With the covers off Nvidia’s latest cards, attention then turned to AMD’s more affordable offering, the Radeon RX 480. Naturally, at $200 to $240 the RX 480 wasn’t taking on the $380 (currently $450) GTX 1070 and it certainly wasn’t tangling with the $700 GTX 1080. So leading up to the RX 480’s release it seemed like consumers would have an easy choice between AMD and Nvidia for the months to come: if you wanted an affordable sub-$300 graphics card, AMD would be the obvious pick while folks spending more than that would surely go for one of Nvidia’s Pascal graphics cards....

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI cards provided a 62% performance gain over the single card configuration when testing with Just Cause 2. As a result the GTX 460 SLI setup was 7% faster than the GeForce GTX 480, 42% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 and even 4% faster than the Radeon HD 5970. Crysis Warhead Benchmarks Rather than using the Crysis Warhead benchmark we elected to record frame rates over 60 seconds of actual gameplay using Fraps....

Initially the first GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards were meant to feature 512 cores, though once again due to TMSC’s poor 40nm yields the design has been scaled back. Apparently, yields are still currently lower than 50%. A CUDA core executes a floating point or integer instruction per clock for a thread. The 480 CUDA cores are organized in 15 Streaming Multiprocessors of 32 cores each, which is a fourfold increase over prior SM designs....

Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz) x4 2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600(CAS 8-8-8-20) Asrock X79 Extreme11 (Intel X79) OCZ ZX Series (1250w) Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB) AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 7770 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB) Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Nvidia Forceware 306....

The GTX 950 provided a very playable 47fps in Battlefield 4 at 1080p using the highest possible in game quality settings with 2xMSAA. That works out to 42% faster than the old GTX 750 Ti and GTX 650 Ti Boost while also being 4% faster than the R7 370. Despite that it was 6% slower than the old GTX 760 but just 15% slower than the GTX 960. The GTX 950 had no trouble delivering highly playable performance in BioShock Infinite with an average of over 60fps – 36% faster than the GTX 750 Ti and 10% faster than the R7 370....

The GeForce RTX 2080 Super adds two extra SM units for a 4% increase in cores, meaning this is now a fully enabled TU104 silicon. This is the same silicon used by the standard RTX 2080, as well as the 2070. There’s also a 9% frequency uplift for the base clock, and a 6% increase for the boost clock. Due to the way GPU boost works though, we anticipate this will be closer to a 3 to 4% increase in frequency....

The browser maker is partnering with Yat Labs on the initiative. Launched in February 2021, Yats are a “self-sovereign identity solution based on emojis.” The collaboration will allow Opera users to navigate the web simply by entering in a string of emojis into the address bar rather than letters and/or numbers. The duo claim the integration is equally about functionality as it is expression, and they might not be wrong....

For example, if you really only play Overwatch, the GTX 1070 is as good as it’s possibly going to get for you and spending over $300 on the 7700K might not be the right move when the $160 Ryzen 5 1400 delivers a similar experience in this game, though this also appears true for many other titles as well. Once overclocked, both processors are able to get the most out of the GTX 1070 in this CPU intensive title, though the R5 1400 was 10% slower than the 7700K with the GTX 1080 and that margin will grow with the 1080 Ti and even faster GPUs in the future....

This week, researchers at the Delft University of Technology published a paper on how they achieved one-directional superconductivity. This could let computers replace semiconductors with superconductors, which can carry a current indefinitely with no energy loss, potentially increasing computer speeds by orders of magnitude. According to Associate Professor Mazhar Ali, superconductor-based computers could reach speeds up to a terahertz. Superconducting might not be usable for consumer computers in the near term, but Ali thinks server farms and supercomputers could implement it....

Games that support a higher native resolution like 4K might benefit from improve anti-aliasing through supersampling down to 1440p. Notably, variable refresh rate on the PS5 only works at 1080p and 4K; 1440p resolution is not supported. The beta also adds a new gamelists feature, making it easier to organize your library. Users can create up to 15 gamelists, and each list can contain up to 100 titles. All games under the “Your Collection” tab can be added to a list including disc, digital and streaming games....

