Posts

With over 400,000 games and items, and its recent addition to the Epic Games Store, itch.io is a popular destination for those seeking indie titles. Some users have questioned its stance toward NFTs; is it more like Steam, which banned NFT/blockchain-based games, or the Epic Games Store, which welcomes them. It seems itch.io is closer to Valve on this one. “NFTs are a scam,” tweeted the official itch.io account. “If you think they are legitimately useful for anything other than the exploitation of creators, financial scams, and the destruction of the planet the[n] we ask that please reevaluate your life choices....

Intel’s Arc (Alchemist) graphics cards have been in the pipeline for a while now, and many gamers are no doubt curious whether Team Blue can come up with decent offerings that rival those of AMD and Nvidia. It looks like the wait may soon be over, which is a pleasant surprise considering that Intel recently changed its website to display a more vague release date. At this year’s Investor Meeting, Intel said its Arc GPUs would roll out in stages in the coming months....

These processors won’t give you the best performance in the latest games or CPU-intensive applications, but they’ll get the job done with undefeated performance-per-dollar. They feature four cores and eight threads at 3.6GHz and support DDR4 RAM. Even at full price, the 10100F is your only reasonable choice for a sub-$100 CPU. Image: CamelCamelCamel The discounts on the latest 12th-generation Core i3s aren’t nearly as large, but they still currently have attractive prices at Newegg....

Someone on Twitter spotted a product page on US retailer B&H Photo Video’s website that listed a 15.6-inch Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro for sale earlier this week. Its specs include a 12th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of 6400 MHz LPDDR5 memory, and an unnamed Intel Arc graphics chip, selling for $1,350. The listing appeared to be an error, as the page disappeared after the news broke. The accidental reveal of the Intel Arc-powered laptop coincided with the release of the rest of the Samsung Galaxy Book 2 lineup, all of which feature 12th-generation Intel processors....

Intel has been working with developers to manually add XeSS to a fair few games (Intel has a mostly complete list here). It sounds like a fairly quick addition to make, but with the plugin it should be a downright trivial addition to any game that uses the Unreal Engine. There are three versions of the plugin (on GitHub) for UE 4.0, 4.26, and 5.0, so games that are already under development with an older version of the engine should be able to add XeSS, too....

However unlike previous Core i5/i7 launches where AMD had little to no answer to Intel, the green camp is better equipped to fight at the mainstream and budget levels. For the most part, the Core i5 661 is slower than the 3.0GHz Phenom II X4 945 processor, which has a two core advantage. With pricing set at $196 for the Core i5 661, it is more expensive than the Phenom II X4 945 ($166)....

At Computex, Intel president Renee James said the chip could be pushed to 5GHz in air-cooled systems and the company’s Francois Piednoel tweeted that he got 4.6GHz without a fan, so he’d have to offer some training to those who couldn’t manage to hit 5GHz. Unfortunately, I may have to take Piednoel up on his course in Devil’s Canyon overclocking because our review sample wouldn’t budge past 4.7GHz at 1....

Back in February, Intel revealed its first-generation “Bonanza Mine” blockchain acceleration solution during a presentation at the annual IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The company said it had been working on a second-generation solution that would offer better performance per watt, but didn’t offer a clear timeline on when it would hit the market. This week, Intel launched a new application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) called Blockscale which is supposedly capable of delivering up to 580 GH per second....

All the LGA1150 processors we tested delivered between 26-27GB/s of memory bandwidth using DDR3-2400 memory. The overclocked Intel Pentium G3258 was slightly faster hitting 28.5GB/s. Although the Pentium G3258 has memory bandwidth that matches the more expensive Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, it is a different story when we look at cache performance. Even once overclocked to 4.4GHz the Pentium G3258 can’t meet even the Core i3-4130’s L1 cache performance, though it was faster when testing L2 cache....

The AMD FX (Bulldozer) launch was pretty disappointing, to put it mildly, and today’s arrival of the new Sandy Bridge-E processors does nothing to make AMD’s flagship look any more attractive. But as was the case with the Phenom II and the original Core i7, Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge-E are two very different animals that target very different price ranges. The AMD FX-8150 is currently being listed for around $270 (if you can find stock), while the Core i7-3960X is a bone chilling $990....

The video is staged as an interview with Ryan Shrout, Intel marketer, posing the questions to infamous engineer Tom Petersen, best known for his 15 years as an Nvidia frontman. Now he’s peddling the benefits of Intel’s ray tracing hardware acceleration — go figure. He explains it well in the first half of the above video, so give it a watch if you’re interested. In the second half, Petersen graphs the frame rates of the A770 and 3060 in 17 games with ray tracing enabled....

In a way this is an extension of the data you might have seen in our day-one CPU reviews. Take the Ryzen 5 5600X review, for example. In that review the intention was to compare CPU gaming performance and therefore we focused on CPU limited testing by using a GeForce RTX 3090 at 1080p. This is ideal for showing which CPUs are truly faster for gaming, at least in the current range of games we test with, though it’s also generally a good indicator of performance for the next few years....

AMD AM3+ Test System Specs - 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 296....

Each side has plenty to bring to the table. IBM, for example, showed off a 2nm design last year that could accommodate as many as 50 billion transistors on a chip the size of a fingernail. Japan, meanwhile, is home to several major chipmaking equipment makers including Canon and Tokyo Electron. Joint research could begin as soon as this summer, and the first facility in the region is expected to be built between fiscal year 2025 and fiscal year 2027....

Similar to desktop replacements, most gaming laptops are large, heavy and usually lack in the battery life department. There are a number of specialized brands and boutique shops that will let you customize their products with all the latest components and even tailor their looks to your taste. Naturally they’ll also charge a nice premium for it. Alienware M17x R3 Alienware’s range-topping M17x was updated with a second-gen Intel quad-core processor and AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics, while also receiving some styling tweaks to refine the overall appearance....

With Alder Lake, Intel made its first step in a long journey to regain the leadership position in terms of performance against years of increasingly improved AMD Ryzen designs. However, the end goal is to make x86 hardware that is also capable of competing on a performance-per-watt basis with Arm-based solutions. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger promised as much during interviews, and he’s generally seen as the right person to turn Intel around, even though some in the industry have their doubts....

Poised to offer desktop levels of performance, Intel’s recently announced Alder Lake-HX CPUs have found their way into Lenovo’s latest business laptop: The ThinkPad P16 Gen1. This model sits between the P15 and P17 to offer the best performance in a manageable footprint. Given that the P16 can pack up to a 16C/24T Core i9-HX chip alongside other powerful components, Lenovo says its engineers had to come up with an all-new cooling solution comprising dual fans, heat pipes, a dual vapor chamber, dual bypass design, as well as a keyboard air intake....

Looking at the front of the system with the lid closed, we see battery and sleep LED indicators as well as two mouse click buttons. The right side of the machine shows an SD card slot, an always-on USB port (signified by the yellow coloring) and a Kensington locking slot. On the back is the power connector, battery and a VGA-out connector. The left features exhaust ports, two additional USB ports, a network jack and a headphone jack....

The x5-Z8550 is clocked at 1.44 GHz with a burst frequency of 2.40 GHz, while the Intel HD Graphics 400 GPU inside is clocked up to 600 MHz. This processor only supports dual-channel LPDDR3 memory, so we’re limited to 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth, and the Yoga Book tops out at 4 GB of RAM. While Cherry Trail processors do support USB 3.0, we’re not getting it on the Yoga Book due to the choice of a micro-USB port....