The W5 was able to fully boot into Windows in just 18 seconds - it’s not quite the 11 seconds that the Yoga 13 was capable of but given the slower hardware, it’s still impressive. One can credit the combination of Windows 8 for the speedy boot time and perhaps to a lesser extent, the flash storage. As I typically do with a new computer, I navigated over to the add/remove programs list to see which software I would jettison from the get-go; in other words, bloatware....

A remastered version featuring the base game as well as two DLC add-ons – The Signal and The Writer – arrived on most major platforms in October 2021. A Switch port, however, was noticeably absent. Developer Remedy Entertainment has confirmed that Alan Wake Remastered will be heading to the Nintendo Switch. Speaking of television, Remedy Creative Director Sam Lake additionally shared that AMC has purchased the rights for Alan Wake....

Like many Alienware laptops, the 13 comes in a large range of configurations. Depending on how much you want to spend, you can kit out this laptop with a GTX 1050 / Ti or GTX 1060 discrete GPU, as well as quad-core Kaby Lake CPUs, up to 32 GB of RAM, up to 2 TB of PCIe storage, and either a 1080p LCD or 1440p OLED display. Prices range anywhere from $999 to nearly $3,500....

It was only earlier this week when prolific leaker Kopite7kimi claimed the upcoming RTX 4070 Ti with its full-fat AD104 GPU could “easily” match the RTX 3090 Ti. Now, Kopite has updated the specifications of the non-Ti version of the card, and it seems the RTX 4070 has replaced the RTX 4070 Ti, specs-wise, with the only difference being a much lower TDP. The RTX 4070 is said to use the PG141-SKU331 that was previously thought to be in the RTX 4070 Ti....

New World saw just over 28,000 peak concurrent Steam players over the last 24 hours. At it’s all-time peak, that number stood at over 913,000. Companies across the world have been reacting to the invasion of Ukraine in different ways. EA Sports this week said it would be removing all Russian international teams and clubs from NHL 22 and FIFA 22. Additionally, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister who is also the minister of digital transformation, has urged Microsoft and Sony to temporarily pull out of Russian markets and block Russian accounts....

CBC News reports that Matthew Legault’s parents decided to buy him the parts he needed to build a PC as recognition of his graduating high school in June. Tom’s Hardware notes that it sounds like an impressive list of gaming hardware: an NZXT H510 case, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3600 memory, a Samsung 98 Series 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, and an MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk motherboard. Matthew also opted for an RTX 3060 Ti, a card we praised in our review....

Looking at the graph above one could infer that Microsoft Excel 2007 is not quad-core optimized, as the Athlon II X4 620 was clearly inferior than the Phenom II X2 550 in this test. That said, the dual-core 550 is clocked much higher than the Athlon II X4 620, which gave it a natural advantage here. The Athlon II X4 620 was still easily able to defeat the Core 2 processors....

As we’ve done before, our focus will be testing VRM thermal performance with the goal of finding the best B550 boards that can comfortably support the Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X, as those processors will make for nice second-hand upgrade options down the track. Unfortunately for now we don’t have any of the more entry-level B550 boards, but those will come eventually. Before we get into testing, let’s briefly discuss why B550 motherboards are more expensive than what most were expecting....

AMD is targeting an even lower price bracket with this new series. The Athlon II X2 250 clocked at 3.0GHz is expected to be the fastest of the bunch and yet it’s set to sell for just $87. This puts it head to head against the Pentium E5400 that costs $90. Like the Phenom range, the Athlon II X2 250 is capable of operating on either AM2/AM2+ or AM3 motherboards and thus inherits the ability to use DDR2 or DDR3 memory....

Furthermore, by reducing the design process to 32nm, these extra cores and the extra performance come at no additional power expense. This was a lot to get us excited about, but like most Intel Extreme Edition processors the Core i7 980X is a tough sell given its $1,000 list price. If money is no object then the six-core Core i7 980X processor is as good as it gets right now....

