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The new Sieren BT is a clip-on version of Razer’s streaming mic, meant for mobile streamers or those on the move with selfie sticks or tripods. Priced at $100, this Bluetooth mic handles background noise suppression with a windsock and can also utilize Razer’s Streaming Mobile app to configure suppression levels and tweak other settings. The Audio Mixer, meanwhile, is a 4-channel analogue box for broadcasting and streaming. It has Chroma RGB lighting support and uses Razer Synapse for adjusting audio levels, applying vocal effects and accessing more options....

When Nvidia announced its upcoming RTX 40 series graphics cards, it confirmed that every Ada Lovelace card would use the new ATX 3.0 compliant 12VHPWR cable. This cable can supply up to 600W, which is 4x the wattage of a traditional 8-pin PCIe cable. It also has four “data” pins, which allow the power supply to communicate directly with a GPU. Nvidia revealed power draws for each of the three graphics cards....

The Battlefield Bad Company 2 results at 1680x1050 saw the GeForce GTS 450 deliver just 36fps at 1680x1050 making it 8% slower than the Radeon HD 5750 and 28% slower than the Radeon HD 5770. Meanwhile the overclocked Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum card provided an additional 19% performance over the standard card though this was not enough to match the Radeon HD 5770. Oddly at 1680x1050 it appeared that SLI was not working very efficiently either as we only saw a 47% performance increase when adding a second GeForce board....

In fact, things continued to move pretty quickly until just four years ago, when we made the transition from the 40nm design process used by Nvidia’s Fermi architecture to the 28nm process, still used today. This extended development cycle has had AMD and Nvidia squeezing the absolute most out of the 28nm design process. As good as the Titan X and Fury X are, it is time to move on in the quest for greater efficiency and even greater performance....

AMD answered with new Polaris GPUs, an impressive family of new Radeon chips that brought great mainstream solutions that most gamers could afford. We recommended (and still recommend) some of the latest Radeons at certain price points, yet unable to compete at the very high-end, AMD offerings failed to generate quite the same amount of buzz as Nvidia’s. You might recall, we awarded the GeForce GTX 1080 our first ever perfect score which was met with controversy....

Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz) x4 2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600(CAS 8-8-8-20) Asrock X79 Extreme11 (Intel X79) OCZ ZX Series (1250w) Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 (3072MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB) AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6990 (4096MB) HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB) Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Nvidia Forceware 306....

Of course, the desktop RTX 2070 has been available for a while and we know exactly how it performs. However the laptop version of the chip is not an identical copy of the desktop card, which may lead to some confusion considering how Pascal (GTX 10 series) and now the GeForce 20 series are different on the mobile front. With Pascal there were 3 main offerings: the GTX 1060, GTX 1070 and GTX 1080....

The current graphics card market is a total contrast to the shambolic state that gamers had to endure since Ampere launched almost two years ago. The chip crisis and unprecedented demand from both gamers and miners combined to push up selling prices, which at one point were 200% above MSRP. Things have changed drastically over the last couple of months, of course, helped in no small measure by the crypto crash....

During a talk at this year’s GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia’s chief scientist and senior vice president of research, Bill Dally, talked a great deal about using GPUs to accelerate various stages of the design process behind modern GPUs and other SoCs. Nvidia believes that some tasks could be done better and much quicker using machine learning rather than humans doing by hand, freeing them to work on more advanced aspects of chip development....

For comparison, we have included current generation SSDs such as the Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB, Crucial m4, OCZ Vertex 3 and Samsung 830 Series. These SATA 6Gb/s drives were tested on the Sandy Bridge (LGA1155) platform for maximum performance. In addition to flash devices, we’ve added the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB HDD. This 3.5" mechanical hard drive will also be tested using SRT. Our testing suite consists of four synthetic benchmark programs and our own file copying and load time tests....

x3 2GB DDR3-1333 G.Skill (CAS 9-9-9-20) Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58) OCZ GameXStream (700 watt) AData S596 Turbo 32GB - Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB - OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB - OCZ Onyx 64GB - OCZ Vertex 120GB - OCZ Vertex 2 40GB - OCZ Vertex 2 Pro 100GB - Intel X25-V 40GB - Kingston SNV425-S2 128GB - Samsung 470 Series 256GB - Seagate Momentus XT 500GB - Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Asus GeForce GTX 480 (1....

