The Omen Desktop case looks quite decent. HP has managed to achieve a lot with a mostly plastic exterior, a few red LEDs and some interesting flaps. The carbon fiber pattern looks neat, the angles are aggressive but surprisingly pleasing, and I love features like the easy-access hard drive bays and the toolless side panel. People will know this is a gaming desktop without HP resorting to “look at me” design features like non-standard shapes and RGB lighting....

However when it comes to editing as I noted earlier when looking at the PCMark results, the performance is more competitive. Generally these editing tasks don’t fully utilize the thread heavy Ryzen processors and we see exactly that when using the Warp Stabilizer effect in Premiere. Still with performance from both CPUs maximised we do get a similar result. If you love your Excel spreadsheets like Tim and myself done, then Ryzen’s going to impress....

If you recall, Intel moved the voltage regulator on-die with Haswell and this caused problems for overclockers by creating an additional hot spot on the chip. Moreover, the company never changed the thermal interface material (TIM) from Ivy Bridge, which was believed to be a downgrade from Sandy Bridge’s and led to Ivy Bridge and Haswell parts to running hotter than older Sandy Bridge ones. Extra capacitors and a new thermal interface should make Devil’s Canyon Intel’s best overclocking chips to date – or at least that’s what we hope to see from the flagship Core i7-4790K we have on hand…...

When copying a single large compressed file on disk, the Corsair Force LS 120GB was reasonably fast for a budget SSD, sustaining 250MB/s. This is comparable to the OCZ Vertex 460, Intel SSD 335 and Plextor M6S. The Crucial MX100 was faster with 294MB/s, though that was the larger 512GB model so it isn’t exactly a fair comparison. The Kingston Fury SSD 240GB was a bit of a letdown with just 186MB/s, 26% slower than the Corsair Force LS 120GB despite being a larger capacity drive....

In January, Intel announced plans to build a $20 billion chip manufacturing complex in New Albany, on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, as part of its IDM 2.0 strategy. The facility, predicted to directly employ 3,000 people, is supposed to begin construction later this year and be fully operational by 2025. Intel said that spending on the Ohio site could reach $100 billion over the next ten years, but the company has warned that the “scope and pace” of this expansion is dependent on the CHIPS Act....

The PCMark 8 storage score doesn’t exactly separate the SATA SSDs from the M.2 SSD. The 600p wasn’t much faster than the top SATA SSDs in the storage bandwidth test, but a throughput of 332MB/s is still respectable for an affordable SSD. Photoshop is another test that looks primarily at read performance though it has to be said there is little difference between the budget SATA SSDs and the mighty M....

As you likely know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional hard drive, any write operation made to an SSD is a two-step process: a data block must be erased and then written to. Obviously if the drive is new and unused there will be nothing to erase and therefore the first step can be bypassed, but this only happens once unless the drive is trimmed....

Once motherboard makers started to run out of fancy new features they could give elaborate names, they moved to ‘purpose’-built motherboards focused on overclocking or gaming. Now Asrock, Asus, MSI and Gigabyte all have special overclocking and gaming motherboards. Being the motherboard giant that it is, Gigabyte has its ‘Ultra Durable Series’, ‘G1 Gaming Series’ and ‘Overclocking Series’, with certain models now wearing a ‘BK’ (Black Edition) badge that makes them even more elite....

Twitter user iGPU extremist tweeted images of the Dell Precision 7670’s specs. The workstation boasts some beefy hardware, including Intel’s desktop-class 55W Alder Lake-HX processor, RTX A5000 or Intel’s Arc Pro 90W graphics card in a Dell Graphics Form Factor (DGFF), and a 16-inch display with a 16:10 4K HDR500 OLED panel. But it’s the laptop’s DDR5 memory that is drawing the most attention, and not for positive reasons. Dell uses its proprietary Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) form factor that replaces the two SO-DIMM memory slots....

Using a rather high 1.520v we were able to push the Core i7-3770K to 4.92GHz which isn’t bad, that is 100MHz higher than we have been able to get our Core i7-2600K processor. Overclocking the Core i7-3770K processor to 4.90GHz allowed for an additional 21% performance in the first past test and 26% for the second pass test. This made the Core i7-3770K considerably faster than the i7-3960X. When testing with CINEBENCH R11....

