The Legend of Zelda holds a special place in the hearts of millions of gamers. For many, including Roosma, it served as their introduction to open-world gaming. “The developer just drops the player off somewhere and you decide where you want to go and what you want to do, it’s the best type of game,” Roosma told Kotaku. Parts for the build were sourced from BrickLink, a third-party marketplace to buy and sell Lego bricks....
Several years ago, we covered how a machine-learning algorithm bested 20 human lawyers when analyzing risks in nondisclosure agreements. The AI tied the highest-scoring lawyer with 94 percent accuracy. At the time, we predicted that it probably wouldn’t go much further than that. “Are lawyers at risk of being replaced? Probably not, at least not for things such as arguing case law,” yours truly posited. Well, now I stand corrected....
Twitter dropped the ban hammer on an account ruining Wordle players’ days. The troll was an automated bot called The Wordlinator (@wordlinator). It would search for tweets containing Wordle results, then reply with snide comments and the solution to the next day’s puzzle. “Guess what. People don’t care about your mediocre linguistic escapades,” read one tweet from the bot. “To teach you a lesson, tomorrow’s word is .” How did the bot predict the future?...
There is one type of monitor, though, that ticks nearly every box for high quality PC gaming. One that provides a good mix of resolution and high refresh rate, while still being realistically usable on today’s most popular gaming hardware. I’m talking about the latest 27-inch 1440p IPS monitors that hit a whopping 165 Hz with support for adaptive sync. These monitors hit the mark in many respects, and today we’re going to explore what sort of gaming experience you can expect with such a feature-laden display....
The front facade has been constructed from plastic and aluminum and features a colored border – red on our sample. Red highlights are also found around the external 5.25" drive bay as well as at the top and bottom of the front panel. The panel itself is covered in a thin brushed aluminum sheet which has been given a black finish. It looks rather sleek. The only other detail is the chrome “In Win” label at the top....
At the top end of the scale we have the Asus P7H55-M Pro and Gigabyte H55M-UD2H motherboards competing at around $105. Then below them we have the Asrock H55M Pro and ECS H55H-CM which at $90 are around 14% cheaper. Obviously a 14% saving is significant enough when building on a tight budget. But it’s important to know what you are sacrificing with these cheaper H55 alternatives. With the ECS H55H-CM, quite a lot really, as this motherboard offers nothing extra in the way of features other than what is provided by the chipset....
Despite its price tag, it didn’t deliver much value because the Asrock P55 Extreme provided considerably more features and better overclocking performance for just a fraction more money. This time round ECS has been a little more prudent when naming their Black Series boards as the P67H2-A2 looks to be a proper high-end motherboard that should hold its own. While the ECS P55H-A Black Edition provided little more than a CPU socket and chipset, the P67H2-A2 Black Edition has quite an extensive list of features including six SATA 6Gb/s ports, USB 3....
The most popular graphics card among Steam survey participants had been the GTX 1060 since it replaced the GTX 750 almost five years ago. But the Pascal card has now been replaced by a Turing entry, though it’s not the RTX 2060 as some might have expected—that card lost users last month—it’s the budget GTX 1650 that first arrived in 2019. The most popular graphics cards among Steam survey participants in November November was another month that showed signs of conservative consumer spending....
The Acer SpatialLabs View and SpatialLabs View Pro are standalone, 15.6-inch IPS 4K displays (3,840 x 2,160 @ 60Hz) capable of producing glasses-free stereoscopic 3D imagery. Both have response times of less than 30ms, a 1200:1 contrast ratio, 323 nits of brightness and cover 100 percent of the Adobe RGB color gamut. The panel weighs just 3.3 pounds for enhanced portability. Elsewhere, you’ll find an HDMI 2.0 connection, a USB 3....
On Thursday, the Activision Blizzard’s Workplace Responsibility Committee turned in the results of its internal investigation to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The probe concluded that the company was not guilty of wrongdoing and did not foster a “fratboy culture” of harassment, discrimination, or retaliation. The finding sparked a flurry of sarcasm on social media. “Contrary to many of the allegations, the Board and its external advisors have determined that there is no evidence to suggest that Activision Blizzard senior executives ever intentionally ignored or attempted to downplay the instances of gender harassment that occurred and were reported,” the Schedule 14A filing reads....
