Ben Funk
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Recent posts
NVIDIA has released a bevy of GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards for desktop PCs of the last few months, but gaming notebooks have remained chained to the previous-generation GeForce RTX 20 family. That all changes today, however, as the company just announced new GeForce RTX 30 mobile GPUs based on its latest...
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For as long as developers have been writing software code, they've been inadvertently creating bugs. It's when those bugs can compromise the security of a PC that a bug goes from an annoyance to a potential real danger. Security issues with apps can be worked around in the interim, even if it means uninstalling it...
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Last year's Consumer Electronics Show was full of great new tech gear, most of which made its way into retail channels throughout the challenging year that was 2020. We saw AMD launch a two-pronged strike into the notebook and desktop CPU markets that, if not fully in the performance lead, at the very least brought...
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AMD's Ryzen 5000 CPUs are still fairly hard to come by. The company delivered world-beating performance at reasonable prices, which has only driven up demand. However, scarcity and selling out every CPU the company makes hasn't stopped the Red Team from working up a full lineup of Ryzen CPUs for its AM4 platform. We...
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Spinning hard disks are completely out for just about all but the very cheapest of systems. Solid state drives like the WD Blue SN550 we'll be evaluating in this article are here to stay, and continue to make their way into lower-priced, ever more affordable notebooks and desktops. That's no doubt due to the fact that these drives' asking...
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It never fails that when a game launches, players find a way to play it in ways that the developer never intended. Whether it's perfect Marine splits against Banelings in StarCraft II or rocket jumps in Quake III Arena, the best players can execute some incredible moves perfectly. Once again, the inevitable has...
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When you are an app developer in a walled garden, sometimes the walls start to close in. It doesn't even matter if if a useful app has been around for six years and attracted over 400,000 downloads with high user satisfaction in the form of user reviews. Apple has its rules and follows them to the letter, sometimes to...
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Solid state drives are the best way to breathe new life into an older PC or add extra storage to a new build to store games and data that needs to be read frequently. NVMe drives typically top out at 2 TB and most motherboards only have one or two slots. When absolute throughput may not be as important as quick random...
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While they often aren’t as great as CPUs on their own, FPGAs can do a wonderful job accelerating specific tasks. Whether it's accelerating acting as a fabric for wide-scale datacenter services boosting AI performance, an FPGA in the hands of a capable engineer can offload a wide variety of tasks from a CPU and speed...
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It's New Year's Eve but it's also still 2020, the year of the pandemic that we long to put in the rear view. As such, it's very likely a whole lot of people will be celebrating the coming of the new year from the comfort of their own homes. For gamers who have been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there's still...
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It's always risky to give an app access to a social media account. Legit apps can create some fun on social media. For instance, at the end of each year, lots of users on social media love to create collages or video montages of their most popular posts. However, when an app claims to do one thing but in reality...
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Whether it's a Nintendo Christmas ornament or an original Game Boy, we love seeing Raspberry Pi-based retro consoles stuffed into into nostalgic spaces. The ingenuity and effort required to make these contraptions that were not originally designed to do this sort of thing work is pretty astounding. The Game Boy in...
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We wish you all a happy Boxing Day, and hope you've been having a great holiday season. While today has traditionally been a day for standing in long lines at brick and mortar stores, waiting to return gifts that didn't work or didn't fit, it's also possible you've come into some green presents in the form of good ol'...
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Cyberpunk 2077's launch was a little rocky, to say the least. The worst bugs and issues were with last-gen consoles, though the #PCMasterRace was somewhat less affected. While the PC port had (and still has) a little wonkiness to it, it's at least playable. Patch version 1.05 has now hit all platforms, and it brings...
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The battle over privacy online rages between key platform holders who strive to protect their users from monopolistic megacorps that earn their money turning personal data into cash. In this particular case, the platform owner is Apple, a megacorp of its own whose recent App Store policy changes on iOS and macOS force...
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Who's ready for another round of 14-nanometer desktop CPUs from Intel? What if those CPUs have a refreshed Cypress Cove architecture with better IPC? Ah, now I see a few more hands. Get ready, because it seems that the 11th generation of Core processors is on track to launch in January at CES 2021. Fortunately, it...
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If 2020 can be notable for any trends in the tech sector, it's these two: working from home and shunning Intel's x86 processors. Apple famously and most recently gave Intel the boot in favor of its own M1 system-on-a-chip (SoC). However, Apple didn't start this trend. Windows on Arm got a big boost very late in 2019...
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Cyberpunk 2077 has been one of the most hotly-anticipated titles in recent memory. Expectations were so high for this title that it's quite possible that CD Projekt Red could never live up to them. After numerous delays, however, Cyberpunk 2077 launched on December 10 to a mix of high praise and mild disappointment from many reviewers. The...
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The increasing cost of flagship smartphones over the last couple of years has put them out of reach for many consumers. We all knew it was coming in late 2018 when Apple priced the iPhone X at a cool $999. It wasn't long afterward that Android handset makers capitalized on the new normal of flagship phone pricing as well, but not everybody...
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Zen 3-based Ryzen processors showed some really outstanding performance on the desktop when we looked at the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X. In the high-performance computing server space, though, 12 to 16 cores is the bare minimum, and systems only scale up from there. AMD has yet to announce its Zen 3 EPYC CPU platform...
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Sony's PlayStation 5 has been available for about a month now, and quantities have been extremely limited, to say the least. Sony says the PS5 has been its largest console release ever and that absolutely every unit the company has made has been sold. However, so far the only way we've seen inside the console so far...
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In case you've been living under a rock, CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 launched on Thursday, and the game has been a massive success for the game studio. That should come as no surprise, at least based on Steam's active Cyberpunk players. Those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg, however, as Steam doesn't...
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