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To create the “Ultimate” Steam Deck, Linus Sebastian and crew started by adding a 1TB SanDisk Extreme memory card to the handheld. They also managed to get their hands on a 30mm Micron 2TB NVMe SSD engineering sample. Micron said they weren’t sure if it would even work in the Steam Deck but spoiler – it does. The team also upgraded the Steam Deck’s thumbsticks, opting for a set of electromagnetic joysticks from GuliKit....

Though it taps into the series’ entire 27-year history, Mortal Kombat 11 is the second sequel to Netherrealm Studios’ 2011 retcon/reboot, which was simply titled Mortal Kombat. The 2011 release took Mortal Kombat back to its roots. It got rid of the clumsy 3D fighting the series had become, replacing it with stylish, impactful battles along a 2D plane. It also rolled back the series’ storyline, retelling the events of the first three Mortal Kombat games with a more satisfying and cinematic narrative....

In the synthetic benchmarks seen above, the GTX 1060 demonstrated performance gains of 18, 34 and 50 percent in Cloud Gate, Sky Diver, and Fire Strike respectively, relative to the GTX 970M. As the level of graphical detail increased, the GTX 1060 pulled out even further ahead, which suggests the GTX 1060 should be around 40 to 50 percent faster in today’s graphically intense games. The GTX 1060 also outstrips the GTX 980M by around 27 percent in Fire Strike, although the Alienware 15 I used to test the 980M does include an older Intel Haswell processor....

The GS75 Stealth 8SG model we were sent for testing is the most powerful unit available equipped with an RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU. There are also models available with the RTX 2070 Max-Q and the RTX 2060. Each variant of this laptop with a different GPU is then available with different RAM and storage configurations, in our case we received 32GB of dual-channel memory and a dual 512GB SSD setup in RAID 0....

Although you may not realize it, there exists a third competitor in the tablet OS market: Microsoft. Over half a dozen manufacturers offer Windows 7 tablets, including the ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro, Acer Iconia Tab W500, Fujitsu Stylisitic Q550, HP Slate 500, EXOPC Slate, Asus Eee Slate EP121, Motion Computing CL900 and of course, the MSI WindPad 110W. With so many Windows slates in production, why don’t you hear about them more?...

At CES 2023, Nanosys held a “top-secret” demonstration for its latest work on electroluminescent quantum dots – a candidate for the next mainline display technology. Nanosys couldn’t publish any pictures of its CES demo, but the potential on hand could be wide reaching. Considered extremely efficient because they emit almost all the light they absorb, quantum dots produce light when fed energy and give off different colors depending on their size....

It’s not the first time NASA has captured a solar eclipse from the Martian surface, but this is the most zoomed-in, highest frame rate version to date. In 2004, rovers Spirit and Opportunity captured time-lapse photos of Phobos during a solar eclipse. In 2012, Curiosity became the first to get video of a Martian solar eclipse. The Mastcam-Z camera that recorded the footage from Perseverance features a solar filter to reduce light intensity....

The Mid-Infrared instrument, or MIRI for short, features a camera and a spectrograph capable of seeing light in the mid-infrared spectrum. It covers the wavelength range of five to 28 microns. These test images were captured at 7.7 microns and shows part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The comparison image of the same target was captured using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera (at 8....

Researchers at enterprise security firm Binarly have discovered no less than 23 high-impact vulnerabilities in the BIOS/UEFI firmware used by several computer vendors like Intel, AMD, Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, Microsoft, Fujitsu, Juniper Networks, Acer, Bull Atos, and Siemens. Specifically, the vulnerabilities affect InsydeH2O-based UEFI firmware and many of them are present in the System Management Mode (SMM), which is responsible for providing system-wide power management and hardware control features....

Image quality from the camera isn’t terrible, but it certainly is not as good as seen with other smartphones on the market. Images taken in good light retain a fair amount of detail, but the camera struggles in low light. I also had issues with white balance not only in the typical indoor situations, but also outdoors, where most cameras have no trouble. Focus speed isn’t the fastest, but it’s not so slow as to be a major point of concern....

