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According to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the amount of money conned out of people using romance scams has skyrocketed in recent years, hitting a record high of $547 million in 2021. That’s more than six times the reported losses in 2017 and an 80% increase compared to 2020. Victims lost a median average of $2,400 in 2021. That’s a lot of money, but it could have been even higher as those who fall for romance scams often feel too ashamed or embarrassed to report them....

As reported by The Register, pro-Putin newspaper Kommersant writes that the percentage of defective imported chips into Russia before the war was just 2%, which isn’t very good considering how many components are found in today’s electronic items. Now, almost eight months after the country invaded Ukraine, it stands at 40%. Russia blames these failure rates on the pandemic impacting the supply chain and sanctions forcing it to import chips from the Chinese gray market, an area that not only comes with the threat of faulty products but is also unreliable and slow....

Total War Warhammer II is another game that’s far more GPU bound that it is CPU bound when using these high-end processors. As a result, there’s little to talk about here given both the 2700X and 8700K enabled the exact same performance. The Ryzen 7 2700X is surprisingly competitive in Watch Dogs 2 delivering very similar frame time performance. The biggest performance deficit was seen at 720p where the 2700X was 8% slower for the average frame rate, but this margin was reduced to just 2% at 1080p....

The quality of the AMOLED used in the Note Edge is pretty much the same as the Note 4, meaning you’re getting generally fantastic color reproduction on a sharp, high resolution display. The curve can introduce some distortion when content approaches it, but that shouldn’t be a huge issue. It’s interesting to note how the Note Edge handles regular apps and 16:9 content on the curved display. Most applications and games will fill the maximum area allocated to it - 2560 x 1532 - which extends from the left edge to the start of the curve....

Many key aspects of the Note Edge are the exact same as the Note 4. You get the same Snapdragon 805 SoC, which is a performance powerhouse that tops most of our benchmark charts. You get the same 16-megapixel optically-stabilized camera, which delivers excellent photo quality in most situations. You also get the fantastic S Pen, and a high quality, high density display. But the main selling point of the Galaxy Note Edge - the curved Edge screen - actually makes the handset worse....

Now comes the hard part about being king - staying on top. If the Galaxy S III was Samsung’s crowning achievement, the Galaxy S 4 is the first defense of the throne. Arriving on the heels of one rival’s flagship and a few months before the expected unveiling of another’s, the Galaxy S 4 will prove whether Samsung is continuing its trend of advancement or becoming just as predictable as the old guard that it mocked....

Having been based on an mSATA version of the company’s SSD 850 Evo, the T1 shared similar performance to that TLC SSD, and although USB 3.0 doesn’t offer quite as much bandwidth as SATA 6Gb/s, Samsung touted sequential read and write speeds of 450MB/s, which at the time was more than twice that of the fastest thumb drive we’d handled. Upon release the T1 series was $180 for the smallest 250GB model, $300 for the 500GB unit that we tested and $600 for the 1TB flagship....

Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have scored a new record in silicon photonics research, achieving a never-before-seen data transfer of 1.84 petabits per second. Even better, the researchers used a single “computer chip” as light source and a single fiber-optic cable as a transmission channel. The research, authored by Asbjørn Arvad Jørgensen and his colleagues, is aptly named “Petabit-per-second data transmission using a chip-scale microcomb ring resonator source....

Although we recommend gamers go for the more affordable Core i5, we used a Core i7-4790K for testing. Cooling the 88 watt processor is NZXT’s Kraken X31 closed loop liquid cooler, which features a 120mm radiator and fan. To install the radiator and fan we had to remove the front panel and fortunately this is easy to do. At this point we should mention that the mounting hardware for the water block needs to be attached to the motherboard before placing the motherboard into the SG13 as there is no rear motherboard access....

Shortly after that I discovered SimCity 2000. The first SimCity title, which was released back in 1989, was before my time so I never played or laid eyes on the original. At the time SimCity 2000 was incredible, it was extremely detailed and offered what seemed like endless hours of gameplay. Some five years later SimCity 3000 was released (1999) and again much of my childhood was spent playing it....