Ignoring the PCI Express SSDs at the top of our chart, you can see that when measuring sequential read performance the Trion 150 is as good as any other SATA SSD. The same is true for the horribly slow Crucial BX200. The sequential write performance is also strong for the Trion 150 as it beats out world class consumer SSDs such as the Samsung SSD 850 Pro. The Trion 150 is actually slightly lower than the results we received from our Trion 100 sample in the random 512K read test....

Considering this, we run the HD Tach full benchmark several times to fill the drive before testing. This simulates heavy usage and clearly indicates how performance will be affected after normal long-term use. Most drives support the TRIM function, which is meant to counteract these negative effects. Test System Specs Intel Core i7-6700K (LGA1151) x2 8GB DDR4-3000 G.Skill Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ (Intel Z170) Silverstone Strider Series (700w) Crucial BX200 500GB Crucial BX100 500GB Crucial MX200 512GB G....

The 2K performance was much the same as the Vertex 3 reached 69MB/s while the 320 Series was faster with a throughput of 84MB/s and the RealSSD C300 managed 183MB/s. The Vertex 3 was still trailing behind the Intel and Crucial drives for the 8K test while it finally caught up in a big way once the data size reached 32K. Finally at 128K the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB almost hit full stride with a throughput of 471MB/s which was unmatched by RealSSD C300’s 344MB/s....

Recall our view that most crypto projects today are either hopeless science projects or outright frauds, the trick is finding that small number of legitimate projects that will someday be immensely valuable. The latest drama around crypto mega-exchange FTX is just the latest example of this. We are not saying that FTX is a fraud, but it is now becoming clear that they were operating out past the frontier of regulatory oversight....

On the CPU side, the Snapdragon 615 MSM8939 comes with two quad-core clusters of ARM Cortex-A53 cores, which use the ARMv8 architecture and are therefore 64-bit compatible. It’s an interesting take on the big.LITTLE CPU implementation, with Qualcomm opting to clock one cluster at up to 1.7 GHz alongside another cluster at 1.0 GHz. The entire SoC is built on the aging 28nm LP process node. Oppo has taken a conservative route with the Snapdragon 615 by underclocking the faster CPU cluster by 200 MHz, meaning we’re left with a 1....

The biggest issue with the Oppo R5 is its horrendous battery life. This is a device with a fairly large 5.2-inch AMOLED display, and despite using a relatively power friendly SoC, the 2,000 mAh internal battery doesn’t cut it. In fact it’s not even close to being adequate, comfortably recording the worst battery life of any device I’ve used recently. Battery life is so critical these days that on this aspect alone the Oppo R5 is hard to recommend....

Okay so what about storage performance as this was the only area where we saw any real impact last time. Let’s start with the Samsung SSD 950 Pro NVMe drive on the Core i7-8700K system. Here we see a 5% reduction in throughput for the sequential write test, a 8% reduction for the 4K-64 thread write test and 20% for the 4K write result, this is seen when comparing the pre-update configuration to the windows and BIOS update configuration....

Announced during Games Workshops’ annual Skulls showcase event, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader will be the first CRPG set in the company’s expansive universe. If that trailer doesn’t get you excited enough, the fact it’s being developed by Owlcat games should get your role-playing-blood pumping. Owlcat is the studio behind Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, two well-reviewed and very, very deep CRPGs. The game sees players take on the role of the titular Rogue Trader, “a scion of an ancient dynasty of daring privateers, that reign over their own merchant empire and explore the fringes of Imperial space with the blessing of the Emperor Himself....

The centrally-mounted control dial lets you choose between four preconfigured flight modes: hover, reveal, follow and orbit. There’s also a favorite mode where you can tweak something from another mode. Pixy ships with a 12MP camera and 16GB of internal storage that can save up to 100 videos or around 1,000 photos. Video quality tops out at 2.7k @ up to 30 frames per second. It also has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, as well as a removable 860mAh battery that’s good for anywhere from five to eight flights using default flight modes....