Posts

News arrived last week that some AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference models are experiencing thermal issues involving GPU hotspot temperatures, or the maximum temperature read by the sensor, reaching as high as 110C. A Reddit user who wrote that their Radeon RX 7900 XTX was experiencing 110C junction temps while playing Modern Warfare II contacted AMD with an RMA request but was denied as the company said this is the normal junction temperature for the card....

During a webinar this week, AMD mentioned goals to get CLX memory technology into consumer products in three-to-five years. The company didn’t outline its plans in detail but made a clear initial mission statement for a technology that has only been mentioned at the enterprise level thus far. Compute Express Link (CXL) is a new open standard the CLX consortium conceived in 2019, leveraging PCIe 5.0 technology to let different system components share memory....

Motherboards are remarkably important though, and full of really cool technology. So let’s go all Grey’s Anatomy, and dissect the motherboard – breaking down its various parts and seeing what each bit does! A simple overview to start with… Let us begin with the main role of a motherboard. In essence, it serves two purposes: Anatomy of a Motherboard Anatomy of a Power Supply (PSU) Anatomy of a Hard Disk Drive Anatomy of a Solid State Drive Anatomy of an Optical Drive Anatomy of a Graphics Card Anatomy of a CPU Anatomy of RAM Anatomy of a Monitor Anatomy of a Mouse Anatomy of a Keyboard Anatomy of a Gamepad...

So let’s prep for theatre, scrub our hands clean, and dig into the anatomy of what we use today to hold onto our trillions of digital bits. We’ve split the Anatomy of a Storage Drive in three parts, all published at the same time to dissect hard disk drives, solid state storage, and optical drives. Follow the links below to read them all, along with our previous published work on the series....

Features like per-app language preferences were already expected to be part of Android 13, and now the announcement of Google’s first developer preview has revealed more under-the-hood and visible changes coming to the OS. The main highlights of this release start off with a new system photo picker designed around user privacy. Like Android’s document picker, this new feature will let the user decide which photos and videos can be accessed by an app while sharing content, instead of the app requiring permission to access all stored media on the device....

On Tuesday, Apple announced that the seventh generation iPod Touch, released in 2019, will be the final iPod model. The company will keep selling the device while supplies last, implying it has discontinued production. The reason is apparent –users can find the iPod’s functionality in any of Apple’s products that followed it. Today’s users don’t view mp3 players as hardware. Instead, it is more like software that can run on many portable devices....

Apple has announced it will hold its next virtual event on Tuesday, March 8. The Cupertino company says it will stream it live on its website at 10 AM Pacific / 1 PM Eastern and through the Apple TV app on Apple devices. The invite sent to media and others today includes the tagline “Peek performance” alongside an augmented reality version of the Apple logo, which appears to be this year’s easter egg....

There is room for coolers that stand up to 90mm tall, which isn’t bad for a slim Mini-ITX case and should be enough to accommodate low-profile high performance coolers such as the Thermalright AXP-100. Much of the internal structure has been constructed from steel rather than aluminum, but it’s very thin steel so weight isn’t much of an issue. We immediately noticed that despite being cramped, the M8 is surprisingly neat and tidy....

The Vision HT 420D’s Microsoft Excel 2013 performance was strong enough to match our Core i3-4130-powered desktop system, though that’s not necessarily surprising since the i5-4200M is almost identical to the Core i3-4130. We’re sure this picture will change in later tests, but Intel’s mobile chip also outpaced AMD’s latest budget APU. Out of the box, the Asrock Vision HT 420D isn’t that snappy in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013, taking 7....

Our small overclock meant that the Radeon HD 5870 could deliver 8% more performance in Unreal Tournament 3 at 2560x1600, with frame rates going from 60 to 65fps. This is a decent performance boost at such an extreme resolution, and even 5fps extra will be noticed here. When testing with Left 4 Dead at 2560x1600, we also see a performance gain of 5fps, which allowed the Radeon HD 5870 to pull ahead of the Radeon HD 4870 X2....

Avatar: The Way of Water will arrive with plenty of expectations. The first entry in the series remains the most successful movie of all time, having made $2.9 billion at the box office from its original release and subsequent re-releases. The sequel has a reported production budget somewhere in the $250 million range. Cameron has never said an exact figure, though he did tell GQ that it was “very f***ing [expensive]....

The keyboard is good but not great. I personally dislike the placement of the Function key in the bottom left corner. Also some of the secondary Function buttons are oddly placed. For example, the volume controls on the Function row keys have the Down arrow on the right and the Up arrow on the left. The same goes for brightness controls, which can be a little confusing. Battery life was good for 2 hours and 44 minutes when sitting idle at the desktop, using 50% screen brightness....

For whatever reason the Athlon X4 860K really struggles in Arma 3 and despite a 4.4GHz overclock the chip managed just 18.3fps. In comparison, the Pentium G3258 delivered 24fps out of the box and 27fps once overclocked, making it 48% faster in overclocked trim. The deficit isn’t quite as bad when using the GTX 960, though the overclocked Pentium was still 22% faster than the overclocked Athlon. For those wondering, the latter saw an average of 80% utilization in the Arma 3 Altis benchmark and 95% at the default operating frequency....

According to anonymous sources and private text transmissions leaked to The New York Times, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was still trying to make cryptocurrency trades after his FTX exchange collapsed. The messages were in an encrypted Signal group chat between several crypto executives, including SBF and Changpeng Zhao (CZ). On November 10, only one day after FTX imploded, Zhao addressed SBF in the group message to stop making trades and warned him that if he continued, he faced extended “jail time....

The HD 5870 outranked the 6950 again by 4fps, placing it alongside the GTX 480. While it’s interesting to see where the cards land amongst their peers, every modern mid-range or high-end product aced the 1920x1200 benchmark. The GTX 580 claimed the top of our graph with 94fps. The higher resolution allowed us to record a greater variation in performance between MW3 and its predecessor as the HD 6950 and GTX 570 were 12% and 9% faster in the newer version....

ChatGPT, the machine learning-based chatbot which is taking the internet by storm, will be persona non grata in New York City public schools. School officials have confirmed that the AI tool will not be accessible through the district network or devices, as they fear students could use it to easily write their essays or to cheat during exams. According to Jenna Lyle, deputy press secretary for New York public schools, there are concerns about ChatGPT’s “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content....

For several decades, scientists and engineers have been shrinking transistors to the point where their tiniest features are only comprised of tens of atoms. Ever since the first integrated circuits in the 1950s, the rate of progress in miniaturizing transistors has followed Moore’s Law, which predicted the density of active components in integrated chips would double every two years. As many of our readers know, progress in this direction has slowed down significantly in recent years....

With the arrival of ReCaptcha 3 in 2018, Google removed the need to pick out specific sections of pictures, decipher barely legible text, or even click a box to prove you weren’t a bot, replacing them with scores based on user interactions. Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare’s version, called Turnstile, works similarly: an invisible process determining whether a site visitor is real. The system, which can be implemented via a free API, uses non-interactive JavaScript code that carries out background checks, including proof-of-work, proof-of-space, checking for web APIs, and various other challenges for detecting browser-quirks and human behavior....