On the CPU side of things, we found similar results with Metro Redux as we did with the first version of Last Light. Overclocking doesn’t help boost performance all that much as Metro Redux is predominantly a GPU-dependent game, and as is often the case, gamers would be wise to invest in a Core i5, though AMD’s FX-8000 series held its own in this title with the FX-8350 lingering behind the i7-4770K by 10fps....
Since 2011, Microsoft 365 has provided a more affordable subscription-based service for Office apps, expanding to include many additional features over the years. Microsoft 365 Basic is a great middle-ground for users who need more features than the free tier, but don’t want all that the Personal plan offers. The Basic option is $1.99 a month, a $5 savings off Microsoft 365 Personal. Basic is essentially the same plan as the Free version but with 100GB of storage instead of 5GB....
As Microsoft works to implement a more secure Windows ecosystem, new security policies have become available for users and system administrators. The most recent policy concerns so called brute-force attacks, a tried and tested threat against the Windows account management subsystem. Microsoft says brute force attacks are one of the top three ways Windows machines are being targeted today, with malware and malicious scripts trying countless password combinations until user login accounts are finally compromised....
Many gamers were disappointed to learn that AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D will come with some overclocking limitations when compared to the regular Ryzen 7 5800X, but most signs so far point to the 3D V-Cache being able to compensate for this shortcoming. Last week, someone in Peru was able to get a hold of a Ryzen 7 5800X3D ahead of its official retail availability date, which is April 20. After performing a few benchmarks, they found AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 series processor won’t be exceptional in productivity tasks, which shouldn’t come as a surprise since AMD is marketing this specifically as a gaming CPU....
Let’s go ahead and get the bad news out of the way up front. Motorola is only launching the Razr 2022 in China, at least for now. With any luck, they’ll reconsider and bring it to more markets but we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out. The new Razr features a 6.7-inch foldable P-OLED FHD+ panel with a 144Hz refresh rate and support for HDR10+ as well as a 2....
In a range of games I tested, the GTX 1050 was anywhere from 5 to 15 percent slower than the GTX 970M, and around 35 to 50 percent slower than the GTX 1060. Considering the GTX 1050 is Nvidia’s new entry-level laptop GPU, these results aren’t surprising: the GPU provides much better performance than Intel’s integrated graphics, but it can’t (and isn’t meant) to outperform current and last-generation mid-range GPUs....
The GS63VR is only a few percent slower than a similar GTX 1060 laptop we previously tested, the GS43VR Phantom Pro. While the GS63VR is consistently behind the GS43VR, the difference is small enough to not be an issue. In real world games, the GS63VR performs essentially as well as the GS43VR, indicating the GTX 1060 in here is just as good as the implementation in MSI’s 14-inch gaming laptop....
Musk made the statement only a few days after entering into the agreement to buy the popular social media platform. Implementing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) supports Musk’s goals for the platform, which include improving Twitter with “…new features, making algorithms open-source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” In its current state, any direct message sent between Twitter users is viewable by the sender, the recipient, and any Twitter administrators with the required level of system access....
A threat actor (TA), going by DukeEugene, sells the malware on the dark web and claims that he wrote the code “from scratch.” However, TreatFabric’s code analysis shows it to be a fork of Ermac, one of the most detected malware families in the wild. While most of the code is from the well-known banking trojan, the rest is bits and parts of other programs, showing there is no honor among thieves....
Getting your hands on a high-end graphics card like those from Nvidia’s 30 series has not been easy in recent memory thanks to a perfect storm involving the pandemic and subsequent component shortages and supply chain issues as well as scalpers and crypto miners. The worst appears to be in the rearview as pandemic restrictions have mostly lifted and the supply chain is gaining fluidity. Ethereum’s recent switch to a proof-of-stake algorithm is no doubt going to flood the market with even more GPUs....
