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A year later the Ivy Bridge replacement arrived and while it wasn’t as exciting as its predecessor, we were prepared for that at the time and appreciated the ~10% boost to performance and efficiency. Tick-tock, remember? Haswell came another year later, in June 2013 and despite being paired with new chipsets and motherboards, it seemed like Intel’s least exciting release in recent times. If its initial launch wasn’t lackluster enough, Intel dragged it out for another year with a ‘Haswell-refresh’....

Since then we’ve seen eight major architectural updates and four die shrinks spanning a decade. Yet after all that time, Intel still only offers up to four cores on its mainstream processors, the latest of which was released in January as the $340 Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K. Shortly after that, AMD did something we all hoped they’d do (even if we weren’t convinced they could) by releasing a highly competitive CPU architecture....

A slight performance advantage over the Core i7 975 EE is also seen when running Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts, just enough for two or three extra frames per second at both resolutions tested. The Core i7 980X Extreme Edition was also about 13fps faster than the Core i7 950 and 30fps faster than the Core i7 920 at 1024x768, but not so much so when compared to either processor at 1920x1200....

By now you’re probably familiar with the flagship Core i9-13900K, so getting up to speed with the KS won’t take long. The Thermal Velocity Boost frequency rating has increased from 5.8 GHz to 6 GHz, the P-Core base frequency has also increased from 3 GHz to 3.2 GHz, and this has raised the base TDP from 125 watts to 150 watts, while the max turbo power remains the same at 253w....

Gamers Nexus took the time to make a video about just the driver problems (see above). In summary, the game drivers are sort-of alright: most newish games load and play fine. But the driver installer is so problematic that it borders on being malware, and when the Arc Command app decides not to crash, its settings toggles and overclocking utilities barely work at all. Partly in response, the VP and general manager of the Visual Computing Group at Intel, Lisa Pearce, penned a blog post discussing some common concerns about the Arc series last week....

It’s already been 14 months since we published that article and the Core i3-6100 has indeed become an extremely popular choice among budget builders thanks to its low $120 cost. But what if I told you a similar level of processing power could be bought today for half the price? As far as enthusiasts were concerned, Intel’s Kaby Lake processors looked like a bust when they launched last month. Besides some new motherboards, the seventh-generation Core i7-7700K and i5-7600K didn’t bring much to the table....

Intel’s Raptor Lake lineup is expected to debut sometime in October, with the first models shipping later this fall. Leaked internal documents have confirmed the new processor designs won’t stray too far from their Alder Lake counterparts, so they’re likely refined versions of existing 12th-gen parts that are manufactured on an Intel 7 process node. All hints, rumors, and leaks so far point out that Raptor Lake performance gains will be achieved through higher clocks and thermal envelopes....

The sequential write performance was also strong as the Intel SSD 520 Series 240GB was only slightly slower than the ADATA S511 240GB which is the fastest SF-2281 drive we have seen in this test. With a throughput of 309.5MB/s the Intel SSD 520 Series 240GB was 8MB/s faster than the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB. The random 512K read performance of the Intel SSD 520 Series 240GB was also strong beating similar SF-2281 drives from ADATA, Kingston and OCZ....

In addition to our featured flash devices, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM hard drive has been included for comparison’s sake. Our testing suite consists of four synthetic benchmark programs and our own file copying and load time tests. As you likely know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional hard drive, any write operation made to an SSD is a two-step process: a data block must be erased and then written to....

Whereas fancy heatsinks and heat pipes used to cool the power circuitry and chipset where once the focal point of aesthetics, attention has now shifted to an internal I/O panel cover. We saw this on the Asrock, MSI and EVGA boards but Asus takes it next level, as does Gigabyte but we will get to them shortly. Asus has equipped the Maximus VIII Hero with a large plastic covering to hide the ugly I/O panel connectors and block any reflections which might spoil that special build....

