But just because you’re living out of home with an integrated GPU doesn’t mean you have to be bored. Here’s 13 games you can play on the potato-powered productivity device that is your laptop. Risk of Rain Part of the problem with gaming on the laptop, however, is that sometimes that’s all you have. No mouse, no separate controller, and sometimes no room for either anyway. Risk of Rain is perfect in those scenarios, since it’s purely a keyboard-only game....

With hundreds of models available, mid-towers are by far the most popular desktop chassis form factor, supporting most full-sized hardware including the ever abundant ATX motherboards and power supplies while typically costing only $50 to $75. In most situations, any mid-sized enclosure in that price range will be adequate for a standard build, but Silverstone, Corsair and In Win have launched new contenders that are said to deliver the build quality, design, features and performance of pricier models....

After January 13, services like matchmaking, fileshare, MOTD (match of the day), challenges, and extras won’t be available anymore. For Halo 4 and Halo Reach, service record and player customization will also stop working, but these services will still be available on Halo 3 and ODST. Achievements in Halo 3, Halo 4, and Halo: Reach will also be impacted, but not all. Only those that require matchmaking, are based on challenges, or are linked to specific activities will stop working....

TechSpot Wallpaper Week - 3rd edition This is the third edition of Wallpaper Week on TechSpot which we’ve broken down in five categories. We’re refreshing all content, keeping the best high-resolution wallpapers from previous editions and adding a ton of new content, one category per day Monday thru Friday. The idea is to share astonishing wallpapers gathered from around the web by members of the TechSpot staff. Most of these are good to use with your 4K desktop, laptop display or smartphone....

The main page looks much like it does on previous Gigabyte motherboards with a large number of menus to choose from. The “MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.)” is where you’ll probably want to head as it provides basic information regarding the BIOS version along with CPU and memory settings. The “Current Status” menu provides detailed information on each processor core and memory module. “Advanced Frequency Settings” allows for CPU overclocking and provides vital base clock and multiplier options....

With an unlocked K-series processor, breaking the 4GHz barrier is no sweat for these P67 motherboards. In fact, all but the MSI P67A-GD55 were able to surpass 4.6GHz with the Asus P8P67 Deluxe maxing out at 4692MHz followed by the Gigabyte P67A-UD7 at 4646MHz. We were impressed to find that even the ECS P67H2-A2 reached 4600MHz. The results were astounding to say the least.

The ECS P55H-A, DFI LanParty DK P55-T3eH9 and Gigabyte P55-UD6 stood out as the best performers, while surprisingly the Asus P7P55D Deluxe was the most sluggish. Using WinRAR we measured the time it took to compress two different types of file archives. The large 720p HD file was compressed in 16.18 minutes using the Asrock P55 Extreme while the Gigabyte P55-UD6 took 36 seconds longer. While tangible, in absolute terms this 3....

Again, because the Intel P55 chipset has a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of just 4.7 watts, the heatsink cooling it does not need to be very large at all and can get away without any kind of active cooling. Although its surface area is quite large, measuring 7 by 8 cm, it is just 0.5cm tall. Asus could have gotten away with making the heatsink twice as thick, but then again, there really is no need to....

Interestingly this price premium does not exactly mean that the P7P55D Deluxe is loaded with a great deal more. A simple features comparison sees this board offer an additional LAN controller, two extra SATA ports and a slightly better audio solution. The power phase design of the P7P55D Deluxe does appear to be superior, though we won’t really know what difference this makes until we test their respective overclocking capabilities....

The key difference between the P55-UD6 and the P55-UD5 is that the more expensive board features a 24-phase power design and six DDR3 DIMM slots. The P55-UD5 instead uses the standard four DIMM slots and a more civil 12 phase power design. For an extra $50, the P55-UD6 could be hard to justify for most. Another issue we see with the P55-UD6’s price point is that this is meant to be a mainstream platform, a cut down version of the LGA1366 platform, if you will....

