The Kickstarter campaign for Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened has more than tripled its $70,000 target; it currently stands at just over $237,000 with around one day to go. To give it a final push, Frogwares tweeted a promotion that’s causing some controversy. The studio is giving three random people who Like and Retweet its post the opportunity to have a custom message written on a 152mm howitzer artillery shell, which will be used by Ukraine’s 24th Separate Assault Battalion against the invading Russian forces....

Standing as one of today’s fastest SATA SSDs, if not the fastest, Samsung’s SSD 850 Pro arrived almost a year ago now. At that time the 512GB version was roughly $0.83 per gigabyte whereas today that same model costs just $0.60 per gigabyte – down nearly 30%. While Samsung secured the high-end market with its 850 Pro, Crucial’s MX100 dominated the value segment with its 512GB model fetching just $0....

The good news as far as performance is concerned is that the Mali-T720 MP3 is much faster than the Adreno 306 found in the Snapdragon 410. This gives the Umi Touch a huge raw performance advantage (over 150 percent) as well as a slight on-screen advantage (about 14%) when comparing this 1080p display to 720p hardware like the 2015 Moto G. Despite issues with performance elsewhere, I didn’t experience any real struggles playing modern Android games at 1080p on this smartphone....

The Xingda plant, run by Taipower, supplies an estimated one-seventh of Taiwan’s total electrical output. The outage lasted 90 minutes and affected an estimated five million households. The cause of the incident was attributed to a failure in the station’s turbine room, which triggered an emergency shutdown to avoid further damage. It resulted in cascading blackouts across the island and a 10.5MW drop in total power supply. Several of Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturers were affected and continue to assess the situation....

Darío teased some of what is already possible on Twitter, noting that the project is still several months away from launch. The dev also conceded that it’ll be impossible to get every N64 game to work, but a whitelist of compatible titles should help to minimize confusion among players. The list is small right now but expect it to grow substantially in the coming months. Further work could lead to additional improvements such as higher frame rates on games that never got 60 FPS patches, HD texture replacements and a detailed graphics debugger that could come in handy for romhackers and homebrewers....

In the end, we determined that Windows 8 was on par with 7 and at times a fraction faster, leading us to this conclusion in our performance review: “Looking beyond benchmarks, Windows 8 appears more polished than Windows 7, even if you plan to live on the desktop and aren’t too fond of the Start screen, general usage is smoother and appears to be faster on Windows 8, which I found most noticeable on our somewhat underpowered Athlon II X4 system....

As the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series reach their second birthdays, prospective owners waiting for that first price drop are finding themselves facing price increases instead. In August, Sony bumped the MSRP on the PlayStation 5 by as much as 10 percent in many regions. It blamed current economic pressures, including hyperinflation, on the need to jack up the price. Now, Microsoft is following suit. Tom Warren reported that this week, Xbox boss Phil Spencer confirmed that price increases are coming....

In its guide to installing Android apps, Microsoft lists a set of system requirements that might seem demanding at first but make sense when you consider the design environment. The three critical requirements are that systems needs to have at least 8GB (but ideally 16GB) of RAM, a solid-state drive, and virtualization enabled. Windows 11 needs just 4GB of Ram and will run on HDDs. When Microsoft first unveiled the new operating system, its most concerning requirements were relatively recent CPUs....

The information was first posted by a user on the Chinese social media platform Bilibili and then shared on Twitter. In the original post, the forum user also shared the first picture of the processor, which has the OPN and QR codes blurred out to prevent AMD from finding the leaker. Soon after the first report was shared, the team at TechPowerUp asked its sources if they could confirm the rumor, which they did....

This past September, AMD released its first set of processors for the new AM5 platform: the 7600X, 7700X, 7900X, and 7950X. The products received good reviews overall, but some buyers felt the chips left a bit on the table. This resulted in a number of fans deciding to wait for the eventual release of Ryzen 7000 X3D processors. Notable leaker ECSM_Official recently reported on information regarding upcoming releases for AMD, including these X3D processors....

What do you play when you want an adrenaline rush? Watch the video on TechSpot’s YouTube channel We can think of dozens of games that fit into this category, but narrowed the list to 10 of our favorites. Some are scary. Some are gory. Some are frustratingly hard, but all are guaranteed to spike your adrenaline. Don’t worry if you have already mastered some on the list. We included alternate picks around each title so there’s plenty for you to choose from....

The Asrock H55M Pro was not quite as impressive. We found overclocking to be far more difficult with this motherboard, as even reaching our maximum stable overclock of 4.18GHz was a real challenge. Still, at over 4.0GHz this is a respectable result for an affordable MicroATX motherboard that will keep most Core i3 owners very happy. Then we had the ECS H55H-CM, which provided a small degree of overclocking headroom pushing our Core i3 540 processor to 3....

Not sure which ones? Well, let us help. We’ve compiled a list of essential programs to get you started. From browsers to productivity tools and lots of suggestions for the areas in between, and as usual with a special emphasis in great free options you can download right away. Update: A new, more up-to-date list can be found here. Browsers Windows 10 offers Edge which is a serviceable browser, nothing wrong with it but you’ll rarely find power users favoring it over Chrome or Firefox....

There were no surprises in the Random 4KB test, either. The A-DATA SH93 performed as is expected from any hard drive connected to the USB 2.0 bus, while the OCZ Throttle did significantly better in this test due to its use of flash memory.

The A-DATA SH93 is an eye catching product that delivers on all fronts. Its build quality is first-class and the durability it offers far exceeds that of the majority of 2.5" portable drives, which often feature flimsy plastic bodies that are easily damaged. The SH93 features a 500GB Fujitsu MJA2500BH hard drive, available online for around $90. This means A-DATA is only charging an extra $20 for their rugged housing – not a bad deal considering a cheap housing will cost you $10 anyway, and going for a quality enclosure separately could set you back significantly more....

Which technologies will become as commonplace as texture filtering or normal mapping is today? What systems will help developers reach these higher standards? Join us as we take a look at what awaits us in the future of 3D graphics. Where do we come from? Before we head off into the future, it’s worth taking stock of the advances in 3D graphics over the years. Much of the theoretical aspects of 3D rendering (e....

Activision Blizzard president Daniel Alegre announced the decision in a letter to employees that was shared publicly. “Today, we are announcing that Activision Blizzard will be suspending new sales of and in our games in Russia while this conflict continues,” he wrote. The suspension will presumably apply to both physical and digital games. Alegre also highlighted the contribution Activision Blizzard is making toward supporting the Ukrainian people. The company has raised over $300,000 by matching employee donations 2:1 and will increase the matching limit from $1,000 to $10,000....

The only real issue we had with the KM780 RGB was its price. That said it wasn’t overly difficult to justify the $170 asking price, the issue was more with the fact that not all gamers can afford to dish out so much money for a keyboard. Thankfully, there is a cheaper alternative, the KM780 MX. Despite shaving almost 25% off the price the KM780 MX is essentially the same keyboard....

Where Tesoro has likely saved the most money is on the switches, like Tt eSports they are using the Kailh switches rather than the genuine article. However, unlike Tt eSports, Tesoro is forthcoming about their choice in switches. They clearly state that Kailh switches are being used on their website, so a big thumbs up for that. Interestingly, Tesoro claims a 60 million keystrokes lifespan for the switches and presumably the keycaps as well....