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The Vertex 4’s sequential read performance in CrystalDiskMark was surprisingly low with a throughput of just 449.8MB/s, 13% slower than the HyperX 3K and 16% slower than the m4. Whereas the Vertex 4’s sequential read performance was surprisingly low, we find the opposite when looking at sequential writes as OCZ’s drive achieved a throughput of 468.7MB/s – considerably faster than any SSD previously tested, with 38% more performance than the HyperX 3K and 74% more than the m4....

The OnePlus 3 comes with a whopping 6 GB of LPDDR4 memory. Most current flagships include just 4 GB of RAM, so it’s interesting to see OnePlus upping this to 6 GB in their flagship. Does it have a significant impact on multi-tasking performance? Not really, at least at this stage. But I’m not going to complain about having more RAM. Storage is capped at 64 GB with no microSD expansion slot....

Kotaku reports that F1 Delta Time was one of the first licensed NFT/blockchain games when it arrived back in March 2019. At a time when many people hadn’t heard of non-fungible tokens, there was a lot of interest in the title as it offered an official F1 license and promised users the chance to “play to earn.” It even held the record for selling the most expensive NFT in its launch year: an in-game car that went for over $100,000....

Before the Palm Pilot, however, the company developed the Zoomer – marketed as the Casio Z-7000 and Tandy Z-PDA. This early attempt went head to head against the more memorable but still flopped Apple Newton. The Zoomer was supported by PalmPrint and PalmOrganizer, software based on an operating system developed by Geoworks. At the time, Palm billed itself as a third-party developer and targeted customers like Apple and Microsoft with their early PDA offerings....

Phoronix notes that the latest Doom port comes via a “Payload” in your BIOS — that is, if you run Coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS). Coreboot is an open-source BIOS compatible with several motherboards, including Acer Aspire VN7-572G, Razer Blade Stealth KabyLake (H2U), and several Google Chromebook mobos. One of Coreboot’s selling points is a feature called Payloads. These are extensions that users can use to customize the BIOS with additional functionality....

Google’s latest stable channel update for the desktop version of its Chrome browser is one of the most important in several months. According to the official changelog, the newest release contains fixes for no less than 11 security bugs, one of which has been actively exploited in the wild. Most of us use the popular web browser daily and trust it to be secure enough for most purposes, so you should update your installation of Chrome as soon as possible....

The Radeon RX 480 was originally intended to do battle with Nvidia’s upcoming Pascal-based GTX 1060, released only a month later. At the time, the 8GB RX 480 was priced at $240 and the GTX 1060 6GB was sold for $250. Three months after release we compared the two, head to head in 22 games and found on average that the GeForce GPU was 6% faster. We noted then that in more recent titles, based on modern DX12 and Vulkan APIs, the RX 480 was almost always faster....

Razer at the time was a brand of Kärna, and wouldn’t formally become a standalone company until 2005 after Krakoff and current CEO Min-Liang Tan bought the rights to the brand from the bankrupt entity. Razer wasted little time flooding the market with a torrent of gaming-focused peripherals, many of which are named after venomous or predatory creatures. Before RGB LEDs became the kudzu of the gaming community, high-speed sensors, programmable hotkeys and customizable profiles were all the rage....

Developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix, the second installment in the Tomb Raider series reboot has been ported to PC by Dutch studio Nixxes, the same folks that ported Square Enix’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Sleeping Dogs, and 2013’s Tomb Raider. With those credentials, in addition to participation from Nvidia, Rise of the Tomb Raider fell into capable hands. It has to be said the game already looked surprisingly good on the Xbox One....

Russian publication Kommersant gained access to a document laying out plans for Russia to defend its economy against the wave of sanctions levied against it since its invasion of Ukraine took place. Section 6.8.3 says Russia might import foreign goods without consent from copyright holders among those companies. According to a since-deleted tweet from Gazeta.ru, Russian politician Dmitry Ionin suggested unblocking popular BitTorrent tracker RuTracker. Russians would likely use it (regardless of the ban) to download movies from companies like Disney, Sony, and Warner Bros....

