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When testing Resident Evil 5 with medium quality settings, the A8-3850 smoked the Core i3-2120 by a 53% margin. The A6-3650 also put a hurting on Sandy Bridge with a 41% lead. The Z68M-ITX/HT system averaged a dismal 20fps when playing Bad Company 2 using the lowest possible quality settings. By comparison, the A75M-ITX and A6-3650 was 140% faster with 48fps and the A8-3850 more than tripled the Core i3’s performance with an average of 62fps....

It was those agreements with NetEase that have enabled Blizzard to publish its games in mainland China since 2008. But the company has announced that they will expire on January 23, 2023, and the two parties have been unable to reach a deal to renew the license. Blizzard said it could not come to an agreement consistent with its “operating principles and commitments to players and employees.” Blizzard said in its press release that it would suspend the sale of its games in China in the coming days, with most online game services in the country suspended from January 23....

The Moto X Style isn’t a small device, packing a 5.7-inch 1440p display on the front. Motorola has taken a leaf out of LG’s book in opting for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 808 SoC over the hotter and more power consuming Snapdragon 810, alongside 3 GB of RAM and a 3,000 mAh battery. The same Moto features from the previous-gen model also return, including Moto Display and always-on voice commands. The handset is very similar in size to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5 (…) however, the Style doesn’t feel like a thick phone in your hands due to the curved body; it’s a more ergonomic and easier to hold design than the Note 5....

The retail offering includes the mouse itself, documentation and software, and a charging station / storage compartment for the optional mouse feet that looks more like a hockey puck. Much like the original SideWinder, the X8 is an overall large mouse. It features a two-tone color scheme with gray on top, black around the sides and silver accents on some of the buttons. There are no rubber grips on the mouse but the covering of the mouse click buttons left me a bit puzzled....

One of the issues people had with Windows 11 at launch was that Microsoft seemed to be up to its old tricks again when it comes to forcing people onto default browser Edge. Installing a new browser and opening a link gave a single chance to commit to that browser with a checkbox, but missing it meant manually changing the default way of opening several internet-related file types, including ....

The vulnerabilities, labeled CVE-2022-26485 and CVE-2022-26486, are both use-after-free (UAF) vulnerabilities that were reported to Mozilla by Chinese Internet security company Qihoo 360. As Kaspersky highlights, these types of vulnerabilities relate to the incorrect use of dynamic memory during a program’s execution. CVE-2022-26485 relates to a UAF flaw in XSLT parameter processing, while the other deals with UAF in the WebGPU PIC framework. Mozilla in its security advisory said they have reports of attacks in the wild utilizing both bugs....

It’s been an ongoing challenge for manufacturers to balance those three and stay competitive. It is easy to pick two of them and do that very well, but that still leaves the finished product lacking in the other category. For example, you can put top of the line hardware in a computer and give it great cooling, but it’s hard to scale that down to a size that makes sense for a SFF PC....

The outer lid is black plastic with an embossed MSI logo in white. Looking at the system head-on with the lid closed, you can barely spot eight small LED activity lights in the center along the bottom bezel. From left to right these indicate: Bluetooth, Wireless, Power On, Battery, Caps Lock, Num Lock, Scroll Lock, Hard Drive Activity. Moving to the right side of the X340 there are two USB 2....

Microsoft released the first version of its flight simulator, Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0, in November of 1982. The simulator allowed players to pilot a Cessna 182 in the Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle areas. The release not only wowed users in the early 1980s, but it also helped to set the standard for realistic flight simulators for decades to come. Forty years later, Microsoft is still churning out new technology and new content for aviation enthusiasts around the world....

Despite only arriving five years ago, the Nintendo Switch is already the fifth best-selling console of all time, despite the numerous complaints of Joy-Con drift, having moved 114.33 million units. This success led to analysts and industry insiders claiming an updated Pro version would arrive complete with 4K support, a better processor than the Switch’s aging Tegra X1 SoC, more storage, a better and possibly bigger screen, and more. The Switch Pro never arrived....