Once again, the TS-412 was slower than the N3200XXX (by 21%) while outpacing the LG N2A2. Transfer speeds were reduced even further in our program copy test, with the TS-412 managing only 7.7MB/s – 23% slower than the N3200XXX’s 10MB/s.

Although it has become relatively common for today’s NAS devices to use SO-DIMM slots, QNAP has opted to solder the memory ICs directly to the PCB. Mounted on the PCB are two 128MB Hynix HY5PS1G831C memory chips (256MB combined), which are rated at DDR2-800 (CL2.5-6-6-6). The PCB is also donning a pair of Marvell Alaska 88E1116R single-port Gigabit Ethernet controllers, which connect directly to the Kirkwood processor. A separate PCB houses the Marvell 88SX7042 SATA 3Gb/s controller which uses the PCI Express interface to provide bandwidth for four SATA ports that support JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 5 + hot spare....

The plan is to start reviewing NAS type devices on a more regular basis at TechSpot so we’ll be building up benchmark results from this point forward. For now, we don’t have anything to compare the TS-853A against, at least nothing that would be in the same league. Still with performance numbers based on RAID 5, 6 and 10 modes we get a pretty good idea of just how capable this device really is....

The RX 570 pushed total system consumption to almost 300 watts which is still manageable despite the fact that the same system with the 1060 consumed almost 20% less power. The RX 570 ended up delivering just a single extra frame on average at 1080p and surprisingly just two extra frames at 1440p. That said, the graph above includes the results for Resident Evil 7, but that title was a massive outlier....

F1 2016 often provides competitive results and we see this once again when comparing the RX 580 and GTX 1060. This time the RX 580 was able to deliver 7% more performance than the RX 480 at 1080p, which placed it on par with the GTX 1060. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is an AMD sponsored title though as is often the case with time, Nvidia has been able to better optimize their drivers for improved performance....

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced three new variants of its tiny Pico board. The Raspberry Pi Pico W adds built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, while the Pico H and Pico WH are versions with pre-installed header pins and a three-pin debug connector. The original Raspberry Pi Pico launched early last year for just $4. It comes with an RP2040 chip built on TSMC’s 40nm process and features two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores clocked at 133 MHz and 264KB of on-chip RAM....

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has issued the recall for the SunVilla 10-foot Solar LED Market Umbrella sold exclusively at Costco warehouse and the retailer’s website for between $130 and $160. The umbrellas feature a series of LEDs along the arms and a black solar panel battery puck containing a lithium-ion battery on the top. The recall notice advises owners to stop using the umbrellas and store the puck, which comes with a black cover marked with “YEEZE” or “YEEZE 1,” out of the sun and away from combustible material....

Earlier this week, an RRA listing signaled the imminent launch of AMD’s refreshed Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards - the RX 6650 XT, RX 6750 XT, and the RX 6950 XT. The new cards will come with 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory and potentially higher boost clocks, as a sort of stop-gap solution until RDNA 3 is ready. As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, a separate listing on the Eurasian Economic Commission’s website hints that Gigabyte will have custom models of its own and possibly even a couple of low-end RX 6400 cards....

Elizaveta Danilova, the Bank of Russia’s Financial Stability Department director, presented the ‘Cryptocurrencies: trends, risks, measures’ report during an online press conference. The report states that cryptocurrency bears many similarities to a pyramid scheme and is often used in criminal activities. It also undermines monetary policy sovereignty by offering citizens a way to take their money out of the national economy. The report goes on to say that crypto mining is damaging to Russia’s green agenda, a risk to its energy supply, and can worsen the adverse effects of cryptocurrency’s spread....

Believe it or not, there’s a total of 20 third-gen Ryzen processors if you include OEM parts and the drool-inducing Threadripper models. However, for general consumers looking at buying a mainstream AM4 processor, there’s primarily 5 models that we recommend – though parts such as the 3100, 3600X, 3800X and even the new XT variants maybe worth buying if available at the right price – for simplicity sake, we’ll be focusing on the 5 top models we recommend the most....