The press release dated August 25 provides readers with links to each carrier’s response to the FCC’s list of questions. The same questions were provided to all 15 wireless carriers about their geolocation data retention and data sharing practices. The questions focused on specific areas including collection policies, retention, storage locations, user notification and opt-out, and policies related to data sharing with law enforcement agencies. The initial request for information sent to each company cited the FCC’s previous efforts to protect user location data....

After all, if your device is no longer under warranty and the only other option is to buy a replacement, what’s the harm in trying? Complexity, that’s what. Some gadgets are simply more difficult to disassemble, repair, and reassemble than others. Whether that comes down to sleeker and slimmer devices necessitating irreparable designs for the sake of aesthetics or manufacturers intentionally making their products tough to fix so you’ll be inclined to buy a replacement is up for debate....

The Need for Speed franchise has been with us for nearly three decades, and is estimated to have sold over 150 million copies during this time. It’s easy to see why, as this mostly arcadey series has been delivering fun and setting pulses racing in a myriad of ways, while also disappointing fans in a number of occasions. Licensed cars? Check. Kickass driving soundtracks? Check. Epic trailers? Check. Crashing past Diggy’s donut shop in Rockport to disable cops?...

Of course, over the years they’ve also achieved much greater operating frequencies while also expanding the core count. That being the case, we also took a look at how increasing to 6, 8 and even 10 cores has improved gaming performance, though we did ignore the frequency gains as that’s been well explored at this point and frequency scaling is more predictable. Ultimately, we found that Intel’s journey on the 14nm process has seen limited improvements from 5th-gen to 10th-gen, amounting to a ~10% jump in gaming performance, when comparing CPUs at the same core count and operating frequency, and that gain includes the transition from DDR3 to DDR4....

Microsoft and US authorities recently released notices about a ransomware gang using legitimate Microsoft certificates to sign its malware. The trick grants malicious software privileged access to Windows, making it harder to fight. Cryptographic signatures tell Windows that Microsoft trusts a piece of software, letting it interact with a system relatively unimpeded. Building fraudulent signatures or fraudulently obtaining real ones has long been a common hacker tactic. A ransomware gang called Cuba – no connection to the Republic of Cuba – uses a dropper that writes a kernel driver that disables security software like antivirus programs....

The most interesting question then, is who exactly is the C7 for? Before we can get to who it’s for (hint: there is more than one correct answer,) we have to get to the bottom of what the C7 is and then more importantly, what it can do. Hardware In terms of hardware, the C7 is a barebones affair though to be honest we didn’t expect otherwise for the price....

To be clear, both displays deliver great color performance, and the things I’m talking about here will be nitpicks for most buyers. If you want a fast, high-resolution ultrawide with a great IPS display, the X34P gives you exactly that. It’s a great proposition for gamers in particular due to that new 120 Hz refresh rate. And let’s not discount the improved design, either. Acer has removed the glossy plastic, which makes the monitor not only look better, but it’s less likely to attract dust and grime over time....

$999.99 - Core i7-7300HQ, GTX 1050, 8GB RAM, 180GB SSD, 768p LCD $1,099.99 - Core i7-7300HQ, GTX 1050 Ti, 8GB RAM, 180GB SSD, 1080p LCD $1,599.99 - Core i7-7700HQ, GTX 1060, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 1080p LCD $2,049.99 - Core i7-7700HQ, GTX 1060, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 1440p OLED $2,624.99 - Core i7-7700HQ, GTX 1060, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 1440p OLED $3,349.99 - Core i7-7700HQ, GTX 1060, 32GB RAM, 1TB + 1TB SSD, 1440p OLED...

According to Variety, the series has been dubbed Blade Runner 2099, and it will act as a follow-up to Blade Runner 2049. Judging by the name, we’re assuming BR 2099 will be set fifty years into the future – but it’s way too early to say whether or not there will be any returning characters, locations, or plot points. Executive producers on Blade Runner 2099 include Silka Luisa, Andrew Kosove, Broderick Johnson, and Ridley Scott....

As you should know by now, Fusion is all about combining general processor execution along with 3D geometry processing and other functions of modern GPUs into a single chip. The E-350 we examined in February was part of AMD’s “Brazos” platform and combined a pair of Bobcat cores with a Radeon HD 6250 graphics unit to deliver some truly impressive performance. Not only was the E-350 more powerful than Intel’s Atom when it came to raw processing power, but the GPU was also much faster than anything we had seen paired with the Atom before, including Nvidia’s Ion....

