The ports are mounted vertically at the edge of the motherboard. This can make them harder to access and more likely to conflict with devices installed into the expansion slots, but it’s an improvement from the split up placement on Asus’ board. Also, you may have noticed that there are only five ports and not six as we found on the P7H55-M Pro. The sixth port is located on the I/O panel where it is used to provide eSATA support....
Gigabyte has several Z77 motherboards to be excited about, such as the G1.Sniper 3 and G1.Sniper 3M, but we’re most interested in the Z77X-UD5H-WB. Although it’s one of the pricier Z77 motherboards available at $230, we think the Z77X-UD5H-WB’s price is justified considering its rich feature set. You’ll find a mass of onboard SATA, eSATA, USB 3.0, and FireWire ports, three PCIe x16 slots, high-quality audio, plenty of display outputs, as well as a PCIe add-in card supporting Bluetooth 4....
We found that AMD was 3% slower in the Corona benchmark but much the same for our Excel, V-Ray and video editing tests. Then while it was 15% slower in HandBrake it was also 8% faster for the PCMark 10 gaming physics test. Of course, there is still the matter of gaming and I bet a few AMD fans were hoping we could put most of the gaming performance deficit down to clock speed....
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....
Activision Blizzard, currently in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, sent out a YouGov survey to select fans over the weekend that tried to gauge interest in “emerging and future trends in gaming.” Some of the areas in the survey included platform cross-play, artificial intelligence content generation, Artificial/Virtual Reality titles, and cloud gaming. While that all sounds reasonable enough, there were a few topics that in most gamers incite feelings somewhere between apathy and downright hatred: the metaverse, play-to-earn games, and NFTs....
Today, the excitement of finding hidden secrets in games is still alive as new Easter eggs and cheats occasionally pop up in decades-old games. Recently Unlisted Cheats uncovered a couple of “new cheats” in 1994’s Super Punch-Out — Nintendo’s followup to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out from 1987. Now to be clear, these are not necessarily “cheats” in that they give you an unfair advantage in the game. Instead, they are the more generic meaning of the term — as in, something that happens after a specific button sequence....
In its most recent earnings report from November, the company reported a net loss of $367 million and said sales of its fitness products were down 17 percent. A voluntary recall last May didn’t help matters, either. Peloton is set to announce its latest quarterly results on Tuesday. Image credit: Andrew Valdivia
Critics and consumers having opposing views on the quality of a movie or show is certainly nothing new—Netflix’s Don’t Look Up is a good example of that—and some site users complain about The Rings of Power’s story and acting, but there are plenty of criticisms over the casting and how it doesn’t “honor Tolkien’s vision.” Other review sites have various policies for mitigating review bombings. Metacritic stopped allowing reviews to be posted within the first 36 hours of a game’s release, likely due to story details about The Last of Us Part 2 leaking before it arrived, while Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t allow reviews of movies that haven’t been released....
In our application tests, we were surprised how similarly the A10-5800K and Core i3-3220 performed. There was little difference between them in Excel while the Core i3-3220 provided superior WinRAR performance and the A10-5800K gave superior Photoshop CS5 results. Things were also close in our encoding benches, with the A10-5800K doing a tad better in Handbrake and slightly worse in TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. When gaming with a beefy discrete graphics card, the results were pretty close, but for CPU-dependent titles such as Civilization V, there’s a clear case to be made for Intel’s processors....
The Phenom II X4 970 was considerably more power hungry than the Core i5 750. And as it couldn’t have been any other way, the Phenom II X6 1075T sat right between the 1055T and 1090T processors, while the Core 2 Quad Q9400, Core i7 930 and the mighty Core i7 980X processors provided the highest load consumption results.