After only launching in 2017, the Switch has become Nintendo’s best-selling home console of all time with an amazing 103.54 million units sold—it reached 100 million units faster than any other console in history. But while consumer demand for the Switch remains high, Nintendo expects to sell 20 million units this year, which is 10% down from its FY 2021 sales and a massive 30% lower than the previous year, when sales peaked at 28....

The Wii U is the first new video game console in six years and the sixth console Nintendo has ever made. It comes freighted with heavy expectations. It more or less starts the next generation of consoles, one that will see a new Xbox and PlayStation late next year, and therefore it needs to seem like some sort of a leap forward. It needs to signal whether it will likely be another phenomenon like the Wii or just a passable role-player like the Nintendo GameCube....

The camera app can be launched by long-pressing the camera shutter key and the interface is the same as on other Windows Phones. You can half-press the shutter key to focus before taking the picture, but it is difficult to feel the difference between a half and full press, which makes it more cumbersome to use than anything else. Alternatively, you can tap the screen anywhere to focus and shoot an image immediately....

It’s possible to crank the image quality a little higher in Overwatch but ultimately at 1080p the game puts up little challenge for even the previous generation mid-range GPUs. Here the GTX 1060 sailed along at a silky smooth 166fps, matching the performance of the Radeon R9 Nano and GTX 980. At 1440p we find that the GTX 1060 is able to hang with the R9 390X and GTX 980, making it 83% faster than the GTX 960 and 20% faster than the GTX 970....

Due to the card’s late arrival, we’re just going to update three games with the GTX 1060 Phoenix GS results and we will also include custom overclocking as well as a note on thermals. Before we get to that let’s take a closer look at the card itself. Like the Founders Edition, the Phoenix GS measures 250mm long. Whereas Nvidia’s design stands 110mm tall the Gainward card is 123mm tall thanks to the oversized cooler....

The GeForce GTX 480 and Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards delivered virtually the same results in our test. The average frames per second of the GeForce GTX 480 were slightly higher, while the Radeon HD 5870 delivered a slightly better minimum frame rate. Also, the Radeon HD 5850 was only slightly faster than the GeForce GTX 470 when measuring average frame rates, while the minimum was considerably higher delivering 21% more performance....

We then used Fraps to measure actual gameplay and saw similar performance trends but with higher frame rates. The reason we prefer the DirectX 11 benchmark is because it plays the exact same scene every time, while our Fraps walkthrough is susceptible to human error. Here the GeForce GTX 480 was slightly faster than the Radeon HD 5870, beating it by 2fps while the minimum frame rates were even at 12fps....

We were disappointed to find a system idle consumption of 191 watts opposed to the 174 watts of the HD 6990. This means when carrying out non-3D tasks the GTX 590 will use 10% more power. Despite being a gas guzzler, the GeForce GTX 590 runs relatively cool at 84 degrees when under load. Its idle temperature of 45 degrees was also very acceptable, and the card was surprisingly quiet – even under full load....

When testing Crysis 2 at 1920x1200, the overclock allowed us to extract an extra 2fps or 8% more performance. We recorded a 6% increase in Deus Ex: Human Revolution when comparing our custom overclock to both the Nvidia spec and Gigabyte’s factory overclock. Again, we see a 6% (2fps) increase from our overclock in Max Payne 3. It appears that there is very little reward for overclocking the GTX 650 Ti....

According to estimates we’ve seen, by the time you read this, the GTX 660 Ti should be hitting shelves for approximately $300, making it roughly 33% cheaper than the GTX 670 while being only 13% slower on average in the 16 games we tested. That’s a heck of a bargain and the GTX 660 Ti only becomes more impressive when you consider that it’s about 6% faster than the GTX 580, Nvidia’s previous-generation single-GPU flagship that launched less than two years ago for $500....