In an interview with CNN this week (via The Telegraph), Bezos was asked if he thought consumers should “batten down the hatches” in response to the global economic downturn. “My advice to people is take some risk off the table,” Bezos said. “If you’re an individual and you’re thinking about buying a new large-screen TV, maybe slow that down. Keep that cash, see what happens. Same thing with a refrigerator or a new car, or whatever....

Something we noticed when switching from high to medium settings is that besides the significant difference in visual appearance, the frame rates did not seem to increase all that much. Even at 1680x1050, graphics cards such as the Radeon HD 5450, 3650, 4650 and GeForce 8600 GTS/GT 220 are quite useless. Note how the old Radeon X1950 Pro (mainstream card released in 2006) delivered the same level of performance as today’s GeForce GT 220....

JPMorgan Chase & Co. reports that the cost of mining Bitcoin has fallen to around $13,000 from $24,000 since early June. Bloomberg notes that the drop is likely an effect of the crypto winter, but it’s unclear whether this could help or hinder any recovery of the cryptocurrency’s price. It’s easy to pin the decline on a miner exodus after Bitcoin’s price crashed from its high last November, which could be lowering the amount of electricity and processing power needed for mining....

Controller = SandForce SF-1222 (a.k.a. SF-1200) Cache = NA Memory = Intel 29F32G08AAMDB (32GB 34nm MLC) Read/Write = 280MB/s - 270MB/s (40GB model) Costing roughly $124 the 40GB version of the Vertex 2 is actually cheaper than the 40GB Agility 2. At this price the drive works out to around $3.10 per gigabyte, making it the second most expensive SSD featured in this round-up. The odd thing about this is that the Agility 2 series is meant to be slightly more affordable as the input/output operations per second (IOPS) rating is over four times lower....

All those G.Skill memory modules aren’t going to waste here. The dual Xeon E5-2630 v4 system delivered a memory throughput of 71.1GB/s, a 28% improvement over the dual E5-2670 processors and 33% more than the Core i7-6950X. The cache performance was also mighty. The dual E5-2630 v4 processors pressed on to reach 955GB/s in the L2 cache test and 515GB/s for the L3 cache test. That means the L2 cache was 31% faster than what we saw from the dual E5-2670 processors and 53% greater than the 6950X....

This week, CD Projekt Red confirmed it’s overseeing a remake of the original 2007 Witcher game. Polish studio Fool’s Theory is developing the project from the ground up on Unreal Engine 5 with CDPR staff involvement. The title is still in early development, so fans won’t see it for a while, and CDPR isn’t ready to share more details on it yet. The cult hit that started the now-popular game franchise which then led to one of Netflix’s biggest hits might be one of the best examples of a game that needs a remake....

The Corvette E-Ray’s gas-powered LT2 supplies 495 horsepower and 470 lb-ft of torque to the rear axle while the electric motor adds an additional 160 horsepower and 125 lb-ft of torque up front via a 1.9 kWh battery pack. Combined, you get an all-wheel drive Corvette making 655 horsepower that can sprint from zero to 60 mph in just 2.5 seconds and tackle the quarter mile in 10.5 seconds flat....

SMIC CEO Zhao Haijun told analysts that demand for smartphones, PCs, and home appliances has decreased dramatically. SMIC is currently the biggest contract chipmaker in China and the 5th largest globally, with a 5.3 percent market share last year. Zhao claims that the war in Ukraine is partially to blame for the sales slump, as many companies have stopped selling their products in Russia, while Ukrainian citizens have cut down on non-essential spending....

The state-run China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) was one of the first to be placed on a US export blacklist in 1997 because of its work in the field of nuclear weapons, preventing it from purchasing American technology. However, according to a Wall Street Journal report, the institute has obtained US hardware at least a dozen times since 2020, including Intel’s Xeon Gold processors and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX graphics cards, for use in academy computers....

With four processing threads available, overall per-core usage levels out using ~50% of each core. As you will see on our CPU performance tests it’s a balance of this, clock speeds, and architecture efficiency that pushes performance on Civ V. The only hexa-core CPU we tested failed to deliver better performance, so it appears this game’s usage maxes out at four cores.

