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The graphics in League of Legends reminds me of Blizzard’s 2002 Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, but the game is still massively popular and the good news is that pretty much anyone can play it with just about anything. Discrete GPUs aren’t required and gamers can even play with Intel’s HD Graphics using anti-aliasing along with all the other bells and whistles. At 1920x1200, the Intel HD Graphics 4600 does dip below 40fps, dropping to just 38fps, though even here the game is still quite playable....

First gaining momentum around 5 years ago, we’ve been closely following and testing both AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-Sync and plenty of monitors packing both. The two features used to be fairly different, but after some updates and rebranding, things today have synched the two pretty nicely. Here’s an update on everything you should know as of 2021. The Skinny on Adaptive Sync FreeSync and G-Sync are examples of adaptive sync or variable refresh rate for monitors....

Intel recently published a whitepaper with some amusing 32nm facts that we are reproducing here for you. If you have ever wondered how small the logic inside these chips really is in ‘measurable’ terms, here are some random facts to give you some perspective: A nanometer is so small that it takes a billion of them to make a meter. A billion is a huge number. A stack of a billion sheets of paper would be 100 km high....

When testing The Witcher 2, the GTX 680 slipped 4% behind the HD 7970. However, Gainward’s overclocked card filled that gap and then some with a 6% performance increase. The GTX 680 was 23% faster than the HD 7970, 42% faster than the GTX 580 and 16% faster than the HD 6990 in Skyrim, while the Phantom offered another 8% more performance. Meanwhile the GTX 680 Phantom provided an 8% (5fps) improvement....

We’re getting there people, second last game and it’s Prey. Here the 390 churned out an impressive 95 fps on average which placed it on par with the GTX 970. Moving to 1440p the 390 again matched the 970 out of the box though overclocking did had the 970 a rather massive win over the 390. Still both were good for over 50 fps at all times using the very high quality settings....

The GeForce RTX 2060 which is found in a wide range of gaming laptops was previously limited to 90W of power, with most manufacturers choosing the default 80W for their notebooks. With the 2020 GeForce refresh, Nvidia is increasing that limit to 115W, which can bring more performance out of the same GPU as long as a proper cooling design is used. The reason for this could be that Nvidia realized the RTX 2060 was not very compelling when limited at 80W....

Normalcy was restored in x264 HD Benchmark 4.0 as the G1.Sniper2 performed slightly better than the Extreme4, while the original G1.Sniper was shoved back to third place. Gigabyte’s new Z68 board maintained its partial lead in the TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress conversion test, faring three seconds better than the Extreme4.

At 4K, the Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming was 8% faster than the Founders Edition graphics card in Overwatch. Not a exactly a huge gain, and we were only able to extract another 3% performance which was pretty dismal. This time we see a decent 11% performance gain for the G1 Gaming over the Founders Edition, and we were able to extend that to a 17% margin with our custom overclock....

The HD 7970 SOC provided a massive 19% performance increase over the standard card along with a 12% lead over the GHz Edition. Interestingly, despite being so much faster than the standard HD 7970 out of the box, we couldn’t extract much more performance out of Gigabyte’s card. The 1200MHz overclock offered only 3% more speed and the 1260MHz overclock was even less impressive. When testing with Max Payne 3, the HD 7970 SOC was 8% faster than the standard version and 6% quicker than the GHz Edition....

According to a new blog post published by Google’s safety & security team, aptly titled “Hounding scammers with litigation,” the company seeks to address instances of puppy fraud using the legal system. According to Google, there’s been an uptick in online scams over the past few years (likely thanks to the ongoing pandemic), some of which cannot be tackled just by raising awareness. In more extreme cases, Google says lawsuits are an “effective tool” for establishing legal precedent and raising the stakes for anyone caught scamming innocent victims....

This week, a team of modders announced they’re releasing a VR mod for Half-Life 2 into public beta in September. The primary aspects of the mod seem to be complete but the team still wants to improve it. The beta will let Half-Life 2 owners play the main story from start to finish in VR. All the weapons will support VR functions like reloading by hand, dual wielding, and optional laser sights....

There are so many expectations on Halo Infinite’s armor-clad shoulders that you’d think it’d crumble apart in a pile of pixels. Every single player is bound to come into this game with their own predetermined definition of what it is and what it stands for. I sure as hell did. So, yeah, let’s just get the easy part out the way: Halo Infinite, officially out on Wednesday for Xbox and PC, is the seventh mainline Halo game and the first in six years, following 2015’s divisive Halo 5: Guardians....

It should be noted that although Hitachi lists all three HDD sizes on its website, we were unable to find the smaller 250GB drive selling anywhere. The 320GB version can be bought from several retails for about $80, while the 500GB variant that we are testing will set you back some $120. The plastic shell has been given a carbon fiber look and offers a good amount of grip, but this is not what makes the drive resistant....

Even though this laptop isn’t available in the US, it provides an interesting look into Intel’s Core i3-6100U and the limitations that 4 GB of RAM provides in cheaper systems. The Core i3-6100U is particularly interesting as it’s still a 14nm Skylake part with two cores, four threads and a 15W TDP, but it lacks Turbo Boost technology, meaning its clock speed is limited to 2.7 GHz. In comparison, the Core i5-6200U that’s available on US models is clocked at 2....

The difference between the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro is a little confusing if you’re tossing up between the two. The Mate 10 has a 5.9-inch 1440p 16:9 LCD, while the Mate 10 Pro opts for a tall 6.0-inch 18:9 AMOLED with a lower 2160 x 1080 resolution. The Mate 10 Pro is water resistant, but it doesn’t include a microSD card slot or 3.5mm headphone jack: features that the Mate 10 does include....

Capture speed from the P9’s camera is good without being outstanding. The on-screen animation makes the camera feel slower than it actually is, with images being captured shortly after the shutter button is pressed, but shortly before the shutter animation is seen on the screen. If you need to capture fast-moving objects, your best bet is to use the burst mode by holding down the shutter button, which works well in most situations and is a better solution that attempting to quick fire a single photo....

With Sony’s PS VR2 only three weeks from release, Bloomberg reports that the company has cut shipments of the next-gen VR headset in half due to low pre-orders. The company previously estimated it would ship at least two million units in its launch quarter. However, anonymous sources say those sales are now projected at one million. Sony expects another 1.5 million units to ship between April this year and March 2024....

With that said, this review will serve as a great reference for those wanting to compare Intel Core i3, i5, i7 and i9 processors directly, and what you get on each jump. It’s rare for us to feature all these processors in a single review since they aim at different market segments and budgets. For example, when reviewing the Core i3-10100, none of the Core i7 or i9 processors were included, as $400+ parts aren’t usually relevant when reviewing an entry-level $100 CPU, so we opt to remove them in an effort to declutter the graphs....

If you missed the previous review and want to learn more about Tiger Lake’s architecture and new features, we strongly recommend you check that out first. In particular, the review of the Core i7-1165G7 talks about the differences between this 11th-gen line and previous 10th-gen parts like Ice Lake. Our main focus in this article will be comparing the 1185G7 to the 1165G7, to see if this faster CPU is actually worth buying....

I get these aren’t gaming focused CPUs but if I skipped over the games I can’t imagine it would go down to well with many of you, so I’ve picked four CPU-intensive games that do as good a job as any of utilizing cores. That said, most are best handled by a 6-core/12-thread CPU. Battlefield 1 for example still hits the highest frame rates on the Core i7-7700K – still, for a core-heavy CPU the 7900X performs great, and so did the 7820X and 7800X....