The Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC at the heart of the device is the most powerful ARM chipset going around, clocking in at around twice as fast as the Galaxy S4’s Snapdragon 600. There’s no shortage of power in the S5, while energy efficiency has improved to give a respectable gain in battery life, thanks to display and SoC-side refinements. Speaking of the display, we really have a winner on our hands here....
In any case, both Galaxy S9+ models include a 3500 mAh (13.48 Wh) battery, while the smaller Galaxy S9 we haven’t tested packs a 3000 mAh (11.55 Wh) cell. These are the exact same battery capacities as last year’s Galaxy S8+ and Galaxy S8, so ideally we should be seeing equivalent or better battery life in the newer Galaxy S9. Unfortunately, as far as the Exynos model of the Galaxy S9 is concerned, that’s not really the case....
In case you want a quick summary, though, in general the Pixel 2 XL is a superior camera, however the Galaxy S9+ puts in a strong showing with pleasing colors, strong performance in a range of conditions, and useful additional features like a 2x zoom camera and 960 FPS slow motion capture. I think most users will be very pleased with the results. As for software, what Samsung has included on the Galaxy S9+ is a continuation of what they provided on the Galaxy S8+....
The Evo drives delivered roughly 480MB/s in CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read test and enabling RAPID made no difference on the 250GB model, in fact it was a little slower. The 1TB version gained around 6MB/s, but certainly nothing to write home about. Conversely, CrystalDiskMark’s write results were fantastic for the Evo, which easily met the 840 Pro’s results before enabling RAPID and far exceeded them after. The 250GB Evo managed 416....
Although we saw minimal performance differences between the various SSDs in the PCMark 8 benchmark the margins in PCMark 7 are quite significant. For example in the importing pictures test above the 950 Pro produced a throughput of 387MB/s and while that meant it was slower than the equivalent capacity SM951 drive and Intel SSD 750 Series drives, it was well over twice as fast as the 850 Pro....
Despite the significant performance difference between the 950 Pro and 850 Pro we only see a very minor increase when looking at the overall PCMark 8 storage score. That said, this seems to be the norm for this benchmark program and despite the minor increase the 950 Pro produced the highest score of any SSD in this test. Although PCMark 8’s overall score placed the 950 Pro and 850 Pro quite close together, we see that the storage bandwidth results are radically different....
The Samsung T1 500GB delivered exceptional upload performance, sustaining 300MB/s in our single large file test for 149% more performance than the Patriot Supersonic Magnum 128GB and 79% more than the Kingston HyperX Max 64GB. This time the T1 was 3.5x faster than a 2.5" hard drive. When measuring performance with our game data the Samsung T1 was 149% faster than the Kingston HyperX Max 64GB and 270% or 3....
Epic fantasy and sci-fi writer Brandon Sanderson launched a Kickstarter campaign for four new “secret novels” written over the past two years. Each book is about 400 pages long and is being offered in your choice of digital e-book, digital audiobook and unsigned premium hardcover book format. The standalone novels require very little previous knowledge of Sanderson’s work, he said, and the titles are being kept hidden for now for an added layer of intrigue....
Having removed the lid, both side panels also lift out (there’s no need to remove any screws). With the side doors removed, it’s still difficult to find your way around inside the FT03, so the façade is also removable, again without the need to unfasten any screws. This panel is secured by four clips and simply pops out. The motherboard slots into the left side of the case and there is a 120mm fan overhanging the tray at a 45-degree angle....
The first game in the series, Fatal Fury: King of Fighters, debuted way back in 1991 for the Neo Geo. It was designed by Takashi Nishiyama, the former Capcom employee who directed and produced the original Street Fighter. In fact, Nishiyama viewed Fatal Fury as a spiritual successor of sorts to Street Fighter. Fatal Fury was SNK’s first fighting game for the Neo Geo and later led to the creation of the series The King of Fighters....