F1 2017 utilizes the CPU about as well as any DirectX 11 title does and once overclocked we see fairly competitive numbers from the Ryzen 5 1600. It was 10% slower than the Core i5-8400 for the minimum result and just 6% for the average, so not a huge margin. That said the margins do remain much the same even at 1080p as the overclocked Ryzen CPU continues to trail the new Core i5....

The MP500 might boast 3GB/s sequential read speeds but that isn’t the case for the CrystalDiskMark test which maxed out at 1.77GB/s. Still this meant the MP500 was only slower than the Samsung SSD 950 Pro and 960 series SSDs here. The write performance was also a far cry from the claimed 2.4GB/s as it was only able to match the Intel SSD 750 Series SSD with a throughput of 1....

The PM500 sustained a throughput of 642MB/s in our large compressed on-disk file transfer test. This placed it alongside the Intel SSD 600p and 750 series while making it faster than the Kingston Predator. That said, it was quite a bit slower than the Samsung SSD 950 Pro, 960 Pro and even the 960 Evo. The Corsair MP500 was able to match the Samsung 950 Pro in our program test, though that isn’t a particularly impressive feat here as that still makes it slower than the Kingston Predator....

Much of that weight can be attributed to 650D’s use of steel rather than aluminum, which is Lian-Li’s preferred construction material. The façade has been constructed from aluminum, which does help keep the overall weight down, but this might not be your ideal case if you intend to haul it around to LAN parties. The Obsidian 650D is available exclusively in black with a case window. Although the design appears very simple, it’s far from boring....

The CINEBENCH R11.5 results are arranged by the OpenGL score and surprisingly the AMD Phenom II processors clean up here. The Phenom II X4 965 managed a score of 33.8fps, while the Phenom II X2 555 scored 32.4fps. The Phenom II X4 925 and X3 720 both also beat the Core i5 750 when measuring OpenGL performance. The Phenom II X4 965 was faster than the Core i5 750 when measuring CPU performance, while the X4 925 was only slightly slower....

CAC, or the cyberspace administration of China, writes (via The Reg) that it has dealt with 12,000 cases of online fraud against youngsters this year. One of these incidents involved Tan Moumou, who was using some of his allotted online game time to enjoy a mobile title when someone added him as a friend on WeChat, China’s instant messaging/social media/mobile payment app. The person promised Tan that they knew a way of avoiding China’s gaming rules for youths, which allow just one hour of online play, between 8 pm and 9 pm local time, on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays....

We kicked things off by installing the Prolimatech Megahalems CPU bracket to the back of the Asrock 890FX Deluxe4, though forgetting this step is no biggie, as it can be performed with the board installed thanks to that hole in the motherboard tray. The motherboard slotted into place without any fuss and connecting everything else was as easy as can be. Installation of the optical drive, in this case a DVD-RW, was very straightforward as Cubitek went with the traditional method here....

Leave all of the files in the W7SBC folder and run Windows 7 Start Button Changer.exe. Click Select & Change Start Button to browse for a new set of icons – a few are included with the utility. Once selected, the program will backup explorer.exe and swap the icons. If you dislike the change, choose Restore Original Explorer Backup before repeating the steps above. Once your original explorer.exe is in place, continue swapping icons until you find something you like....

On a high-end gaming system equipped with two GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards, ARMA 3 sees a 10% increase in minimum frame rates when going from DDR4-3000 to 4000, which is surprising. DDR4-4000 even provides a noteworthy increase over 3600MT/s memory, it would be interesting to find what’d be the limit here. CoD Black Ops 3 sees a more minuscule 4% boost in minimum frame rates, when going from DDR4-3000 to 4000, though interestingly the average frame rate is increased by 7% at 156fps....

The Dell XPS 13 has long taken the ‘Best Ultraportable’ award alongside the 13-inch MacBook Pro in our Best of Laptops guide. It’s often praised for a design that one would imagine could not get any sleeker, but the Dell XPS 13 Plus shows it can be done—but is it too sleek? The first thing you might notice in the new model is that Dell has removed all the space between the keyboard keys....