History is filled with famous rivalries, but few have matched the intensity and, quite often, the viciousness seen when two tech industry giants clash heads. Charting their path from the dawn of computers to the current digital age, here are what we consider the five biggest rivalries in computing history, followed by a shortlist of current rivalries that have the potential to join this select list. Apple vs. Microsoft (Jobs vs....

We used Fraps to measure frame rates during a minute of gameplay from the campaign mode to save the Ark. The level is titled “What-If: Copper Down,” and there’s nothing particularly unusual about it, so it should make for a fair evaluation of overall game performance. Brink was tested at four resolutions: 1280x800, 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with anti-aliasing enabled. Other quality settings include Motion Blur, High Quality Post Processing and Ambient Occlusion while Shadow and Texture quality were both set to high....

Back in 2013, James Howells’s life changed when he threw out a hard drive that may just be the most valuable in the world. Before doing so, Howells had two 2.5-inch hard drives stored in a drawer, one of which he intended to get rid of, and another that had a digital wallet with some 7,500 Bitcoin on it. Even as Bitcoin has fallen significantly from its peak value of nearly $67,000, the wallet still holds the equivalent of almost $185 million in digital tokens....

Starting from the bottom, the Budget Box delivered 116.2fps, the Entry-Level Rig and with 162.4fps (40% faster), the Enthusiast’s PC was another 54% faster with 250.2fps, while the Luxury System was yet 19% faster. As quick as the Luxury System was, the Extreme Machine peaked at 378.4fps, 27% faster. Similar performance margins are seen when testing Hybrid x265, as the Extreme Machine rendered almost 4fps making it 31% faster than the Luxury System....

In that time what I’ve seen of this new game certainly lives up to the hype, and those already calling it game of the year could be right on the money. While the multiplayer was expected to be top notch given that this is a Call of Duty title, the single player campaign has impressed me the most so far. The missions are loads of fun and the improved A....

So we’ve put our collective thoughts together, collated our reviews and benchmarks, and trawled through numerous online stores to see just what you can put together and stay within budget. This should be easy, right? Once more unto the breach Two years ago, we set ourselves a shopping target of just $500 to build a gaming PC and we were quite surprised as to what was and wasn’t possible. In the case of the latter, it was sticking to a hard $500 limit but with double the budget now, matters should be a lot better....

Many years have passed and plenty of milestones were met along the way, from the first PC clones in 1982, to the Internet revolution in the 90s and the so-called post-PC devices hitting the market today. We didn’t want to let the occasion go by without paying our respects to the legacy that the 5150 brought. Here are some of the most important developments in the industry over the last 30+ years....

We began by installing the heatsink’s CPU bracket to the back of the Asrock 890FX Deluxe4. Given the massive hole in the motherboard tray, forgetting this step wouldn’t be a big deal. The motherboard slotted into place without any fuss and connecting everything else was as easy as can be. The DVD-RW slipped in effortlessly and although the Trooper doesn’t have a tool-less design, Cooler Master still managed to keep things simple....

Using an intelligent tool-less design, the dual 5.25" drive bays offer an ultra-quick and reliable way to install and remove devices. While the majority of the tool-less designs we’ve used are clumsy and impractical, this design actually works very well. The 3.5" drive cage supports three drives and features quick release cradles that support both 3.5" and 2.5" drives. Given the price tag, we hoped these bays were hot-swappable, but this isn’t the case, sadly....

Not only are SSDs faster than HDDs, but they also consume less power and generate less heat. Additionally, because they have no moving parts, they’re quieter, more reliable and more compact than their spinning counterparts. These “bonus” attributes don’t matter much to desktop users, but they’re particularly advantageous to notebooks, which are increasingly outfitted with flash storage instead (or alongside) of sluggish HDDs. Recognizing that demand, the Serial ATA International Organization standardized a new compact “mSATA” form factor in September 2009, letting manufacturers produce tiny 1....

