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In addition to the massive discrepancy between supply and demand brought about by the pandemic, chip shortage issues have been exacerbated by (deep breath) high crypto prices, reduced silicon output, a copper foil shortage, a lack of components, shipping delays, aluminum disruption, droughts, lockdowns, and more. We’d previously heard that chipmakers and electronics makers had encountered another problem: there aren’t enough skilled workers to fill the required positions. Now, Nikkei Asia reports that this issue is especially prevalent in Taiwan, home of TSMC and where 90% of the world’s most advanced chips are made....

Alternatively, there are tons of free games online, but very few are worth playing (yeah, we’re looking at you Obama Alien Defense). What you may not be aware of however, is the wealth of older commercial titles freely available, just waiting to be discovered. Dozens of old school favorites like Doom and GTA can be had at no cost. We’ve compiled a brief list of popular titles from yesteryear that you can download absolutely free of charge – and that’s something to appreciate in an age of hidden fees and fine print....

As was the case in our netbook roundup, the Aspire One has a fantastic LED backlit screen that is a joy to work with. Colors are crisp, text is sharp and the 1366 x 768 resolution is amazing. Vertical viewing angles could be better, but then again, you just need to tilt the screen and the problem is eliminated. Horizontal viewing angles are pretty decent too, making this by far the best netbook screen I have used to date....

I conducted our standard notebook battery tests on the S5. Our video playback test consists of looping a 720p rip of the movie Inception at full screen with max brightness and Wi-Fi disabled. This is a taxing test that resulted in a rather disappointing 3 hours and 21 minutes of usage. Intel’s i7-3517U really showcases the improvements that come with Ivy Bridge in terms of reduced heat and subsequent cooler noise....

I’d rather have seen Acer not include a camera at all (and save a few more bucks) than include a poor quality camera just for the sake of listing it on the specifications sheet. Similarly, the W4’s speaker system was a disappointment. Listening to music and watching videos, I found the speakers extremely tinny, quiet and very flat. It would seem that Acer attempted to cut corners here and the results are overly obvious....

Dual-cores fair very well in older games such as Unreal Tournament 3, though the performance advantage of the quad-core processors is still very apparent. The small frequency bump does not help the Phenom II X4 970 much and we found that it was still slower than the Core i5 750 and quite a bit slower than the Core i7 930. The Phenom II X6 1075T is largely wasted in this game and as a result it was slower than both the Phenom II X4 970 and 965 processors....

There are two things to note about the 34UM67 that affect how it works with FreeSync. The first is that there is no DisplayPort cable in the box, only HDMI, so if you wanted to use FreeSync straight away, you’re going to need to purchase a DisplayPort cable separately. Secondly, FreeSync is actually disabled by default in the monitor’s settings; if you’re struggling to get FreeSync working, this could be the reason why....

The new Piledriver processors failed to deliver much extra performance in our HandBrake test, as the FX-8350 and FX-6300 were just 1 to 2% faster than their predecessors. That said, on the bright side, the FX-8350 was 17% faster than the i5-3470 and just 6% slower than the i7-3770K. When testing with the x264 HD Benchmark, we found the FX-8350 and FX-6300 to be 6% and 4% faster than their predecessors, while the new eight-core chip was 16% slower than the i5-3470....

Starting with the Phenom II X6 1090T, this processor can be matched to the Core i7 930 processor as they are both priced around the $300 mark. Unfortunately for the Phenom, the Core i7 930 processor was faster in most of our real-world tests. The Intel CPU dominated in all of our application benchmarks and was much faster in all of our gaming benchmarks. Games such as Company of Heroes and Resident Evil 5 heavily favored the Core i7 930 processor....

The good news is that the HD 6970 was 20% faster than the HD 5870 and HD 6870 graphics cards, while it also lead the GeForce GTX 470 by an 18% performance margin. This time the Radeon HD 6950 was 16% slower than the GeForce GTX 570 and 11% slower than the Radeon HD 6970 when testing with Call of Duty: Black Ops at 1920x1200. With an average of 93fps though, Black Ops is not as demanding as the previous games we’ve tested so far....

