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The Motorola Droid Xyboard 10.1 and 8.2 use Google’s Honeycomb music app, the one that is integrated with its cloud-based Google Music service. Users can play locally stored tracks as well as cloud-based ones, and easily create playlists or view their music organized by artist, album, song, genre, and “new and recent.” Each option presents music in a different view, and only the “new and recent” view offers the cool 3D rendered scrolling flow of album art for some reason....

The synthetic 3D performance of the MSI X58 Pro-E is spot on, matching the Asus P6T Deluxe in all three tests. While the overclocked X58 Pro-E configuration didn’t show much in the way of gains in FurMark, it was considerably faster in PCmark Vantage.

One area of particular concern involved inevitable collisions with micrometeoroids, tiny particles of rock or metal that are common in space. Despite their small size, they can do a great deal of damage when striking a spacecraft due to their extremely high velocities. NASA reinforced Webb’s mirror to withstand the barrage of micrometeoroid strikes it would experience over its lifetime. To date, the telescope’s primary mirror has absorbed 14 measurable micrometeoroid hits, or about 1-2 per month....

Webb’s First Deep Field was captured using the scope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), and is a composite made of images captured at different wavelengths across 12.5 hours. The first image reveals the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, and shows the effects that gravitational lensing have on distant galaxies behind it. Trying to appreciate the vastness of space can truly melt the mind. Recent estimates peg our Milky Way galaxy as being around 100,000 light years in diameter (a single light year is equivalent to 5....

The 21-foot, gold-coated primary mirror had to be folded to fit inside the nose cone of the rocket that carried it to space. The maneuver came after several other critical spacecraft deployments including the unfurling of the five-layer sunshield, and completes the final stage of all major deployments. Webb will spend the next couple of weeks continuing its journey to the L2 insertion point. Along the way, the launch team will begin calibrating its 18 primary mirror segments using 126 actuators on the backside of the mirror segments to properly align the telescope optics....

Still, the fast and fluid interface is a joy to navigate and provides a very different experience than other smartphone platforms. Windows Phone 7.5 introduced a few new features to make it easier to navigate a long list of apps, but I feel that the app list could benefit from some sort of folder organization system, especially when there are a lot of apps installed on the phone. Nokia hasn’t really altered the Metro interface in Windows Phone 7....

According to VideoCardz, the GeForce GTX 1630 will replace the six-year-old GTX 1050 Ti. That means it would be the cheapest desktop graphics card to come from Nvidia in years. Its entry-level 3000-series product, the RTX 3050, has a $249 MSRP but the model closest to that price on Newegg is $329. The appeal of a GTX 1630 could be its low selling point. It’s expected to be less than $190, the current price of the GTX 1650....

The GTX 1050 and RX 460 shared the same 23fps minimum frame rate in our Rise of the Tomb Raider test and when comparing the average frame rate the 1050 Ti was 10% faster, not to mention that it was 38% faster than the RX 460, but still 18% slower than the RX 470. Testing The Witcher 3 with HairWorks disabled handed the performance advantage to the GTX 1050 as it was 9% faster than the RX 460 4GB while the GTX 1050 Ti was 16% faster than the 1050 and 26% faster than the RX 460....

The GTX 1060 was able to average 89fps in Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1080p making it 71% faster than the GTX 960 and surprisingly 27% faster than the RX 480. Boosting the resolution reduced the impact of the driver overhead issue AMD’s GPUs face when using DX11 and as such as the GTX 1060 is now just 16% faster at 1440p. The GTX 1060 was also 66% faster than the GTX 960 and 18% faster than the GTX 970....

Despite being 30% cheaper than the GTX 480, the GeForce GTX 470 only has 7% less CUDA Cores and Texture Units, as well as 17% less ROPs. The graphics clock for fixed functioning units and the CUDA clock have been reduced by 13%, while the memory frequency has been cut down by 9%. This means in total the GeForce GTX 470 features 4 Graphic Processing Clusters, 14 Streaming Multiprocessors, 448 CUDA Cores, 56 Texture Units and 40 Raster Operations Units....

