Lowering the quality preset from ultra to high along with reducing the anti-aliasing level to FXAA should help improve frame rates. At 1680x1050 almost all the cards we tested broke 40fps, with the exception of the GTX 650 Ti, HIS R7 250X iCooler 1GB, GTX 560 Ti and the HD 7770 and 7750. For an average of 50fps, you’ll only need the GTX 660 or R9 265 while 60fps requires the R9 270X (7870) or GTX 760....
The WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB is off to a good start by maxing out the gigabit network connection when downloading large files such as our 6GB ISO file. The My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB demonstrates surprisingly strong performance in our game download test with a throughput of 78.5MB/s, slower than a few higher-end and considerably more expensive devices but exceptional performance for its class. The My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB continued to impress with strong performance in the program download test, sustaining 38MB/s – much faster than the DS715 and Netgear ReadyNAS RN312....
The textbook example is Apple, which ties its chips to its own software to meaningfully differentiate their phones and their computers. Or Google, which is customizing chips for their most intense workloads like search algorithms and video encoding. A few hundred million dollars in chip design costs are more than paid pack in billions in extra sales for Apple or billions in capital expenses and operating expenses savings for Google....
Microsoft seeded a new Windows 11 Insider build (22572) today through the Dev Channel, and while it doesn’t include any new features, it does introduce two new “inbox” apps that will soon be part of the default experience in Windows 11. One of them is called Clipchamp, an in-browser app for editing videos that Microsoft acquired last year for an undisclosed sum. At the time, the company said it was looking to integrate the app into its Microsoft 365 suite, and that it was exploring the idea of eventually integrating it into Windows....
This list of weird and wonderful stuff that the internet has kicked up made us gasp and giggle and shake our heads no less than 10 times. And while these items exhibit varying degrees of strangeness, they stand here as proof that if you can dream it, you can almost certainly buy it. Skull-Shaped Telephone with LED Eyes ($9.95 with $4.45 s&h) Who doesn’t need this? LED eyes that light up when the phone is ringing, a removable face handset, and an excuse to start answering the phone “Skullo!...
And that’s a shame, because apart from a collection of issues relating to Google integration and notifications, Xiaomi’s MIUI skin does include handy functionality that expands upon what you get in stock Android. The skin is still heavy, and there’s a ton of bloatware to contend with, but MIUI could have been half-decent were it localized appropriately for outside of China. There are some aspects to the Xiaomi Redmi Pro’s hardware that are great....
Last October, video-gaming history channel DidYouKnowGaming (DYKG) posted a 20-minute documentary on a formerly unknown and unpublished Nintendo DS game, Heroes of Hyrule. As the name connotes, it was a Zelda spinoff planned for Nintendo’s popular portable. The video remained on YouTube for nearly 90 days before DYKG received a copyright warning and automatically removed it from public view on December 28. Channel operator Shane Gill said the copyright strike accused him of using “unauthorized material” in his video....
Likewise, almost all of the boards rendered 95-96fps in the x264 HD Benchmark 3.0 with the exception of Asrock’s P67 Extreme6, which averaged 99.9fps. When testing with TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress we found that the boards took between 6.17 and 6.22 minutes to complete the conversion. That’s less than a 1% difference, so while the MSI P67A-GD55 was the slowest board tested, it’s not a crucial result.
The x264 HD Benchmark 4.0 saw a 5fps difference in the first pass test between the fastest and slowest X79 boards. The MSI X79A-GD65(8D) was again the slowest X79 board, with the ECS X79R-AX taking the lead delivering 175.4fps. TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress saw the six X79 boards deliver virtually the same performance as they all completed the task in around 5 minutes and 30 seconds.
Sitting between these two boards is the P55-GD65, which is priced at $160 making it one of the cheaper boards featured in this round-up. Feature-wise the MSI P55-GD65 is similar to the more expensive Asus P7P55D Deluxe offering Firewire, dual Gigabit LAN and 8 SATA ports. At just $40 more than the ECS P55H-A, you seem to be getting more for your money, though we feel the biggest advantages will be seen when overclocking....