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition consumed considerably more power than the GeForce GTX 680 and standard 7970, using around 7% more power. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition operated at roughly the same temperature as the standard 7970 under load and at idle. With a load temperature of 81 degrees we expect to see much better results from AMD’s board partners with their own custom cooling designs.

The Radeon R9 380X was good for 55fps in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor which was actually 1fps slower than the old Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and 7% slower than the R9 280X. Still the R9 380X was 12% faster than the R9 380, though we should point out it was also 29% slower than the R9 390. Rounding out the benchmarking segment of our review is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and here the R9 380X was just 7% faster than the R9 380, though it was 16% faster than the GTX 960....

Intel Core i7-5960X (3.0GHz) x4 4GB Kingston Predator DDR4-2400 (CAS 12-13-13-24) Asrock X99 Extreme6 (Intel X99) Silverstone Strider Series (700w) Crucial MX200 1TB (SATA 6Gb/s) Nvidia GeForce Titan X (12288MB) Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti (6144MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB) Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB) Palit GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB) AMD Radeon R9 Fury X(4096MB) HIS Radeon R9 390X (8192MB) HIS Radeon R9 390 (8192MB) AMD Radeon R9 295X2 (2x 4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon R9 290X (4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon R9 290 (4096MB) Microsoft Windows 8....

Here we see a closely fought battle when testing with Grand Theft Auto V. The R9 Fury X matched the GTX 980 Ti at 1600p and it was just 2% faster at 4K. AMD’s new flagship was 12% slower than the dual-GPU R9 295X2 when running GTA V at 4K, but 25% faster than the GTX 980 and R9 390X. The R9 Fury X was 6% faster than the GTX 980 Ti in Far Cry at 1600p and 20% faster once cranking the game up to 4K, not to mention 45% faster than the standard GTX 980....

The 6800 XT is based on the new RDNA2 architecture using TSMC’s 7nm process. The GPU packs 4608 cores, 288 TMUs and 128 ROPs across 72 CUs. The cores clock at up to 2250 MHz, and with 16GB of 16Gbps GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit wide memory bus, it has 512GB/s of memory bandwidth to play with. It’s rated at 300 watts TBP, and of course, supports PCI Express 4....

Here we see that the slightly higher clocked 2950X consumed 10% more power than the 1950X under full load in the Corona benchmark and this placed it on part with the Core i9-7900X. Then we have the 32-core 2990WX pushing total system consumption up to 383 watts which is 19% more than that of the Core i9-7980XE. Still it’s only a 36% increase over the 2950X, at least for total system load, so not bad given we have 100% more cores which allowed it to complete this workload 40% faster....

By switching from spatial to temporal, FSR 2.0 should deliver much higher visual quality than FSR 1.0. FSR 1.0 was useful at resolutions like 4K, especially when using the “Ultra Quality” mode where it could get close to DLSS (without matching it) at times. But put simply, the image quality DLSS was able to provide at lower resolutions and lower quality levels was much better – think at 1080p, or when using the Performance mode....

Quite clearly, in the $100 to $200 range, the Intel Core i5 750 emerged as the winner at the upper end of the spectrum. Those looking to spend a bit less, at around $150 the best two options currently available are the Phenom II X4 925 and the Core i3 540. However, as we tightened up our budget it was all AMD. When looking at sub-$100 parts the result didn’t come as much of a shock given our previous findings....

Over 70 issues were addressed by Google in its March 2022 Android feature drop. Pixel 6/6 Pro users also received Live Captions for calls and Night Sight mode in Snapchat. Meanwhile, general improvements to the OS saw the addition of several UI + usability tweaks, including an app pairs feature, optimizations for tablets and foldables, and a refined widget picker experience. Google also introduced enhanced haptics as part of this update, allowing for increased feedback while using the Pixel Launcher app drawer, scrolling through the Recents app menu, and dismissing apps....

The iPhone 14 Pro features a 6.1-inch OLED display (2,556 x 1,179 pixels, 460 PPI) while the larger iPhone 14 Pro Max packs a 6.7-inch OLED panel (2,796 x 1,290 pixels, 460 PPI). Both models utilize a stainless steel edge design with a textured matte glass rear and a ceramic shield front coating. Spec-wise, both offer 1000 nits of typical max brightness, 1600 nits of peak HDR brightness and up to 2000 nits of peak brightness outdoors....