Usually we’d choose the Top 5 processors currently in the market, but with competition at an all-time high, for the most part there are no clear winners, and the right choice heavily depends on your use case. Therefore we’re going to work through the pros and cons for each option, so you’ll know exactly what will work best for you. To go through our recommendations, we’ll go from least to more expensive and discuss gaming performance first, then general productivity and other considerations....

But with great power comes great responsibility. What games should be making use of your GPU? Here are our 10 current PC favorites that offer a mix of old and new, from strategies to shooters. They do all share a common trait, though: these titles will make you stare at the screen with a smile on your face while mulling the greatness of our platform. In the grim darkness of the far future there is only War Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters There are a lot of PC games out there that carry the Warhammer name, and while the franchise can boast brilliance such as Dawn of War 1 & 2 and Space Marine, there’s also absolute garbage like Dawn of War 3 and Fire Warrior....

The world’s most popular crypto has been on a downward trajectory since it hit that near-$69,000 high back in November 2021. The industry was rocked following the collapse of TerraUSD in May, and the recent implosion of exchange FTX sent seismic shockwaves throughout marketplaces. The so-called crypto winter has seen digital asset prices fall (including those of NFTs), lawsuits, bankruptcies, and job losses. Joining crypto exchange giant Kraken in laying off staff are Bybit and Swyftx, which are reducing their headcounts by 30% and 35%, respectively, writes Bloomberg....

The Last of Us Part I, announced and released in 2022, was a remake of the original 2013 game. Developer Naughty Dog wanted to re-release the game to bring it up to par with The Last of Us Part II. The remake features higher-quality graphics and animations compared to its previous counterpart and support for Dualsense exclusive features such as adaptive triggers and haptic feedback. The studio also revealed a first for The Last of Us franchise: a PC port....

Users surfing through Steam or the Epic Games Store for free-to-play shooters may be surprised to see Paragon reemerge. Developer Netmarble F&C is reviving the name to launch a new, very similar game this fall. It’s unclear how much its gameplay will follow or differ from the original. For those who don’t remember, Epic Games released a free-to-play MOBA called Paragon in 2016 for PlayStation 4 and PC. Unlike the isometric camera angle League of Legends and DOTA use, Paragon employed a third-person perspective, not unlike Epic’s Gears of War series....

Compared to a dedicated server that requires a monitor, keyboard, mouse and of course a PC case, a desktop NAS is considerably more compact, especially two-bay and four-bay models, which are typically smaller than a shoe box. Models such as the four-bay Synology DS415+ have less of a footprint than a standard ATX motherboard so we don’t imagine there are many users who demand something smaller. Nonetheless, back in mid-2009 NAS specialist Synology released the DS409slim, a tiny four-bay NAS outfitted with 2....

The QNAP TS-435mini had no trouble maxing out the Gigabit LAN connection when downloading a single large file with a throughput of 112MB/s using either the WD Red 1TB hard drives or the Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512GB. Meanwhile the Synology DS414slim came close to maxing out the network connection with 91.6MB/s when testing with the 1TB hard drives and 97MB/s with the Samsung SSD. Here we see neither NAS was able to reach the limits of the Gigabit network connection when moving multiple smaller files....

On Thursday, Twitter released its first quarterly financial report for 2022. It claims that despite revenue for Q1 reaching $1.2 billion, the company operated at a loss. Perhaps even more interesting is that the company admitted to accidentally overinflating monetizable daily active user (mDAU) counts. It blamed the error on a change to how it managed user accounts. “In March of 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts,” the report reads....

To mark Safer Internet Day, UK digital minister Chris Philip announced that the Online Safety Bill would be updated with a section requiring all sites that publish pornography, not just those with user-generated content (i.e. OnlyFans), to put “robust” checks in place ensuring visitors are over 18. Rather than using a pop-up that asks “are you over 18?” which is about as far as most porn platforms go when verifying ages, it’s suggested that “secure age verification technology” is used to confirm visitors have a credit card....

One requirement in the proposal calls for all app stores to include steps to report security holes in hosted software. Another would be to make privacy information more accessible for users. Apps also need to specify why they need access to a user’s location and contacts. At the same time as the DMCS’s proposal, the National Cyber Security Centre published a report warning about compromised and malicious applications. It includes details on compromised SDKs, counterfeit apps, malicious updates, and more....

