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After the successful release of Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs, AMD appears to be fighting back against team blue’s offerings not with Zen 4, but with discounted Zen 3 processors on the desktop and Zen 3+ processors for laptops. As noted by our own Tim Schiesser, the latter wave is a decent mid-generation upgrade — especially in terms of performance-per-watt — but it isn’t able to compete with Alder Lake in higher power classes....

AMD announced this week that it’s widening the availability of the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX series processors. Over a year after releasing the Zen 3 standard Ryzen CPUs, AMD launched their Threadripper counterparts in March, but only as part of Lenovo’s ThinkStation P620. Starting in July, the 5000 WX CPUs will feature in other OEM systems, including the Precision 7865 Dell announced earlier this month. AMD plans to release Zen 3 Threadrippers for DIY consumers later this year....

The average data above is not meant to be conclusive, but I know many of you really like it when I take all the games tested and provide an overall perspective of what we’ve been able to gather. From the 16 games tested we see that disabling SMT on the 1800X resulted in 3% more performance for the average frame rate and just 1% for the minimum. The effectiveness of turning off SMT varied from game to game and we hope that it won’t be long before SMT stops being a burden for proper gaming performance (a software patch should do)....

Recently, TSMC has seen a high level of demand due to many of its customers launching new product lines. Nvidia’s RTX 40-series graphics cards hit stores on October 12, and AMD recently released its Zen 4 processors, with RDNA 3 graphics cards soon to follow. While AMD and Nvidia are big names to tech enthusiasts, neither company compares to Apple regarding TSMC’s bottom line. In December 2021, DigiTimes noted that Apple accounted for over 25 percent of TSMC’s total sales....

Apple quietly dropped a press release today unveiling the latest entry-level iPad. Rumors suggested that Apple would launch the new iPad any day now, without the press show fanfare customarily associated with its flagship product launches. Apple’s 10th-generation iPad receives the most substantial redesign in several years. Taking design cues from the iPad Pro and Air lineups, the new iPad features an all-screen design and flat-edge casing. Engineers dropped the home button to make room for the symmetrical bezels, and Touch ID moved to the top power button, similar to the iPad Air....

We recorded less than a 2% performance improvement when testing with our Excel 2013 workload. Both versions of the Beebox-S took 11 seconds, so no noteworthy gains here. This time the 7200U was 0.1 seconds faster than the 6200U – again nothing noteworthy here either. We saw small gains from the 7200U model, despite being clocked up to 11% faster we found just 2% more performance in the 7-Zip test....

I never got around to exploring the ins and outs of audio equipment as console gaming, computers and photography consumed much of my free time over the past two decades. Recently, however, an opportunity to further tinker with my sound system presented itself and I couldn’t pass it up. I recently picked up a set of the same floorstanding speakers I had as a teen. As a side project, I turned my attention to my Logitech G51 PC speakers....

Asus has covered pretty much every laptop form factor with its refreshed Zenbook lineup, targeting creators with a variety of use cases and budgets. The main highlight is the Zenbook Pro 16X OLED (UX7602), Asus’ most powerful Zenbook to date. Fully specced, its 16.9mm, 2.4kg aluminum chassis can house a 14C/20T Core i9-12900H chip paired with an RTX 3060 GPU (70W), 32GB RAM and 2TB of PCIe 4.0 M.2 storage....

In graphics-heavy workloads, I wasn’t expecting to see any significant performance gains, and that’s exactly the case here. In fact, in 3DMark I observed a regression in performance relative to Skylake, although in the small handful of games I tested performance was roughly the same as what Skylake provided. While I was hoping to see at least a small improvement here, the simple fact is the ZenBook 3 is not fast enough to play some popular games on even the lowest settings....

Furthermore the previous generation AMD flagship card, the Radeon HD 4870 X2, was blown away by a 62% margin. We’re eager to see how this numbers translate into real-world gaming performance.

