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The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is one of the global monopoly watchdogs that is still investigating the $68.7 billion Microsoft/Activision Blizzard deal. The agency said in September that the merger could lead to competition concerns within the video game industry. This led to the CMA opening an extended stage 2 phase of its probe in which the acquisition faces increased scrutiny. Part of the CMA inquiry involved collecting public comments over two weeks in October....

Update: See our latest CPU Buying Guide here. With readers constantly inquiring about which CPU they should buy, and after all the extensive testing you’re familiar with, the TechSpot CPU buying guide narrows things down to a handful of recommendations you can trust. Due to pricing and availability, Intel is largely dominating the picks in this buying guide update, and the release of Alder Lake has helped them secure a foothold at the high-end....

Market research firm NPD writes that US spending on video gaming, which covers content, hardware, and accessories, reached $12.35 billion in the most recent quarter. That’s still a lot of money, but it’s down $1.78 billion, or 13 percent, compared to the same period last year. Looking at some individual segments, content spending in Q2 reached $10.97 billion, marking another 13% decrease compared to Q2 2021. Hardware and accessories declined 1% and 11%, respectively, but it was mobile content that contributed most to the overall decline....

We found the results to be quite different when looking at 512K performance. Although the Supersonic provided the highest read result with 94MB/s, the N005 actually came second with 82MB/s while the DataTraveler was much slower at 67MB/s. The tables turn again when measuring write performance, as the DataTraveler provides the best results while the Patriot Supersonic completely tanks. The HD Tune Pro random 512 bytes read test favors the ADATA Nobility Series N005 quite heavily in both USB 2....

The update, aptly titled the “Lock Screen Update,” is available now to all Deck Owners. You can read the full changelog here, but we’ll go over the broad strokes below, starting with the biggest inclusion: the lock screen. This screen is not mandatory, but you can optionally set it to display after you wake the system up from sleep, on boot, on login, or when switching to Desktop Mode (or a combination of these)....

Core voltage typically maintains a constant value while your CPU is in use; however, sometimes under heavy workloads vcore can fluctuate. This is known as Vdroop and can be corrected with load-line calibration. This applies additional voltage as load increases to maintain your CPU’s stability. Vcore and Overclocking When it comes to overclocking, you can only push your CPU’s frequency so far before your CPU starts to experience instability. Programs might begin to crash or hang up, game performance could suffer or your computer could even fail to boot....

It’s important to note that not all decisions Microsoft makes in an Insider build end up in an official Windows release, but the requirement for an internet connection and an MSA during initial install seems quite likely to ship as part of a future update. This means that first-time Windows 11 installs will have fewer ‘Skip for now’ buttons in the future, or probably none at all. While the move will likely disrupt a lot of IT admin workflows, especially during fleet deployments with Windows 11, even personal users have their reasons for not wanting to sign up with a Microsoft account when installing Windows....

Comparing Windows 8 armed with the new Office 2013 suite we found that it was 10% faster when running our Excel MonteCarlo test against Windows 7 using Office 2010. Even when comparing apples to apples, with both operating systems running Excel 2010, Windows 8 is more efficient using the CPU cycles to its benefit on our MonteCarlo simulation. The AS SSD Benchmark was used to measure the performance of the Kingston SSDNow V+ 200 256GB SSD....

When looking at UWP apps that run natively on ARM, the Snapdragon 835 is typically faster than the Intel Celeron N3450 and varying degrees slower than Intel’s Core processors from the last few years, based on limited testing. Certainly when you put the Envy x2 next to an N3450-based device, just browsing through Explorer and using Edge is noticeably faster with Windows on ARM and I think that’s reflected to an extent with the benchmark results....

There’s a lot more ground to cover, but we’ll start with this expansion’s cinematic trailer, which you can watch above. It gives us our first look at the Dragon Isles, a mystical region filled with beauty, wonder, and a distinctly different tone than what we’re used to from this MMO. Occasionally, World of Warcraft gets a more “relaxed” expansion that doesn’t lean so heavily into giant faction conflicts and bitter, world-ending rivalries and grudges....

The GPU in the S835 has also received a healthy boost relative to the S821. We’re seeing typical raw performance gains of around 27 to 37 percent in offscreen GPU benchmarks, which is a handy gain that falls in line with what we’re seeing on the CPU side. With screens now extending beyond 2560 x 1440, the GPU is more than capable of handling those extra pixels (not that the Mi 6 uses a screen of that resolution)....

The games were among several worthy finalists including NBA Jam, PaRappa the Rapper, Resident Evil and Minesweeper, among others. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Released for the Nintendo 64 gaming console in 1998, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time defined what a 3D action video game could be, influencing countless games that followed. The game’s combination of storytelling, puzzle-solving, and combat earned Ocarina of Time multiple “Game of the Year” awards in 1998....

#1 You can compare CPUs by core count and clock speed If you’ve been around technology for a while, at some point you may have heard someone make the following comparison: “CPU A has 4 cores and runs at 4 GHz. CPU B has 6 cores and runs at 3 GHz. Since 44 = 16 is less than 63 = 18, CPU B must be better”. This is one of the cardinal sins of computer hardware....

Primarily, we’ll be looking at the monitor options you can get on the market today, and how the pricing structures differ for each line. For example, generally how much more expensive is it to go with a 4K monitor over 1440p, and what sacrifices are you making along the way? What sort of GPU performance hurdles are there to upgrading or choosing a higher resolution? We test many monitors each year and somehow we’ve never really talked about this, so we’ll give it a shot....

Fortunately, it was only a few months later when enthusiasts were blessed with the Core 2 Quad Q6600, another Kentsfield-based quad-core chip that sold for a less absurd $530. Although the part was locked at a frequency of 2.4GHz, we were still able to overclock via the front side bus back then, allowing us to boost the Q6600 from its stock 2.4GHz operating frequency to well over 3GHz! By no surprise, it quickly became one of Intel’s most popular enthusiast-grade processors of all time....

More than that, the living room laptop was killed by the smartphone. Every one of these alternatives fills the living room (read: consumption) role better than a Chromebook can. The differences are clear. Android and iOS have more mature ecosystems than Chrome OS, especially in terms of content availability and consumption. The Chromebook’s advantage is its keyboard, which isn’t a real advantage in terms of the living-room laptop. If you want a hybrid device that’s good enough at content creation to get by, keep looking....

“We are very grateful for all his contributions, and wish Mike the very best,” Jones added. New World has already seen player counts dip significantly since launching last September. Only 25,370 people are playing the game right now according to SteamDB. Lost Ark peaked at more than 1.3 million concurrent players following its February 2022 North American debut but is down to just 367,832 players as of this writing. Frazzini’s leadership was called into question over the years....

Naturally, some merchants will fall above or below the average. Trophy Skin has seen conversions increase by more than 30 percent and Wyze has experienced a 25 percent higher conversion rate with Buy with Prime. Others, like HydraLyte, have realized more modest gains of around 14 percent. (Papa needs a new pair of shoes) The feature was designed to work with most major ecommerce platforms including BigCommerce, which announced support for the feature earlier today....

Image credit Andrea Piacquadio

The first wave of these new APUs are known by the codename “Bristol Ridge” and while they do indeed support the new AM4 platform, they aren’t what many believed (or at least hoped) they would be. These aren’t Zen-based APUs, which probably won’t arrive till some time next year. What we have here are Excavator-based CPU cores, or a refined Bulldozer architecture, and I am using the word “refined” rather loosely here....