I want to stress here that the LG V30’s display does not have as many issues as the Pixel 2 XL, even though both handsets appear to use the same screen. That’s not to say this display is fantastic, because it’s not, but it’s not as plagued by issues as the Pixel 2 XL. The biggest issue with the V30 display is viewing angles. This is the exact same issue as with the Pixel 2 XL: a noticeable blue shift when viewing at off-normal angles....
It’s been a busy end of year for LockBit, the infamous ransomware operation offering its encryption capabilities to script kiddies and other interested partners in crime. The ransomware was first responsible for an attack against the Port of Lisbon Administration, which manages Portugal’s third-largest port and one of the most accessed ports in Europe. The Port of Lisbon was targeted by LockBit on December 25, but according to the port’s administration, no operational activity was compromised....
Apologies to those who wanted to see the R9 Fury X and Fury in our results. Sadly AMD is circulating just 1 or 2 of each card in Australia and we weren’t able to hold onto ours. Worst still, everywhere locally that I have checked, along with major retailers such as Newegg.com, have been out of the Fury X for weeks. With AMD’s heavy hitters in short supply, the fastest AMD GPU we have on hand is the R9 390X and while it was able to keep pace with the GTX 780 Ti and slightly trail the GTX 970, we had nothing that could be compared with the GTX 980 or faster....
Earlier this month, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) wrote that the Microsoft/Activision deal could lead to competition concerns within the video game industry. The regulator said that if Microsoft didn’t submit a proposal to assuage these worries, the CMA will open an extended stage 2 phase of its probe in which the acquisition would face increased scrutiny. According to the Financial Times, citing two individuals with knowledge of the situation, Microsoft decided not to offer any remedies to the CMA because there were no obvious commitments the UK regulator would likely accept....
As the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority closely examines Microsoft’s $68 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard, plans for an Xbox mobile game store emerged in Microsoft’s filings. The big-name intellectual properties Microsoft would gain from Activision Blizzard King (people tend to forget King, which specializes in mobile games) could be a lynchpin in the bold initiative. Filings obtained by The Verge indicate that Microsoft wants to move customers away from the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store using a marketplace stretching across multiple devices, including mobile....
Last week, Microsoft released a new preview build with a few unannounced features, as they are more or less buried and require some additional steps to enable. One of them is an indication that File Explorer will soon have a tabbed interface, which is one of the most highly-requested features of the past few years. This week, a Windows Insider named Florian noticed a not-so-subtle addition to File Explorer that suggests Microsoft is experimenting with new ways to promote its services throughout the Windows user interface....
At its Surface Event 2022, Microsoft finally unveiled the successor to its four-year-old Surface Studio 2 all-in-one desktop. The new Surface Studio 2+ features upgraded internals while the exterior remains mostly the same, which might explain why the company didn’t think it was worth bumping up the version number. Microsoft’s AIO PC keeps all its components in a small Mac mini-like enclosure that acts as the base of its stand, allowing the screen to be thinner....
At best, we were only able to squeeze 100MHz more out of this processor and a 3% overclock is hardly worth talking about. What’s more, this meager figure wouldn’t let us accurately discuss the overclocking abilities of Asrock’s Z68M-ITX/HT. Therefore, we reconfigured the Z68M-ITX/HT with the Core i7-2600K, which has an unlocked multiplier. Without much trouble, the Z68M-ITX/HT arrived at a maximum frequency of 4.4GHz using a 44x clock multiplier and 1....
After over a decade of waiting, fans of the original StarCraft might finally get their mitts on the sequel this year. Like many games, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was expected for late 2009, but was bumped ahead for development reasons and is now anticipated to launch in the first half of 2010. The Terran, Protoss and Zerg races are all present in the sequel, which is set in a distant part of the Milky Way galaxy some four years after the events of Brood War....
A report by Cisco (via ZDNet) sheds some light on people’s attitudes towards remote and hybrid working. From a survey of 1,050 UK employees, 75% said their manager trusted them to be productive while working from home. Whether this really is the view held by their bosses or just what the workers believe is debatable. The most interesting finding is that while most people consider themselves more productive when working remotely, 61% said their colleagues could not be trusted to do the same....