I know several people who have steered clear of netbooks for this reason alone, and with just cause. Anything more than basic tasks like word processing, Internet surfing, email, music or standard definition video playback and these systems will quickly begin to feel inadequate. Fortunately, there is a middle ground for users who want something smaller than a standard 15-inch notebook, but require more processing power than what a netbook can offer....

Pac-Man hit arcades in 1980. Players controlled the titular Pac-Man and were tasked with eating all of the dots within a maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Each ghost had their own “personality” based on unique artificial intelligence. Players could advance to the next level by eating all of the dots in a given maze. Difficulty increased with each level: the ghosts moved faster and power-ups decreased in duration, eventually disappearing altogether....

Apple has brought the battery level indicator back to the status bar of notched iPhones as part of iOS 16 beta 5. As on older models like the iPhone 7 and 8, the returning feature appears as a toggle under Settings > Battery. Interestingly, the option isn’t available on all notched models, with beta testers reporting it missing on the iPhone XR, iPhone 11, and the iPhone 12/13 mini. Apple has also changed how it shows the battery percentage indicator on compatible models....

For those gaming at 1680x1050 or similar resolutions, we found that very modest GPUs like the Radeon HD 6770 (aka the 5770) were able to deliver decent results, but again, Nvidia’s performance advantage allowed budget GeForce cards such as the GTX 460 to produce 58fps, besting the HD 6850 and HD 7770. At 1920x1200, the GTX 660 Ti could be considered overkill as the GTX 660 was only 1% slower while being 30% cheaper....

Here we focused on sniper rifle scopes. Please note that these images are completely unaltered. This is how they appear at 2560x1600. MW3’s visuals are near to identical to those of MW2. The texture quality is very much the same and so is sharpness and AA. Here’s a shot of ground textures. While MW2 looks much better in my opinion, the quality of the textures does vary from scene to scene....

While we usually like to benchmark around 40 GPUs, given what’s involved here, that just wasn’t feasible, but we think we have a good sample of current-gen hardware. In total we tested 7 CPUs and 10 GPUs across three resolutions using two quality presets. The results are super interesting, which you will see in a second. But how do you test a multiplayer battle royale game like Warzone 2.0? It’s never easy, especially if you want to test more than one or two hardware configurations....

Apple supplier Foxconn and several other manufacturers have suspended production in Shenzhen following a rise in Covid-19 reports. Sixty new cases were reported Sunday, and now all businesses except those that supply food, fuel, and other necessities have been ordered to close or work from home, reports AP. Additionally, all 17.5 million residents must undergo three rounds of testing. Those infection numbers are low compared to most other countries, but China has an extreme “zero tolerance” strategy that sees quarantines and lockdowns of entire communities or cities even if just a few Covid-19 cases are discovered....

In 2020, there was a massive spike in demand for electronics that we had never seen before. Due to the lockdowns, shutdowns, and other restrictions brought on by the pandemic, workers and students were told to continue their respective work from home. Of course, not everyone had the necessary products to make that happen, thus explaining the major boom in demand. However, as time went on and restrictions were slowly lifted, the need for such products began to dwindle....

The HAF X’s dimensions are fairly standard for a full tower ATX case, measuring 9.1" wide, 23.6" long and 21.7" tall (23.3 x 59.9 x 55.0 cm) making it slightly bulkier than the HAF 932. It is constructed from SECC (Steel, Electrogalvanized, Cold-rolled, Coil) – a type of metal known for its low cost and high thermal conduction properties, making it ideal for computer cases. There is also a lot of plastic used, but don’t let that put you off as the HAF X definitely looks the part....

The first step was to pop in the motherboard’s I/O shield and then the motherboard itself. For the photos we went with the Asrock Z97 Extreme9 which was pre-fitted with the Core i7-4790K and Noctua NH-D14 in passive mode. We also installed a pair of G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-2400 memory modules. Even though we had pre-installed the NH-D14 we completely removed it once the motherboard was fitted just to see how easy the process was and I am happy to report that all went as expected....