AOC has been collaborating with Porsche on monitors since 2017, when it brought out the PDS241 and PDS271. The Agon Pro PD32M might have a similar stylish design, but the technology has moved on over the last five years. Like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9, the Agon Pro PD32M features a mini LED panel, improving its brightness, contrast, and HDR capabilities. No word on how many local dimming zones it has, but for comparison, Samsung’s 49-inch monster boasts 2,049 of them, while the 27-inch Cooler Master GP27-FQS has 576....

With the massive 70WH battery, the 920 excelled with an impressive 8.61 hour battery life in our web browsing test. Next we take a look at the brand new 8th generation Intel Core i7 8550U processor. It’s a 4C/8T CPU with a turbo frequency of up to 4GHz and it does all this while using just 15W. Our x264 and WinRAR benchmarks are designed to pin the CPU to measure both single and multi-core performance across different processors....

Compared to the HTC One M9, again with the same Adreno 430 GPU, the LG G Flex 2 holds a slim 3.7% advantage, which can be attributed to different levels of throttling and underclocking. The G Flex 2 holds a much larger advantage over the LG G3 with its Adreno 330 GPU: 61% in general GPU benchmarks, and 182% in onscreen benchmarks thanks to the lower display resolution. The G Flex 2 does still throttle its GPU when under a sustained load, but not to the extent of the HTC One M9....

During my time with the LG G4, I found the battery life to be pretty decent for a phone with a powerful SoC and high resolution display. Let’s take a look at what the benchmarks say. The battery life results for the G4 back up my real world experiences using the device over the course of a few weeks. The handset features battery life similar to the Galaxy S6 in all situations but LTE web browsing, where the G4 outperforms the S6 by 16%....

As expected, the GPU is the weakest part of the Snapdragon 808 SoC. The Adreno 418 does outperform the Adreno 330 in the Snapdragon 801 by around 30%, matching gains on the CPU side, and this results in greater performance compared to the LG G3. However, comparing the G4 with its 1440p display to a 1080p device like the Sony Xperia Z3 results in an on-screen performance drop of 16%, which shouldn’t have significant repercussions in mobile gaming....

Logitech just announced the G502 X series, an overhaul of one of its most popular lines of gaming mice. The new mice retain a similar shape to their predecessor but add new features while shedding some weight. The lineup consists of the wired G502 X, the wireless G502 X Lightspeed, and the top-end G502 X Plus which adds RGB lighting. All three mice come with Logitech’s new Lightforce hybrid optical-mechanical switches....

Madison Square Garden (MSG) Entertainment prevented a lawyer from attending a show with her daughter because she works for a firm currently suing one of its subsidiaries. The episode stoked controversy because the company identified the mother using facial recognition. When Kelly Conlon accompanied her daughter on a Girl Scout field trip to Radio City Music Hall in New York City over Thanksgiving weekend, security forced her to wait outside while the Girl Scouts and the other parents watched the Christmas Spectacular show....

Besides hostility over day-one DLC and forced Origin, many fans seem displeased with core aspects of the game, noting that it makes little use of decisions imported from previous saves and lacks an epic conclusion. As usual, we have no intentions on reviewing the gameplay or storytelling of Mass Effect 3 (full blown review on the PC is here instead). But this piece is dedicated to the nuts and bolts of the game, analyzing how it runs on today’s finest PC hardware....

Playing on Warfighter’s ultra preset requires a high-end card, as the HD 7850 and GTX 560 Ti only produced 41fps and 38fps, while AMD’s previous-generation flagship single-GPU card rendered a meager 36fps. The new GTX 660 Ti fell just shy of our ideal at 57fps, while the HD 7950 hit 60fps and the new boost version matched the GTX 670 at 68fps. Running the game on ultra at 1920x1200 saw the HD 6970 average just 30fps while the GTX 560 Ti gave 31fps....

To cut $150 off the Pixel 6 introduced last October, the Pixel 6a sacrifices on memory, screen, camera, and charging functionality. It goes from the Pixel 6’s 6.4-inch 90Hz screen down to 6.1-inches and 60Hz with nearly the same FHD resolution. The always-on functionality and HDR with 24-bit color depth remain. The Pixel 6a gets 6GB of memory from 8GB in the Pixel 6 and 12GB on the 6 Pro....