However, finding the right one to buy has become highly convoluted with countless brands and models, many of which are clones of each other, or of popular players like the iPod. In some cases you may even wind up comparison shopping for two seemingly different devices which are actually made by the same company and have the same specs despite different branding. Models range from around $1 to more than $3,000 and they vary at least as widely in feature sets....
A Twitter account cataloging the on-disc contents of retail games has revealed that the PlayStation 5 disc for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II contains only 70MB of data. To make things worse, the game – launching this week – requires a 150GB download. The same is likely true on Xbox. Users have often complained about needing to download massive day-one patches that keep them from enjoying a new game as soon as they insert the disc into their console....
There’s room to fit up to six 120mm fans, or a combination of two 200mm and two 120mm units, and while there’s not much space to install water cooling components inside the 912, there are grommets to run tubing to the outside of the case. Cooler Master thoughtfully adds a 2.5" drive cage for those who are using solid state drives in their desktop system, while allowing both 2.5" and 3....
The last of the DirectX 11 titles tested is Ghost Recon Wildlands and here we again see competitive performance for the most part. Interestingly, with Vega 64 running at 1080p we saw the R5 1600 struggle quite a bit, significantly more than the 7700K. Meanwhile, with the GTX 1080 installed the R5 1600 is competitive with the 7700K. Increasing the resolution to 1440p we see the R5 1600 struggling with Vega 64, again the 1% low result is particularly troubling....
For those of us that played the game at launch and haven’t touched it since (hoping that a DLC release DLC would bring us back), this is unfortunate news. However, if there’s any studio that now understands the value and importance of releasing content when it’s ready, it’s CD Projekt Red. The company was burned badly with Cyberpunk 2077’s launch in December of 2020, and they likely won’t want to repeat that mistake with the game’s first expansion....
“Retina” is a marketing term Apple uses to designate its high-PPI displays. The idea behind Retina is this: with a high enough pixel density, users should be unable to discern individual pixels at typical viewing distances. Of course, visual acuity and “typical viewing distances” can vary greatly, so what constitutes a Retina display is open to some interpretation. Check out this article from DisplayMate for an interesting look into why Retina falls short of being an exact standard....
New for late 2015/early 2016 is an upgrade to Skylake, a USB Type-C port that supports Thunderbolt 3, and the option to get the laptop in gold. That’s about it. This Skylake refresh also presented the opportunity to see how the high-resolution touchscreen model compares to the 1080p variant, which I had previously looked at last year. In case you’re unfamiliar with the Dell XPS 13 series, here’s a quick rundown for you....
The base performance model will feature a 100+kWh battery with a range of over 300 miles and an electronically limited top speed of 155 MPH. DeLorean claims a 0-60 MPH time of 2.99 seconds while a sprint to 88 MPH will take 4.35 seconds. No word yet on additional performance tiers or pricing at this stage. “The Alpha 5 is a representation of the past 40 years of DeLorean,” said Troy Beetz, chief marketing officer of DeLorean Motor Company....
Moving to ultra-quality shows a 17% reduction in performance at 1080p for the GTX 1080. Incredibly, at this resolution we are only receiving just over 60fps with the mighty GTX 1080. The Fury X dropped to a 53fps average, while the Nano was only good for 49fps. The GTX 1080 is reduced to 43fps at 1440p, which we consider still playable but far from ideal. The Fury X wasn’t bad either though the occasional dips below 30fps were noticeable....
What makes tech especially interesting for some is that it’s peppered with anecdotes and fun facts that add substance to a story and make them even more compelling. Here are some of our favorites that you might not have known about. The computer “bug” was named after a literal bug found in a computer. Image: Naval History and Heritage Command In 1947, computer pioneer Grace Hopper found herself working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University....
To start off with a reference point from each camp we began testing with the R9 290X and the GTX 780 Ti. Both runs went well and continued going well until our 9th GPU into testing. Doing exactly as we had done with success many times prior, we clicked on Dragon Age: Inquisition’s shortcut which opened up Origin and then the game. However, this time we received an error message…...
In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, Musk was asked about China, where the Shanghai Gigafactory produces between 30% - 50% of Tesla’s EVs. He believes that conflict between the country and Taiwan, which is self-ruled but Beijing claims is part of its territory, is inevitable, adding that it would cause a 30% hit to the global economy, with Apple suffering more than most. Musk also offered his solution to the problem: “figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable....
How many people remember the last time the idea of a second world was the hot topic of the moment? It was not that long ago. In fact, the last time this idea was in vogue it was in the final stages of the 1990’s dot com boom. People have been speculating about this for a long time. These days, author Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash is cited as the originator of the concept, but even he will concede he was not the first (note: Snowcrash is still a great book, worth a read)....
FedEx has announced a partnership with California Bay Area-based Elroy Air to test the company’s autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) cargo system next year. Up to this point, most commercial drone projects have focused on last mile delivery – that is, delivering a single product from a retailer to the buyer. While convenient in certain situations, it’s also tedious as the drone has to return to base after each delivery to reload and perhaps even recharge....
The expansion briefly appeared on the Forza Horizon 5 Steam page, as spotted by ResetEra and Reddit users. The Premium Add-ons bundle “includes expansion 1,” and the listing showed a Hot Wheels car going around a loop. Valve quickly removed the entry, but you can still see an archive here. The Forza franchise is no stranger to Hot Wheels crossovers. You might remember the excellent Hot Wheels expansion filled with stunt tracks that arrived for Forza Horizon 3 about five years ago....
Max Weinback from Android Police shared schematics for the next-gen iPhone on Twitter last week. According to the leaked documents, Apple’s next iPhone will feature a rear camera array with dimensions that are roughly five percent bigger. The bump will also protrude further out from the device. In a recent tweet addressing the changes, renowned iPhone analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said the main reason for the larger and more prominent rear camera bump is to accommodate a higher-resolution camera module....
The press release provided information and screenshots showcasing G.Skill’s new DDR5-8000 CL40 and DDR5-7800 CL38 kits. The modules were all paired with Intel’s new 13900K on the Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex, which enabled the DDR5-8000 kit to achieve more than 124 GB/s read and 120 GB/s write speeds in AIDA64’s memory benchmark. In addition to the kits running at their rated XMP 3.0 speeds, the Asus and G.Skill team managed to overclock the DDR5-8000 kit to an impressive 10,000 MT/s without the use of exotic cooling....
AMD has kept Nvidia on its toes in recent generations. The Radeon HD 4000 series spurred a war that saw the GTX 200 series receive numerous price cuts, the HD 5000 series had full run of the market for half a year before GTX 400 cards arrived, and this time around, AMD was almost three months ahead with the HD 7970. Being slightly behind, it was important for Nvidia to come out guns glazing....
Testing Tomb Raider using its ultra-quality preset allowed the GTX 760 to average 70.1fps, which works out to be 4% faster than the GTX 660 Ti, 10% faster than the HD 7950 and 27% faster than the 7870. The frame time performance was quite different than the frames per second testing as the GTX 760 was actually 1% slower than the GTX 660 Ti while it only matched the performance of the HD 7950....
To get a fuller picture, it’s increasingly apparent that you need to factor in a card’s frame latency, which looks at how quickly each frame is delivered. Regardless of how many frames a graphics card produces on average in 60 seconds, if it can’t deliver them all at roughly the same speed, you might see more brief jittery points with one GPU over another – something we’ve witnessed but didn’t fully understand....
