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When using MLAA we find that mid-range graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 560 Ti are able to still crack the 60fps barrier at 1920x1200. The Radeon HD 6850 was slightly slower with 59fps; the Radeon HD 5830 and GeForce GTX 560 averaged 55fps. The Radeon HD 6870 averaged 72fps, making it slightly faster than the GeForce GTX 470 which managed 70fps. The Radeon HD 6970 did well to provide 86fps, though the GeForce GTX 580 was again superior with 95fps....

That being the case, Intel can afford to be somewhat relaxed with its releases and the Haswell refresh is a good example. Some of the new Haswell CPUs do make a minor effort to improve on performance and value, though it is barely worth recognizing. In fact, Intel hasn’t provided us with samples of the new Haswell processor, nor has the company gone as far as sending us information about the products....

The IMX377 is pretty familiar considering it was included with the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P, but in the HTC 10 we’re seeing better light-gathering optics thanks to OIS and the wider f/1.8 lens. The camera is capable of 4K recording as you’d expect. On the front is a 5.0-megapixel Samsung S5K4E6 CMOS sensor, which is 1/4" in size and features 1.34 µm pixels. It’s also paired with an f/1....

Firstly, though, I want to heap bucket loads of praise on to HTC for resisting the urge to include spam and duplicate applications. The HTC 10 is completely devoid of unnecessary crap: there’s just one browser (Chrome), just one gallery app (Google Photos), and just one app store (Play Store). I have not seen a single pop-up dialog while using this device that asked me to choose between two apps....

The main home screen works on a system of tiles, which can be completely customized by the user to contain shortcuts to the most commonly used applications and contact entries. The neat thing is, these tiles can also show live information such as new message counts, status updates, and photos. Many of them are also animated, which adds a richer feel to the otherwise spartan UI. Any options or apps not found on the tiled home screen can be found in the main menu, which can be accessed by swiping left on the display, or tapping the arrow on the top right of the screen....

While the Snapdragon 821 is a reasonably efficient SoC, the small battery capacity is not enough for daily usage. Switching over to the HTC U Ultra as my daily driver felt like I was going back to the days of the Galaxy S6 with its poor battery life, and this isn’t what I’ve come to expect in 2016 or 2017. As you can see in the charts above, the U Ultra is obliterated by phones like the Pixel XL and Mate 9 in nearly every test....

Dragon Age: Inquisition is third main title in BioWare’s action RPG series, and it’s a much more expansive and ambitious game than those that came before it. Part of this is explained because it’s launching on ’next-gen’ consoles, and part of it is thanks to the use of DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine. Another factor is simply that Creative Director Mike Laidlaw wanted this game to finally realize the vision for Dragon Age....

On Wednesday, March 2nd, Göran Marby, President of ICANN, replied to the government of Ukraine that it did not have the authority to grant its request to disconnect Russia from the internet. This is a rare instance of an organization acting in Russia’s favor, more so at a time when many others are taking drastic measures to pressurize the Russian economy and force the country’s armed forces into an immediate ceasefire....

Either way, if that was reason enough to have manufacturers looking into custom board designs and cooling offerings out of the box, then you won’t hear us complaining. Besides your run of the mill reference-based boards, Inno3D produced a number of impressive GeForce GTX 200-based products, such as their GTX Accelero line and the flagship of them all, the GTX 295 Black Series that added a large water-cooling block for heavy overclocking....

However once under full load the overclock did push the card for an added 10% power consumption compared to a standard GeForce GTX 480. As the only water-cooled graphics card on test, it’s no surprise to find that the Inno3D GTX 480 iChill Black Series had the coolest operating temperatures of the high-end graphics cards tested. Whereas the standard GeForce GTX 480 operated at 97 degrees under full load, our overclocked Inno3D GTX 480 iChill Black Series configuration operated at just 68 degrees, a welcomed 30% drop in temperature....

