The PCmark 7 importing pictures test saw the WD Black 4TB sustain a throughput of 8.9MB/s, making it 6% faster than the WD RE 1TB and 24% faster than the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB. However it was 10% slower than the Velociraptor and 70% slower than the Samsung SSD 840 Pro 512GB. The performance of the WD Black 4TB was average in the PCmark 7 video editing test with a throughput of just 18....
Bitdefender security researchers found three vulnerabilities in Wyze cameras back in 2019. One allowed hackers to bypass the authentication process to gain remote connection and control of the cameras, including tilting and turning them off, though they couldn’t view the encrypted remote feed. However, the second issue was one of the standard stack buffer overflow variety, allowing attackers access to the live feed combined with the remote authentication bypass. The third vulnerability allowed access the contents of the SD card within the camera via a webserver listening on port 80 without requiring authentication....
Apple currently has a fairly limited ad implementation on iOS, comprising Search Ads on the App Store as a way for developers to promote their apps, as well as ads inside the first-party Stocks and News app. Weirdly, the latter even serves up ads to paying subscribers of News+, though it is a minor issue in terms of the overall iOS experience. However, it now looks like Apple’s ad strategy is kicking into high gear, as the company is planning a significant increase in annual ad revenue with an expansion of ads into new places on the iPhone and iPad....
Playing as the genetically engineered and professional hitman Agent 47, players can use disguises to get unlock access within the levels, hide bodies to prevent suspicion, and use a variety of tools to complete the job. The Hitman series helped define the modern stealth action game, and while the early games appear similar to the latest ones, the formula has kept evolving with each entry bringing in new locations, new ways to dispatch targets, and impressive developments in artificial intelligence....
Although the layout is slightly different, this is pretty much the exact same setup as the original 8.9" Aspire One we reviewed a few months back. I like how Acer has angled the Ethernet and VGA out port slightly, though; it should help a bit with cable management when using these features. Acer made a few changes to the bottom of the netbook, where we now find individual removable access panels for the hard drive, memory and wireless bays....
Discrete GPUs are usually restricted to 15-inch laptops, with the occasional 14-inch unit seen in the wild. So it’s a feat in itself that the Switch 7, a much smaller device, contains a discrete GPU. But on top of that, you get an Intel quad-core CPU without any fans, instead using what Acer calls a “dual LiquidLoop” cooling solution to send heat away from these components and distribute it around the chassis....
The game’s BC7-compressed textures were probably the most disappointing aspect of its visuals, though they allow GPUs with just 2GB of memory to deliver playable performance at 4K resolutions. In its defense, Alien: Isolation also isn’t the type of game that really needs jaw-dropping graphics to be fun, relying more on atmospheric effects. Although Creative Assembly says its new game engine is optimized for multi-core processors, we weren’t really able to show that using the in-game benchmark....
Performance results in 3DMark are exactly what I expected from the combination of a high-end Intel quad-core CPU and the GTX 1060 6GB. In the Time Spy benchmark, you’ll see the GTX 1060 outperforming the GTX 1050 by 89 percent, while the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 are 44 and 75 percent faster respectively. In games, the Alienware 13 performs very similarly to other GTX 1060 laptops. It’s two percent slower than the MSI GS43VR, and roughly on par with the MSI GS63VR on average....
Online shopping wasn’t a new phenomenon in 2005, mind you - eBay had been around for nearly a decade by that point - but it was more or less understood that buying something on the Internet meant waiting a week or so for it to be delivered unless you paid for premium shipping. $79 per year for 2012 and 2013 $99 per year for 2014, 2015 and 2016 $105.93 ($99 plus tax) for 2017 and 2018 In 2019 I’ll have to pay the newly increased rate of $119, plus tax...
As the successor to last year’s Richland APUs, Kaveri has been updated with new CPU cores based on AMD’s Steamroller architecture (Richland uses Piledriver cores). The Radeon R7 series GPU has also been integrated, though the 384 SPU version on most Kaveri APUs isn’t much different than the A10-6700 and A10-6800’s Radeon HD 8670D. Kaveri is AMD’s fourth-gen APU while Steamroller is third-gen CPU technology that is supposedly 10% faster per-clock and per-core than Piledriver....