This week has seen AMD show off its upcoming Zen 4 architecture at Computex. One of the exciting demos involved a 16-core Ryzen 7000 processor, believed to be a prototype of the Ryzen 9 7950X, running Ghostwire Tokyo at up to 5.5 GHz. AMD didn’t reveal too many details about the demonstration at the time, but now we know a little more. Speaking on PCWorld’s The Full Nerd, AMD Director of Technical Marketing Robert Hallock revealed that the chip was cooled using a consumer-grade 280mm all-in-one liquid cooler from Asetek and sat in a reference AMD motherboard—AM4 coolers will be compatible with new 600-series mobos....

First thing’s first, the setup. It’s as easy as attaching the FreeSync display to your AMD graphics card via DisplayPort, installing the latest Catalyst driver (I tested with the 15.3.1 beta drivers for this review), and then enabling FreeSync in the display settings section. There is no need to enable FreeSync for individual games: with the setting enabled for a display, it will always be active regardless of whether v-sync is enabled or disabled....

The SiSoftware Sandra bandwidth test showed a slight increase when testing with the Phenom II X4 965 compared to the Phenom II X4 955. The bandwidth of the Phenom II X4 965 is now twice that of the Core 2 Quad Q9650 at over 13GB/s. The Sandra processor arithmetic test saw little difference between the two Phenoms. The Core 2 Quad Q9650 has the edge in this test. The Sandra multimedia results show a different reality as the Phenom II X4 series is far superior to the Core 2 Quad Q9650....

Using the new Futuremark 3Dmark 11 benchmark, the Radeon HD 6950 was 20% faster than the GeForce GTX 470 when running the extreme test. Should this be the case when running actual games this could be very good news for AMD. The same test also reported that the Radeon HD 6950 was ~5% slower than the GeForce GTX 570 and 12% slower than the HD 6970 while it was just 2% faster than the HD 5870....

Testing with CoD: Modern Warfare 2 the new Radeon HD 6970 averaged 73fps making it a single frame faster than the GeForce GTX 480. This was a near match to the GeForce GTX 570 performance while lagging behind the faster GTX 580 by a 16% margin. Against the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970, the new HD 6970 was 19% slower though it was ~30% faster than the Radeon HD 5870. Call of Duty: Black Ops Fraps was used to benchmark the single player aspect of CoD: Black Ops....

The R9 285 averaged 35fps at 1920x1200 in Crysis 3 with all the quality settings turned up. While this was 7% or 2fps faster than the R9 280, it was also 3% slower than the R9 280X and 4% slower than the GTX 760. The R9 285 was far more capable when playing BioShock Infinite, delivering an average of 66fps to match the R9 280X while being 8% faster than the GTX 760 and 13% faster than the R9 280 that it is replacing....

AMD did however take the opportunity to release an even smaller (101mm2) Polaris 10 GPU, which can be found at the heart of the Radeon RX 550, an ultra-affordable sub-$100 entry-level card aimed at the eSports and HTPC markets. With just 512 SPUs, it packs the same amount as the old Radeon R7 350 (though that chip used first-gen GCN cores), we’ve been wondering how capable the RX 550 is....

The 2600 again matched the Ryzen 5 1600, this time drawing 345 watts and we see a 12% increase once overclocked which is still less than the amount of power a stock 7800X draws. Here we see with the Blender workload, the 2600 draws less power than the 1600 and again overclocked still consumes less than the Core i7-7800X. The HandBrake results are an eye opener and I honestly expected to see more results like this where overclocking just throws efficiency right out the window....

This is the chip AMD is selling for entry-level systems, and yet it’s a compelling piece of silicon to be putting in budget devices: you get 6 Zen 2 CPU cores and 12 threads, a base frequency of 3.0 GHz with boost up to 4.0 GHz, along with 8MB of L3 cache and a standard 45W TDP. With AMD offering 8 cores in more expensive parts like the Ryzen 7 4800H (see the review), they can comfortably include six cores in mainstream laptops while maintaining nice product segmentation....

Today we’re revisiting the issue to see how the GPU market sits right now, what pricing and availability is like relative to various points in the past year, and what the trends in pricing are looking like. We’ll also go through some performance figures to show which graphics cards make the most sense to purchase right now. Also read: The Best Graphics Cards 2018 For the past year it’s nearly impossible to purchase a graphics card at the MRSP as we’re sure you’re all aware....