So let’s answer that first question to begin with. Across a range of more recent games, the extra CPU power no doubt has a significant impact on gaming performance. This doesn’t always manifest itself in terms of improved average frame rates, but often you’ll get much better minimum frame rates with the power of the i7-7820HK. Eight of ten games I tested at 1080p ultra detail settings achieved noticeably better minimum frame rates on the X5 v7 than a GTX 1070 laptop with an i7-7700HQ....

The Gigabyte’s card allowed for an additional 9% performance when playing Crysis 2 at 2560x1600. On top of that, our overclock provided 12% more performance as the GTX 580 SOC topped 28fps.

There was a noticeable performance gap between the LGA1155 motherboards when testing with the x264 HD Benchmark. That said, only 4fps separated the slowest board from the fastest while the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3-iSSD was just 1fps slower than the Asrock P67 Extreme6. The last encoding test is based on TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress where we converted an AVI file to MPG. This took the Core i7 2600K processor just 6 minutes and 10 seconds on the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3-iSSD – a whopping one second faster than the Asrock Z68 Extreme4....

According to TrendForce analysts, global DRAM revenue fell by 28.9 percent in the third quarter of this year compared to the previous quarter. The decline is the biggest since the 2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, Q3 DRAM contract prices dropped by between 10 and 15 percent compared to Q2. That fall roughly aligns with the predictions from TrendForce’s Q2 report from July, when prices fell 10.6 percent year-over-year. Server DRAM shipments also declined in Q3....

A team from the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons swiped the record last year, pushing the total up to 62.8 trillion decimal places. Like before, Google used y-cruncher to perform calculations. This time around, the Compute Engine was configured with 128 vCPUs, 864 GB of RAM and 100 Gbps of egress bandwidth. For comparison, the 2019 calculation had just 16 Gbps of egress bandwidth. The program ran for a total of 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7....

Players may need a fairly beefy system to run Warner Bros Games Montréal’s Gotham Knights at anything above the lowest graphics settings when it launches on October 21. The developer published the minimum PC system requirements this week, with the recommended specs soon to come. Warner Bros says you’ll need either a GTX 1660 Ti or a Radeon RX 590 to play Gotham Knights at 1080p and 60fps on the lowest graphics settings....

Follow up: May 2022, June 2022, July 2022, August 2022, September 2022, October 2022, November 2022, December 2022 Whether MSRP pricing is good enough at this point in 2022, is an entirely different question. We’ll get to that in this article, considering that a new generation of GPUs is set to launch later this year. One crucial indication that pricing is improving comes from, oddly enough, the hideously expensive GeForce RTX 3090 Ti....

Follow up: April 2022, May 2022, June 2022, July 2022, August 2022, September 2022, October 2022, November 2022, December 2022 There are no new GPU launches this month, after a bit of activity as of late like the RTX 3050 and RX 6500 XT releases from Nvidia and AMD, respectively. There are however a few upcoming products before we get into next-gen territory, hopefully at the end of this year....

Rockstar Games has scaled a mountain with Grand Theft Auto V, creating the best-looking, best-sounding and, most importantly, best-playing version of gaming’s most notorious franchise. Scaling one peak, however, reveals another—their cloud-piercing ambition to create a great ensemble video game drama, an epic of intersecting, interactive lives. Rockstar doesn’t summit that new peak as impressively with GTA V, but in its first attempt at such an audacious feat, makes a good go of it....

Maryland-based security firm Inky Security tracked attack activity related to the vulnerability from mid-May through mid-July. The phishing attack relies on a known open redirect vulnerability (CWE-601) and popular brand recognition to deceive and harvest credentials from unsuspecting Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 users. The attacks targeted unsecured sites from Snapchat and American Express. Snapchat-based attacks resulted in more than 6,800 attacks over a two-and-a-half-month period. The American Express-based attacks were much more effective, affecting over 2,000 users in just two days....