You could argue some free games deserve to be free, as their quality or length is not quite up there with AAA releases, but there are plenty of notable exceptions. In fact, some of them are so good that it’s easy to forget the cost to play is a whopping zero dollars. Most free video games offer at least some form of in-game purchases, designed to extend the experience and serve as a steady revenue stream for its creators....
Follow up: GPU Update December 2022 About that RTX 4080 pricing… The launch of Nvidia’s RTX 4080 has not gone well in terms of sales, with very weak demand for a high-end product. For the past few generations (not to mention during shortages), Nvidia was able to release anything and a significant number of people would flock to buy those GPUs. It would be typical for any new release to sell out almost instantly and buyers a little slow to hit the purchase button would have to wait weeks for a restock....
Adobe’s latest version of Lightroom now supports video editing across Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. Existing Lightroom users should have no trouble acclimating to video. As senior product manager Benjamin Warde explains, the same controls for editing images are used to manipulate video. It’s possible to copy and paste settings between photos and videos to achieve a consistent aesthetic across both mediums, and utilize premium and AI-powered recommended presets. With the new Lightroom, you can even trim the beginning or end of a clip....
It’s disappointing that the 4K variant does not come equipped with G-Sync, which would help with the lower framerates you’ll achieve at that panel’s native resolution. I’d advise against purchasing the 4K display if you’re only opting for a GTX 1060 GPU, however GTX 1070 models should be fine. The 1080p TN model I received isn’t fantastic from a quality perspective. The display is bright, achieving just over 400 nits in my testing, however a contrast ratio of just 800:1, due to poor black levels, is below average....
This display is easily one of the nicest I’ve seen on a laptop. Not only is it large, which is great for gaming and consuming media in general, but it’s also of excellent quality in many areas. Starting with the resolution, there’s nothing quite like viewing a relatively compact panel with so many pixels crammed in. The 15.6-inch display with a resolution of 3840 x 2160 equates to 8.3 million pixels in a 671 square cm area, or 282 pixels per inch....
The latest claim that Nvidia will release a Ti version of the incredibly powerful RTX 4090 comes from prolific hardware leaker @kopite7kimi, who has a good record when it comes to these sorts of leaks. They tweeted that the RTX 4090 Ti (model PG136/139-SKU310) will use a slightly cut-down version of the AD102 with 18,176 Cuda cores, 192 ROPs, 568 TMUs, a 96MB L2cache, and a 384-bit memory bus. That AD102 configuration is similar to the one used in the RTX 6000 Ada Generation card aimed at the professional and enterprise market, though that $7,000+ product packs 48GB of GDDR6....
Memory overclocking isn’t a new practice in the PC community. For years, enthusiasts have pushed the limits of their RAM beyond the rated JEDEC standard to squeeze every drop of performance from their modules. Tuning RAM can reap big rewards in performance but requires understanding a wide variety of settings, voltages, and frequencies. This understanding is usually accompanied by lengthy bouts of stability testing. The introduction of Intel’s XMP technology (also known as DOCP on most AMD platforms) provided the average user the ability to overclock modules by changing a bios setting to a pre-configured profile designed to work across a number of hardware configurations....
Back in February, AMD launched the Ryzen 6000 series mobile processors for gaming laptops. Our own Tim Schiesser noted the Zen 3+ (Rembrandt) architecture brings a roughly 10 percent improvement in performance per watt when compared to the previous generation, and mostly shines in the iGPU department where the RDNA 2 design brings some substantial performance improvements when compared to the previous Vega design. Today, the company announced the Ryzen Pro 6000 series CPUs, which are aimed at enterprise machines where security and robust IT management support are key....
Based on the 12nm process, AMD sent us its new Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X processors for testing. The company tells us that Zen+ offers a reduction in cache latency (anywhere from 13% up to 34%), an 11% reduction in DRAM latency, IPC improvements of approximately 3%, and improved memory support for greater frequencies. So that all sounds good. In addition to all of that, being that Zen+ is based on the Globalfoundries 12LP process (LP for “Leading Performance”), you can reportedly expect these chips to handle higher frequencies and offer improved power consumption....