Given the relative rarity of high-capacity 1.8" SSDs and the m4’s solid track record, Crucial could have likely gotten away with charging a slight premium over its 2.5" iteration. Currently, it seems the 1.8" m4’s primary competition comes from SandForce SF-2281-based drives such as the Mushkin Direct Atlas Deluxe mSATA 240GB, which costs slightly more at $230. With high marks in both price and performance, the m4’s reliability is the only factor that remains unaddressed, and in my opinion, Crucial also scores very highly here....

We cannot say with certainty that the performance we’ve seen today will align with what we find in roughly a month’s time, but we can tell the graphics we saw were amazingly detailed and performance output from current generation GPUs was quite satisfactory. Many of the graphics cards we tested performed within a few frames per second of their Crysis Warhead result. Could this just be a coincidence? Graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 560 Ti and Radeon HD 6870 were able to play the game smoothly at resolutions up to 1920x1200....

As a reminder, 50 million Facebook users’ profiles were harvested by data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica without permission. It was used to build profiles on US voters and target them with personalized political ads during the 2016 election race in an attempt to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Racine’s lawsuit alleges that Zuckerberg was personally involved in failures that led to the Cambridge Analytica incident, and that his “policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct....

I’m sprinting across a battlefield alongside two friends. A massive alien gladiator wielding an equally massive shotgun chases us all over, his minions appearing on all sides. We shift and maneuver, coordinate our defensive strategy on the fly, cry out for help, rush to one another’s aid. For twenty minutes we survive by the skin of our teeth, until the boss goes down in a tower of flame. We circle back to where he fell and start to dance....

Ripple Effect is a studio that helps DICE with expansions and game modes. Ripple’s Senior Designer Justin Wiebe explained that they removed Zombie Survival and replaced it with a “Gun Game” mode because it borked the game’s progression system. Evidently, the zombie addon wasn’t grindy enough because it awarded too much experience. Wiebe was vague about when or if the zombie mode would return, saying only, “Hopefully, we can fix it in the future and keep it in alignment with standard game progression....

Earlier this year we got word that AMD were exploring the possibility of expanding support for Ryzen 5000 series processors to 300-series motherboards, which was exciting news for those of you still rocking a B350 or X370 motherboard, especially if it was a high-end board as having to spend more money on a 400 or 500-series board just to snag an affordable part like the Ryzen 5 5600 isn’t all that appealing....

The only thing keeping me sane while I tried to get into Dragon Age: Inquisition was the fact that I wasn’t alone – not that it was comforting to know paying customers were enduring the same misery. Other players experiencing the issue have flocked to the answers.ea.com forums, with some threads so long you could sew an anti-EA t-shirt. As always, it’s loyal customers who lose with aggressive anti-piracy measures....

A single Radeon HD 6970 averaged just 44fps at this relatively low resolution, while the HD 6950 was only slightly slower with 40fps, both cards provided very playable performance. The older Radeon HD 5870 also held its own with 37fps. With the latest drivers Nvidia has overcome any initial issues and the GeForce GTX 580 now performs as expected, leading the pack just below the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990, scoring 45fps....

I had to rub my eyes a few times after seeing the power meter display just four watts at idle – six times more efficient than the Celeron J1800 on the Asrock D1800M motherboard. With 100% load on both cores the power consumption amazingly only increased from four to six watts, nearly five times less power than the Celeron J1800 system consumed, a truly phenomenal result. Now with both the CPU cores at 100% load as well as the GPU the maximum amount of power we were able to consume when using the Liva was just 10 watts, which is a little over three times less than the Celeron J1800 system....

The incident began on Sunday when Musk tweeted an apology for Twitter being super slow in many countries. The CEO blamed this on the app performing over 1,000 “poorly batched” remote procedure calls (RPCs) to load a home timeline. One of the replies to Musk’s tweet came from Eric Frohnhoefer, a Twitter employee working on the Android version of the app. “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong,” he wrote....