The latest version of Android Auto is now available for Android phone users with compatible vehicles. It includes a new adaptive interface with improvements to navigation, communication, and entertainment features. Android Auto’s new split-screen presentation prioritizes three app windows that change shape to accommodate the various screen sizes between car models. Users have immediate access to navigation, messaging, and audio controls. All of these features come with expansions to their functionality....

But before you hand over some hard-earned cash for a new smartphone, there are some things that can be done to speed up your phone experience, and some things that do utterly nothing. What Doesn’t Work Clearing apps from the app switcher Some people seem to think if they clear the apps from the app switching screen, which shows the apps you’ve been recently using, that this will free up system resources like RAM....

Apple hired Dhirendra Prasad in 2008 to work in its Global Service Supply Chain. His primary responsibility was to purchase services and parts for the company from its various authorized vendors. In 2011, Prasad began accepting kickbacks, falsifying invoices, and stealing components. Prasad enlisted the help of at least two of Apple’s vendors to set up and execute the scams. The embezzlement continued through 2018 before Apple caught on and pressed charges....

In Just Cause 2 we found the AMD E-350 to be 33% faster than the AMD 890GX and 41% faster than the Atom 330/Nvidia Ion combo. Similar results were found when testing Far Cry 2 at 1440x900, with the AMD E-350 coming in at 30% faster than the Atom 330/Nvidia Ion and 38% faster than the AMD 890GX chipset. The biggest performance margins were seen when testing with Company of Heroes at 1440x900, with the AMD E-350 being 76% faster than the AMD 890GX chipset and more than two times faster than the Atom 330/Nvidia Ion....

After showing off the 42-inch ROG Swift OLED PG42UQ and the 48-inch ROG Swift OLED PG48UQ back at CES earlier this year, Asus has now announced availability of its two massive monitors. They both feature slim panels, 4K resolutions, and all the usual benefits associated with OLEDs: perfect blacks, fantastic colors, excellent contrast, etc. But they aren’t just high-refresh-rate TVs that are suitable PC monitor replacements, like LG’s excellent C2 42....

Current motherboards offerings using the well rounded AMD 785G chipset can be purchased for as little as $60, with higher quality versions going for about $90. Meanwhile, Intel was falling short of the mark as their G45 chipset with integrated GMA X4500HD graphics was simply not up to the task. But with the release of the new Core i3/i5 32nm processors last January Intel introduced the GMA HD graphics engine, their most powerful yet....

The G752VS also dominates our range of game benchmarks that we’ve been using for over a year now. In all these titles, most of which are a few years old, the GTX 1070 provides huge frame rates that well exceed the 75 Hz refresh rate of the display, even at maximum quality levels. Again, it crushes the GTX 980M by providing near double the performance. I also decided to test a range of more modern games, and these are the results I achieved at the listed quality levels....

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing Asus’ competitor in this space, the ZenBook 3. Of all the ultrathin laptops I’ve reviewed, the ZenBook is most like Apple’s MacBook from a design perspective. It packs a 12.5-inch display, an edge-to-edge keyboard, and a single USB-C port for charging and all connectivity. Where the ZenBook pulls away from Apple’s ultraportable is on the inside. While the current MacBook packs an Intel ‘Skylake’ Core M processor, the ZenBook uses a current-generation, full-powered ‘Kaby Lake’ Core i5/i7 CPU....

Wolfenstein doesn’t offer much in the way of adjustable quality settings, so we simply tested this game using the low and high quality presets. Far Cry 2 can only be tested using high quality presets when using the DX10 rendering method. Therefore we conducted a batch of testing using DX9 allowing us to use the medium quality preset. Even at 1280x720 using low quality settings the Radeon HD 5450 managed just 34....

For all the glory that comes with owning a dual-GPU video card, the reality is most hardware buffs don’t have the coin to fund their desires. Instead, the typical system builder settles for a graphics solution in the $100 to $250 territory, which generally provides enough performance to play any modern game with reasonable settings. Fortunately for cash-strapped gamers, intense competition between AMD and Nvidia ensures that the sub-$200 market is well stocked....

My point being that there is no integrated GPU that has ever been able to hold a candle to something like that and you could say the same of the Raven Ridge APUs frankly, but they do a significantly better job than anything that has come before them. Here’s a quick look at the eight game break down using the 1080p data. The GTX 750 Ti was on average 38% faster than the 2400G and 60% faster than the 2200G across the eight games tested, and that’s a bit brutal to be honest....

The Silverstone Sugo SG10 has its own unique way of doing just about everything, from how the power supply is mounted to how the doors come off. This however isn’t necessarily bad, as the SG10 makes working with a tiny 23L computer case very easy, easier than some larger mid-sized cases in fact. With the doors/lid removed as well as part of the bottom the SG10 is incredibly open, making it easy to fit components inside....

Liquid cooling specialist Bykski has launched an extreme cooling solution for those struggling to keep their PC temperatures under control. The Bykski 1080 external liquid cooling station (model B-1080-CEC-X) is a liquid cooling kit designed to sit outside of your chassis. It is comprised of a huge radiator cooled by nine 120mm fans (think three 120mm x 3 radiators slapped together) housed inside a custom chassis that comes with a built-in acrylic reservoir and water pump (model DCC CP-PMD3COV-X) capable of flowing 700L/h....

Call of Duty: Black Ops debuts a new theme around the Cold War conflict whereas previous titles related to either World War II or modern age warfare. Developed by Treyarch, Black Ops seems to have a lot more in common with the older World at War than Modern Warfare 2 though. Besides the fact that it’s coming from the same development team, Black Ops essentially uses the older Call of Duty 4 game engine....

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Paramount recently uploaded the first episode to YouTube to watch free of charge. The hour-long episode has already garnered more than 356,000 views in less than a full week. The new series is loosely based on the popular Halo video game franchise. It takes place in the same universe fans were introduced to in the original Halo, dramatizing a 26th century conflict between humanity and a group of aliens known as the Covenant....

Often we find installing hard drives and power supplies into compact cases to be very difficult but it was quite the opposite with the HAF XB. Installing the 3.5" drives was extremely quick and easy thanks to the X-Dock. The 2.5" drives were just as easy to install using the supplied plastic rails. The HAF XB also excels in cable management and we found it extremely easy to keep things tidy with loads of room under the motherboard tray....

The section used to test Rise of the Tomb Raider features varied environments, out in the open the frame rates are quite low while indoors we see much higher frame rates. What is important to note here is overclocking made little difference to the 7800X’s performance, while I suspect the 7700K was able to max out the 1080 Ti. Again the 7700K was the superior processor in this title, offering just shy of 20% more performance....

Interestingly the AS SSD Benchmark does not seem to be as optimized as CrystalDiskMark was. That said the first run was still exceptionally fast providing a throughput of 357.5MB/s whereas by the third run the Crucial Adrenaline had achieved 456.7MB/s. The AS SSD Benchmark sequential write data does resemble that of the CrystalDiskMark test with both the first and third runs delivering the same poor performance. Here we see a massive difference in performance between the first and third run....