A spokesperson for Ford Motor recently told Reuters that it plans to suspend or cut production at eight of its facilities in the US, Canada and Mexico through this week due to chip supply constraints. A day earlier, the company said the chip shortage would result in decreased production output in the current quarter. Production at Ford plants in Chicago, Michigan and Cuautitlán, Mexico, will be suspended, the spokesperson said....

Automotive News said Ford will move forward with plans to ship partially built vehicles to dealers that’ll be fully drivable and sellable, but with certain non-safety features absent. For example, in the case of select Ford Explorers, they’ll arrive with non-functional rear passenger climate controls. Ford spokesperson Said Deep told the publication they are offering ways for customers to get their vehicles sooner during the global semiconductor shortage. With the Explorer, buyers will receive a discount at the time of purchase....

Back in 2018, Federal agents stopped Zhang at San Jose International Airport as he departed for Beijing using a ticket bought at the “last second.” He was accused of transferring 24GB of Apple’s data onto his wife’s laptop via AirDrop. The files included a 25-page document containing engineering schematics of a circuit board, along with technical manuals and PDFs relating to the company’s self-driving vehicle prototype. Zhang was also caught on camera removing hardware from Apple’s autonomous vehicle development lab....

And there’s a fair bit of confusion around what FreeSync 2 really is, how it functions, and how it differs from the original iteration of FreeSync. This article will explore and explain FreeSync 2 as the technology currently stands, as it’s a little different to the tech AMD announced more than a year ago. Our detailed impressions of using a FreeSync 2 monitor will come next week. What is FreeSync?...

The GTX 680 was surprisingly slow in Aliens vs. Predator, matching the performance of its predecessor while falling 29% short of the GTX 590, 36% behind the HD 6990 and 14% lower than the HD 7970. Gainward’s special edition card only increased frame rates by 3% (1fps) at 2560x1600). The GTX 680 stepped up its game in Metro 2033 with an average of 42fps, 24% faster than the GTX 580, on par with the HD 7970, 9% slower than the GTX 590, and 24% slower than the HD 6990....

When testing Crysis 2 at 2560x1600, both the standard and overclocked GTX 680s averaged 32fps, which is precisely what the HD 7970 achieved as well. The GTX 680 was 11% and 21% faster than the HD 7970 and the GTX 580 when running Dragon Age II at 2560x1600, while the Phantom card provided a 3% gain.

The GTX 680 draws fairly little power given its performance. Under load, the whole system pulled 349 watts, 6% less than the HD 7970 and 14% less than the GTX 580. The overclocked GTX 680 Phantom only consumed roughly 2% more power than a standard version. The Phantom’s operating temperatures were remarkable, never exceeding 75 degrees under full load, making it five degrees cooler than the HD 7970 as well as a standard GTX 680....

The GTX 760 averaged 54.3fps when testing BioShock Infinite, which was 3% slower than the GTX 660 Ti yet 11% faster than the HD 7950 and 33% faster than the 7870. The frame time margins were similar to those seen when measuring the frames per second performance, as the GTX 760 was 2% faster than the GTX 660 Ti, 19% faster than the HD 7950 and 38% faster than the 7870....

Dual-slot coolers are practical because they can handle more heat and they tend to be quieter, not to mention that desktop hardware has been designed with dual-slot graphics cards in mind for years. Taking that into consideration, you might be wondering why anyone would bother with a single-slot card at all then. There’s no doubt that this is a niche product, but it should call to compact system builders who would rather not sacrifice an additional expansion slot, which could otherwise be used for hardware such as a dedicated sound card, an NVMe SSD, a Thunderbolt 3 controller, or extra SATA ports....

Weighing 120g, we found the G500s a little light for its size and felt more comfortable after adding half of its 27g worth of weights. There are a handful of 4.5g and 1.7g weights and you can insert up to six of either at once. Measuring 128mm long x 76mm wide x 43mm tall, the G500s is quite comfortable using a claw grip, but we found ourselves moving to a palm grip more naturally....

Of course, this information will only be relevant if you are thinking of buying a GPU right now, which may not make the most sense depending on your position and what sort of GPU you are after. As we’ve discussed at length now, buying a new high-end graphics card today may not be a great idea if those products will be superseded with newer, faster GPUs by the end of this year....

