I’ll start with the things I like. The 4,000 mAh battery is huge and delivers great battery life across the board. The fingerprint sensor surprised me at how fast and accurate it was, particularly after a recent software update. I like seeing a 1080p display this price point as well, as companies often opt for cheaper and less processor-intensive 720p displays in entry-level handsets. The Touch also features a pretty compelling software setup....

Steam’s most-played games chart shows the usual names: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is still number one; GTA V continues to hang around; Apex Legend, Rust, Dota 2, and so on. But in seventh place sits Wallpaper Engine, which boasts almost 100,000 peak players and 45.2 million hours ‘played.’ That’s a lot of hours for a wallpaper app. But its popularity comes not only from creating, browsing, and sharing Windows desktop wallpapers but also because it’s a way to evade China’s ban on pornography, hence why over 200,000 of those positive reviews are written in Chinese....

Variety reports that Village Roadshow has a 20-year relationship with Warner Bros. during which time it co-financed several movies, including The Matrix trilogy, Joker, and the Oceans series. As with all of Warner Bros. 2021 movies, the Matrix Resurrections was released at theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously to offset declining cinema attendance that came as a result of the pandemic. But Village Roadshow says Warner Bros. did not consult with or notify the company before deciding to put the Matrix Resurrections on HBO Max....

Unfortunately, some of these problems have gotten worse and will probably continue to worsen throughout 2018, which is going to make it increasingly difficult to build a PC. Part one of this series will be dedicated discuss DDR4 memory pricing and why it’s so high. RAM pricing is currently a big issue plaguing those wanting to build a new computer or even update an old one. From July 2016 to July 2017, the market saw a 111% increase for the average selling price of DDR4 memory, and it has continued to increase since then....

So, this is no more than a Windows 11 preview and it’s well worth noting that this leaked version isn’t the final version and therefore performance numbers are subject to change. We downloaded the ISO and made the necessary modifications, so that it could be installed on our test system. So far stability has been excellent, not a single crash and everything has worked. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the Mac-alike look that Microsoft seems to have gone with, but it’s not a big deal and I’m sure you’ll be able to customize the appearance to suit your preferences....

This review is based on my experience with Windows 8 using a desktop, so I’ve been treating Windows 8 like most computer enthusiasts will: as a direct upgrade from Windows 7 on my custom-built machine, just like I did with Vista, XP, 2k, and other previous Windows releases. As you’ve heard repeatedly in the past year, the new Windows Start screen replaces the Start menu, and that’s a radical shift for the platform....

The HP Envy x2 is not running an Intel or AMD x86 processor, but an ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, the same system-on-a-chip used by many of 2017’s flagship Android smartphones. It will soon be joined by other devices from Asus and Lenovo, using the same SoC for what should be largely the same results. Now you might remember Microsoft’s attempt to get Windows running on ARM hardware way back at the launch of Windows 8 with a variant of the OS known as Windows RT....

Inside there are two 3.5" bays with tool-free retainers. One of these bays can be used to house a 2.5" drive with an adapter. Additionally, there is also a single dedicated 2.5" mount. Along with room for a Mini-ITX motherboard there are also two expansion slots for dual slot graphics cards. While Xigmatek claims the case can support 200mm-long cards, there is a catch. We found that only single slot cards were able to measure 200mm long while dual slot cards couldn’t be longer than 175mm....

Almost 50 gigabytes of stolen data from Yandex services were recently shared online. The company is trying to downplay the leak but the source code shared via torrent can reveal a lot of useful information about how its services – and the web search engine in particular – actually work. One of the most interesting – and potentially damaging – facets of the leak is the source code of the Yandex search engine, namely the ranking factors used by the algorithm to provide results for user search queries....

For this roundup we will be focusing on the Poseidon Z, though Tt eSports was kind enough to supply all three keyboards. The Poseidon Z is certainly one of the most affordable mechanical keyboards on the market though there is a good reason for this. Rather than the preferred Cherry MX switches the Poseidon Z has been fitted with the cheaper Kailh knockoffs. The patent expired earlier this year on the Cherry MX switches, which has opened the gates for cheaper Chinese knockoffs to start appearing....

