Ben Funk
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Apple's 4th generation iPad Air has a lot going for it. The A14 Bionic SoC at the heart of the device offers great performance in a wide variety of apps and games, and the 10.9" Liquid Retina display looks great under many different conditions. In fact, for some use cases, the iPad Air could rival a full-fledged...
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The original Nintendo Game Boy and its follow-up Game Boy Color weren't the first portable video games. However, they were incredibly successful and spawned many successful franchises, like Pokemon and Super Mario Land. For millions of Gen X and Millennial gamers, it was their first exposure to the wonders of video...
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The Surface Go 2 took all the good looks of Microsoft's more expensive tablet + keyboard combinations and brought the price point down to a very affordable level. That machine has been hanging around since its release in the middle of last year, so it's getting a little long in the tooth. If rumors pan out to be true...
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Intel's high-performance Arc family of graphics architectures resemble an adventuring party from tabletop role-playing lore or a classic turn-based computer RPG. The Intel Arc Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid delegation set off across a barren wasteland where GPUs are scarce to take on the mighty Dragon...
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Since its release, NVIDIA's Broadcast effects suite has been enhancing camera video and microphone audio for streams and teleconferencing tools using the company's machine learning hardware baked into the GeForce RTX series of graphics cards. Back when it was just RTX Voice, we found the AI-assisted cleanup tools did...
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More powerful, more capable and feature-rich -- the current crop of gaming laptops with the most recent CPU and GPU platforms can offer a major upgrade to the enthusiast laptop experience. That's especially true these days with discrete graphics cards being hard to come by and marked up by factors of two to three...
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Windows 11 is coming just about six weeks from now, on October 5th -- at least, on new PCs. One of the biggest pieces of application-related news was the ability to run Android apps directly in Windows. Thanks to Intel, Android apps compiled for Arm64 would still be able to run on x86 PCs directly from Amazon's App...
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Sony's PlayStation 5 launched in November of 2020 somewhat incomplete. While the hardware had an M.2 slot to expand the internal storage needed by PS5 games, the software didn't know what to do with it out of the box. Earlier this year though, Sony opened up a beta program with early access to firmware that can use that slot, and we managed...
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Windows 11's Insider Preview builds keep coming fast and furious. Just a couple of weeks ago, the next version of Windows made the shift from developer builds into beta, indicating that Microsoft thinks that it's time to let more people in. The Beta Ring gets fewer builds that have purportedly undergone additional...
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Laptops are complicated beasts. There's a whole PC jammed into the base of a foldable computer and as such thermal management is a huge challenge. To get the best performance out of a CPU or GPU requires giving it as much power as possible without overheating the innards or making the outside of the system too hot to...
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It seems that just about everyone's excited about Valve's Steam Deck, the tiny portable computer with big PC gaming aspirations. Right out of the gate, just securing a position to pay for one was a hot commodity on online marketplaces like eBay. That doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon, either. Already...
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While it may not have been the first 3D accelerator to market, the 3dfx (then, 3Dfx) Voodoo Graphics PCI was the add-in card that kickstarted the 3D gaming revolution. The company made its name on Voodoo graphics, but ultimately could not weather the storm of speedy cards that could process both 2D and 3D graphics...
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Halo Infinite is the first brand new Halo installation since 2015, when Halo 5: Guardians came to the Xbox One. To say there's a lot of hype around the much-delayed return of Master Chief after apparently going rogue in the previous installment, ultimately being recovered by Spartan Locke. Apologies for the spoilers...
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17-inch laptops are becoming somewhat of a rarity these days. Every manufacturer has a couple of models in their line-up, but they don't get a ton of attention because they're typically quite bulky and harder to tote around than sleeker, smaller machines. However, the system we'll be showing you today isn't just any run-of-the-mill 17" notebook....
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If you've been following New World, the first title out of Amazon's PC game development, you'll know it's been a bit of a bumpy ride. Something about the game was reportedly causing certain GeForce RTX 3090 cards to keel over and die. Reports were pouring in all over Reddit of graphics cards from a variety of...
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Mobile workstations come in all shapes and sizes. Recently we took a look at the HP ZBook Fury 15 G7, a powerful mobile workstation with ISV-certified drivers that could replace many desktops, but in a more portable form factor. Many engineers need the type of power and reliability offered by a machine the size of the ZBook Fury 15 G7,...
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A lot can happen as a system is under development, especially with a relatively new family of hardware. Maybe the drivers and BIOS aren't quite tuned for the best possible performance or power efficiency, and sometimes early reviews aren't completely indicative of what a user will experience when they first purchase a laptop, even a new one...
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Water-cooled graphics cards aren't exactly new. For years, enthusiasts who build their own custom liquid cooling loops have incorporated blocks onto their GPUs to keep the heat at bay without producing a ton of noise. In recent years, some manufacturers have released cards with their own closed-loop AIO coolers...
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Windows 11 is coming this holiday season, although upgrades from Windows 10 won't happen until much later. We're sure that users who are hungry to get their hands on Microsoft's latest OS will be able to do so fairly quickly, though. That's especially true considering Windows 10 Insider Previews have all but dried up...
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In the spring, Id Software and Bethesda announced that they would bring real-time ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 to the Vulkan-powered Doom Eternal. When we reviewed thsi latest Doom title, we found that it was already pretty stunning graphically while running really well on all kinds of different hardware. High performance and a bevy of...
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Just last week, many Western Digital MyBook Live owners lamented the fact that their personal cloud was being attacked and wiped remotely. Those storage devices were older and hadn't been supported since 2015. As a result, those NAS products proved to be a lesson in not putting unsecured and unpatched devices on your...
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We were really impressed with Intel's latest high-performance notebook CPUs from the Tiger Lake-H family when we got to try them out in a test platform. Intel arguably produced the single fastest x86 notebook CPU on the planet, with blistering single-threaded speed and heavy multi-threaded prowess. However, we were itching to get our hands...
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