Although it has been out for a year and a half now, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla still ranks on our ongoing current and recent “Best PC Games (You Should Be Playing). If you haven’t played it yet, now is the perfect time to try before you buy. Sorry for the late notice, but as of yesterday, Ubisoft made Assassin’s Creed Valhalla free-to-play until February 28. If you hurry, that still gives you more than 72 hours to potentially finish the core story (about 60 hours) as long as your heart doesn’t explode from energy drink overdose and 24-hour gaming sessions....

Using WinRAR, we conducted a real world test with two different samples. As you can see, the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme was able to match the Formula in both tests. We used an 88MP image to test with Adobe Photoshop CS5 and applied the Radial Blur filter. The Crosshair IV Extreme was again able to meet the Formula’s performance, taking 61 seconds.

Innovation and ambition always come at a cost, though, and the fully-loaded Asus Zephyrus Duo arrives at a mighty $3,699 - which makes it one of the most expensive gaming notebooks on the market, and around $1,000 more than most conventional machines with the RTX 3080 and weaker Intel processors. While the RTX 3080 may be the most powerful laptop GPU that Nvidia has ever produced - and it shares the name of the barnstorming desktop card - there are differences between the desktop and laptop versions....

When comparing CPU performance, the Tegra 3 featured in the Transformer Pad was a little over five times faster with a score of 6199. Additionally, the Tegra 3’s GPU offered roughly a 70% increase over its predecessor. We also used AnTuTu to measure RAM and I/O performance and the Transformer Pad was around 2.5 times faster than the Galaxy Tab 10.1 when measuring RAM performance, while the I/O performance was almost twice as fast....

The design of the ZenUI is pleasant, although many applications have been skinned for the sake of skinning, adding no new features to what is provided through the AOSP or Google apps. I’d be very displeased if Asus skin was visually awful and failed to improve the standard feature set, but at least their offering melds reasonably well with the vanilla Android style. Like the MeMO Pad 7, the notification pane is split into both a quick toggles area and a standard notification drop-down depending on which side of the status bar you drag down from....

The Radeon HD 5770 was able to deliver similar performance to that of the Radeon HD 4870 in Enemy Territory Quake Wars, with an average of 57fps at 2560x1600. This made the Radeon HD 5770 around 33% faster than the Radeon HD 4770, which is a much more respectable performance gain.

Each vehicle was able to detect a slow-moving dummy vehicle traveling in the same direction as the test vehicle. In each test (five runs per vehicle), the test vehicle applied the brakes and matched the speed of the stand-in to avoid an impact. Similarly, all test vehicles were able to detect a simulated cyclist traveling in the same direction and slow their speed to prevent an impact. When the dummy vehicle was placed in the same lane to simulate a head-on collision resulting from an impaired or distracted driver, the test vehicles impacted it each and every time....

Finally the dual-core processors were maxed out, as the Phenom II X2 560 and Athlon II X2 265 both reached over 90% utilization and constantly hit 100% when testing. Before we discuss the individual CPU performance tests, let’s just take a quick look at how the AMD FX-4100 processor scales when testing between 2GHz and 4GHz. When paired with the single-GPU GeForce GTX 580 the average frame rate goes almost untouched....

The second problem is Origin. We had to cut some testing as EA’s platform only allows us to change the CPU/GPU up to eight times per account before locking us out. We were forced use four different accounts to produce this article! After eight hardware changes we get hit with “we’re sorry, an error has occurred…too many computers have accessed this account’s version of Battlefield Hardline recently. Please try again later....

Krebs on Security reports that the phishing emails claim to be an invoice from PayPal’s billing department asking for $600. Most people these days know to check the senders’ email address in suspicious messages to see if they look fake, but this one originates from PayPal.com. The email even includes a link at Paypal.com that displays the invoice. Moreover, the message headers show it passed email validation checks as originating from PayPal, and it was sent through an internet address assigned to the payment company....