Above is a screenshot of the Windows Task Manager taken while playing Hard Reset. As you can see just two of the eight available threads on the Core i7-2600K are heavily used. However there are another two threads that are being lightly accessed, while the other 4 remain unused. This would suggest that Hard Rest will play best on a quad-core processor which we are about to confirm. The above graph tells us that Hard Reset does not play well with dual-core processors....

The only other fault we could find was that the drive can only be connected using the standard “type A” USB cable which comes attached to it. The A-DATA SH93, for example, could also connect using a Mini-B USB cable. Although for many this won’t be a deal breaker, having the option means I could plug the SH93 using my camera cable, which is always hooked up to my PC and sitting on my desk where it is easy to access....

The main topic of this article is about an important stage in rendering, where a three dimensional world of points, lines, and triangles becomes a two dimensional grid of colored blocks. This is very much something that just ‘happens’, as the processes involved in the 3D-to-2D change occur unseen, unlike with our previous article where we could immediately see the effects of vertex shaders and tessellation. If you’re not ready for all of this, don’t worry – you can get started with our 3D Game Rendering 101....

There are many good histories of this process, the most recent of which is Chris Miller’s Chip Wars (which is very good), that cover the narrative of TSMC’s rise, but we think the question really goes to deeper fundamentals. What capabilities does TSMC have that others lack? And can anyone else build those? Not surprisingly, there is no simple answer to this question, but we think there are a few factors that really stand out....

In our web browsing test, the Envy x2 dominates most other devices with outstanding battery life, even while using Chrome. Switch to Edge, which is a more sensible option as it runs natively, and the Envy x2 pulls even further ahead than other devices running Chrome natively. Either way you look at it, that’s a great result for this device. Video playback is another strong area for the Envy x2, though other devices are a bit more competitive here as 1080p playback these days is a bit limited by the efficiency of the display....

This new machine doesn’t just look different on the outside - it’s got new hardware, too. The laptop we’ve reviewed pairs a Ryzen 7 4800H processor with GTX 1660 Ti graphics, 16GB of memory, 1TB SSD and a 1080p 144Hz display for $1149. If you don’t want this precise Omen, there are several alternative specifications. For example, if you’d like more power, the $1799 model pairs an Intel Core i7-10750H processor and an RTX 2070 graphics core with a 4K display....

The Spectre is a thing of beauty. At 10.4mm, it’s the world’s thinnest laptop, edging out Apple’s 12-inch MacBook by a few millimeters. It’s also very light for a 13-inch device, at just 2.45lbs (1.1 kg), making it a perfect companion for the businessman on the go. And the design itself is truly unlike any Windows laptop I’ve seen before, thanks to a breathtaking hinge and use of premium materials....

Today we will be looking at the Core i5 661, one of four new Core i5 processors. The other models include the Core i5 650, 660 and 670. Based on this naming scheme the Core i5 661 doesn’t seem to fit quite right. Furthermore, Intel will charge $196 for both the 660 and 661 processors, but we’ll break it down for you so you can gain complete understanding of the new processor line-up being announced today....

Enabling all cores had the dual-core Core i5 661 matching the i5 750 however. This could be due to the clock speed advantage combined with Hyper-Threading support. The second set of MaxxPI² results shows the actual throughput that each processor was capable of. Using the WinRAR benchmark we measured performance using a single core and multi-core configurations. Oddly, with a single core in use WinRAR indicates that the Core i5 750 is faster than the Core i5 661, which we thought was unlikely to occur....

Intel’s last couple of product lines have been a bit confusing, with multiple code-names and architectures split across different series. Current U-series chips for ultraportable laptops are still branded as 8th-gen and are codenamed Whiskey Lake, while newer H-series chips get a bump up to 9th-gen and form part of Coffee Lake Refresh, the same as current desktop CPUs. Most of Intel’s 9th-gen laptop parts aren’t particularly exciting and don’t bring much to the table....