We also saw decent performance gains when testing with Far Cry 2, though the boost was not enough to help the Phenom II X6 1100T overtake the Core i5 750. HandBrake was one of the best applications at fully utilizing all six-cores, and we saw a tremendous leap in performance when overclocking the Phenom II X6 1100T to 4.10GHz. Not only was performance boosted by 16%, but the 1100T was almost on par with the more expensive Core i7 980 XE, which has twice as many threads at its disposal....

The Radeon HD 7990 powers through Medal of Honor Warfighter at 2560x1600 rendering an average of 77.9fps, making it 9% faster than the GeForce GTX 690 and 43% faster than the GTX Titan. Meanwhile it was 104% faster than the 7970 and 107% faster than the GTX 680. The frame time performance of the Radeon HD 7990 in Medal of Honor Warfighter was also pretty good, taking just 22.4ms between frames....

The R9 285 delivered a very playable 48.7fps in Metro Last Light at 1920x1200, making it 8% faster than the R9 280 but 6% slower than the R9 280X. Meanwhile it was 12% faster than the GTX 760 which averaged just 43.3fps. Again we see over 40fps on average when testing with Tomb Raider at 1920x1200, though this time the R9 285 had a rather poor showing at 10% slower than the R9 280 and 20% slower than the R9 280X....

Quite a bit as it turns out. The R9 290 has been set at $400, 27% less than the 290X. That’s fantastic when you consider that the R9 290 should never be more than 9% slower than the R9 290X while averaging 5% slower in our tests. In a sense, the R9 290 has kind of made the R9 290X redundant, much like the GTX 780 did to the GTX Titan....

Once again we find the Nano delivering an average of 35fps at 4K, this time in Far Cry 4, and once again it was 5% slower than the Fury. The Nano was also just 6% faster than the R9 390X despite matching the GTX 980 Ti and beating the standard GTX 980 by a 21% margin. In Civilization: Beyond Earth the Nano was 9% slower than the Fury with an average of 51fps at 4K, as well as 2% slower than the GTX 980 Ti and 19% faster than the standard GTX 980....

Raising the MHz ceiling won’t accomplish anything as the card can already run as high as 1000MHz and it’s almost never there. Overclocking to 1100MHz, the limit of the Fury X we tested, won’t do a thing. To achieve higher clock speeds, the power limit needs to be increased and the Catalyst Control Center allows the limit to be boosted by 50%. Without making any other changes we raised the power limit by 50% and ran some tests....

Overclocker and YouTuber der8auer posted a new video showcasing the performance of an Ampere Altra Q80-30 server processor and even delidded a sample to see what’s under the IHS. The Altra Q80-30 features 80 QuickSilver cores (based on Arm’s Neoverse N1 architecture derived from the Cortex-A76 found in some smartphone SoCs) and utilizes TSMC’s N7 manufacturing process. It supports 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, eight channels of DDR4 memory, and has a maximum frequency of 3GHz....

As part of its Wizards Presents stream, Wizards of the Coast unveiled an early-in-development virtual tabletop that’s currently being referred to as D&D Digital. You can see it from the 7-minute 20-second mark in the embedded video below. D&D Digital beautifully mirrors the tabletop experience by using Unreal Engine 5 to make it look “dope.” Users will be able to create 3D environments filled with their favorite miniatures, which can be moved around just like the physical versions....

But this is not an issue with HTC phones exclusively. In fact, Ice Cream Sandwich is more the exception rather than the rule on Android devices across the board. There’s a total of four smartphones shipping with the OS preloaded, just over a dozen with upgrades available, and more than 30 on the “coming soon” list (also: see a list of Android 4.0 ICS highlights). Phones shipping with ICS Your choices here are limited to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which was released in December in partnership with Google and features an unskinned version of Android 4....

As with most radical case designs, the LanBoy Air is not for everyone. Personally I have come to appreciate its aesthetics, reminding me of when I used to attend LAN parties in the Quake World days. However I’ve since become accustomed to the subtle elegance of other cases and I believe I’m not alone there. For instance, I can already hear the Performance One crowd jumping up and down about how ugly the LanBoy Air is....