If we check out the cost per frame, this is what we find… (Please note I’m combining both the CPU and motherboard cost here, so the 8400 is paired with a cheap Z370 board and the R5 1600 with a B350 board. Both use the same memory, graphics card and all the rest of the hardware.) Based on the 720p data of the Core i5-8400 combo, it actually ends up costing 2% less per frame than the competition despite costing 9% more thanks to its superior overall performance....

We saw some mixed results in the games tested and without even tallying them up it’s clear that the Core i7-7800X was underwhelming. The 7700K clearly seems like the best option for gamers. Before we did any tinkering, the 7700K was on average 11% faster than the 7800X across the 30 games tested for the minimum frame rate. Once overclocked that margin was reduced to 9% and summing up all 30 games this way, 7800X doesn’t look too bad, despite being slower....

At idle, the Corsair Obsidian 650D’s thermal performance was on par with the larger, better equipped Thermaltake Chaser MK-1. While that’s impressive, the more affordable Lian-Li Lancool PC-K63 mid-tower delivered significantly better GPU, CPU and HDD temperatures. Under full load, the 650D again had a respectable showing. Even with the low fan speed setting it still provided very solid results. While the overall thermal performance is acceptable, the 650D certainly has room for improvement when compared to the Lian-Li Lancool PC-K63....

The Windows 7 boot time test starts when the OS loading screen appears and ends when the Windows desktop is fully loaded. On the first run the Crucial Adrenaline performed much like the Western Digital RE4 1TB without the SSD cache. However after a few runs the time was reduced significantly as the Crucial Adrenaline became 48% faster than the Western Digital RE4 1TB without the SSD cache. With a load time of 15....

The MX200 was slower than the MX100 in all three of our file transfer tests – often quite a bit slower. Perhaps more surprising was the fact that the BX100 was only a fraction slower than the MX200. Our application tests also favored the MX100 over the new MX200, while the BX100 was as fast as the MX200. If we compare the pricing of the 500/512GB models, the MX100 and MX200 cost $210 and the BX100 is $185....

The photo above is a mosaic comprised of six images captured by Curiosity’s mast camera on June 2, 2022. It is believed that the flaky rock layers depicted in the photo formed in an ancient pond or streambed. Curiosity has been making its way up the foothills of a three-mile-high mountain known as Mount Sharp since 2014. At the base is the clay-rich area, which likely was once home to flowing streams and lakes....

The XPS 13 is good from a multitude of fronts. The design is spectacular, combining a premium and surprisingly tough aluminium lid with an attractive carbon fiber interior that feels great to the touch. The keyboard is pretty decent considering the size of this thin and light laptop that ultimately make it so portable. But of course, the standout feature of the new XPS 13 is its near bezel-free display....

For those needing a quick refresher, games require massive amounts of data to build their immersive worlds. Every object, character and landscape has assets attached that dictate various aspects like color, shape and lighting. Collectively, the assets amount to hundreds of gigabytes of data which gets compressed to reduce the overall size of the game. When it comes time to utilize the assets, they must first be transferred to system memory where they are then decompressed by the CPU before being moved into GPU memory for use as needed....

Despite packing a more efficient architecture and higher operating frequencies, the 2500K and 2600K processors were slower than the 920 and 750 processors. In fact, the Sandy Bridge-based parts were also slower than the Phenom II X4 980 and X6 1100T. It was also interesting to see that Dirt 3 really dislikes dual-core processors as the Phenom II X2 560 averaged 54fps, making it effectively twice as slow as the Phenom II X4 980....

The figure is up from 118.1 million subscribers three months earlier, and is 37 percent higher than the 94.9 million the company finished with a year ago. ESPN+, another of Disney’s properties, reached 21.3 million subscribers, an increase of 76 percent year over year, while Hulu’s total subscriber count inched up to 45.3 million users. Revenue for the quarter ending January 1, 2022, was $21.82 billion with diluted earnings per share of $1....

This week, VGC acquired comments from EA CEO Andrew Wilson during a November internal meeting. During the conference, he went over the disadvantages of continuing to pay FIFA for the right to use the name of the sport’s governing body in its soccer franchise. The comments indicate FIFA has been restricting what the games can include in terms of functionality and licensing. Wilson said FIFA hasn’t let EA include modes in the games beyond 11v11, and it won’t let EA license the Nike brand due to FIFA’s agreement with Adidas....

SpaceX has supplied around 25,000 Starlink ground terminals to Ukraine since the war began. Musk says this has cost the company $80 million and will exceed $100 million by the end of the year. Additionally, SpaceX must create, launch, maintain and replenish satellites and ground stations, and pay telcos for access to the Internet via gateways, all of which costs close to $20 million per month. Musk also noted that the terminals have data usage 100x greater than typical households....

“This is a great day for the factory,” Musk said, describing the occasion as “another step in the direction of a sustainable future,” writes Reuters. He added that Tesla would likely launch a test version of its new Full Self-Driving software in Europe next year, assuming it gets approval from regulators. “It’s quite difficult to do full self-driving in Europe,” he told factory workers on Tuesday, citing the difference between the US and Europe, where roads and rules vary drastically in each country....

Musk was replying to a tweet from crypto news publication Coindesk about Trudeau ordering Canadian authorities not to interact with 34 different crypto addresses tied to the country’s ongoing trucker protests. Those involved in the protests are objecting to a requirement that truckers be vaccinated against Covid-19 to cross the border. They have camped out at the Canadian capital and are blocking border crossings, leading to Trudeau using Canada’s Emergencies Act to halt funding for the protestors....

A false facial recognition match last fall led to an arrest and a week-long detention before police admitted they made a mistake. The police currently aren’t providing information on which facial recognition algorithm they used or how it led to a false identification. Police in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, used facial recognition to secure an arrest warrant for 28-year-old Randal Reid for a $7,500 June purse robbery at a consignment shop in Metairie, The New Orleans Advisor writes....

TikTok is a formidable tool for espionage and mass control, and the Chinese communist dictatorship could do whatever they want with it. These, in brief, are the concerns expressed by FBI director Christopher Wray while attending an event at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Wray once again described TikTok, an extremely popular video app from ByteDance with 80 million active monthly users in the US and a billion active users worldwide, as a potential threat to US national security, The most pressing issue with TikTok, Wray remarked, is its recommendations algorithm, which could be used by Beijing authorities to “manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations....

Dota 2 can be enjoyed on a laptop and at 1680x1050 you don’t really need a discrete GPU. Here we see that all discrete cards with the exception of the R7 260X reached the game limit of 120fps. The integrated solution found in the AMD A10-7850K offered playable performance with 51fps, while the Intel HD Graphics 4600 of the Core i7-4770K fared less than ideally at 38fps. The fps limit of 120fps was less apparent at 1920x1200, though the R9 280X, R9 290 and GTX 760, GTX 780 all still reached it....

Going from user feedback, it sounds like many are planning a final AM4 upgrade and the gaming crowd may be most interested in going all out on the 5800X3D, which can currently be had for $428 or slightly below the MSRP, and we already know it’s a cracking good gaming CPU. Today we’ll be comparing it against the Ryzen 5 3600 and for good measure we’ll also throw in the Ryzen 5 5600 data we had already collected as well....

Ghostwire: Tokyo, the upcoming action-adventure game from developer Tango Gameworks and publisher Bethesda Softworks, has updated its Steam page with minimum and recommended system requirements for PC gamers. The requirements don’t seem particularly demanding, but we also aren’t told what the target resolution, frame rate and image quality settings are, so there are still some pieces of the puzzle missing there. Regardless, here’s what we have to work with at this hour: Minimum:...