvidia’s Founders Edition looked gigantic in CEO Jensen Huang’s hand during the GTC keynote, but the third-party versions of the flagship are, in many cases, even larger. VideoCardz writes that Gigabyte’s RTX 4090 Aorus Master is a triple-fan four-slot beast measuring just over 14 inches long and 6....

Sources have told Quazar Zone that AMD plans to unveil at least three X3D Zen 4 CPUs at CES in January. Contrary to earlier reports, they will come in eight, 12-, and 16-core models. The 12- and 16-core X3D processors could be the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and 7950X3D, respectively. Based on the effects 3D V-Cache had on the Zen 3 CPUs, the two high-end processors might feature 192MB of L3 cache....

Windows 8.1 comes with optimizations that enhance the experience on smaller-screened tablets. Many areas of the OS now have functional portrait modes, which is critical for this sort of tablet that is mostly held in a portrait orientation. Some apps, such as Bing News, are actually better to use in portrait than landscape, thanks to the work Microsoft has put in. The applications available through the Windows Store will still be an issue for those who aren’t too fussed about Windows 8....

Designed by German YouTuber Doctor Volt, a recent DIY project uses parts of a defective Samsung BD-J5900 Blu-ray player to put a laser-scanning microscope together. Compared to optical microscopes, laser-based microscopes can capture much more details – and with a higher magnification level – by focusing on a single point at a time to remove interference. Blu-ray players work in a similar way: the “blue” diode beams a 405 nm laser onto a Blu-ray disc surface, and then an optical sensor converts the reflected light into a binary digit (“1” or “0”) depending on the intensity of the reflection....

Musk’s poll, which was posted yesterday—the same day it was revealed he owns a 9.2% stake in Twitter—purposely misspells the word yes as yse, highlighting the long-running issue of being unable to correct a typo in a tweet once it’s out there for all to see. Unlike Facebook, which lets users edit posts after they’ve hit the news feed, the only option for Twitter users is to delete the tweet....

As a result, if you’re a gamer that just wants a 32-inch 4K display, there’s no reason to buy the VP3268. Get something cheaper instead, and you’ll probably be happier. You might even pick some additional features like FreeSync and faster response times on the way. But if you’re a professional that wants a high-quality, accurate display, there’s a lot to like about the VP3268. It supports four separate color spaces each with a dedicated, factory-calibrated profile, and in my testing with the sRGB mode, it’s certainly very accurate....

Tom’s Hardware spotted the Asus ROG Strix TouchStone novelty keycap for sale in China. It appears that little expense was spared recreating a tiny version of the popular card; it’s constructed of solid aluminum alloy rather than plastic and comes with the famous Republic of Gamers name emblazoned on the side. But the highlight is the three ball-bearing fans that you can actually spin with your fingers, something that would undoubtedly form into a habit while waiting for games to load....

CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read/write test confirms the strong download/upload performance we saw when working with large files. Here the My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB had no trouble maxing out the gigabit interface when moving data in either direction. The random 512K test shows the My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB providing strong read performance coupled with average write performance. Its results are comparable to the DS216+ using Synology’s Hybrid Raid. While 4K-QD32 performance isn’t necessarily important for a NAS device, the results are interesting....

We’ve been playing with it ever since the beta became available, and can honestly say that much of the hype is justified. Although Windows 7 is still very much the same as Vista at its core, hundreds of small improvements make it work more smoothly, easier to navigate and overall better looking than before. With few exceptions, compatibility isn’t expected to be a major issue either. In preparation for the launch this week, we thought it would be a good idea to run through a few things worth keeping in mind before taking the plunge....

Exclusive Edition - MediaTek Helio X25 - 4 GB of RAM - 128 GB storage High Edition - MediaTek Helio X25 - 3 GB of RAM - 64 GB storage Standard Edition - MediaTek Helio X20 - 3 GB of RAM - 32 GB storage - Reviewed The Helio X20 and Helio X25 are very similar SoCs, only differing slightly on clock speeds. Both SoCs are deca-core designs with three clusters of CPU cores: the first cluster is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A72 configuration for high-performance workloads; the second is a quad-core Cortex-A53 for medium workloads; and the third is another quad-core Cortex-A53 for low power tasks....

LG confirmed it would close its mobile unit in April 2021. The announcement came as little surprise, given that it had been losing money for six years, totalling around $4.5 billion, and its market share had fallen to just 2%. The decision meant that the rollable phone LG had teased in September 2020 and shown off at last year’s CES would no longer launch in 2021. LG is said to have sold some of the devices to its employees, which is likely how Korean tech reviewer 뻘"-구소 (BullsLab) got hold of one....

In a follow-up article we’ll list devices and gadgets you can service on your own. But if it’s controversy and indignation you want, this is the week you’ve been waiting for! Here are iFixit’s top 10 hardest-to-repair electronics. Read the 2017 follow-up: 10 Tech Products That Are Next to Impossible to Repair We have to wonder what the late Steve Jobs (who was so obsessive about making his gadgets user-friendly) would think to see a whopping six Apple products filling out iFixit’s list of the least repairable objects....

This isn’t the most realistic consumption test as many power saving features are disabled in our 4GHz clock-for-clock comparison. It’s also not the most scientific because I’ve had to increase voltages for the Ryzen CPUs above spec to stabilize an all core 4GHz overclock. All that said, we see that the 1600X and 2600X systems consume the exact same amount of power. Meanwhile, the 8700K system consumed 3% less power making it slightly more efficient under these test conditions....

You won’t get the latest SoC, camera tech, and a few other bells and whistles with our great value choices, however, these phones are capable of handling almost everything you can throw at them. From social media apps to content consumption and connectivity, photography/videography and gaming, these phones only fall behind slightly in terms of battery life and charging speeds, as phone makers are still able to offer noticeable improvement in these areas by putting in more efficient chips and cramming bigger batteries in newer devices....

TechSpot Wallpaper Week - 3rd edition This is the third edition of Wallpaper Week on TechSpot which we’ve broken down in five categories. We’re refreshing all content, keeping the best high-resolution wallpapers from previous editions and adding a ton of new content, one category per day Monday thru Friday. The idea is to share astonishing wallpapers gathered from around the web by members of the TechSpot staff. Most of these are good to use with your 4K desktop, laptop display or smartphone....

The main menu does not provide a great deal of information other than the time and date. The “Advanced” menu contains many sub-menus that let you change network, power and storage settings along with a number of other integrated peripherals. The “CPU Configuration” sub-menu allows you to enabled and disable certain CPU features as well as display processor information. The “M.I.B III” menu provides access to the overclocking related options such as base clock, core multipliers and voltages....