Nonetheless, we recognize that it may not be an attractive upgrade for existing 7700K owners, not to mention that it’s somewhat expensive at $360. With supply being very limited at the moment, buying one this year might be challenging even if you are interested. With that in mind, we’ve purchased the more affordable Core i3-8100 and 8350K to see what they have to offer. For $180 the Core i3-8350K is nearly a rebadged Core i5-7600K: both are 14nm quad-cores operating at ~4GHz, but the 8350K is 25% cheaper and should be faster thanks to a larger 8MB L3 cache....

Please note we’re using the Core i3-8100 DDR4-3200 data since you can only buy Z370 boards for now and that’ll make even more sense in a moment. So here we are, the Premiere price vs. performance scatter plot and it’s looking all Intel in this category. The Core i3-8100 and i5-8400 provide the best value, beating the 1300X, 1500X and 1600 processors quite easily. However, what happens if we factor in motherboard price....

Intel’s Extreme Edition processor line is over a decade old now starting way back in 2003 with the single-core Pentium 4 EE 3.4GHz, which shared the same Socket 478 platform as standard Pentium 4 processors but received an exclusive L3 cache. Having been comprised of 169 million transistors on the 130nm process and priced in line with what it might have cost to build an entire PC, the Pentium 4 EE was serious business....

These claims could have been made regarding the mobile Skylake CPUs, so we will have to wait and see how that shakes out. After our results indicated that the 6700K was no faster than the 4790K, we retested with the expectation of finding at least a 10% increase. However, it became clear that there was no extra performance and Intel’s own PR material only claimed “up to” a 10% increase, which means you can expect just a few percent for the most part....

First up we have Blender, this is a lower is better scenario which is why the numbers at the bottom of the chart work backwards. The faster a CPU the further right it will be and the lower the price the lower it will be situated, so ideally you want to be as far right as possible and as low as possible on the chart. It’s a little confusing so I’ve added a line indicating the very best value CPUs start from the Ryzen 7 1700 and going up to the 1950X....

We want to start with 3DMark’s entire suite of tests here, because we think it paints a really interesting picture of how Kaby Lake G stacks up against the GTX 1050 combined with an i7-7700HQ. Unfortunately, we don’t have data for an 8750H and GTX 1050 combo just yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to follow up on that soon. In any case, with the more CPU demanding tests like Cloud Gate and Sky Diver, Kaby Lake G is clearly behind the 7700HQ with a discrete GTX 1050....

Using our custom WinRAR test we found that the Core i7-3960X took just 92 seconds to compress a 700MB file, while multiple smaller files totaling 400MB’s took 20 seconds. Here the advantage against the i7-2600K was small but considerably larger versus the AMD FX-8150. The Core i7-3960X topped the charts again when testing with Adobe Photoshop CS5. The test took 15.8 seconds making the Core i7-3960X roughly 20% faster than the Core i7-2600K and 26% faster than the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition....

It feels a bit like EVGA’s engineers were too busy playing golf to develop the Z97 FTW, which is nearly a direct clone of the Z87 FTW and offers fewer features than seemingly every board in this roundup while still being priced in the same territory. The audio quality of the Z97 FTW’s ALC898 codec is inferior to the ALC1150 elsewhere and for reasons we may never understand, EVGA limited the Z97 FTW’s M....

Vollebak embedded the coat with 42 panels of graphene, a highly conductive material that some companies, like Samsung, believe can provide longer-lasting and faster-charging batteries. In fact, Professor Coskun Kocabas of UoM says the material works much like a lithium-ion battery. “We have a multilayer graphene coating on the surface, and we intercollate ions between the graphene layers, similar to a lithium-ion battery,” Kocabas told Wired. Graphene is an absorbing material in its normal state, but as it becomes charged with electrons, it turns reflective....

The Hollywood Reporter writes that the Futureverse Foundation, created in collaboration with Non-Fungible Labs and New Zealand-based NFT company Fluf World, will be funding artists whose works will be turned into NFTs. Its aim is to make the metaverse more accessible to people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Reeves, Grant, and Non-Fungible Labs co-founder Brooke Howard-Smith will help artists through the process of transferring traditional artwork into digital NFTs that will go on sale in the metaverse....