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Lots of thought was put into the headset’s ergonomics, as Sony wants users to feel as immersed in their game world as possible while ensuring a comfortable fit for a variety of head sizes. New additions to the next-gen headset include a lens adjustment dial to manually tweak the distance between a user’s eyes and the lens, a built-in motor for headset feedback and a ventilation system to prevent the lens from fogging up during intense gaming sessions....

On top of that, another four apps (Weather, News, Sketch, and a fitness app called Lifelog) I suspect users won’t use over their third-party favorites. And if you’re thinking about simply uninstalling the bloatware apps, you can’t: the best you can do is disable the app, which removes it from the app drawer. It is unfortunate to say but Sony isn’t alone in this kind of behavior. Samsung tends to act similarly when it bundles apps depending on the carrier you use....

While the MSM8x74AB supports a maximum clock speed of 2.36 GHz across all four Krait 400 CPU cores, the Xperia Z2 Tablet reports a maximum clock of 2.27 GHz. It’s paired with an Adreno 330 GPU clocked at 578 MHz, the Hexagon QDSP6V5A DSP at 600 MHz, and a 32-bit dual-channel memory controller sporting 3 GB of RAM with 14.9 GB/s of bandwidth. There’s nothing too surprising about the SoC in the Xperia Z2 Tablet, as I’ve covered it in more detail in my reviews of the HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5....

Valve partnered with teardown specialist iFixit earlier this year to offer a variety of replacement parts for its Steam Deck handheld game console. Inventory on high-demand components like the replacement fan kit was very limited early on but it looks like the issue has finally smoothed out. iFixit got in just 100 Steam Deck fan fix kits last month and according to The Verge, those sold out in the blink of an eye....

As reported by Ars Technica, a new study by Researchers at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, looked at the logs from laptops that had received overnight repairs from 12 shops (national, regional, and local) in the greater Ontario region between October and December 2021. Disturbingly, not only had technicians from six of the locations accessed personal data, but two of them had also copied data onto a personal device....

In comparison, the DS415+ is one of the best four-bay NAS devices available, but at $580 it isn’t much more affordable, it can only use the DX513 as external storage rather than as an expansion unit, and only supports four drives out of the box. Then the DS1515+ costs $770. It packs an Intel Atom C2538 SoC but there shouldn’t be much difference between the DS1515 and the DS1515+ in terms of performance....

T-Mobile said more than half a million miles in the US are uncovered by cell signals from any provider. These mobile dead zones exist mostly because of land-use restrictions (national parks, for example) as well as terrain limitations (mountains and deserts) and the sheer vastness of the US. To remedy the situation, the two companies are creating a new network that will broadcast from Starlink’s satellites using T-Mobile’s mid-band spectrum....

Motherboard, Processor, Cooler, Memory If you’re undecided between Haswell and Ivy Bridge-E, the former should be faster for anyone who doesn’t need more than eight threads, it uses less power and it’s much cheaper, while the latter is technically the fastest, most feature-packed platform available if you’re willing to pay for it. There are tons of high-end Z97 boards available and unless you’re hunting for a particular feature, you’ll probably be equally satisfied with anything you pick....

Motherboard, Processor, Cooler, Memory When it comes to ultimate processing power, nothing comes close to the Core i7-5960X. Based on the Haswell-E architecture this 8-core/16-thread CPU operates at a base clock of 3GHz and can be boosted as high as 3.5GHz depending on the workload. Backed by a 20MB L3 cache the i7-5960X certainly dwarfs the quad-core Core i7-6700K and its 8MB L2 cache. There is no shortage of top notch Intel X99 motherboards and just about every board maker has at least one....

As is true for nearly all PC components, investing in a good gaming mouse can go a long way into improving your performance and comfort, allowing you to maximize the potential of your hardware by binding macros to a set of extra buttons or choosing the ideal DPI setting for that perfect shot. There’s a highly competitive market for gaming mice, to the point where most models now seem over-engineered with sensor DPIs going into the tens of thousands....

