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The TechSpot PC Buying Guide offers a comprehensive analysis of today’s best desktop PC hardware spanning five well differentiated budgets. Starting at ~$400 for an affordable PC capable of medium workloads, followed by two well-balanced enthusiast-oriented machines, a premium high-end build, and finally a dream machine that disregards price-to-performance value altogether with a focus on the biggest and baddest hardware available, period. Whether you’re a first time builder seeking guidance or a seasoned enthusiast, we have you covered....

The laptop we have on hand is the new Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED, a mobile workstation aimed at creators packing a ton of great hardware. Our test unit came with a Core i7-9750H processor and GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics, but this same laptop can be upgraded as high as a Core i9-9980HK and RTX 2080 Max-Q. You also get usual high-end specs including up to 32GB of RAM and 512GB SSDs....

At $42 MSRP (currently $75 at retailers), this is a very affordable chip, but is it any good, and who should buy it? These are the questions we hope to address in this review. Let’s quickly go over the specs. The Celeron G6900 is a dual-core processor sporting just two P-cores and no hyper-threading, so right away that’s going to raise some red flags, and rightfully so. We’re not entirely sure what a dual-core can achieve these days, even a powerful one, but we suspect not a lot....

Thermaltake NiC C5 Earlier this year Thermaltake unveiled its NiC (non-interference cooler) series consisting of the F3, F4, C4, and C5. All of the company’s new models should be fully compatible with RAM of all kinds, which is obviously ideal for power users who fill their DIMM slots with taller high-end modules. The NiC lineup supports TDPs of 160w, 180w, 200w and 230w respectively, with each power rating corresponding to the models in order of mention above....

The R7 260X was 14% faster than the GTX 750 and it was able to match the GTX 750 Ti. That being the case, the R7 265 was 29% faster than the GTX 750 Ti. The R9 280 managed to outpace the GTX 760 by 14% and the R9 290 was 26% quicker than the GTX 770. Nvidia’s new Maxwell cards outpaced The GTX 970 was 3% faster than the Radeon R9 290X, while the GTX 980 was 22% faster than the Radeon....

A report from French site CowCotland claims that the Radeon RX 6500 XT will sell for 299 Euros in the country, making it around 50% more expensive than the European MSRP, according to VideoCardz. That’s around the same as or slightly less than the MSRP increase applied to other RDNA 2 cards in Europe. In an interview with PCWorld about the Radeon RX 6500 XT, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said, “We’re positioning the launch such that - and I know, you guys always say, ‘Well, yeah, they’re just saying that’ - but we really are positioning the launch at a $199 price point....

Is 250W for a CPU and 450W for a GPU far too high? Do manufacturers even care about this? In this article, we’ll peel off the heatsinks to look at the truth behind power figures and see exactly what’s going on. Why chips need power and get hot CPUs and GPUs are classed as Very Large Scale Integration circuits (VLSI) – enormous collections of transistors, resistors, and other electronic components, all microscopic in size....

The convergence of technologies such as 5G, IoT, blockchain and AI would enable a fully meshed world of wirelessly connected everything that would be seamlessly woven into the fabric of our existence, imbuing our environment with an intelligence that evaluates and responds to us, ultimately transforming how we interact with our day-to-day surroundings. Many industries expect 5G to generate billions of dollars through currently unrealized revenue streams, providing an endless supply of applications and services to the more than four billion additional people 5G is hoped to reach....

Front on the Level 10 GT is an interesting blend of shapes that mix plastic and mesh together, and honestly I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. The right hand side of the case does resemble the original with the wall panel which houses all the I/O stuff. At the top of this panel is the power button followed by a reset button. Below that are four USB ports and a pair of audio jacks, this part of the case looks quite good....

An independent developer has released a short 2D shooting game they made using only AI-generated art. The game itself isn’t very remarkable but shows some of the advantages and limitations of using AI to create art for a game. Developer “Nao_u” built the title, called Shoon, over three days to see if Midjourney – an AI image generator similar to Dall-E – could create art for a game. Nao_u made a single level for a horizontal shoot-’em-up while generating the background, the player’s ship, and the enemies with AI....

You should know, buying a really solid budget Intel motherboard is as difficult as ever with power limits and performance all over the place. There are few good options, mainly from MSI, while we were disappointed with what Gigabyte and Asus have to offer on the lower end, as their sub-$150 boards are only suitable for Core i5 CPUs, which matters a lot if you plan to push your CPU to the limit or upgrade later....

Considered a successor to Tribes 2, Tribes: Ascend embraces its heritage by incorporating the same fast-paced combat, tons of maps, weapons, vehicles and unique traversal mechanics. At the same time, it adds a new class-based system. There are nine classes spread across three armor tiers (light, medium and heavy) with switchable load-outs that have different gear and deployables. Players can either unlock weapons and such through in-game experience, or by purchasing them outright with real money....

Wario64 spotted a message on the Bungie Help website that states: “Destiny 2 is not supported for play on the Steam Deck or on any system utilizing Steam Play’s Proton unless Windows is installed and running. Players who attempt to launch Destiny 2 on the Steam Deck through SteamOS or Proton will be unable to enter the game and will be returned to their game library after a short time....

Bloomberg reports that TSMC has increased its sales growth from the previous ~30% to somewhere in the mid-30% range. It also gave a projected revenue for the September quarter of $19.8 billion to $20.6 billion, beating previous estimates of $18.5 billion. Many tech companies are feeling the strain in wake of the previous two years’ pandemic-induced demand. A downturn made all the worse by rising inflation, skyrocketing fuel prices, and the Russia/Ukraine war....

Musk is looking for evidence that refutes Twitter’s claim that spam and false accounts comprised less than five percent of monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) during the fourth quarter of 2021. The subpoena requests any documents Zatko might have pertaining to the metric Twitter uses for counting mDAUs and anything related to the platform’s alleged spam issues. Musk’s legal team also finds the timing of Twitter’s firing of Zatko and other key employees highly suspect....

The Guardian (via Tom’s Hardware) reports that the two men, aged 33 and 36, are alleged to be senior members of an international crime syndicate. The AFP (Australian Federal Police) and the FBI carried out a sting operation called Operation Ironside in which every message posted via the An0m encrypted communications platform was intercepted over three years from 2018. One of the messages allegedly indicated that one of the men had coordinated more than 30 methamphetamine importations into Australia in 2020....

A significant leak dubbed the “Uber files” has generated a flurry of media reports around the alleged house of cards built by the company in its quest for profitability. According to The Guardian, which gained exclusive access to more than 124,000 confidential files, the person who wanted to expose the ridesharing giant was Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist. During an interview, MacGann revealed the company’s journey under former CEO Travis Kalanick was rife with wrongdoing....

YouTube overclocker SkatterBencher recently got ahold of an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5990X engineering sample and went on to test its overclocking capabilities. This 64-core CPU is an unreleased Zen 3-based successor to the 3990X, offering only half the PCIe lanes and memory channels of the company’s Threadripper Pro 5000 workstation processors. As this is a TRX40-based processor, SkatterBencher used an Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha motherboard for testing and equipped it with an EKWB monoblock to water-cool both the CPU and VRMs on the board....

Apple just announced its 3rd generation Apple TV 4K digital media player with better internals, more storage, and, surprisingly, lower pricing. It also adds support for HDR10+, meaning that it now supports both major formats for delivering dynamic metadata HDR content (most TVs support either Dolby Vision or HDR10+). The new Apple TV 4K is available in two configurations. A Wi-Fi-only model comes with 64 GB of storage. A higher-end variant adds a Gigabit Ethernet port, has 128 GB of storage, and supports the Thread mesh networking protocol....