Jassy said that as the decision to lay off even more staff was leaked before time—The Wall Street Journal revealed the revised figure before the CEO’s post—he shared the news early, rather than speaking to those directly affected first. It means many staff being let go won’t discover their fate until January 18. That could mean a long and stressful two weeks for those who fear their jobs are at risk....

Whereas the FM1 socket only saw a single generation of APUs, we believe AMD is going to release at least one more generation after Trinity for the FM2 platform, which makes investing in it a lot safer for budget users. Although the FM1 and FM2 sockets aren’t compatible, you will still find FM2 boards using the existing A55 and A75 chipsets. Given that the features offered by these two chipsets are still very current, such as full SATA 6Gb/s support and native USB 3....

The A10-6800K has an MSRP of $142, while the slightly slower A10-5800K has been selling for just $129 over the past 6 months. That means consumers would be paying 10% more for a processor that is clocked just 8% higher and going by our tests it even struggles to make up that margin. There were some scenearios under which the A10-6800K showed noticeable performance gains over the A10-5800K, namely in our encoding benchmarks, where it was between 10 and 14% faster....

Titles such as Company of Heroes 2, Metro: Last Light and Hitman: Absolution weren’t really playable on medium at 1680x1050 while Arma 3 and BioShock: Infinite were borderline playable. You can achieve playable performance in titles such as Tomb Raider at this resolution if you’re willing to play on the lowest quality, but that’s never an answer gamers want to hear, least of all after buying a new gaming chip....

That didn’t change much with the R9 280X: Intel setups were about 5% faster when using Mantle in Battlefield 4 and Thief at 1920x1200 while the FX-8350 and A8-7600 were around 5% and 13% faster in BF4 with a 40% increase in Thief. Scaling down, Mantle was actually detrimental to Battlefield’s performance when we ran it on both Intel and AMD rigs using an R7 260X, a GPU tier that could probably use a boost in frame rate....

The Athlon II X2 250 had to use a FSB boost to 260MHz in order to reach a stable 3.90GHz overclock. The voltage was also increased to 1.50v. Overall we saw decent performance gains provided by the overclock at the cost of power consumption. Although both processors were clocked at the same frequency, the Phenom II X2 550 still provided a considerable performance advantage for the most part.

Using Unreal Tournament 3 at low resolution settings, the Phenom II X4 965 closes the gap to just 3fps against the Core 2 Quad Q9650. The Phenom II X4 965 was 6fps faster than the Phenom II X4 955 processor in Crysis Warhead. This made it a single frame faster than the Core 2 Quad Q9650. The Phenom II X4 processors appear to have an advantage over the Intel Core 2 range in Far Cry 2, with a small 5fps advantage over the Core 2 Quad Q9650....

At 1920x1200, the Radeon HD 6870 was 11% slower than the Radeon HD 5870 and 7% faster than the Radeon HD 5850. Moreover, the Radeon HD 6870 outperformed the GeForce GTX 470 by 10% and the GeForce GTX 460 (1GB) by 23%. Far Cry 2 Benchmarks To test Far Cry 2, we used the “Action Scene” from the custom benchmark tool, which we feel is an excellent representation of real gameplay performance....

The Radeon R9 290 averaged 66.1fps at 2560x1600 in Battlefield 3, which was 3% (2fps) slower than the R9 290X, 30% faster than the R9 280X, as well as 2% quicker than the GTX 780 and 28% faster than the GTX 770. The card’s frame time performance was identical to the R9 290X at 24.5ms: The R9 290 rendered 36.3fps in Battlefield, 46% slower than the R9 290X, which only actually works out to 2fps....

What do you do when dealing with connector-melting levels of current? Add water of course. Traditionally, GPUs are cooled using a heatsink made up of a copper and aluminum cocktail, while higher-end models have adopted performance-enhancing features such as vapor chambers and heatpipes. Unfortunately for AMD, given the space they have to work with it just isn’t possible to fit a big enough heatsink, certainly not one capable of dispersing 500 watts of heat, no amount of heatpipes are going to help with that....