The dual HD 7770s were only 16% faster than the HD 6870 and GTX 560 Ti in King Arthur II, but we’d expect this to improve with a future driver update as both Crossfire configurations yielded a 38% boost over their single-GPU results. Crossfire scaled very well in Metro 2033, with the HD 7770 and 7750 seeing a 95% and 100% jump in frame rates, placing both cards above the HD 6870 and GTX 560 Ti....
The move to 28nm lets AMD squeeze 1500 million transistors into a 123mm2 die. In addition, the HD 7700 series die is 26% smaller than the HD 6770, while containing 44% more transistors. As impressive as those figures are, gamers will be more excited to see AMD’s prices: the HD 7770 is $159 – in line with the GeForce GTX 560 – and the HD 7750 is even cheaper at $109, combating the GTX 550 Ti....
While we’re overall impressed with the HD 7750, we acknowledge that some users might be a little disappointed with the card’s showing, namely because it’s not faster than the GTX 550 Ti in most cases, so it won’t force Nvidia to make price cuts in the near future. The pricier Radeon HD 7770 delivered 26% more speed than the HD 6770, but that’s a bit misleading as the HD 6770 is a shameless rebranding of 2009’s HD 5770....
The Radeon HD 7790 was very efficient as the system power consumption increased by just 3% when compared to the 7770. The 7790 consumed slightly less power than the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, albeit just 3 watts less. The Gigabyte Radeon HD 7790 ran a little hotter than we were expecting, hitting 72 degrees under load. Although this is relatively cool when compared to high-end GPUs, it is a poor showing when compared to the 55 degrees of the Gigabyte GTX 650 Ti, though that particular graphics cards does carry a significantly larger cooler....
The power consumption of the RX 470 was similar to the RX 480, though keep in mind we are using a custom factory overclocked Asus RX 470 Strix card. Although we have underclocked the card to meet the standard AMD specifications for the RX 470, the card is likely still running a more aggressive power profile. Testing with Call of Duty: Black Ops III we see that the RX 470 consumed just five watts less than the RX 480 reference card....
The last time AMD played with the chiplet design concept in consumer desktop GPUs was back in the Vega era, with the Vega 56/64 and the decidedly prosumer-oriented Radeon VII. Those cards never really took off with gamers, so the company went back to monolithic designs for its Navi (RX 5000 series) and Big Navi (RX 6000 series) GPUs. However, the rumor mill is abuzz again with hints that AMD may be returning to the chiplet GPU game with RDNA 3 designs....
The official Twitter account of CapFrameX recently posted details about FSR 2.0, saying AMD will announce it soon. CapFrameX and VideoCardz claim to have seen internal slides from AMD describing additional features it will have on top of FSR 1.0, which launched last summer. The biggest improvement is temporal upscaling, which uses information from previous frames to help upscale new frames from lower resolutions to higher resolutions. This is already used in temporal anti-aliasing as well as FSR’s competitors, Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s upcoming XeSS....
Last month we checked out the Ryzen 7 5700G, which is the other APU in the 5000 series so far. If you haven’t read that review, in short, we were disappointed by what’s on offer as we struggled to find a practical use case for it considering the $360 asking price. For our audience, I think it’s fair to say the 5700G is a niche product that only makes sense for ultra compact PCs, whether that be for home theater use, casual gaming, or some other that requires you to have a desktop PC that’s the size of a gourmet burger....
For this review I tried two methods of overclocking, using the ROG Zenith Extreme I tried the Asus Precision Boost Override method and then with the MSI MEG X399 Creation the old fashion multiplier and fix voltage method. Both methods resulted in fairly similar multicore performance, but the Asus PBO method provides significantly better single core performance. Here we see that the fixed frequency overclock yields slightly better results in the Blender test, though I should emphasise only very slightly....
The first generation AirPods Pro were a major success, with estimates for 2020 sales reaching nearly 90 million units. Apple has decided to capitalize on this success and release the first revision/upgrade of the popular premium-priced wireless earbuds. The earbuds come with a new H2 chip, which Apple claims improves audio bandwidth, which in turn allows for higher audio quality. The AirPods Pro 2 also have a new “low distortion audio driver” accompanied by a custom amplifier to power said driver....