Interestingly despite the explosive sequential write performance found when testing with CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD Benchmark the results seen when running the Atto Disk Benchmark were not all that impressive. While the Samsung 830 Series 512GB didn’t start as weak it finished up maxing out at 414MB/s whereas the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB went on to achieve a throughput of 496MB/s making it 20% faster.

The Note 5 uses Samsung’s Exynos 7 Octa 7420 SoC, the very same 14nm 64-bit chip the company used in the S6. It features an octa-core CPU with four ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores at 2.1 GHz alongside four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5 GHz, plus a Mali-T760 MP8 GPU clocked at 772 MHz, and a 64-bit LPDDR4 memory controller providing 24.88 GB/s of bandwidth. In the Note 5 we’re getting 4 GB of RAM, which is a largely unnecessary upgrade on the Galaxy S6’s 3 GB of RAM....

Multi-window was introduced as a way to run two apps on a split screen of Galaxy tablets, but the feature is more mature and still useful on the 5-inch screen of the Galaxy S 4. The number of apps, including those developed by third parties, able to run in Multi-window has grown significantly, so users can check YouTube and Twitter simultaneously just as easily as they were previously able to use Gmail and the browser....

Considering the size of its on-screen keyboard and of the screen in general, it is no real surprise that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a pretty good messaging platform. As a non-3G device, there is no support for text or picture messaging. Social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter have no built-in support, either, but there is no shortage of free third party applications available to fill that void....

Samsung has just showed off some of its kitchen appliances that will be part of its CES 2023 lineup. The Bespoke AI Oven stands out thanks to its internal camera and what Samsung calls powerful AI. It’s able to recognize 80 different dishes (106 in Europe) and ingredients that are being cooked and recommend the appropriate temperature, time, and mode, the latter of which includes air frying, steam cooking, and dual temperature zones....

The benchmark result originated from @BenchLeaks, with the W9-3495X scoring 36,990 points in the multi-core stress test, and 1,284 points in the single core test. While the multi-core results are impressive, the single-core performance is an insignificant upgrade, just 6.6% faster than the Xeon W-3375. For the Xeon W-3375 Geekbench scores, we are averaging the chip’s score across all the results uploaded in the Geekbench 5 browser. The Xeon W9-3495X is an upcoming workstation CPU, featuring Intel’s new Sapphire Rapids server microarchitecture....

We’re used to seeing graphics cards arrive with such high demand that they’re quickly bought in bulk by scalpers and sold on auction sites at hugely inflated prices. But the MSRP of the RTX 4080 (and RTX 4090) has led to memes calling Nvidia the scalpers. Our investigation last month showed that the RTX 4080 isn’t selling that well—most retailers have plenty in stock. But it seems plenty of scalpers assumed the Lovelace card would be hard to find, so they decided to purchase units for resale....

Silverstone’s “stacked” design might offer unbeatable cooling performance, but it makes the RV05 cramped inside, not least because of all the space wasted at the top of the case. The case suffers serious limitations in PSU support as larger 1000w capacity units – often required for SLI and Crossfire – won’t fit unless you eliminate support for 3.5" drives. While some users were disappointed about certain aspects of the RV05’s internals, others simply weren’t in for the largely aggressive aesthetics....

The stack effect relies on the natural occurrence of air movement driven by the difference in air density between the exterior and interior of a chassis. While most full tower cases have front intake fans to draw in cool air, the Raven didn’t. In fact, the front of the case was completely blocked, preventing air from passing in or out, and instead packed intake fans mounted in the bottom of the case....

As with all Mini-ITX builds there is far less room to work with compared to a full or even standard ATX tower case. This can make builds for novice users quite challenging as even seasoned system builders will have to stop and think things over at certain points. The primary challenge is getting everything inside in a neat and tidy manner. Thankfully we didn’t end up having too much trouble with the RVZ01, but we will get to that shortly....