Thankfully it’s easy to shut down most of these annoyances if you know where to look. We published this guide when Windows 10 was newly released, we’ve since revised all content so it’s current with the latest OS updates. Disable lock screen ads, or bypass the lock screen To get rid of lock screen ads you’ll need to disable Windows Spotlight, which is the default option for the lock screen background and displays different images as you log into the operating system....

We used Prime95 to test load or stress performance, which increase power consumption to 178 watts – the same amount of power consumed by the Asrock A75 Pro4. Although it technically “beat” the Extreme4, the G1.Sniper2 was only 2 watts ahead in the load test and a single watt ahead when idle.

Having traded performance blows, both companies are tightening their pricing with the $400 R9 290 forcing the GTX 780 down to $500 from $650, further invalidating the GTX Titan, which is effectively history after the announcement of the GTX 780 Ti that we’ll be testing today. Nvidia’s latest offering packs 7% more CUDA cores and 17% increased bandwidth for $700 – 30% less than the Titan, which is still $1,000 new in case you want one for your museum....

The default SATA ports are accompanied by another two SATA 6Gb/s connectors courtesy of the Marvell 88SE9172 controller, which also adds hardware RAID (RAID 0 and RAID 1), NCQ, AHCI and “Hot Plug” functions. Gigabit LAN is delivered via the Realtek RTL8111E controller, which utilizes the PCI Express bus for maximum throughput. The Z68XP-UD3-iSSD only offers one Gigabit LAN jack, but this should be sufficient for most. Gigabyte tackled the audio with Realtek’s ALC889 chip, which features Dolby Home Theater, a codec that supports 16/20/24-bit SPDIF input and output with up to 192kHz sample rate....

The alpha is focused on seven specific Chromebook models: Acer Chromebook 514 (CB514-1W) Acer Chromebook 515 (CB515-1W) Acer Chromebook Spin 713 (CP713-3W) Asus Chromebook Flip CX5 (CX5500) Asus Chromebook CX9 (CX9400) HP Pro c640 G2 Chromebook Lenovo 5i-14 Chromebook. Google is working on expanding this list in the future. Enabling Steam on one of these Chromebooks requires an Intel Iris Xe Graphics chip, an Intel 11th generation i5 or i7 CPU, and a minimum of 8GB of RAM....

It appears that a new Nest Hub is coming this year. According to anonymous sources speaking with 9to5Google, the device will have a detachable screen allowing it to operate as a tablet. It docks with a base speaker to function like Google’s existing Nest Hub models when not in use as a personal device. The two Nest Hubs Google currently offers, starting at $99, work like smart home speaker systems with a touchscreen interface....

Enter 2013, and it’s time to refresh the Nexus 7 with a new model and new specifications. Asus is still producing the device, it’s received a serious speed boost, a better quality display, a rear camera and new features. Yes, it costs $20 more than last year’s model, but at $220 it still presents itself as a remarkably attractive proposition for people who want to read, watch or play. The first Nexus 7 established itself as a cheap yet quality device, so will the Nexus 7 keep the bar raised to its lofty standards?...

Reuters reports that the Alphabet unit has been under pressure in Russia for a while, but the invasion of Ukraine has seen authorities escalate the situation. Since then, Google has suspended all advertising in the country, banned state-run media channels from YouTube, and refused to remove content relating to the war that Russia deemed illegal, which led to Google News being banned. “The Russian authorities seizure of Google Russia’s bank account has made it untenable for our Russia office to function, including employing and paying Russia-based employees, paying suppliers and vendors, and meeting other financial obligations,” a Google spokesperson said....

Throughout this section I’ll be looking at encoding two TV show episodes I ripped from a Blu-ray earlier. If you want to learn how to rip Blu-rays, there are plenty of guides around, and plenty of ways to do so. For this guide, however, I created two high-bitrate H.264 files that are of excellent quality, essentially representing what you’d get from the source material. It should be noted here that if you rip a Blu-ray at original quality you will get a massive file size as Blu-rays use high-bitrate media for the ultimate in quality....