Along the way, we produced a preliminary article which you may recall where we discussed the insane performance differences seen between Intel B560 boards when using 65-watt CPUs such as the Core i7-11700, where performance could be up to 50% greater depending on the boards tested. Detours aside, it’s now time to take a wider look at the Intel B560 mobo landscape. There are plenty of results to go over, so instead of taking an individual look at all 12 motherboards, we’re going to jump straight into the testing....

DDR4 vs. DDR5 for Your Next Build (2 / 3) Top 5 Intel B660 Motherboards Best Budget Intel Z690 Motherboards Top 5 AMD X570 Motherboards The Best Intel B560 Motherboards Top 5 Intel Z490 Motherboards Top 5 AMD B450 Motherboards Best Overall Intel B660 For $190, you can get the MSI B660 Tomahawk WiFi, and while I would normally opt for the Z690 board, if you don’t care about CPU overclocking, it’s possible to argue that the B660 is the better value option....

The graphics industry that existed before that largely consisted of a more prosaic 2D, non-PC architecture, with graphics boards better known by their chip’s alphanumeric naming conventions and their huge price tags. 3D gaming and virtualization PC graphics eventually coalesced from sources as diverse as arcade and console gaming, military, robotics and space simulators, as well as medical imaging. The early days of 3D consumer graphics were a Wild West of competing ideas....

Recently we checked out the disaster that is the DDR4 version of the GT 1030, a horribly misleading product that shouldn’t exist. We expect that to go down as one of the worst graphics card released in history. We don’t expect this GTX 1050 3GB version to be nowhere near as bad, in fact it might not even be bad at all. However we bring up the GT 1030 to memory because it’s an unnecessary odd release and a bit misleading....

Redditors discovered the upcoming Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming card for sale in a Serbian store. Gamers in the country will have to pay a high premium to become one of the first to own the GPU: it’s priced at 172,229 RSD, including taxes, which converts to around $1,550. That’s close to the US MSRP of an RTX 4090. The retailer is generously offering a discount on the RTX 4070 Ti to those who pay cash for the card....

The Office of Inspector General oversighting one of the most important federal agencies in the US Government analyzed internal practices for password management and complexity. The result is startling, to say the least: the US Department of the Interior is doing almost everything wrong, exposing the Government body to grave consequences in case of a successful, state-sponsored cyber-attack. The auditors tested cryptographic hashes for 85,944 employees’ active directory (AD) accounts, using a database of more than 1....

According to new rumors coming from Washington, the US Government is ready to further increase its pressure on China’s high-tech industry. The US Commerce Department is seemingly preparing new, high-profile additions to its infamous Entity List, making the companies involved unable to obtain US-made technology and components. The list of companies that would be essentially banned from the US market as early as this week, the rumors say, include Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (YMTC) and more than 30 other enterprises....

Interestingly, the HD 6990 was slower than the single-GPU GTX 580 when using the Ultra Spec quality preset. Although the 11.5a hotfix provides Crossfire support, we found that it was not working properly when using the Ultra Spec settings. As a result, we do not believe there is an AMD configuration that can handle UberSampling.

When it comes to serious Excel spreadsheets we see a significant difference in performance between the old Core 2 series and the newer Core processors. In fact, even the Core 2 Quad Q9650 couldn’t beat the Celeron G1820, which was 12% faster. The Core 2 Quad Q9650 was also 3.5x slower than the Core i5-4690K, while the E6600 was almost 7x slower. The Sandy Bridge Core i5 and Core i7 processors were impressively fast, losing out to the newer Haswell models by slim margins....

Other large cases, such as the Lian Li D8000, feature a more traditional vertically-mounted motherboard tray which makes installation a little more difficult. For the installation process we decided to remove all the modules from the case and install them one by one. Starting with the 3.5" hard drives we loaded three of them into each of the drive cages and then slotted the cages into the bottom of the case....