Posts

The Rijksmuseum, an arts and history museum in Amsterdam, has published an incredibly detailed photograph of The Night Watch boasting a resolution of 717 gigapixels. The team used a 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS-camera to capture 8,439 individual photos of the painting. Artificial intelligence was then used to stitch the whole thing together, resulting in a massive photo featuring 717 billion pixels with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes....

While most of these clients are mobile-first nowadays, thankfully for my sake all offer some form of desktop counterpart — either a full blown native client or a web based one — so I can reply faster and more comfortably using an actual keyboard. However that doesn’t make switching between different app windows and browser tabs throughout the day any less annoying. If this sounds familiar, there are a handful of all in one messaging clients that can save you the trouble by keeping all your chats under one roof, and best of all they are cross-platform....

While we talk about video games plenty here at TechSpot, those pieces tend to focus on the games themselves or how they run on modern PC hardware. Today, however, we’re going to pull back the curtain on the industry and take a look at the studios behind some of our favorite games to determine what makes them tick. How have they contributed or influenced the industry? What are some of their biggest successes?...

Graphics setting adjustments have always had an impact on the performance margins between AMD and Nvidia cards, but the degree of that effect is amplified at these extreme resolutions. Simply pushing the anti-aliasing level one notch too high was enough to see the GeForce GTX 590 go from playable to a complete slideshow. As is the nature of dual-GPU graphics cards, they sometimes suffer from the lack of multi-GPU support in certain titles....

When reading or copying data, Patriot’s Supersonic is hands down the fastest. Given Patriot’s claimed read performance of 100MB/s, this shouldn’t be too surprising. To be honest though, when sitting these drives side-by-side I was sure Patriot had written a check that the Supersonic simply wouldn’t be able to cash, the drive quickly proved me wrong. Patriot’s drive crushed the competition in our ISO file read test, offering speeds of 116MB/s compared to the DataTraveler Ultimate 3....

The Spoon Browser Sandbox offers 11 different Web browser builds, including IE 6, 7, and 8, Firefox 2, 3, and 3.5, Safari 3 and 4, Opera 9 and 10, as well as Google Chrome. All of these run securely and don’t require installation. To begin, visit spoon.net/browsers and click where it says Install Plugin. After executing the downloaded installer, you should be able to run any of the available browser sandboxes by selecting your browser of choice....

Now, we’re not encouraging you to go and pirate the software, and we don’t have to. A majority of the enthusiast community will download Windows 7 illegitimately. Some will have already pre-ordered Microsoft’s latest OS, others will undoubtedly come into a legal copy at one point or another, and many will flat out steal 7 - you know who you are. That out of the way, the bottom line is, nobody wants to wait until October 22 to get their hands on the final build of Windows 7....

In Wordle: The Party Game, players will have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. The fewer tries a player needs to guess the word, the fewer points they score. The player with the least points at the end of the game is declared the winner. There are four different ways to play: classic mode, fast play, timed games or with teams. Once a round is over, simply wipe the dry-erase boards clean to start anew....

The launch window for New Shepard’s 23rd mission opened at 8:30 a.m. central time. Liftoff occurred at 10:26 a.m. from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas and everything appeared to be going smoothly at first. The booster failure occurred a little over a minute into the flight as New Shepard reached max q, the moment when aerodynamic stress on the vehicle reaches its maximum. The anomaly triggered the emergency capsule escape system, which safely separated the crew capsule from the booster....

Given the flood of reports that claim an RTX 3090 Ti will arrive in January, along with alleged photographs of the card/packaging, the announcement of a new Ampere flagship seems pretty much inevitable. The RTX 3090 Ti is expected to feature a whopping 450W TDP—100W more than that vanilla RTX 3090—along with a GA102-250 GPU with 10,752 CUDA cores (256 more than the RTX 3090), 24GB GDDR6X VRAM, 84 clusters, 84 RT cores, 336 Tensor cores, and 128 ROPs....

The Black2’s HDD maxed out at 112MB/s in Atto Disk Benchmark’s read test – very close to WD’s claimed 114MB/s. Meanwhile, the package’s SSD is rated for 350MB/s and reached 417MB/s when working with 128K data. The combo drive’s disk hit 112MB/s again while its flash portion reached 148MB/s, a tad over the company’s quoted 140MB/s.

Despite WD’s claim of a 350MB/s read speed, it’s the Black2’s 140MB/s write throughput that falls short here. The SSD portion of the drive managed just 105.8MB/s, which is only slightly faster than the WD Black 4TB HDD and slower than the WD Velociraptor 1TB. OCZ’s Agility 4 256GB was previously the slowest SSD tested here and the Black2 was 23% slower than that. Even worse, the Black2’s flash drive was 46% slower than the Samsung SSD 840 Evo 250GB while its hard drive portion was the slowest storage device tested at 42MB/s, 54% slower than the WD Black 4TB....

The Beginnings This early Internet venture was wildly successful, largely in part due to AOL’s web portal for beginners which featured casual and classic games, news and sports sections, chat rooms, tips on finance, and more. At a time when it wasn’t readily apparent just what to do once you’d gotten online, AOL’s web portal served as a good starting place for many. One of my earliest computer memories involves AIM....

The Guardian reports that YouTube has removed thousands of pro-Kremlin and Russian state media channels for violating its guidelines relating to the Ukraine conflict. The content goes against the company’s major violent events policy, which applies to the denial of events such as the Holocaust and Sandy Hook. Google suspended all advertising in Russia, including on YouTube, following the invasion. It also refused to remove content relating to the war that Russia deemed illegal, which led to Google News being banned in the country....

Retailers have cut the prices on all Zen 4 CPUs this month. Europe and China saw prices fall by almost 30 percent for all models, while in the US, they decreased by roughly 15 percent. The cuts started in China earlier this month, where all Zen 4 CPU prices fell by around a quarter, with the 7950X going down by 27 percent. Similar drops hit Europe over the weekend, with the flagship processor becoming almost €200 cheaper....

To flesh this comparison out into a true three-way battle, I reached out to Corsair, who provided me with their K70 RGB Rapidfire keyboard. This is the keyboard we rated as the best for gaming in our Best Keyboards article last year, so it’ll be interesting to see whether this still holds true throughout this comparison. The Creative keyboard I have on hand is the Sound BlasterX Vanguard K08: the only keyboard that Creative currently sells....

When testing the coolers we remount them onto the CPU three times and record the idle/load data. Each time the thermal paste is wiped clean from both the CPU and the heatsinks base. The best result is displayed rather than the average of all the recorded data. Because we record the temperatures using EVEREST Ultimate Edition, the same version is used every time with the same motherboard using the exact same BIOS revision....

While this sounds like an easy question, unfortunately it does not have a completely clear-cut answer. Different people have different eyesight quality, and both the size of a monitor and the viewing distance between the monitor and a person’s eyes make a huge difference. In order to accurately answer whether a 4K monitor is going to look any better than a lower resolution monitor, we will need to determine the pixel pitch (which is the distance between the pixels) of a monitor and compare it to what you are actually capable of seeing....

Despite this, the power consumption numbers at both idle and under load are quite different amongst most of the boards. The MSI P55-GD65 was the “greenest” motherboard with a system idle consumption level of just 68 watts, which is incredible. Under load the MSI configuration consumed 160 watts which was again the lowest of any board tested. At the opposite end of the scale we had the DFI LanParty DK P55-T3eH9 taking the place of a full-sized SUV, consuming the most power at both idle and under load....