Raijintek rather unceremoniously announced the Morpheus 8069 through Igor’s Lab this weekend after leaked photos of the cooler found their way onto the internet late last week. But it had already let Igor’s Lab run some tests on an early prototype a few months ago, so it was hardly a surprise. The Morpheus 8069 takes the opposite approach to most board partner coolers: instead of strapping more metal to the heatsink and using faster fans, it relies on thoughtful engineering and careful construction to achieve similar or better results with less material....

Marty O’Donnell and Mike Salvatori are the minds behind Halo’s iconic soundtrack, including the “monk” chant and the “der der der der” refrain. Their work is well known in the Halo community and have been used in various Halo products. However, the composers affirm Microsoft is misusing them by not paying royalties they’re due for 20 years. Both composers claim Bungie licensed the music for the first three Halo games....

Buyers can choose from a library of beloved IP including G.I. Joe, Ghostbusters, Power Rangers and Marvel. Hasbro said there will also be designs inspired by Star Wars heroes. “We have done extensive research to truly understand the fan’s ask for a personalized product, and the team has done a fantastic job at making that dream a reality,” says Brian Chapman, head of global design and development for Hasbro. The custom creation will be a collector-grade, 6-inch figure....

When left to idle, the Asrock Z97 Extreme6 consumed 52 watts, slightly more power hungry than the Z97X Killer and Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force which consumed 49 watts. Firing up Prime95 saw the Asrock Z97 Extreme6 consume 153 watts, which was a bit more than the 149 watts pulled by the Z97X Killer, however, the Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force drew only 133 watts, making it at least 10% more efficient. When gaming, the margins are much smaller....

Anyone who has played Until Dawn or one of Supermassive’s Dark Pictures titles will be familiar with the cinematic, narrative-driven gameplay style seen in The Quarry. Players make high-pressure decisions that can have relationship consequences and keep characters alive or see them killed off in (usually) brutal fashion, making for numerous possible endings. The Quarry will put you in the shoes of nine counselors on their last day of summer camp who are “hunted by blood-drenched locals and something far more sinister....

Chrome Remote Desktop can be installed in any machine with a Chrome browser, regardless of the operating system. This brings the possibility of not only accessing your files and programs remotely like in traditional cases: forgotten files at home, providing remote assistance for a technologically impaired in-law, or just taking advantage of the super fast internet connection you have at work, but also the option of running Windows or macOS applications in your ChromeOS device....

I had high hopes for the Beats Audio on this system given the ample space for sizable speakers and HP didn’t disappoint. While still not aftermarket desktop speaker quality, the integrated speakers were more than powerful enough to fill an entire room with good-sounding music without having to crank the volume to the max. The size of the speakers allow for a good bit of bass as well. I made a note to ask HP if there were any plans to bundle Beats Audio headphones with future systems and was told it wasn’t in the mix....

As we suspected, the In Win 805 doesn’t perform that well out of the box, allowing our CPU to reach 94 degrees and the GPU 86 degrees. These temperatures match the Cooler Master Storm Scout 2, which also only comes with a single 120mm exhaust fan, though the Scout 2 is heavily ventilated. The In Win 805 simply looks too good to leave it at that, so we installed a pair of front mounted 140mm intake fans....

We tested the D-Frame in two different configurations. The one labeled “In Win D-Frame (120mm fans)” has the four optional 120mm (Silverstone AP121) installed leaving the Prolimatech Megahalems in passive mode, while the other is simply labeled “In Win D-Frame” and has a 120mm fan on the Megahalems heatsink but no case fans. All testing was conducted with an ambient room temperature of 19 to 21 degrees Celsius (66 to 69 Fahrenheit)....

With the fans set to their maximum speed, the In Win tòu is extremely loud, much louder than we consider tolerable. The only good news here is that the idle temperatures were quite good, keeping the GPU at 37 degrees and the processor at 22 degrees, close to ambient room temperature. Reducing the fan speed to its minimum value meant that the tòu was now near silent. Despite the drastic reduction in operating volume the CPU/GPU only increased slightly in temperature and that is impressive particularly given the CPU is passively cooled....

