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On Friday, Asus released BIOS updates to prepare its Z690 motherboards for Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs when they launch later this year. We already knew that Raptor Lake wouldn’t require 600 series owners to upgrade to the upcoming 700 series boards since compatibility for the new processors just requires a BIOS patch. Asrock rolled out similar updates in late June, but those applied to its Z690, H670, B660, and H610 motherboards....

Using the built-in WinRAR benchmark we can measure how the Core i5 750 processor is performing on each of the three P55 motherboards tested. As you can see, the weaker memory bandwidth performance of the Asus P7P55D Deluxe motherboard do not appear to be hindering its performance in this test either. While the Asus P7P55D Deluxe was slower than the Maximum III Gene in both SPECviewperf tests, it was able to match the performance of the MSI P55-GD65 motherboard....

You can do sRGB accurate work, wide gamut accurate work, and HDR work with this monitor. And it’s not fake HDR. We’re talking genuine, full blown HDR with great brightness, elite contrast and proper color support. Asus is doing this with a 32-inch display, which right now is unique. There are some pro-grade 27-inch HDR monitors with a similar feature set, like the Dell UP2718Q, but at a smaller size....

The laptop market is still dominated by chips like the i7-9750H and now the i7-10750H, but Ryzen has seen AMD snatch back market share on the desktop, so Zen 2 coming to laptops is tremendously exciting. It’s all the more impressive when the Zephyrus G14 we’ve reviewed costs $1,449. That compares favorably with the Razer Blade 15 - a base model with a six-core Intel 10th Gen CPU and an RTX 2060 costs $1,799, and Advanced models with the 8-core i7-10875H start from $2,999, albeit with better screens and GPUs....

Asus first revealed the creator-focused ProArt Display PA147CDV back in September last year. It showed off more of the portable monitor at the Las Vegas event while announcing its availability (in the second quarter) but not the price. Lenovo’s similar ThinkVision M14t mobile display is a fairly hefty $449, so this could be in the same ball park. The ProArt Display PA147CDV connects to a PC or laptop to offer better levels of control compared to a mouse and keyboard combo alone, as well as giving users with limited screen space a little extra room....

On your first usage, the Transformer Pad TF300 will provide a step-by-step setup process that ends by connecting you to your preferred network. Asus has added the AccuWeather widget to the primary (center) screen and can be manually set to a certain location or left on auto and will update as you relocate. By default, Asus uses a landscape theme, though this can be easily changed through the settings. The layout of Ice Cream Sandwich 4....

BattleForge is another demanding RTS game, though you wouldn’t really know it looking at the Radeon HD 5970. When testing at 2560x1600, AMD’s latest card averaged 46fps, making it nearly 2.5x faster than the GeForce GTX 295 and around 90% faster compared to the Radeon HD 5870.

Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare recently put a dozen vehicles to the test. Of them, 11 featured touchscreens and only one – a 17-year-old Volvo V70 – relied on physical buttons from yesteryear. The publication measured how long it took a driver to perform a series of basic tasks while traveling at 68 mph on a closed course. Notably, the drivers were given time to get to know each car and their respective infotainment systems before testing started....

Incredibly, even our multi-GPU setups failed to deliver an average of 60fps when playing on ultra at 2560x1600, with the GTX 780 SLI cards topping our graph at 58fps. To which we should note that while AMD’s GPUs currently have an edge in this title, Crossfire isn’t scaling nearly as well as SLI. As a result, the HD 7970 GHz Edition cards averaged 51fps, while the 7990 was limited to 48fps....

PC gamers can enjoy today’s competitive pricing in CPUs, graphics cards and other PC hardware to build a highly capable gaming machine without having to spend a ton of money (unless you want to). We’re glad to report we continue on a builder’s friendly environment and this extends to gaming monitors. You can now get 144 Hz options for just a few hundred dollars, which has opened up this monitor category to more buyers....