After what feels like an eternity of graphics cards being so expensive they reached three times MSRP, we’re finally seeing the market normalize. Some cards are now below MSRP, and Nvidia is reducing prices to clear an excess of stock. Newegg wants to make the process of buying a GPU a lot simpler with its JustGPU.com site. The landing page offers the option of jumping straight into the store, trying the benchmark tool, seeing the five most popular AIB makers’ products, and checking out some exclusive sales; the Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 6800, a card we awarded 95 in our review, is down to just $599....
The Tempest – the United Kingdom’s planned fighter jet of the future – will have a cockpit without physical switches or screens. Its systems will also try to “read” the pilots’ minds to monitor their condition and make them more aware of their surroundings. Unmanned and automated drones are becoming increasingly prominent in air-based combat, but the operation of the Tempest will involve a gradient between human and machine control, called “scalable autonomy....
Not as much time was spent tuning the GDDR5 memory, but we were able to test at a stable 2177 MHz, which admittedly isn’t a huge boost over the stock 2000 MHz. Our overclock enabled a 12% performance boost for the GTX 1070 at 1440p in Far Cry Primal, taking the average frame rate from 52 FPS to 58 FPS and leaving the GTX 1070 12% behind the stock 1080....
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege plays exceptionally well on the GeForce GTX 1080, delivering a smooth 65fps at 4K resolution. It’s 20% faster than the Titan X and 30% faster than the GTX 980 Ti. Meanwhile it was also 27% faster than the Fury X when comparing minimum frame rates. However, you will have no doubt noticed the weak minimum frame rate of the Fury X, as well as the Fury and Nano cards....
Because the GeForce GTX 560 Ti was nearing the limits of the CPU at 1920x1200 in Call of Duty: Black Ops we only saw a minor 7% rise in performance, but this did put the GTX 560 Ti on par with the GTX 570. Crysis Warhead is a GPU dependent game and our overclock provided an impressive 24% frame rate boost at 1920x1200. Again, we saw a nice 22% performance increase when testing with Battlefield Bad Company 2 at 1920x1200....
TechEpiphany (via VideoCardz) tweeted the latest sales figures from German hardware retailer Mindfactory, which show that 545 RTX 4070 Ti models were sold in the third week of January alone. For comparison, that’s more than the combined sales of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, RX 7900 XT, and Intel Arc A770/A380 – only 20 Intel cards were sold in the same week, admittedly. Interestingly, Mindfactory’s stats show that the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX sold 300 units, over 100 more than the RTX 4080 it competes against....
So when OCZ announced the arrival of the Octane SSD series based on the Indilinx Everest controller it seemed fairly plausible, despite the amazingly fast turnaround time. Then OCZ went on to release a second, Indilinx Everest 2-based Vertex 4 just months later. Some started to question how these new controllers were being developed so fast. Eventually it was revealed and later confirmed by OCZ that the Octane and Vertex 4 drives actually used Marvell controllers, while the firmware was developed in-house by Indilinx (hence the ‘Indilinx infused’ moniker)....
Take the file copy tests for example, the Vector was always very close to the top of our graphs and despite never actually hitting first place it was overall one of the fastest drives we have tested. With an average transfer speed of 242MB/s the Vector outpaced the Intel SSD 335 (218MB/s), OCZ Vertex 4 (190MB/s) and Crucial m4 (185MB/s). In fact, the only thorn in the Vector’s side was the Samsung SSD 840 Pro which averaged 260MB/s, making it 7% faster in the file copy tests....
Interestingly, our 100GB Vertex 2 Pro sample actually carried 128GB worth of flash memory. This is because the Vertex 2 Pro not only loses the ~7% from the GB to GiB conversion, but SandForce also specifies an additional 20% flash be set aside for spare area. SandForce uses this reserved space for its DuraWrite technology, which is designed to reduce write amplification and extend endurance. Once formatted the drive only has 93....
The AS SSD Benchmark 4K-64 Thread test saw the Vertex 3 once again outperform the RealSSD C300 when measuring both read and write performance, but both were considerably faster than anything else tested. Access time is one aspect where SSDs have always crushed standard disk drives. Read access times of the Vertex 3 were slightly quicker than the Samsung 470 Series and slightly slower than the Intel SSD 320 300GB....
