Nearly every computing device needs one to be used, so the insides of monitors must be something special, yes? Well, there’s only one way to find out. Let’s gear up and prep the theatre for another fascinating dissection of a crucial piece of hardware. A Picture Paints a Thousand Words Having a visual display of the output of a computing system is a crucial element to the whole thing, and we’re surrounded by them – monitors connected to desktop PCs, screens in laptops, tablets, and smartphones; even modern TVs are essentially a basic computer these days....

In this next chapter of the Anatomy of Hardware series, we’ll be investigating the innards of a mouse, a keyboard and a gamepad. You can also check out previous articles touching on other computer components. We’ll start by digging into the guts of a simple mouse – the kind that costs less than $10 and is used by millions of people, all around the world. Later on this same article, we’ll dissect a higher-end Logitech mouse to see how the two compare on the inside....

The Verge writes that once an Apple employee is eligible for a booster shot, they will have four weeks to get one. Failing to comply will mean the workers have to take frequent tests to enter a retail store, partner store, or Apple office starting February 15th. “Due to waning efficacy of the primary series of COVID-19 vaccines and the emergence of highly transmissible variants such as Omicron, a booster shot is now part of staying up to date with your COVID-19 vaccination to protect against severe disease,” Apple states in an internal email seen by the publication....

So this review is all about benchmarking the new M1 Pro and properly comparing it to the best x86-based CPUs we have today from AMD and Intel. And by properly comparing, we don’t mean running Geekbench and calling it a day. In fact, we won’t be running Geekbench at all… we mean running a wide range of real-world multi-platform applications and comparing performance across the best laptop chips available today, all run under fair and equivalent conditions....

When Apple introduced its M1 Ultra chipset, it made a big deal about its performance and energy efficiency, extolling the benefits of the chiplet design and the UltraFusion packaging and interconnect technology that made it possible. To be fair, a lot of engineering clearly went into both the hardware and software aspects of the new chipset, as Apple essentially fused together two M1 Max chips and paired them with a bunch of high-bandwidth unified memory....

A new test from Igor’s Lab suggests applying thermal paste in a “sausage-like” straight-line down the middle is the best technique, at least for graphics processors. The results come with caveats and are unlikely to resolve age-old arguments about how best to spread the paste on a CPU. Igor tested three thermal paste methods on a reference RTX 3080 running Furmark while using Alphacool’s Aurora GPX-N water backplate and the same company’s Apex thermal grease at a 20C room temperature....

The claim stems from Nuvia’s special architecture licenses obtained from Arm in 2019, which allowed the startup to create Arm-compatible processor cores. According to Arm, rights were non-transferrable, making them unusable by Qualcomm following its acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Formal license termination in 2022 required Qualcomm to destroy and cease using any technology resulting from the previously existing agreements. Qualcomm’s general counsel, Ann Chaplin, has refuted these accusations. She states the company is well within its rights to continue its CPU design efforts — efforts that have been ongoing since before the Nuvia deal....

Evidently, gaming-focused monitors are not alone in pushing the envelope though they’ve been the primary drivers of higher refresh rates and other advanced features for some time now. With that said, you can get a great experience for less cash by venturing outside of known gaming sub-brands like Asus ROG and Acer Predator. That’s why today we’re looking at the Asus Designo MX34VQ. It may come as a bit of a surprise, but the MX34VQ is the cheapest 3440 x 1440 ultrawide display you can get with a refresh rate of 100 Hz....

This is one of those displays that is a true flagship, with Asus going all out in basically every area they could. It’s a G-Sync Ultimate display that uses Nvidia’s G-Sync processor, bringing with it features like variable overdrive, although as it’s the latest generation of module it also works perfectly with AMD GPUs even with adaptive sync enabled. It uses a Quantum Dot enhanced LCD panel with 98% DCI-P3 gamut coverage....

Throughout my time with the ZenBook I typically achieved six hours of continuous use, performing light tasks like web browsing, a bit of game streaming, video watching, and document editing. This isn’t a stellar result for the ZenBook 3, and I typically prefer laptops to hit at least eight hours of moderate usage, however the battery did outperform in the HP Spectre in similar circumstances. Thanks to the efficiency improvements in Kaby Lake’s video encoding and decoding block, the ZenBook 3 outperforms most of its ultraportable Skylake competition in video playback benchmarks....

As one of the few single slot graphics cards featured in the list above, it wasn’t surprising to find the Radeon HD 5670 running a little hotter than most. The idle temperature of 40 degrees is average for a budget card, though it is certainly well within acceptable parameters.

Xfire reports that EA COO Laura Miele led a post-mortem discussion on Battlefield 2042 during an internal Town Hall tele-meeting. In the 20-minute talk, she went over the challenges EA and DICE went through, leading to the game being one of the most unpopular in Steam’s history. Hundreds of thousands of BF2042 buyers have signed a petition asking for a full refund from EA. Since day one, players complained about numerous bugs and a long list of missing features compared to previous Battlefield games like server browsers, VOIP, persistent lobbies, and a lot more....

Compared to the beta’s performance, the retail version is around 5fps slower on average. As a result, the GTX 980 dropped from 57fps at 2560x1600 to 53fps, while cards such as the GTX 970 and GTX Titan were good for just 44fps. The R9 290X did well with 50fps, as did the R9 290 with 46fps, but it was the mighty GTX Titan X that stormed home with an average of 70fps – 32% faster than the GTX 980....

The bigger differences from my perspective seem to be texture and lighting quality. For larger, more detailed images click on any of the pictures for a 2560x1600 version of it. For the above series of screenshots we have focused on the sign in the background for comparison purposes. Here we see a significant difference in quality when going from the high preset to the medium and then low. The high quality settings provide strong lighting, vivid colors and detailed textures....

Just by looking at our our Core i7-3770K results above, BioShock Infinite does not appear to be a CPU bound game. Clocking the 3770K from 2.5GHz up to 4.5GHz made for a marginal 4fps difference, so overclocking your Core i7 processor is not going to help improve performance. The same situation was found when testing the AMD FX-8350 which seemed limited to 65 - 66fps. If you look at frame times, it’d appear however that a faster CPU will result in more fluid gameplay....

The PCMark7 video playback test uses 1080p samples at 24fps. So as you can see all CPU’s managed to pass this test with 24fps meaning smooth playback without frame loss should be achieved. Not wanting to just take PCMark’s word for it we conducted our own 720p and 1080p tests using MPlayer. Using the benchmark mode MPlayer allows the system to play the video as fast as it can without frame loss....

Pre-built systems do have their advantages: sometimes they will offer components before they’re available on retail, like the Ryzen 4000G and 5000 non-X CPUs. And if you buy a pre-built, that usually removes the fear that some parts won’t be compatible, or that something will go wrong in the assembly process. We recently updated our PC Buying Guide, where as usual we recommend the best combination of components for builds of different budgets and intended workloads....