However, for a first time build you will need to delve deeper and that requires the removal of an additional four screws as well as unclipping a ribbon cable and the 2.5" drive bay lifts out. Now we have exposed the guts of the Cubi 2 Plus, the MS-B123 motherboard and its Intel H110 chipset. The Cubi 2 Plus does come with an Intel Skylake-S low powered processor which for your convenience has been pre-installed into a narrow little LGA1151 LM socket....
The Cubi 2 Plus continues to perform well in the HandBrake encoding test with an average frame rate of 165fps – 7% faster than the Core i3-4130 and 167% faster than the Asrock Beebox. Similar performance margins are seen in the x264 HD Benchmark test as the MSI Cubi 2 Plus beats both the Pentium G3220 and Core i3-4130 processors. The MSI Cubi 2 Plus is again the fastest small form factor PC we have tested when it comes to encoding, this time using Video Master Works with a completion time of just 411 seconds....
On the CPU side, the new Kaby Lake Core i7-7700HQ isn’t revolutionary, but it does provide a handy 8 to 10 percent performance boost in intensive workloads. This is all down to the higher clock speeds Intel has achieved across all four cores, and it comes without being noticeably hotter or power consuming than its Skylake predecessor. It’s not worth upgrading from a Skylake gaming laptop just for the i7-7700HQ, as in general this performance gain will have little effect in games, but those still rocking quad-core Haswell systems or older will see appreciable benefits from the move to Kaby Lake....
As I said when reviewing the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, the docking station’s keyboard was a primary selling point for me. Tablets can be used for many useful things but without the ability to connect a physical keyboard when needed they’re more of a novelty item than a true “companion” device in my humble opinion – yours may vary. I think your perspective will largely depend on your usage habits....
The cooling used on the X58 Pro-E is far from over the top, and the low-profile north bridge heatsink which is passively cooled will not conflict with third party cooling. The north and south bridge chips are also linked via a single heatpipe. Moving along, the six DIMM slots are positioned far enough from the primary PCI Express 16x as to avoid any kind of conflict. Even with a large graphics card installed users should be able to easily install/remove memory modules....
Last month, AMD officially released its new Zen 4 architecture and Ryzen 7000 series processors. Subsequently, manufacturers began to flood the market with motherboards to accompany the latest CPU. Consumers were taken aback by the high prices of those X670 boards, with the cheapest offerings reaching nearly $300. Thankfully, buyers no longer need to spend $300+ on a motherboard to get in on the AM5 experience. Four companies revealed their upcoming B650 boards, expected to release later this month....
Update: Here’s the first image with more to come… NASA and eager enthusiasts have been waiting a long time for this day. Planning for the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope started in the early 1990s. After what seemed like countless delays and budget overruns, Webb finally launched into space on Christmas Day 2021 and spent the next month traveling to its orbit spot roughly a million miles away from Earth....
This week, the head of Nightdive Studios responded to a popular tweet in a way that hints at what retro remasters the company could currently have in development. Recent game industry events make some of the suggestions in the original tweet more likely than others. After someone tweeted a grid of old-school FPSs asking respondents to pick one from each row, Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick quoted them, pointing out four that the studio already remastered and then saying more are on the way....
The GeForce GTX 480 was 10% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, rendering an average of 93fps at 2560x1600. It was also 7% slower than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and 8% slower than the GeForce GTX 295, while impressively with the latest Catalyst 10.3a drivers the Radeon HD 5770 Crossfire cards were able to average 102fps.
The RTX 3080 has been available for weeks now, it packs 6144 CUDA cores, 20% more than in the RTX 3070 Laptop GPU, and is configurable to a range of power levels which will dictate final performance output, in this case anywhere from 80W to above 150W. This results in a maximum boost clock range of 1245 MHz to 1710 MHz depending on the configuration. The memory subsystem includes 8 or 16GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus....