The fastest drive in the AS SSD Benchmark’s sequential read test was the new Samsung 840 120GB which reached 504.5MB/s. The Crucial m4 64GB wasn’t a great deal slower hitting 502MB/s, while the 128GB version sustained 492.7MB/s. The older Samsung SSD 830 64GB also managed a transfer speed of 494.9MB/s making it one of the fastest drives tested. Further down the graph we find the Kingston HyperX 3K 90GB which managed a respectable 444....

On Thursday, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) expressed worry that Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard could harm competition in multiple gaming markets. If Microsoft doesn’t submit a proposal to address the CMA’s concerns by September 8, the organization will move its investigation into a second phase and examine the deal with greater scrutiny. Under Phase 2, the CMA would appoint an independent group to more closely study the likelihood that the acquisition could harm competition....

Pei tweeted the words “Back on Android” yesterday, followed by another tweet singing the praises of Android 12 and tagging Android Senior Vice President at Google Hiroshi Lockheimer. The official Android account joined in a few hours later with “We’ve got a lot to catch up on Carl [Sic],” before the Snapdragon account added its own take: an image of Predator’s mid-air arm wrestle between Dutch and Dillion, but with a third arm added to show the partnership between the trio of companies....

The Finalmouse Centerpiece keyboard features a technology called Laminated DisplayCircuit Glass Stack (LDGS) that’s covered by multiple patents and backed by years of R&D. As best we can tell from the reveal video, what you’re looking at is a keyboard featuring clear keys and switches with a high-resolution display beneath that’s powered by Unreal Engine 5. It’s almost insulting to label it this way because it looks absolutely stunning. The board will ship with custom auto-lubed linear mechanical switches co-developed with Gateron and inspired by their Black Ink switch, albeit tuned for faster actuation and with slightly different travel parameters....

Aimed at netbooks and other proprietary systems, it’s the most diluted version of Windows 7 with many basic features missing. Among them are the Aero Glass interface, fast user switching, DVD playback, multi-display support, as well as personalization options, such as the ability to change desktop backgrounds, window colors, or sound schemes. Most of the excluded features won’t really hinder the use of a netbook. After all, few ship with DVD drives or have multiple users anyway, but staring at a bright blue Windows logo for the lifespan of your system is torture....

AMD announced the Epyc 7004 CPU series, codenamed Genoa, in November last year. It uses the Zen 4 architecture and is built on the TSMC N5 node, and features 12-channel DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. The CPUs will have as many as 96 cores / 192 threads and as few as 16 cores / 32 threads. It’s no surprise that it will need a bigger socket than the up-to 64-core, DDR4-wielding 7003-series....

The South China Morning Post reports that an editorial post in the Chinese nationalist tabloid Global Times slammed TSMC’s investment in its Arizona plant as “a dark turn” in the global semiconductor industry. TSMC’s Arizona facilities will include an upgraded 4nm fab and a 3nm fab for producing the most advanced chips. The Global Times claims TSMC’s decision to invest in this cutting-edge technology within the US shows that the nation’s government tricked the company and that Washington was stealing the latest tech from “our Taiwan region,” a reference to China’s claim of sovereignty over the island....

Next up we have another DirectX 12 title: Civilization VI. For testing I used the GPU benchmark and measure performance with PresentMon. The test runs for 30 seconds and it takes the same amount of time on a Pentium G4560 as it does the 8700K for example, as far as I can tell it’s an accurate test and given the results it has provided over time it appears very accurate....

Moving on, we have Sniper Elite 4 and these results look much like what we saw when testing with older DX11 titles such as Resident Evil 7 and Rainbow Six Siege for example. The Core i7-7700K does offer slightly better numbers though it has to be said that the Ryzen 5 1600 is competitive and turns in a number of respectable results. The Division provides fairly typical results much like what we just saw in Sniper Elite 4, here Ryzen is slightly slower but still competitive while the GTX 1080 and Vega 64 GPUs deliver similar results using either CPU....