Pricing starts at just under $100. We’ll be covering every board we could find that was selling up to $140. We have another group of 8 motherboards priced from $150 to ~$200 which we’ll look at separately on a mid-range Part 2 follow up feature soon. For now, we have 10 Intel budget boards that we’ll briefly review before going into testing setup notes and benchmark results. The Contenders Asrock B660M-HDV - $95 Starting from the bottom, we have the Asrock B660M-HDV which we’ve already exposed for being a very bad product, so we won’t spend too much time on it....

Geek Squad members are also on site to lend a helping hand, and familiar services like in-store pickup and around-the-clock pickup lockers outside the store persist. Most products in the store will be on display for shoppers to see, touch and try out. When it comes times to buy, customers can use their phone to scan a QR code on a product’s price tag and send the order to the pickup counter....

A paralyzed man has fed himself for the first time in 30 years by remote-controlling robotic arms with his brain. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland designed a brain-computer interface to perform a multi-step action that non-disabled people perform daily. The test subject sustained a spinal injury three decades ago that left him with partial arm movement but almost no use of his fingers. After researchers implanted electrode arrays into his brain, he could manipulate the prosthetic arms to cut a piece of food and guide it into his mouth....

When they first landed, Kabini chips were BGA parts using the Socket FT3 and featured either two or four cores using the Jaguar microarchitecture. Unlike Kaveri desktop APUs which have a dual-channel DDR3 memory controller, Kabini parts are limited to a single-channel DDR3 controller that tops out at 1600MHz. Low-end desktop SoCs typically come soldered to motherboards, including AMD’s 2011 Brazos platform with the E-350 as well as Intel’s Bay Trail-D architecture....

As mentioned previously, we only tested using maximum graphics quality settings, but doubled our tests with AA/AF settings enabled and disabled. The latest official drivers were used for all graphics cards, which saw both Crossfire and SLI working correctly. For measuring frame rates we relied on FRAPS where we recorded 2 minutes of gameplay from the first level at the bridge crossing. This is a very impressive looking scene that made for an ideal place to test these GPUs....

AS SSD Benchmark shows that the m4 mSATA’s sequential read performance is very strong, as was the case when testing with CrystalDiskMark, with the drive achieving speeds on par with most other high-end solutions. Again, like what we found in CrystalDiskMark, the m4 drives fall short when it comes to sequential write performance in AS SSD Benchmark. The mSATA variant sustained a transfer rate of 215.4MB/s, which is quite slow compared to other SSDs....

Crypto.com has published a full security report on its website detailing exactly how much currency was lost as part of the hack. The company also briefly discussed how and when it first detected the hack and listed the steps it has taken and will be taking to better protect its users in the future. For starters, not only were customer funds most certainly lost despite the CEO’s claim to the contrary, but that loss was significantly greater than the $14 million initially predicted by data analytics firm PeckShield....

Two months after being considered one of the worst-rated titles of all time on Steam, Battlefield 2042 remains at the bottom of Steam user ratings despite DICE launching various patches to fix the game. Sure, they brought noticeable gameplay improvements, like better hit detection, nerfs to vehicles, and other welcome additions. However, they don’t pack any groundbreaking new features to impress players. Besides introducing weekly missions, some skins (that people are not happy with), fixes, and QOL adjustments, the game remains mostly the same....

“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was so much farther than the previous most-distant, highest redshift star,” said astronomer Brian Welch from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Welch is the lead author on a paper describing the discovery, which can be found in the March 30 edition of the journal Nature. The previous single-star record holder, a huge blue star nicknamed Icarus, existed when the universe was roughly four billion years old....

The ECS Liva is around 10% slower than the Celeron J1800 when measuring multi-threaded performance and with a score of just 0.78pts, the box is half as fast as the Celeron J1900. Don’t expect to execute any 3D-related tasks on the Liva as it scored just 1002pts in the 3Dmark Cloud Gate test. The older 3DMark 06 benchmark was no kinder to the Liva with its meager 1759fps, almost 50% slower than the AMD Sempron 3850....