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Recently there has been a surging demand for drives that sacrifice space for speed and more affordable price tags, and manufacturers have been racing to deliver just that. The cheapest offering in our last round-up over a year ago came from OCZ. Priced at $270, the OCZ Agility 120GB cost almost twice the $150 limit we have imposed on the SSDs featured in this article. With that price cap we’ve been able to include more than half a dozen drives using controllers from the likes of JMicron, Intel, Toshiba, SandForce and Indilinx....

While the Silverstone SG10 provides quite a lot of headroom supporting up to 165mm as we just mentioned, this is hardly a common feature. The older SG04, for example, supported a maximum cooler height of 82mm, while the Thermaltake Armor A30 went as tall as 90mm. This rules out most traditional tower style heatsinks, leaving users to seek out a decent low-profile CPU heatsink. While there are plenty on offer, many are no better than the stock coolers that ship with AMD and Intel CPUs....

The proof of concept is intended to increase renewable power generation and reduce water evaporation in canals. TID, in partnership with the state of California, the University of California Merced and development firm Solar AquaGrid, also expects to experience water quality improvements and lower maintenance costs through reduced vegetative growth in the covered canals. The state also said putting panels over water instead of land can help keep them cooler by making them more efficient....

Chaos is a novel malware written in the Go programming language with pretty unique capabilities. Discovered and analyzed by Black Lotus Labs, the research arm of security company Lumen, the new threat can infect a plethora of computing platforms both on the software and hardware front. There are more than a hundred infected machines as of now, a malicious network that could be leveraged to spread other threats and malware strains as well....

id Software’s Quake II received the ray tracing treatment in 2019, and similar support came to Doom Eternal last year. Now, it’s time for the game that started it all to get some new eye candy. Modder sultim_t has added real-time path tracing support to the PrBoom source port of the 1993 classic. The necessary source code and playable build can be downloaded over on GitHub, along with instructions on how to get up and running....

Ryzen is rather competitive in Overwatch at 1080p and in fact does much better with the GTX 1080 than it does Vega 64, which is something we’ve seen in other DX11 titles. Moving to 1440p the margins close up as the game becomes primarily GPU bound and here the R5 1600 delivers the exact same experience as the 7700K. We again see more competitive results from the Ryzen CPU, this time when testing with Rainbow Six Siege....

Corsair has introduced two new gaming monitors, the Xeneon 32UHD144 and Xeneon 32QHD240. Both feature 32-inch Quantum Dot IPS panels with 100 percent sRGB, 100 percent Adobe RGB, and 98 percent DCI-P3 color gamut coverage. They also support AMD FreeSync Premium (with Nvidia G-Sync compatibility) and come with a VESA DisplayHDR 600 certification, meaning they can deliver a peak brightness of at least 600 nits while displaying HDR content. Also see: Corsair Xeneon 32QHD165 32" Monitor Review...

We haven’t had a good reason to talk in-depth about CPU prices yet, we’ve done it for GPUs with fluctuating prices that were all over the place, but for a long time CPU prices have stayed fairly consistent. Intel and AMD would launch their new products at a certain MSRP, and then over time prices would drop slightly until the next generation was ready to launch. However this isn’t what’s happening right now, at least on Intel’s side....

Those looking to spend around $150 had the option of getting either the Phenom II X4 925 or the Core i3 540. Depending on the user’s needs we felt that either processor would get the job done, as they offer similar levels of performance, though we did lean towards the AMD Phenom II X4 for the extra pair of cores. Then as we approached the bottom end it seemed to be all AMD and we believe that for little over $100 the Phenom II X3 720 is the best option here....

TerraUSD (UST), the 11th largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is an algorithmic stablecoin that uses a set of smart contracts to ensure its value stays as close to $1 as possible. But after hovering at around $1 for about a year, it crashed to 29 cents yesterday, plunging its market cap from more than $45 billion to less than $5 billion. It has since rallied to 62 cents, but that’s still far from $1....

“Rather than simply adding more airflow, we wanted a case that dynamically provided appropriate airflow for the situation in real-time,” says CyberPowerPC creative director Nam Hoang in the Kinetic Series launch video below. CyberPowerPC told Tom’s Hardware that the vents are controlled by 18 servos connected to a post and collar inside the chassis. When the system’s internal ambient temperature is low, the vents stay mostly closed to keep noise down and dust out, but when temperatures start to get toasty, they open to increase airflow into the chassis....

Much of the ECC versus Non-ECC argument comes down to speed versus reliability. The reliability argument at least is easy to validate; over the last 12 months we’ve seen a tiny .09% failure rate with ECC memory compared to a .6% failure rate for standard memory. As for performance, we’ve actually tested RAM performance in the past and found that faster memory does not always equate to better performance since the RAM is often not the bottleneck....

Monitor LCD panels are made up of many layers, including a backlight, polarizing filters and the liquid crystal layer. It’s this liquid crystal layer that determines the intensity of light let through from the backlight, and in what colors, whether red, green or blue. To control this intensity, a voltage is applied to the liquid crystals, which physically moves the crystals from one position to another. How these crystals are arranged and how they move when voltage is applied, is the fundamental difference between TN, VA and IPS....

NASA’s InSight lander is on pace to end science operations this summer and become fully inoperable by December. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on May 5, 2018, and touched down on the Red Planet less than nine months later. The lander was designed to detect seismic activity on the rocky planet. To date, InSight has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes – the most recent being a magnitude 5 quake that occurred on May 4....

But expanding functionality through these add-ons can have some downsides of their own. For example, most of them are not cross-platform, so if you decide to try another browser your favorite extensions might not be available. There’s also the possibility some of them will break with every major release of your browser, or even worse, poorly coded ones can significantly slow down your browser’s performance. Enter ‘bookmarklets’ – small applets stored as an URL that are designed to add 1-click functionality to a browser or web page....

The Epic Games Store is hosting its biggest sale ever. From now through January 5, you can score deep discounts on hundreds of games. Highlights include half off Madden NFL 23, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Grand Theft Auto V: Premium Edition and Cyberpunk 2077, a full 67 percent off Far Cry 6 Standard Edition, Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Standard Edition and Anno 1800 Standard Edition, and as much as 80 percent off select titles such as Ghost Recon Breakpoint Standard Edition....

Ethereum developer Tim Beiko recently tweeted that the cryptocurrency won’t be moving to proof-of-stake in June as expected. Despite the delay of a few months, he maintains that the switch is nearing. Ethereum’s current proof-of-work model has made GPUs its primary mining tool. This has pushed up the demand for them and exacerbated the global semiconductor crisis’ effect on their prices. During the worst of it last year, some GPUs were going for over double their MSRP....

Memory bandwidth performance of the Pentium J2900 remains the same as the Celeron J1900, which is around 60% more than the Athlon 5350. The Pentium J2900’s L1 cache performance is rather weak, much like the Celeron J1900’s. However, its L2 cache performed relatively strong, providing almost 50% more bandwidth than the Athlon 5350.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced a crackdown on online-learning platforms that may be excessively gathering student data. It says that this data collection is often mandatory, leaving parents with no recourse but to accept it. “Students must be able to do their schoolwork without surveillance by companies looking to harvest their data to pad their bottom line,” said Samuel Levine, the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection director....

The overclocked GTX 670 garnered 13% more performance (9fps) in Just Cause 2, enough to push it over the dual-GPU HD 6990. The card saw an 18% (9fps) boost in AvP, enough to overtake the GTX 580, GTX 580, HD 7950 and match the HD 7970. Battlefield 3 also witnessed an 18% (12fps) gain, allowing the GTX 670 to surpass everything tested, including the GTX 590.