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Those that do a lot of heavy Excel work will benefit from a Core i7 processor here and the more cores the better. The Extreme Machine was 61% faster than the Luxury System, while the Luxury System was 60% faster than the Enthusiast’s PC. Then we see that the Enthusiast’s PC was 69% faster than the Entry-Level Rig, which was 65% faster than the Budget Box. Those doing a lot of file compression/decompression will again be best looked after by the Extreme Machine, which managed 41703 MIPS making it almost 70% faster than the Luxury System....

Password manager NordPass with the help of cybersecurity researchers analyzed over 290 million data breaches worldwide to put together a list of passwords used by business executives. These included company CEOs, C-level execs (CTOs, CFOs, etc.), business owners, and management. It turns out that these high-fliers aren’t so different from the general public: “123456” and “password” were the number one and number two most popular passwords, respectively. That first string was also the most common password among everyday users last year, estimated to have been used over 103 million times....

Mauch moved into his home in Scio Township in 2002 and was able to get a T1 line, a speedy connection at the time. As broadband technology matured, his once mighty 1.5Mbps connection fell behind the competition. Surely an ISP would come along and wire up his home for cable or fiber, but unfortunately that never happened. Mauch eventually settled on a wireless ISP that offered speeds of around 50Mbps....

Congress has proposed legislation that would require online companies to post a summary of their terms of service (ToS) agreements on their websites. The bipartisan law is called the “Terms-of-service Labeling, Design, and Readability Act”—the TLDR Act. It’s sponsored by Representative Lori Trahan, Senator Bill Cassidy, and Senator Ben Ray Luján. Trahan says the proposed law will make it easier for consumers to evaluate the terms of legally binding agreements for the websites and services they use....

Out of the box, the HAF XB wasn’t overly impressive. In fact, it ranked similarly to the Scout 2, which comes with just a single 120mm fan. The processor hit a warm 50 degrees at idle while the graphics card sat at 40 degrees. Adding in a Silverstone AP121 (1500 RPM) 120mm fan to the rear of the case reduced the processor idle temperature by 16% down to 42 degrees....

Cooler Master has also released various cases under its “Storm” banner, a subsidiary tasked with “arming the gaming revolution.” Naturally, this duty is fulfilled by developing new keyboards, mice, cases, mouse pads and audio gear for gamers. To date, the brand has released a strong lineup of mid-sized ATX cases, including the Sniper, Scout and Enforcer. We featured the Enforcer in our recent roundup and found it to be an excellent value at only $85....

The Cooler Master finger-press buttons for the expansion drives have been scrapped. In fact, the drive bay area of the Trooper has been completely redesigned. The new configuration accommodates a pair of what Cooler Master calls 90-degree rotatable 4-in-3 HDD modules. We like this addition for several reasons. The Trooper essentially has nine 5.25" drive bays. The 4-in-3 HDD modules take up the bottom six, converting them into eight 3....

Creative Technology founder, chairman and CEO Sim Wong Hoo died last week, his company recently confirmed. He was 67. It didn’t take long before the Sound Blaster became the top-selling PC expansion card and a household name among computer enthusiasts and PC gamers. Creative dominated the sound card market throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s and became the de facto for quality audio on the PC before motherboard makers started integrating increasingly better quality onboard audio into their offerings, demoting discrete sound cards to niche category status....

Don’t be fooled (credit: Akamai Technologies) The site uses a captcha-style challenge to filter out bots and web crawlers looking for malicious content while also adding to its apparent legitimacy.

For our benchmarks we used Fraps to measure frame rates during a minute of gameplay from the single-player level called Sudden Impact. The scene has heaps going on which should provide a fair representation of the performance gamers might expect to see on Crysis 2. Our Intel Core i7 920 processor was left running at its default operating frequency of 2.66GHz for these tests. The game was tested at three resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600....

Want to play using the very high quality settings? Be prepared to bring some serious GPU firepower, even at 1080p. Here the GTX 1080 had no trouble with a 75fps average. However previous-gen champions such as the GTX 970 and GTX 980 were a far cry from achieving 60fps. The same is true for AMD R9 390, 390X and RX 480 GPUs. Gamers will ideally want at least a GTX 980 Ti or R9 Nano here....

At 1920x1200, the GTX 550 Ti, HD 7750, 7770, 6750, 6770 and 6790 still delivered playable frame rates. To hit 60fps+, you’ll only need an affordable card such as the GTX 460 or HD 5830. Anything better should deliver perfect gameplay with plenty of headroom, as high-end cards exceeded 90fps.

Increasing the resolution to 5760x1200 reduced the frame rate of the dual-GPU cards to just below 50fps as the HD 6990 averaged 48fps and the GTX 590 managed 46fps. The HD 6970 dipped to 28fps. Finally, at the extreme resolution of 7680x1600, only the HD 6990 was able to deliver some semblance of playable performance with 36fps. Interestingly, while the HD 6970 averaged 21fps, the GTX 590 delivered a worthless 4fps....

For most people, closing or otherwise avoiding the occasional pop-up ad and other nuisance is fair trade for not having to dole out their hard earned dollars – that said, I believe few would object to disabling nagware in a matter of a few clicks. We’ve already seen how to accomplish this with AVG 8.5 and AVG 9.0, and today we’re going to have a crack at Avira. If you read our article on AVG, you might recall how simple it was: rename (or delete) a few key files, and viola....

Hardware reviewer ExtremePlayer has posted some benchmarks of an Core i9-13900K qualification sample they managed to obtain. This CPU should offer near-identical performance to shipping products as it features final clock speeds, unlike the engineering samples we’ve seen before. This late sample features a 5.5 GHz all P-core turbo clock and boosts up to a whopping 5.8 GHz when only two cores are loaded. In both instances, that’s 300 MHz faster than the pre-binned i9-12900KS....

Bumping the resolution up to 1080p saw the GTX 750 Ti dive to 32fps and the R7 260X to just 34fps. For an average of 40fps, we needed the GTX 660 Ti or HD 7850 while the R9 285 and GTX 960 brought us up to 55fps. If you want to play at 60fps, you’ll need the GTX 770.

Square Enix announced the pixel remasters during its summer showcase for E3 2021. Games started arriving on Android, iOS and Windows (via Steam) in July and continued through February 2022. The pixel remasters deliver graphical improvements over the originals as well as remastered musical scores, bug and glitch fixes, general gameplay enhancements and modern user interfaces. Composer Nobuo Uematsu returned to oversee the rearranged soundtracks. All six of the first numbered titles in the series – that is, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI – are now listed in the ESRB’s database for the aforementioned systems....

Square Enix in December halted sales of Final Fantasy XIV due to the immense popularity of the latest expansion, Endwalker. Simply put, the game’s fourth expansion pack was so well-received that Square Enix’s servers became overloaded and the company elected to suspend sales until it could get a grip on the issue. One would think that deploying more servers would solve the problem, but it wasn’t that easy given the current semiconductor shortage....

Even though Firefox isn’t as popular as it once was, you can still count on the fact that Mozilla will do something different compared to the ubiquitous Google Chrome. Case in point: the open source foundation is currently working on a new translation tool, a Firefox extension designed to respect users privacy aptly named Firefox Translations. Unlike Google Translate, Bing Microsoft Translator, DeepL Translate and other online services of that kind, Firefox Translations algorithms work completely offline....