Ben Funk
Recent posts
While Creative Labs has expanded its product offerings into other arenas, the company has never waivered from its core competency: PC and home audio. The Sound Blaster maker has almost always offered speaker systems to pump out the audio...
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AMD's Zen 3-based EPYC CPUs might be the worst-kept secret in all of technology. Details about these CPUs have been leaking onto the internet via Twitter since late last year. More recently, the 32-core EPYC 7543 made itself known via the...
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Alienware's m15 series of notebooks has typically impressed us, thanks to the family's performance and unique good looks in a relatively svelte mobile package. Performance always hinges upon having the latest platform hardware, so perhaps it's no surprise that the laptop we're looking at today...
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Back in September, NVIDIA and SoftBank confirmed the chip giant's intentions to acquire Arm for $40 billion. In the intervening months since the announcement, tech giants and governments alike have shown a range of reactions from hesitance...
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Everyone was afraid of the "Y2K bug" that would leave un-patched systems in a quandary, but January 1, 2000 came and went with hardly a whimper. Instead, it's January 12, 2021 that will live in infamy, perhaps. Adobe announced the coming...
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It's been kind of painful to watch Cyberpunk 2077 stumble and flounder since it launched on December 10. While the game is a blast when it's working right, bugs and glitches galore have caused a torrent of outrage, particularly from our...
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One of the more pragmatic aspects of Intel-powered Macs was their ability to run alternative operating systems, including Windows and Linux, without much effort at all. Apple even included a Windows preparation tool, Boot Camp, on all of...
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Intel's Tiger Lake mobile platform came out of the gate swinging, with excellent performance and improved power efficiency. The early Core i7-1185G7 development platform we evaluated set several mobile processor records in our benchmarks, and retail notebooks were just as strong when they...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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