The Plextor M6e M.2 2280 512GB provided similar performance of just over 300MB/s in our single large file copy test when using any one of the six supporting motherboards. The program copy test saw the Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H-BK and Asrock Z97 Extreme9 both max the Plextor M6e M.2 2280 512GB out at 260MB/s, while the MSI Z97 MPower Max AC hit 259MB/s. The Asus Z97-Pro WiFi/AC slipped to 255MB/s, while the Asus Z97-Pro WiFi/AC delivered just 241MB/s....

Externally, the enclosure is a bit bulkier than most 2.5" drives but the added thickness is attributed to increased shock protection. The glossy blue paint job on our review sample looks great but will undoubtedly attract fingerprints and smudges over time. The Power Grip Band adds additional shock protection and can be removed if you prefer how the drive looks without it. The portable drive performed as expected in our benchmarks and real world testing, maxing out at around 90 MB/sec on writes and 45 MB/sec on reads....

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope arrived at ground zero for its mission activities in late January following a month-long journey to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point nearly a million miles from Earth. Initial images from the James Webb Space Telescope will be unfocused. These will be used to slowly fine-tune the scope’s mirrors into alignment in order to create a single, sharp image. We’re still at the very beginning of this process, but NASA said initial results match expectations and simulations....

Romero tweeted that the new level is priced at five euros ($5.54), 100% of which will be used to support the people of Ukraine through donations to the Red Cross and the UN Central Emergency Response Fund. To play the level, called One Humanity, you will need an original copy of Doom 2 and a modern source port. The .WAD contains a readme text file as well as the external mod data, and it can be downloaded up to three times after purchase....

The lower the f-number, the wider the aperture and thus more light is able to pass through. Differences in f-number aren’t immediately obvious though, as double the f-number doesn’t equate to half the light gathering area (one stop less). Instead, due to the circular nature of an aperture, double the f-number is a two stop difference, providing one quarter the light gathering area. The 20.7-megapixel, 1/2.3" Sony Exmor RS sensor in the Sony Xperia Z2, paired with an f/2....

This particular variant of the Snapdragon 400 uses four ARM Cortex-A7 CPU cores clocked up to 1.2 GHz. It also includes an Adreno 305 GPU at 450 MHz, an LPDDR2 memory controller, single-band Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, A-GPS, the usual array of 2G radios, tri-band HSPA+ (2100, 900 and 850 MHz) and tri-band LTE. It’s disappointing to find that the Agora 4G only supports three LTE bands: 700, 900 and 1800 MHz....

Set #71411 is intended for builders aged 18+ and joins other Nintendo products in the adult line including the Lego Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Mario 64 Question Mark Block. Lego said each set in the line is designed to evoke nostalgia from fans who remember Mario as an intrinsic part of their childhood. The Mighty Bowser features a button to control his head, neck and mouth. If you pull the trigger fully, Bowser will even shoot a fireball out of his mouth....

The Core M-5Y70 features a base clock of 1.1 GHz across two cores (with Hyper Threading), with a Turbo Boost frequency up to 2.6 GHz. There’s also Intel HD Graphics 5300 inside, clocked at 850 MHz, plus 4 MB of L3 cache. The base model of the ThinkPad Helix comes with 4 GB of DDR3L-1600 memory, though my review unit was blessed with 8 GB. The TDP for this part is just 4....

Here’s a quick and informative guide for changing your mouse’s sensitivity in Windows. Setting the basic mouse movement When talking about mouse sensitivity, we’re referring to how much the cursor moves on the monitor when you shift the mouse in a particular direction. Low sensitivity means you need to move the mouse a lot, in order to get the cursor to shift places. At the other end of the scale, a tiny nudge of your hand can result in the pointer flying off to the corners of the monitor....

In the trailing three-month period (October-December 2022), DRAM and NAND flash prices dipped 23 percent and 28 percent, TrendForce said. Memory chip pricing peaked during Covid thanks to strong demand for consumer electronics but started trailing off near the end of 2021. Rising interest rates combined with geopolitical uncertainties from the Russia-Ukraine war and sporadic Covid lockdowns in China only made matters worse in 2022. The research firm believes a combination of high interest rates, rising inflation and weak global economics will continue to impact consumer and corporate spending on devices like smartphones, PCs and servers over the coming months, all of which utilize both types of memory....