However we’ve seen some replies claiming the Core i3-9100F is a better choice. It’s also cheaper and more widely available, so there is that. It happens to be one of Intel’s most popular CPUs right now as it costs just $80, so before we get into the benchmarks, let’s discuss Intel’s budget processor. The Core i3-9100F is a 4-core/4-thread Coffee Lake CPU, which means it’s nearly identical to an 8th, 7th and 6th-gen quad-core....

Tiger Lake and the Core i7-1165G7 represent an overhaul of Intel’s mobile offerings, in particular Ice Lake, which wasn’t that great. With AMD storming into the laptop market with Ryzen 4000 in 2020, Tiger Lake is Intel’s big response that’s filled with new features. Key to this new series is Intel’s new 10nm SuperFin process. 10nm has been problematic for Intel to say the least, but for a low power mobile CPU, 10nm SuperFin seems up to the task for next-generation CPU architectures....

Enter the Core i7-4960X which still features 6 cores, 12 threads, 15MB L3 cache, quad-channel DDR3 memory and is supported by the same aging X79 chipset. This doesn’t sound very exciting, so what’s new? Well, other than a slight bump in frequency, which is kind of pointless on an unlocked Extreme Edition processor, and the ability to natively support DDR3-1866 memory, not a lot. You do get the slight efficiency improvements of the Ivy Bridge architecture, and honestly Haswell didn’t do much for the desktop anyway, so that’s not something we’d criticize first thing....

The 6950X makes short work of extremely complex spreadsheets, taking just 1.7 seconds to complete our custom work load, making it 47% faster than the 5960X and 100% faster than the 6700K, though it was just 6% faster than a pair of E5-2670 processors. The 6950X totalled 50860 MIPS in the 7-Zip 32MB dictionary test, making it 27% faster than the 5960X and 102% faster than the 6700K, while our dual-Xeon system topped that by 21%!...

At 720p we see quite a large difference between the Core i5-7600K and Core i7-7700K. The i7 model is 24% faster when comparing the minimum frame rate. However, the 7700K is only able to match the Ryzen 5 1500X in this title and is therefore slower than both the 1600X and 1800X. The new 8700K is only a fraction faster than the 7700K and its minimum frame rate of 68fps places it roughly on par with the 1500X and 1600X while the 1800X is still a good bit faster....

When you add in 50 percent more cores and increase the clock speeds of these cores, this is the sort of result you can expect in a best-case scenario. The 8750H also provides nine percent more performance in the single-threaded test, which is just shy of the 11 percent single-core turbo clock speed increase. Gains in performance of around 50 percent are typical for a lot of workloads. While performing a 2-pass x264 encode, the 8750H was 46 percent faster than the 7700HQ, which is a significant difference for a rendering test....

In less than a week, AMD will make one last push for the RDNA 2 generation of GPUs with updated RX 6000 series graphics cards. Meanwhile, Intel has been scrambling to get its desktop Arc Alchemist GPUs ready, but even the laptop versions announced more than a month ago are missing in action. Intel’s official release window for desktop Arc GPUs is the “end of Q2,” so given the paper launch of the mobile versions, you’d expect the same to happen with the rest of the Alchemist family....

The motherboard layout and design is similar to what we have seen from Gigabyte in the past and it features the typical range of enhancements. The board features all IR Digital Power Design (IOR International Rectifier) with IR digital PWMs equipped with IR Powerstage ICs. Meanwhile the PCB itself is a 2-layer copper design and is equipped with Durable black solid capacitors. Other features include Intel Gigabit LAN with high ESD protection using the new Intel I217-V controller....

The aptly named Pixel Pat, which you can try here, is a free, endless runner put together by Intel. This writer assumed it was an April Fools’ Day joke that the company may have posted a day early, and in a way, maybe it is, but you can still play the retro-esque game. Pixel Pat sees the eponymous hero making his way through Intel’s new fabrication plant as he attempts to collect wafers scattered around the facility....