Motherboard, Processor, Cooler, Memory Intel’s recent Haswell refresh saw the Core i7-4770K replaced by the i7-4790K and like we found with the Core i5 series, it’s somewhat of a pointless update. The Core i7-4790K is physically different to the i7-4770K but the upgrades largely go unnoticed. Anyway, with pricing remaining the same, the Core i7-4790K is worth buying at $340. Want to see how the Luxury System performs? We built one and benchmarked it here....

The TechSpot PC Buying Guide offers an in-depth list of today’s best desktop PC hardware, spanning five budgets that go from an affordable ~$500 PC capable of medium workloads, a couple of well-balanced enthusiast-oriented machines, a luxury high-end build and finally a dream extreme machine that disregards price-to-performance value altogether with a focus on the biggest and baddest hardware available, period. Whether you’re a first time builder seeking guidance or a seasoned enthusiast, we have you covered....

Bloomberg writes that Apple has scaled back the self-driving plans for its future electric vehicle, which looked set to be fully autonomous with no steering wheel or pedals. The car was also supposed to feature inward-facing seats. But creating a vehicle with full level 5 autonomy still presents too many technical, legal, and regulatory issues. As such, the Apple car’s self-driving abilities will be scaled down. The EV will have a steering wheel, pedals, and conventional seats, and its fully autonomous capabilities will only be available while on highways....

When testing with Max Payne 3 the GeForce GTX 650 Ti averaged 44fps at 1680x1050, making it 2% slower than the Radeon HD 6870 but 10% faster than the 7770 and 38% faster than the 7750. Now at 1920x1200 the GeForce GTX 680 can be found averaging 75fps making it 12% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 and 1% faster than the 7970 GHz Edition. The GeForce GTX 670 was 15% faster than the Radeon HD 7950 and 6% faster than the 7950 Boost....

The Callisto Protocol has received several pretty good (PC Gamer) and very good (Eurogamer) scores, as well as some decidedly average ones (GameSpot). The best version of the game—the one without any significant performance issues—is on the PlayStation 5. Xbox and PC owners have not had such a smooth time. In addition to being limited by single-core performance, the Unreal Engine 4-powered PC version suffers from major shader compilation stutter....

With the recent launch of new AMD processors, reviewers and consumers alike have been dropping their opinions on the chips, with reviews generally favorable. However, one negative aspect that people are pointing out is the sheer cost of upgrading to AM5. So far, we’ve only seen the launch of X670 and X670e motherboards, with B650 and B650e motherboards arriving sometime in October. Unsurprisingly, the X670 and X670e boards are more expensive since they have the current flagship chipset for AM5....

Based on early estimates, Skyrim has shipped seven million copies worldwide across all platforms, including digital stores such as Steam. During a peak hour last Monday, Valve’s platform alone recorded some 287,000 Skyrim players – greater than the combined peak activity of MW3, Counter-Strike, Football Manger 2012 and Team Fortress 2. We usually don’t open our performance reviews with sales figures, but we felt compelled to illustrate the magnitude of Skyrim’s launch because role-playing games rarely garner this type of attention....

If you found the iPhone 14 Pro’s graphics processing to be a rather tepid improvement from its predecessor, a report this week from The Information may reveal why. Sources claim the premium phone’s GPU nearly supported hardware-accelerated ray tracing before a hasty backtrack hobbled it. Unfortunately, Apple’s engineers found a flaw late in the iPhone 14 Pro’s development that caused its GPU to draw too much power. To shore up the device’s battery life and thermals, Apple had to hurriedly pivot the A16 Bionic chip’s graphics processor to that of the previous generation A15, found in the iPhone 13....

The Maldives is an archipelago consisting of many low-lying islands, 80 percent of which are less than one meter above sea level. In a worst-case scenario, the entire country could be submerged by the year 2100 due to rising sea levels. The floating city being constructed in the Maldives is just 10 minutes away from the capital city by boat. It’ll consist of some 5,000 floating homes, restaurants, schools and shops, which will be built in a local shipyard and towed into place....

The news comes from regular leaker Kopite7kimi, who tweeted that the power consumption for the RTX 4070 and RTX 4080 is lower than previously reported. We’d heard that the RTX 4070 would have a total board power limit of 320W. Now, that figure is said to be 285W. The RTX 4080, meanwhile, was expected to consume a beastly 450W. That’s said to have been revised down to a much more manageable 320W, the same TBP as the RTX 3080....

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The first game to support DX11 was EA’s Battleforge in early 2009, a real-time strategy title that tanked big time, selling less than 100,000 copies and eventually becoming a freemium title. More to the point, the DX11 designation was used to hype the product and virtually offered no eye candy to justify the moniker. It wasn’t until 2011 that we started to see games that truly took advantage of the API....

For this article we tested at 1366x768, 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 resolutions. We have yet to incorporate 4K benchmarks because none of the current single GPU graphics offerings today provide true playable performance at this resolution. System Specs Intel Core i7-4790K (3.60GHz) x2 4GB Crucial DDR3-2400 (CAS 11-13-13-28) Asrock Z97 Extreme6 (Intel Z97) OCZ ZX Series (1250W) Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gigabyte Radeon HD R9 290X (4096MB) AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB) AMD Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB) AMD Radeon HD 5870 (1024MB) Microsoft Windows 8....

The letter from TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was sent to nine U.S. senators to explain how the company will keep all information stored in U.S. based Oracle data centers. The data would be periodically audited by a U.S.-based security team. Chew acknowledged that the move was part of the social media company’s larger approach to enhance data security known as Project Texas. Chew also minced no words in the letter, acknowledging that TikTok is one of the “…most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of U....

Today we’re going to do something a little different just for fun and look at the top 5 worst CPUs released in the last few years. This is not intended to be taken as seriously as one of our buying guides, and if you happen to have one of these CPUs please don’t be offended. In fact, under certain conditions they might even be a justified purchase. Without further ado, let’s see why we think these are bad picks for most users…...

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) charges that Clearview AI failed to use data fairly and transparently because the firm did not inform UK residents that it was collecting their personal biometric data. It also says that Clearview did not have a legitimate reason to scrape people’s personal information and does not have a method in place to stop it from being retained indefinitely. All of these actions break UK data-collection rules....

As the Touch runs stock Android by default, there are very few features around the operating system to discuss. In the settings screen you’ll find a Turbo Download mode for downloading using Wi-Fi and mobile networks simultaneously, and a range of touchscreen gesture features I didn’t bother using. You can also schedule times that the Umi Touch turns itself on and off, perhaps overnight if you don’t want to be disturbed....

The US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruling is the latest chapter in a long-running battle between workforce analytics startup HiQ Labs and LinkedIn. The employment-focused social network sent HiQ Labs a cease and desist letter in 2017 demanding that it stop scraping its members’ public profile data; something it did approximately every two weeks as part of a service offered to businesses looking to “determine skills gaps or turnover risks months ahead of time....

Previously, all of these models came with a PCIe Gen 3 x4 SSD. A Valve spokesperson told IGN that many Steam Deck components come from multiple suppliers for improved redundancy and production capacity. Specifically, one of their SSD suppliers provides PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe SSDs while another provides an x2 (two lane) variant. The rep said they have tested both components extensively and determined there is no impact on performance between the two....

At the top we have the GeForce RTX 4090, which is based on the new Ada Lovelace architecture built on a custom version of TSMC’s N4 node. This GPU is a bit of a monster in terms of hardware, packing 16384 CUDA cores and 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus, plus boost clock speeds for the GPU up to 2.52 GHz. As expected, it’s a power hungry card with a rated TGP of 450W....