The Moto G is Motorola’s biggest and best effort yet in conquering the entry-level market. It’s not a handset meant to break records, but the 4.5-inch 720p display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC and dual-SIM support (in certain models) will please the right crowds. Plus, at $179 for the 8 GB model and $199 for 16 GB, unlocked and off-contract, it certainly fits the definition of what an affordable smartphone should be....
Up until now, MSI’s offering at $200 has been the X570 Gaming Edge WiFi, a board that failed our Ryzen 9 3900X VRM stress test. Making matters worse, no other brand failed that test at any price point. Those of you who have been following our X570 VRM thermal testing will know what we think of MSI’s A Pro, Gaming Edge, Gaming Plus and Gaming Pro Carbon… in terms of VRM performance they’re all pretty lackluster....
Juno launched from Cape Canaveral on August 5, 2011, and entered Jupiter’s orbit on July 5, 2016. In 2021, the probe sent back its first images of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. During the flyby of Europa on September 29, the probe came within about 219 miles of the icy moon. It was only the third close pass below 310 miles altitude and represents the closest look at Europa since NASA’s Galileo buzzed Europa in 2000....
April brought news that Netflix likely thought would never happen: for the first time in a decade, its overall number of subscribers was down, which the streamer blamed on everything from rivals like Disney+ to account sharing and the Russia/Ukraine conflict. The resulting share crash saw it lose $54 billion in a single day. Netflix’s shares have collapsed a further 75% since April’s bombshell. In an interview with The New York Times, CEO Ted Sarandos called the situation “horrifying, disappointing and embarrassing” but added that the company needs to move on....
Microsoft and Netflix have announced that advertisements for Netflix’s upcoming cheaper ad-supported tier will all come through Microsoft’s advertising platform. The companies’ statements end a string of rumors surrounding Netflix’s ad plans. In April, Netflix confirmed plans to offer an ad-supported subscription sometime in 2022, reversing earlier statements against the idea. A first-quarter financial report showing the first loss of subscribers in a decade might have encouraged the decision, as the company laid off staff in response....
Nintendo must see its 135-page player’s guide for Earthbound as highly important. It has offered a PDF of the original 1995 guide for free online for a few years. However, with the game’s re-release for the Nintendo Online subscription service, it has been pointing a whole new generation of users to the well-designed guide often commended for its artistic style. Users looking around in the Nintendo Online news feed, found on the Nintendo Switch home screen, found a QR code that leads to the PDF....
When adding a second Radeon graphics card to create a Crossfire configuration the performance is boosted by just 56%. While a 56% performance boost saw the average frame rate hit 64fps, it still allowed the GeForce SLI setup to take the lead. The GeForce GTX 480 SLI graphics cards provided a 94% performance boost compared to a single GPU. Although this meant that the GeForce GTX 480 SLI were just 6% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire cards it is still another win for the green team....
Compared to the Radeon R7 370, the GTX 950 seems like an obvious choice as it was on average 10% faster while consuming roughly the same amount of power. The cheaper R7 370 cards retail for $150 and the GTX 950 is expected to sell for a similar price with an MSRP of $159 at launch. Where the GTX 950 really represents a great value is through its overclocking abilities, which can place it within spitting distance of the GTX 960, a graphics card that currently retails for $185....
Besides outclassing all tested SSDs based on the Indilinx Barefoot controller, the Agility EX was also faster than the Corsair P128 drive, which uses the latest Samsung controller. We were a bit surprised to see the steep performance drop when running HD Tune Pro, specifically in the 1MB and random write tests where it achieved the lowest scores at 133 and 100 MB/s respectively; versus 191 and 151 MB/s for the Corsair SSD....
Looking at the write performance, the OCZ Enyo manages to outpace the Intel X25-M when working with data larger than 32K, while it was considerably slower with the smaller 1K and 2K data. The Vertex 2 was far superior in this test, largely due to the fact that it features a superior controller.
When measuring write performance the RevoDrive Hybrid reached 776MB/s on its third run, which is again leaps and bounds ahead of other drives we’ve run through the benchmark.
Comparatively, the OCZ Vertex 120GB is currently selling for $380, which ends up being a better value at $3.16 per gigabyte. The new OCZ Summit is even cheaper at $350, getting it down to $2.91 per gigabyte. Clearly the biggest factor holding back SSD adoption is cost, and storage capacity as a result of that. Today it is possible to purchase a WD Caviar Green 2TB drive for roughly $240, and in terms of hard drive pricing that’s not exactly great value....
Again, the 4K test has the Vertex 2 Pro delivering incredible write performance with a throughput of 64MB/s. The read performance was not quite as impressive with a throughput of just 20MB/s which made the Vertex 2 Pro slightly slower than the Vertex. The AS SSD Benchmark’s 4K-64 thread test also saw the OCZ Vertex 2 Pro deliver incredible results. The read and write results are truly amazing as both exceed 100MB/s....
The Pebble smartwatch for iPhone and Android is a prime example of the bizarre times in which we live. In an era of people increasingly telling time by looking at the corner of their computer’s screen or their smartphone lock screens, Pebble wants to make the wristwatch everyone’s preferred timepiece. But instead of pitting the watch and smartphone as competitors for one function, Pebble tries to go beyond the default use case for either device and do much more....
Vietnamese news site VNExpress (via PC Gamer) notes that one reader was tricked into thinking a streamed video of EA’s game was a low-quality stream of a World Cup match. They found the channel by searching for Germany vs. Japan on Google. “It wasn’t until I read the comments on the livestream and watched the player’s face close-up that I knew it was the image in the FIFA 23 game simulating the World Cup,” they said....
Asobo Studio released the system requirements for A Plague Tale: Requiem on Friday, and they appear to warrant the game’s generational visual improvement upon its 2019 predecessor. The minimum system requirements aren’t quite as heavy as those for the Dead Space remake, but it may be time for some users to consider upgrading. The console editions of both games will only support PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, signaling a real turnover in hardware specs....
Kojima Productions has always had a good relationship with Sony. After all, Kojima announced the studio’s first game would be console exclusive to the PlayStation 4. Still, the developer remained independent from Sony, but that may change soon. The new banner on the PlayStation Studios website shows some significant changes. Sony changed the Horizon, Gran Turismo, and MLB images and introduced a slot for the Demon’s Souls remake. Perhaps even more striking is the Death Stranding image that replaces the Concrete Genie segment on the far left....
Back in September of 2012 we got our first look at an mSATA SSD when Crucial provided a sample of its m4 mSATA 256GB drive, which offered the same performance as the larger 2.5" version but was capable of fitting in much smaller devices. The M6M is a newer, faster product that has a lot less competition than the 2.5" version. Plextor is offering capacities as small as 64GB while it is still possible to get a 512GB version as well....
Network-attached storage (NAS) devices made by QNAP are experiencing another ransomware campaign orchestrated by the DeadBolt gang. The malicious campaign started during the weekend and is still ongoing. This new DeadBolt attack targets a zero-day vulnerability in QNAP’s Photo Station, a photo management software solution that offers private cloud photo storage, but unfortunately in this instance it’s opened up a window for malicious efforts. The campaign was identified during the weekend, and rated as “critical....
The HS-210 sustained a transfer speed of 47.3MB/s when uploading a single large file, 17% faster than the TS-220 but 10% slower than the TS-221. QNAP’s offering was also 53% slower than the DS214play. Next to its TS-220, QNAP’s HS-210 was 10% faster and 13% slower than the TS-221, though it was much slower than the DS214play again, this time by 45%. Installing Seagate’s drives boosted performance 31% to 50....