AMD AM3+ Test System Specs - AMD FX-8350 (4.00GHz) - AMD FX-6300 (3.50GHz) - AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (3.30GHz) - AMD Phenom II X4 980 (3.70GHz) - AMD FX-8150 (3.60GHz) - AMD FX-8120 (3.10GHz) - AMD FX-6100 (3.30GHz) - AMD FX-4170 (4.20GHz) - x2 4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-14900 (CAS 8-9-8-24) - Asrock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional (AMD 990FX) - OCZ ZX Series 1250w - Crucial m4 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit - Nvidia Forceware 306....
Last week, AMD released AGESA ComboAM5PI 1.0.0.4, the newest software update for motherboard manufacturers that boasted typical stability upgrades. Most importantly, it also added support for the recently launched Ryzen non-X CPUs and the upcoming X3D processors, set to reach shelves in February. Unfortunately for AMD, hardware leaker “chi11eddog” revealed that the new software was accidentally disabling one to two cores on specific Ryzen 5 7600X processors. 7600X CPUs with a single core-complex die (CCD) were unhindered by this bug, however dual-CCD processors weren’t so lucky....
Finally, when testing with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on maximum quality at 2560x1600, the HD 7970 rendered an average of 55fps – 34% faster than the HD 6970 and 8% faster than the GTX 580.
Hardware leaker Greymon55 tweeted single-core Cinebench R23 scores for the upcoming Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X processors. He claims that in the single-core test, the 7600X scores from 1900 to 1999, while the 7700X achieves a score of 2000 to 2099. With Ryzen 7000’s uplift in clock speeds and IPC (instructions per cycle), we see a healthy performance increase from the almost two-year old Ryzen 5000 series, with both of these mid-range Raphael CPUs comfortably outscoring any 5000 series chip with margins of over 25%....
The Ryzen 9 7900 is said to feature 12 cores / 24 threads, 76MB of cache and boasts clock speeds up to 5.4GHz. The Ryzen 7 7700, meanwhile, will pack eight cores / 16 threads, 40MB of cache and speeds of up to 5.3GHz while the Ryzen 5 7600 reportedly carries six cores / 12 threads, 38MB of cache and clocks of up to 5.1GHz. Base clock speeds were not referenced in the leaked slides....
Beyond the six standard SATA ports, the MSI 870A-G54 doesn’t have much else on offer. Rather than including a JMicron controller for extra SATA ports, some of which could be used to provide eSATA support, the JMB368 simply offers an IDE legacy port. This is a shame considering that the MSI 870A-G54 costs ~$5 more than the Gigabyte 870A-UD3, and yet it sacrifices so much in the storage department. Another feature that has gone missing in order to save a few dollars is Firewire....
The event marked the 37th launch of the year for SpaceX and was the 9th launch overall for the specific Falcon 9 first-stage rocket that was used. The launch’s second stage carried 53 of SpaceX’s flat panel satellites into orbit. Their successful deployment brings the total number of Starlink satellites deployed to 3,108. The launch was carried out at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at 3:21 PM Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) and lasted for just over 15 minutes....
Like previous iPads, the iPad mini with Retina display comes in two different versions. The one I have on-hand for this review is the Wi-Fi model, packing 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n, and Bluetooth 4.0; there’s also the cellular model that includes LTE, HSPA+ and CDMA radios, and A-GPS. There’s no expandable storage in the iPad mini, but there are four different storage options (16, 32, 64 and 128 GB) available....
Apple Pay already allows you to pay for goods at any store with a third-party terminal supporting the method. This technology helped make the process of paying much simpler and more secure, as you don’t have to use cash or a credit/debit card. However, small businesses had to pay for new equipment to support the payment option. Now, Apple is reportedly working on a new technology that could reduce costs for small businesses, as they wouldn’t need any extra hardware....
Apple revealed its first custom processor, the Apple M1, during an event in November 2020. The chip was met with high praise for cramming loads of power into a tiny space. Apple’s M1 led people to wonder if SoCs were the future of computing. Due to switching to an ARM architecture, Apple had to figure out a way to allow M1 Macs to use programs that were designed with Intel-based Macs in mind....