Update (Mar 1): According to the hackers, they are threatening to release even more confidential information they were able to gather from Nvidia’s servers. The data wouldn’t be just limited to the LHR mining caps, which are enforced at the firmware level, but they are claiming to have (and potentially release) more sensitive information like the source code of DLSS and information about Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs codenamed Ada, Hopper, and Blackwell....

The OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB delivered 3.3 times more performance than the Vertex 2 Pro when measuring reads, while it was 3.8x faster in writes. Again, the RevoDrive X2 performed well in this synthetic test, showing twice the performance of the Crucial RealSSD C300. The RevoDrive X2’s read access time was an impressive 0.054ms, making it the quickest of our test drives. However, its write performance slipped behind the Samsung 470 Series 256GB SSD at 0....

The CrystalDiskMark 3.0 random 512K test paints quite a different picture. Here the Vertex 2 Pro was 11% faster than the Vertex when writing data and 31% when reading. Furthermore the Vertex 2 Pro was 3.2x faster than the Samsung hard drive when writing and 3.9x faster when reading data. The random 4K results shocked us when we first saw them. While the read performance of the OCZ Vertex 2 Pro is nothing out of the ordinary with a throughput of 28MB/s, the write performance was just incredible....

Therefore it is no longer a matter of performance as the Vertex 2 Pro has certainly proven itself in that regard, but we are more concerned about its price as OCZ has made it clear that this is an enterprise SSD and we believe it will be priced accordingly. Currently the Intel X25-E costs $800 for the 64GB model and we suspect the 100GB version of the OCZ Vertex 2 Pro could retail for around that price....

The Vertex 4 proceeded to match the real-world performance of SF-2281 drives, delivering fast Windows 7 boots and game loading performance. Once we fired up synthetic tests such as CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD Benchmark, it became clear why the Everest 2 drive is so fast: along with relatively strong read performance, it has impeccable write performance, especially when you look at AS SSD Benchmark’s results. Early reviews indicated some performance inconsistencies, a couple of months later, our tests show nothing to be concerned about....

Once upon a time chip companies all specialized on designing one type of chip: Intel made CPUs; Qualcomm made modems; Nvidia made GPUs; Broadcom (pre-Avago) made networking chips. That age is all over. The future of semis will be designing ever more specific chips for ever more specific uses. This change will take many years to play out, but the transition has already begun. This is going to upend the semis industry to the same degree that consolidation over the past 20 years has....

This latest version improves memory support by enhancing overclocking and compatibility, it also adds a virtualization-related feature that enables the ability to manually assign PCIe graphics cards within IOMMU groups. Improved memory support is great, of course, but today we’re exploring Athlon 200GE overclocking which has been inadvertently enabled across MSI’s AM4 motherboard lineup. We’ve tried a handful of Asrock B350 and B450 boards, but none enabled 200GE overclocking. However, all MSI AM4 boards do, and we’ve confirmed this ourselves from budget B350 boards right up to the higher-end B450 models such as the Gaming Pro Carbon, for example....

Panasonic unveiled two successors to its Lumix S5 Mirrorless camera at CES this week. The S5II and S5IIX introduce phase detection autofocus (PDAF) and a new imaging engine to improve video functionality. The new PDAF function should help the cameras better track moving subjects in various lighting setups, even when multiple objects in the frame are moving. The S5II and S5IIX accomplish this with a 779 AF-point phase hybrid autofocus system....

The beta will focus on new features like improved RGB lighting, case customization and bespoke waterblocks for GPUs, memory and motherboards. Another feature allows users to import and export builds in free build mode using the new .pcbs file format. The open beta runs through June 20 and all participants will receive 15 percent off the final game once it launches later this year. Furthermore, those who go the extra mile and provide feedback during the beta will be entered for a chance to win a copy of the game....