Power consumption is about where you would expect it to be and the Ryzen 3 1300X should consume around the same amount of power as the Core i5-7500. Keep in mind we are testing in a high-end X370 system with a liquid cooling pump and all the other more extreme gear you can expect in a high-end rig. In a lower specced system you will see better numbers, so keep that in mind....

The good news is that Sony’s Android skin has matured significantly since I last looked at it on the Xperia Z3. The general design of the skin is much closer to stock Android than anything the company has produced before, while still retaining some signature Sony features that fans of their phones have come to enjoy over many years. Some of the most awful aspects of Sony’s Android skin on the Xperia Z3 have been completely removed on the Xperia Z5....

Vastflux was first detected by Human Security last year while working on a separate threat. It worked by targeting a single advertising slot rather than a user’s entire phone or an entire app. Once the group won an ad slot via advertiser auction, they would insert malicious code allowing them to stack multiple video ads on top of each other. The end user would only see a single video ad but behind the scenes, the attacker was actually feeding them up to 25 video ads stacked on top of each other....

Disabling HBAO+ earned up to a 10fps performance increase at 1680x1050, with the GTX 670 being 9% faster, 12% for the HD 7950 Boost and 18% on the HD 7970 GHz Edition. HBAO+ is a new Ambient Occlusion technology designed by Nvidia, so it’s no surprise that the technology favors GeForce cards. As a result, playing without HBAO+ gave AMD cards a massive performance bump, so much so that the HD 7970 GHz Edition came within 1fps of the GTX Titan....

Intel Core i5 661 Processor EVGA H55 Motherboard Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3 2x 2GB 64GB Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD Corsair Obsidian 800D Chassis BFG 550w Power Supply Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Despite the fact that a 2.5" drive doesn’t really fit securely in this enclosure, I still installed a 64GB WD SiliconEdge Blue SSD in it as I wanted to test the upper bandwidth limits of the interface. The enclosure would be able to run any standard spinning hard drive at full speed, but the solid state drive should give us an idea of where bandwidth tops out....

Motherboard, Processor, Memory With updated processors from Intel and so many affordable enthusiast graphics cards on the menu, it’s a great time to start a new Luxury build. In our review of Intel’s latest architecture, the Core i7-4770K stayed one step ahead of Ivy Bridge-based parts with the biggest gains in encoding where you could see up to 13% more performance with the fourth-generation part. If you’re undecided between Haswell and Sandy Bridge-E, the former should be faster for anyone who doesn’t need more than eight threads, it uses less power and it’s much cheaper, while the latter is technically the fastest, most feature-packed platform available if you’re willing to pay for it....

On the computing side, LG was showing a small group of netbooks, all of which we were told will only be sold in Asian markets except for the readily available LG X120 which sells through Sprint when coupled with a 3G data plan. There was also a very interesting showcase of LG’s Network Monitor running 31 users out of a single PC. We later found this is not an entirely homegrown solution but it works in combination with NComputing’s virtual desktop technology....

The problem is that your current case, like most cases that can fit the components you have, may not look like something that should be on a desk either: in tower-style cases, I/O connectors in the middle of the front panel are all but gone, which may require you to stand up in order to use them. Depending on what part of the desk your PC stands on, it can also fall over if you bump into its upper half....

Fewer GPUs reach the 60fps cap when playing at 1920x1080. From AMD, gamers will require the R9 290 or 290X for a constant 60fps, while Nvidia users will get away with the GTX 780. Falling just short of 60fps was the GTX 770 with 58fps, followed by the HD 7970 GHz Edition with 54fps. Again we see a heap of mid-range AMD cards all bunched together as just 3fps separates the R9 270X and R9 285, with another three GPUs squeezed in-between them....

The Smart Monitor M8 also has an integrated SmartThings hub for controlling compatible smart home devices. Owners can connect wirelessly to a Windows PC or Mac, mirror smartphone content, and run Microsoft Office 365 applications via a virtual machine without requiring a computer connection. It also comes with features such as Samsung DeX, Apple AirPlay 2, Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 4.2, 400 nits of brightness, 2.2-channel 5-watt speakers with two tweeters, and HDR 10+ compatibility....