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The P55 chip is cooled by a small black passive heatsink located directly behind the SATA ports. The board’s 12 + 2 power phase is cooled by a pair of large black aluminum heatsinks, which are designed to receive air-flow from the CPU cooler. When benchmarking we found the motherboard cooling to be ample, even when overclocking to extreme frequencies. The EVGA P55 FTW provides three PCIe x16 slots, though using two of these with either Crossfire or SLI technology will reduce its bandwidth to x8 each....

The Bloom Firm filed a complaint with the Superior Court in Los Angeles on behalf of an anonymous client against Activision Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, three former and two current Blizzard employees, and 25 other unnamed individuals. Charges include two counts of sexual harassment, failure to prevent harassment, sexual favoritism, retaliation, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Several allegations are pointed at Mark Skorupa, a former Blizzard employee now working at parent company Microsoft....

Across the board, the Alienware 15 R3 is around four percent slower than the other i7-6700HQ/GTX 1060 laptop I’ve reviewed recently, the MSI GS43VR 6RE Phantom Pro. This isn’t a massive margin, and considering the Core i7-6700HQ has been around for a while, the rough performance provided by gaming laptops in professional workloads has remained stagnant for at least a year now. I don’t expect performance to improve drastically when H-series Kaby Lake parts are available in a few months either....

At CES 2022, Samsung created a buzz around QD-OLED televisions with several partnered brands, but Alienware stood alone as the only company offering a monitor with the technology. It might have a PR-driven name, but quantum dots are an impressive display innovation. In brief, they’re a filtering layer that converts the blue light emitted by the OLED panel underneath into the red, green, or blue subpixels needed for an image....

The A10-5800K was a beast in StarCraft II, rendering 73fps at 1280x800 – 35% faster than the A8-3850 and 78% faster than the Core i3-3220. When playing Resident Evil 5 at 1280x800, the A10-5800K was 27% faster than the A8-3850 at 103fps, as well as 119% faster than the i3-3220’s 47fps. Despite seeing significant performance gains in the previous two games, the A10-5800K was just 14% faster than the A8-3850 when running Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 1280x800, though it still managed to deliver three times the performance of Intel’s i3-3220....

Those of you interested about the Phenom II X6 range please read our review on the 1090T and 1055T models. Here are some CPUz screenshots and brief commentary on the new Phenom II and Athlon II processors to give you some overall perspective on each model. The Phenom II X6 1075T is by far the most powerful processor launched today featuring six-cores with the standard 6MB L3 cache. Using a x15 clock multiplier this processor has an operating frequency of 3....

Although the Core i7 940 dominated Unreal Tournament 3 when using low quality settings, the results are quite different when using high quality settings. This is something we have found time and time again when testing the Phenom II X4 processors. The Phenom II X4 965 was just a single frame faster than the 955, but remained on top of both the Core 2 Quad Q9650 and Core i7 940 processors by a small margin as well....

The 3Dmark Vantage results at 1920x1200 suggest the Radeon HD 6870 is slightly faster than the Radeon HD 5850 and the GeForce GTX 470. That said, the numbers also imply that the GeForce GTX 460 is slower than the Radeon HD 5830, which we know not to be true. Let’s see what real-world benchmarks reveal…

The Barts variant used the same VLIW5 configuration as the Radeon HD 5000 series, which features SIMD units with 4 simple and 1 complex stream processing unit. The Radeon HD 6900 series on the other hand adopts a VLIW4 configuration, which features stream processing units arranged in groups of four along with general purpose registers. Although the four have equal capabilities, two out of four of these (occupying 3 and 4 issue slots) are assigned with some special functions....

When testing with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat we again find that the Radeon HD 6990 was 7% slower than a pair of Radeon HD 6970 Crossfire graphics cards. It was also considerably faster than the Radeon HD 5970 providing 110% more performance.

The Radeon HD 7790 is more than capable of providing playable performance in DiRT 3 at 1680x1050, with an average of 62.1fps making it 7% faster than the GeForce GTX 650 Ti. The new Radeon GPU was 10% slower than the Radeon HD 7850 and 16% faster than the 7770. The frame time performance clearly shows the Radeon HD 7790 leading the GeForce GTX 650 Ti by an 11% margin....

To get a fuller picture, it’s increasingly apparent that you need to factor in a card’s frame latency, which looks at how quickly each frame is delivered. Regardless of how many frames a graphics card produces on average in 60 seconds, if it can’t deliver them all at roughly the same speed, you might see more brief jittery points with one GPU over another – something we’ve witnessed but didn’t fully understand....

With the enthusiast community demanding a response, AMD answered last month by delivering Titan-like performance for nearly half the price. At $550, the new Radeon R9 290X is set at the same rate as the HD 7970 when it debuted two years ago. With its age-old adversary swinging full force, Nvidia’s back hit the ropes and it quickly countered by slashing prices across its affected upper-tier products. Five days after the R9 290X landed, Nvidia dropped the GTX 770’s price from $400 to $330, while the GTX 780 fell from $650 to just $500, 10% cheaper than the R9 290X instead of 15% more expensive, putting them at about an equal value....

In a way, the RX 6400 is quite unique. This low-powered GPU doesn’t require external power, consumes less than 75 watts, and so it can received all of its power from the PCI Express slot. Moreover, AMD has branded this model with a total board power rating of just 53 watts, meaning it should use even less power than the GeForce GTX 1650. This low power usage means it’s possible to create a low-profile version of the RX 6400 and this is what most card manufacturers have gone for....

In the top left corner of the main keyboard are two scroll wheels which allow for quick adjustments of the system volume and keyboard backlighting. We think the wheels are neat to begin with but Gigabyte went the extra mile to make them clickable so you can mute your audio or disable the backlighting altogether. Flipping over the Thunder K7 doesn’t reveal much other than a few fold out feet....

Samsung and LG have been Apple’s main suppliers of OLED screens for the iPhone over the past several years. That said, the Cupertino giant has also built a partnership with display maker Beijing Oriental Electronics (BOE), who was supposed to get an order for around 30 million OLED panels for the iPhone 14. Previously, BOE only made display panels for refurbished iPhones. According to a report from The Elec, the Chinese supplier could lose this lucrative contract due to going out of its way to pass Apple’s strict quality control checks....

Wi-Fi will still be the go-to connection for many users at home and it’s another area where the iPhone 5 has been updated. The new handset now features 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi with 802.11n supporting dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies. Bluetooth 4.0 is back in addition to GPS and GLONASS for location services. Carriers are still actively rolling out LTE, and this is expected to continue for the next couple of years....

A pre-production 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro ran for 22 hours on a single charge during internal testing, securing the title of longest battery life ever in a Mac, according to marketing boss Greg Joswiak. The new MacBook Pro with M2 Max, meanwhile, pushes performance to new heights. It comes standard with a 12-core CPU (eight high-performance cores and four efficiency cores) that’s 20 percent faster than the M1 Max....

Apple partnered with UNiDAYS to authenticate users’ credentials. UNiDAYS, long since popular with overseas students, verifies education status and aggregates student discounts into a single point of access. What was unusual about Apple’s implementation of verification in the US is that it seemingly came out of left field with no warning. What’s more, Apple locked down the entire education portal, meaning you couldn’t even browse the store without first being verified....