The AS SSD Benchmark sequential read results tell a different story to what was seen when testing with CrystalDiskMark. Here the Intel SSD 750 Series smashes the 2GB/s barrier, hitting 2.2GB/s and leaving the Samsung SM951 well behind. That said, the SM951 still managed to reach 1.9GB/s while the G.Skill Phoenix Blade topped out at just over 1.7GB/s. The Kingston Predator delivered the same sequential read performance in AS SSD Benchmark as it did when testing with CrystalDiskMark....

Microsoft will be granting both XP and Vista users the right to buy “Upgrade” versions of Windows 7 which run for considerably less money. For example, the Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade is $120, versus its full version counterpart that will sell for $200. Similarly, Windows 7 Professional ($200/$300) and Ultimate ($220/$320) will be sold as Upgrade and Full versions. Now, in terms of how you can perform an upgrade on a machine already running Windows, for some the in-place upgrade option will make the experience seamless; all your programs, files and settings will remain untouched coming from certain versions of Vista....

Streamer Charlie ‘Cr1tikal’ White set a challenge earlier this year for someone to complete a deathless ‘Legendary All Skulls On’ (LASO) Halo 2 Anniversary run. Casual players will know that finishing the game on Legendary difficulty is an arduous feat in itself, but turning on all but one of the skull modifiers and finishing the game without dying once makes it impossible—or so Cr1tikal thought. The secret skulls found across the Halo franchise contain modifiers mostly designed to make the games harder, such as turning off the radar/entire HUD, increasing enemy difficulty, and halving the amount of dropped ammo....

You might remember back in December when Bob Wulff of YouTube channel Wulff Den carried out an experiment that involved leaving a screenshot of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on his Nintendo Switch OLED at full brightness 24/7. After 1,800 hours (75 days) of this, there was no visible indication of burn-in and no significant differences in any of the color tests he ran. To keep the Switch from turning the screen off, Wulff attached a third-party Hori Split Pad Pro Controller that continuously performed automatic button presses....

As you likely know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional hard drive, any write operation made to an SSD is a two-step process: a data block must be erased and then written to. Obviously if the drive is new and unused there will be nothing to erase and therefore the first step can be bypassed, but this only happens once unless the drive is trimmed....

What could Yahoo!, the site’s former owner, have done so poorly in the years in between? How could Instagram have taken the lead so quickly after its launch in 2010? Is Flickr headed toward a virtual grave, or is it still a compelling service for some people? A Promising Start In 2004, the most popular sites on the web were Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and other sites that offered news stories and indexes of recommended websites....

Members of Joe Biden’s cabinet, tech executives and experts have recently joined a listening session at the White House, in a meeting held to discuss the challenges of “tech platforms” and the possible improvements lawmakers can bring to the current market situation. At the end of the meeting, representatives from the Biden-Harris Administration announced six “core principles” which should inspire future reforms. According to the official White House write-up, attendees at the meeting included several members of Biden’s cabinet, president and CEO of Center for Democracy and Technology Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation Mitchell Baker, and Sonos CEO Patrick Spence....

BNPL plans have been gaining popularity recently, especially with inflation hitting a 40-year high and the increased cost of living—Elon Musk recently said he has a “super bad feeling” about the economy. PayPal, Block, Affirm, Klarna, and Mastercard are just some of the firms offering BNPL, and Apple is joining in with Apple Pay Later. The iOS 16 version is more rigid than some of its competitors. Buying something with Apple Pay will bring up the option of paying for the item in four equal purchases across six weeks....

On Friday, Microsoft announced that it got its cloud gaming service to work on the Steam Deck through the Linux version of Microsoft Edge. The process requires a lot of tinkering but results in users being able to jump into Microsoft’s service directly from the Steam Library. Microsoft posted a detailed list of instructions on its website and Reddit for installing Edge on a Steam Deck, linking it to Steam, and linking the Edge launcher to Xbox Cloud....

And that userbase might grow if recent developments in the modding community are any indication. Two separate modding projects are joining to create one of the most ambitious combined mods we’ve seen in a long time: TES3MP VR. The two mods being slapped together here are OpenMW VR, which lets you play Morrowind in VR (an offshoot of the OpenMW project), and TES3MP, a multiplayer mod that’s been out for years....