Most of the keyboards were comfortable to use besides the widespread lack of wrist rests. As I’ve mentioned in this roundup, I require a wrist rest so the keyboards that didn’t come with one were tested with 3M gel comfort wrist rest, an additional $25 cost. It might seem unfair to test these keyboards with a third-party component but without it they were simply too uncomfortable for me to use....
The popular 1920x1200 (1080p) resolution won’t present too many challenges for gamers as the HD 7870 and GTX 660 Ti both averaged 61fps – even the GTX 650 Ti/560 Ti cards were able to provide reasonably playable performance with 36fps and 37fps.
At AMD’s latest Meet the Experts webinar, board partners showed off some of the features and designs of their upcoming X670 and X670E motherboards. As a reminder, AMD’s AM5 platform will support CPUs with a TDP of up to 170W, 28 PCIe 5.0 lanes (x16 for graphics cards, x8 general purpose lanes used for storage and USB4/Thunderbolt 4 controllers, x4 to connect to the chipset), up to four DisplayPort 2 or HDMI 2....
The Radeon HD 6870 was very impressive when testing with Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 at 1920x1200, matching the Radeon HD 5870 by delivering an average of 56fps, making it 14% faster than the Radeon HD 5850. It was just 2% slower than the GeForce GTX 470 while leading the GeForce GTX 460 by 12%. Dirt 2 Benchmarks Dirt 2 has a fantastic built-in benchmark tool that measures actual gameplay performance very accurately, so we closed Fraps for this title....
That sounds great on paper, but is it enough to consider the Crossfired HD 7700 series a valid option for budget-minded gamers? Unfortunately, no – or at least not yet. We’ll start with the HD 7770. At $320, the dual-card configuration is 60% more expensive than the $200 HD 6870 while delivering 39% more performance. Likewise, the duo is 33% pricier than the $240 GeForce GTX 560 Ti while offering only 29% better results on average....
As expected, idle consumption figures remain much the same, working within one watt of the R9 280 and R9 280X. Here we see no improvement in power consumption compared to R9 280X. Granted, we are using a slightly overclocked R9 285, but the results are still surprising. Again the R9 285 consumed roughly the same amount of power as the R9 280X, this time when playing Metro: Last Light....
The R9 290X averaged 54.8fps in Medal of Honor: Warfighter, granting it a 34% advantage over the HD 7970 GHz Edition and 12% over than the GTX 780 while matching the GTX Titan. The R9 290X slipped behind its rival in Warfighter’s frame time results, offering 11% less performance than the GTX Titan and 4% less than the GTX 780. Hitman: Absolution’s demanding graphics limited the R9 290X to 34fps, which was still 35% faster than the HD 7970 GHz Edition....
The RX 6750 XT features a core overclock of 19 MHz… not 19%, 19 MHz, but you’re getting faster 18 Gbps memory, which results in a 12.5% boost to memory bandwidth when compared to last year’s RX 6700. There’s also a 9% increase in board power and that’s it. Oh wait, no it’s not. You’re also faced with a 15% increase in MSRP which has gone from $480 to $550....
When it comes to productivity and content creation, the new Ryzen 7 CPUs are very impressive. Premiere Pro and Excel performance output is incredible. The gaming performance was less exciting. We always knew this was one area where Ryzen might struggle against the empire, so while the results are a little disappointing, they aren’t entirely surprising either. AMD liked to show off Ryzen’s gaming capabilities running at 4K using a Pascal Titan X and we all know this isn’t how you test CPU gaming performance because it imposes a GPU bottleneck that virtually eliminates the impact the CPU may have, within reason anyway....
Starting with the cooling, Asrock’s 880GMH/USB3 features two passive heatsinks constructed from aluminum. The north bridge heatsink measures 7 x 4cm and 2cm tall and the smaller south bridge heatsink measures 4 x 4cm and 1cm tall. The lower half of the former uses a smaller profile to avoid conflicting with long PCI Express x1 cards. Directly under the PCIe x1 is a full length PCI Express slot (16x bandwidth)....
