Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz) x4 2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600(CAS 8-8-8-20) Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79) OCZ ZX Series (1250w) Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gainward GeForce GTX 680 Phantom (2048MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 670 Phantom (2048MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 (3072MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB) AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (3072MB) Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 SOC (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6990 (4096MB) HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB) Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Nvidia Forceware 301....

Like many enthusiasts, we were mostly impressed by the R9 290 because its $400 MSRP was almost 30% cheaper than the R9 290X while only being 5% slower. In reality, if you can find a R9 290 it costs at least $500, while most are fetching closer to $550 – 40% more than we were lead to believe they would cost. Unfortunately, the story is similar for AMD’s Titan killer....

The Nexus 5X also supports fast charging, which allows you to charge the smartphone very quickly. For some reason, not every flagship includes fast charging, so I’m glad Google and LG have understood its importance to a good battery experience.

There are a wide variety of display resolutions used in flagship phones, so it’s worth taking a look at how the Pixel 2 XL with its 2880 x 1440 display stacks up. Relative the HTC U11, which uses the Snapdragon 835 and has a standard 1440p display, the Pixel 2 XL was about 4 percent slower in onscreen benchmarks. This gap extends to 38 percent compared to the OnePlus 5, which uses a 1080p display....

A new report from Kaspersky describes a malware campaign targeting gamers through YouTube. The malware can steal various kinds of credentials from a victim’s system, then use them to trick more users. In March 2020, Kaspersky discovered a trojan that bundles together multiple malicious programs that hackers used to spread through spam e-mails or third-party loaders. Once activated, the payload also known as RedLine can steal data from Chrome, Firefox and Chromium-based browsers, including autofill information, usernames, passwords, cookies, and banking credentials....

When we first tested it last October, we gave it a score of 95 and said it was ’the’ high-end graphics card to buy, which was the general consensus at the time as the 290X provided GTX Titan-like performance for nearly half the price. The following month AMD did one better with the vanilla R9 290, offering similar performance to the 290X while being $100 cheaper. Again, we gave it a high score of 95 out of 100 and recommended it as the way to go for high-end gaming....

The majority of the visual effects seen in games today are down to the clever use of textures – without them, games would dull and lifeless. So let’s get dive in and see how this all works! As always, if you’re not quite ready for a deep dive into texturing, don’t panic – you can get started with our 3D Game Rendering 101. But once you’re past the basics, do read on for our next look at the world of 3D graphics....

I ran two battery tests: one while looping a 720p rip of Inception, the other using Powermark’s default “Balanced” profile, which provides mixed workloads including Web browsing, word processing, gaming and playing videos. The battery tests came in well under HP’s advertised 9-hour autonomy at just over 4 and 6 hours. However, the display, processor and integrated graphics core ran at their maximum settings and both tests are probably more taxing than you’d put the machine through if you used it for light tasks with Windows’ Power Saver profile....

The design of the One M8 may not be as striking as the original One, but HTC has put in some serious polish to how it feels. The polished gunmetal grey aluminium, which now covers 90% of the non-screen surface area, not only looks fantastic, but it makes the One feel like a flagship product in your hand. A more curved design also makes the M8 more ergonomic than before....

The HTC U11 is slightly different from other S835 handsets we’ve reviewed in that it has a 1440p display. The Xiaomi Mi 6 and OnePlus 5 both have 1080p displays, so it’s no surprise the U11 brings with it a 45% performance reduction in on-screen workloads. However, when comparing raw offscreen data, the S835 performs as expected. Compared to the HTC 10 with the same display, we’re looking at 23 percent better performance on average in GXFBench’s onscreen tests, and 45 percent better performance overall....

When testing with Wolfenstein at 2560x1600 we find that the overclocked Inno3D GeForce card is 16% faster than the standard GeForce GTX 480. With an average of 80fps, the GTX 480 iChill Black Series is faster than the Radeon HD 5870, but slightly slower than the MSI R5870 Lightening.

While Intel claims the Core i3-13100 is based on the Raptor Lake architecture, in reality it’s little more than a rebadged 12100 with a small bump to the clock speeds. The L2 cache capacity, for example, is just 1.25 MB per core while most Raptor Lake CPUs are meant to offer 2 MB per core, so calling the 13100 a Raptor Lake processor is a bit disingenuous, and we suppose calling it a 13th-gen part is as well....

This graph sums the situation up really well for me. The overclocked 7350K was 10% slower in the Excel workload and yet it consumed almost 80% more power than the 7400. For those wondering what you are looking at here is total system consumption. Finally, here are the consumption results when running the Prime95 stress test, as you can see the overclocked 7350K burns almost as much power as the Core i7-6700K....

For those of you interested, we’ll still review the Core i9-11900K in a few days, but with a $540 MSRP, I reckon you’ll be able to guess my thoughts on that one. The 11700K at $400 is a little more palatable, especially if it’s widely available. So that leaves the 11600K as the third unlocked Rocket Lake 11th-gen chip that’s been announced so far. Like the 10600K, the 11600K is a 6-core / 12-thread CPU packing a 12MB L3 cache and a 125 watt TDP, along with the same $262 MSRP....

Handbrake is a popular application for encoding video and we’ve used it to convert a 4K H.264 video to 1080p using H.265 and recorded the average frame rate. Here the Ryzen 5 1700 spat out 11 fps on average while the 1800X managed 12.6 fps. Not bad but the new Core i7-8700K went complete beast mode with 13.8 fps making it 10% faster than the 1800X and 11% faster than the 7800X....

The 120GB version boasts read and write speeds of 450MB/s and 210MB/s, while the larger 250GB version is considerably faster at 500MB/s reads and 315MB/s writes. Naturally, the SATA 6Gb/s interface is essential to achieving these staggering read speeds, but this presents a minor issue: Intel’s new Sandy Bridge platform is the only one to provide native SATA 6Gb/s support – and it does so with only two ports. Third party embedded solutions such as the Marvell 88SE9128 can provide motherboards with SATA 6Gb/s support, but have very poor performance compared to Intel’s implementation....

With NVMe driver installed the SSD 750 Series is able to hit 2.2GB/s, which is considerably faster than the sequential read performance seen when testing with CrystalDiskMark. The sequential write performance is still strong at 1.25GB/s, which is more than twice the bandwidth of a SATA 2.5" SSD. Here we see that the NVMe driver does nothing to aid in 4K-64 thread performance, as the SSD 750 was good for 1....

Sapphire Rapids-based workstation CPUs from Intel are in the works and you might not have to wait long to get your hands on them. In a teaser video shared on Twitter, two Intel employees are seen talking tech. Midway through, the guy turns to his coworker and asks about her new Sapphire Rapids system. She comments on how ridiculous it is, adding that it used to take a whole room full of computers to do what the system can now accomplish on its own....

The follow-up to 2015’s zombies-meets-parkour title is one of the most hotly anticipated titles this year. The first game also required a fairly hefty investment of players’ time, around 55 hours, but according to developer Techland’s recent tweet, fully completing everything in Dying Light 2 will take 500 hours. That’s the equivalent of over 20 days of continuous play, or, as the company puts it, almost as long as it would take to walk from Warsaw to Madrid (around 534 hours)....