The Snapdragon 800 might not be the latest SoC from Qualcomm, but its performance still falls at the top end of the spectrum. The Lumia 930 is undoubtedly a speedy device, assisted greatly by Windows Phone’s supreme hardware optimization that consistently delivers a smooth experience. Internet Explorer 11 may not be the fastest mobile browser going around, although I hear many rendering issues have been resolved with the latest update....

When the Radeon RX 480 arrived last month it left us with mixed feelings. The overall performance was good enough to play at 1440p and great at 1080p. The cost per frame also looked strong. While I wouldn’t go as far as saying there was a dealbreaker, we were hoping the 14nm process would hand AMD greater power savings than what was seen with the RX 480. Overclocking is also a value-adding feature and the RX 480 just didn’t, though we noted this could change with board partner cards....

Here we see a huge 22% increase in performance from 41fps to 50fps as the GTX 950 lands just 1fps behind the GTX 960. This time we see a 17% gain from the overclocked GTX 950, making it just 2fps slower than the GTX 960. We saw another strong 23% performance boost in Assassin’s Creed Unity as the GTX 950 averaged 43fps.

Once again we see that the Titan X is roughly able to match the dual-GPU R9 295X2 at 2560x1600 while outpacing the GTX 980 and R9 290X by 29% and 57%. Similar margins are seen at 4K as the Titan X was 26% faster than the GTX 980 and 50% faster than the R9 290X but 28% slower than the R9 295X2. The Titan X might have been 35% faster than the GTX 980 with an average of 50fps, but this also meant that it was just 6% faster than the R9 290X and 29% slower than the R9 295X2....

Now for temperatures we saw a peak of 65 degrees with the MSI RTX 2070 Armor model with an ambient room temp of 21 degrees, so a very respectable given the dual fans were only spinning at 1300 RPM, so a very nice cool and quiet entry level model here from MSI. I should note that south of 60 degrees the fans on this model don’t spin at all, so for normal operation it’s completely silent....

Meanwhile the vanilla RTX 2080 is landing at $700 for partner models and $800 for the Founders Edition. Later next month we’ll also get the RTX 2070 at $500 or $600 for the FE card. This means gamers are looking at somewhere between $100 and $300 more for an equivalent model from the previous generation. On top of that, the Founders Edition models carry a further $100 to $200 price premium, and just know these will be the only models in stock from time to time....

Several leakers with good track records have recently said that they expect the RTX 4080 or 4090 to have a 600W TBP (total board power). A higher-end model, either the RTX 4090 Ti or some special edition card, could consume over 800W. But they’ve also attached several disclaimers to those numbers, noting that it’s too early for exact details to have been finalized. Igor’s Lab reports that Nvidia has told OEMs to test the reference boards used to help them design their PCBs and coolers at the full 600W....

Despite the RevoDrive X2’s massive bandwidth, it was unable to load Windows faster than some of the 2.5" SSDs. The Samsung 470 Series 256GB set the bar at 9.5 seconds, and the RevoDrive X2 failed to decrease that time, taking 13.4 seconds, only a fraction faster than the Vertex 2 Pro 100GB. For the application load test, we set the following applications to launch during the Windows 7 startup: Internet Explorer, Outlook 2007, Access 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Publisher 2007, Word 2007 and Photoshop CS4....

The Sabre Manager software consists of two windows. The main window manages layers and images as well as actions for each button. OCZ took the liberty to load a couple thousand images for you to select from, although the majority of these images are simple descriptive text like “cut”, “copy”, “refresh”, etc. There are also a few Wingding folders with some usable icons for things like e-mail and chat....

In our single large file copy test, the OCZ Vector 150 was not only slower than the original Vector, but 19% slower with a throughput of 240.5MB/s, which was also slightly slower than the Intel SSD 335, 27% slower than the Samsung SSD 840 Pro and 23% slower than the SanDisk Extreme II. The Vector 150 recovered in our program copy test with a throughput of 188MB/s, 4% faster than the original version....