Or Yair, a security researcher at SafeBreach, discovered multiple zero-day vulnerabilities that could turn endpoint detection and response (EDR) and antivirus tools into “next-generation wipers,” a potential new threat impacting hundreds of millions of endpoint systems (including consumer PCs) all around the world. A wiper is a destructive type of malware designed to erase or corrupt files on a compromised system, to the point of making any effort to recover said files pointless....

Worse yet is Activision Blizzard’s monthly active user count, which fell from 435 million at the end of Q1 2021 to just 372 million at the end of the most recent quarter. The silver lining here is that from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022, total MAUs actually increased but only by a million users. Activision said sales of Call of Duty: Vanguard, the most recently released CoD game, were lower than the year ago title....

Adata says its new Elite SE880 portable SSD is designed for people on the move. With a volume of just 28cc/0.94fl oz, the drive’s measurements are smaller overall than Apple’s wireless charging case for the Airpods. It’s also quite lightweight, coming in at just 31g. In terms of performance, this USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 drive offers read and write speeds of up to 2,000MB/s via USB-C. This puts it ahead of storage rivals like the Samsung T7 and T5, and on par with the likes of Sandisk’s Extreme Pro Portable....

In 2019, Asurion published a study indicating that US residents checked their smartphones an average of 96 times per day, or about once every ten minutes (when accounting for eight hours of sleep). The company has recently done a follow-up study and found that the number increased nearly four-fold to a whopping 352 times a day. That would mean the average American checks their phone about once every three minutes....

Although the game features some weapons, they will only be effective against the human occupants and android “Working Joes”. Apparently the Alien AI has been programmed not to follow a predetermined path but rather hunt the player using sight, sound and smell, which should make for plenty of pants-wetting moments. The game sounds like a blast if you’re comfortable with soiling yourself but we’re more interested in Alien: Isolation’s performance when running at max quality and varying resolutions....

PC manufacturers have somewhat mitigated those concerns over the years, using newer low-powered CPUs and building attractive and thinner chassis for gaming machines, even though they haven’t reached ultrabook-like portability, nor desktop-class performance. Meanwhile, there’s been the long-lived promise of thin and light laptops that could offload graphics processing to an external desktop-based GPU. Well, it never happened, until now… This is why the new Alienware 13 is such an interesting laptop....

Our A10-7800 sample bottomed out at 38 watts when idling, consuming 11 watts more than the A8-7600. Placing all four cores under full load saw the A10-7800 system consume 125 watts, which was 19% more than the A8-7600 and 76% more than the Core i3-4130. Stressing both the CPU and GPU pushed the total system consumption out to 129 watts, 15% more than the A8-7600 and 57% more than the Core i3-4130....

You wouldn’t buy any of them as placeholders, which makes about as much sense as using a Kaby Lake-X CPU as a placeholder. Sure the Athlon X4 950 is cheap at $60, but it delivers the exact the same performance as the A12-9800 with a discrete GPU. The G4560 can be had for around $90 and it’s worlds better in every single way when compared to the Athlon. In order to use the Athlon X4 950 or the A12-9800 you need to buy a new AM4 motherboard along with some new DDR4 memory....

Unsurprisingly Futuremark’s 3DMark synthetic benchmark reveals that the AMD A4-5000 offers better 3D performance than the Pentium 2117U. That said, we were surprised to learn that the A4-5000 was just 11% faster than the Pentium 2117U in this test. Here the AMD A4-5000 was a match for the Pentium 2117U. It was also 25% slower than the A4-5300 desktop processor. The Futuremark PCMark 7 synthetic benchmark measures system performance focusing on both GPU and CPU power....

Unfortunately, the gap between the A8-3850 and HD 5570 broadened in Crysis Warhead. What’s more, the DDR3-1866 RAM didn’t yield much of a gain over the 1333MHz setup (23fps versus 27fps). Although the Fusion APU didn’t blow us away, it still proved to be a step up from the Radeon HD 6450, GeForce GT 520 and the Core i7 2600K – all of which hovered in the teens or single digits....