AS SSD Benchmark is a new program designed specifically to measure the performance of Solid State Drives. The first test measures sequential performance and here we see for the first time very different results when comparing the Corsair P Series 128GB to the OCZ Summit. The Summit produced better write performance in this test, while the Corsair P Series delivered considerably better read performance. Then we have the A-Data S592 128GB which was considerably slower than the original Vertex SSD....
Duke University computational biology student Devang Thakkar has created a Wordle Archive that allows anybody to return to any previous puzzles they may have missed. The game looks and works identical to the Josh Wardle’s original except for the navigation buttons. Players can go to the First or Last puzzle with a click no matter where they are in the archive. There are also Previous, Next, and Choose options. The settings have toggles for Dark Mode and Color Blind Mode....
The cooling fan on the StarTech enclosure is fairly quiet and produces enough airflow to keep a standard hard drive cool even under heavy use. The on/off switch for the fan is a nice touch as you can disable the fan if you are only doing a quick transfer. Overall the enclosure is a nice product. I like the My Book styling and ease of use. The brushed aluminum side panels will be more immune to fingerprints than the glossy black surface we have seen from other enclosures....
This year’s Summer Game Fest included new footage from upcoming games including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Street Fighter 6, the Callisto Protocol, and more. We’ve gathered the biggest trailers here along with the full stream archive (watch above). The Last of Us: Part 1 Rumors of a PlayStation 5 remake of the first Last of Us game have circulated for a while. Naughty Dog has completely rebuilt the 2013 survival action game with next-gen graphics and improved gameplay....
First unveiled at CES 2022, Synaptics says Gemini can wirelessly dock a device with up to two 4K 60Hz monitors with a level of latency indistinguishable from wired connections. It uses WiFi 6E combined with Bluetooth, DisplayLink, USB, and IoT technologies. As a laptop approaches the monitors, the Gemini’s Wireless Dock Connection Manager securely connects them so that it’s already docked as the user sits down. When moving away after a session, the device securely disconnects the user....
Nonetheless, we recall that even back then it wouldn’t have been fair to classify Synology’s NAS devices as just ’network attached storage’. Applications such as Photo Station, Audio Station and Download Station for example already existed, and although they have evolved beyond recognition, we got a glimpse of where things were heading seven years ago. Today Synology’s DiskStation range can’t truly be described as ‘NAS’ products any more – they are full blown servers that can handle everything from Cloud based storage to 4K UHD transcoding....
The blistering fast transfer speeds enabled by 10GbE are immediately evident. The DS3612xs went from 112.5MB/s on a Gigabit connection to 478.9MB/s. Despite sporting a faster processor, the QNAP TS-879 Pro was about 31% slower, reaching just 365.4MB/s. The game copy evaluation uses a mixture of small and large files. The DS3612xs averaged 356.4MB/s or 26% faster than the TS-879 Pro. Compared to their Gigabit Ethernet speeds, which is limited to less than 115MB/s, we saw a significant boost when using 10GbE....
For instance, in CrystalDiskMark, the DS3612xs’s sequential writes jumped from 114MB/s to 951MB/s. Despite packing a faster processor, the TS-879 Pro was much slower with sequential write speeds of 675MB/s – still blisteringly fast, mind you. That gap existed through most of our benchmarks, including our file download and upload tests, where the DS3612xs was 20 to 30% quicker than the TS-879 Pro. Nonetheless, both units were impressive, especially when handling smaller file writes as we expected the HDDs to hinder performance more than they did....
The AMD FX-8320E remains the king of Excel with a surprisingly fast 4.5 second completion time once overclocked. The Core i3-6100 on the other hand was actually slower than the Core i3-4360 using the DDR4-2133 memory, thanks to its higher latency when compared to DDR3. Moving to the much faster DDR4-3000 memory did allow the 6100 to overtake the 4360, though not by a significant margin. Adobe Photoshop CC is another application that works well on the overclocked AMD FX-8320E, though it didn’t exactly blow the Core i3-6100 out of the water....
