Ben Funk
Recent posts
Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 - Starting MSRP: $1,218.50 Lenovo's latest AMD-powered ThinkPad has been endowed with Ryzen 6000 for great performance and it is built from sustainable materials too. Great Performance Lightweight At 2.76 lbs Typical Fantastic Keyboard Accurate 16:10 1200p...
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Kioxia XG8: Starting At $XXX A new NVMe controller and the latest 3D NAND combine to make a very solid product for OEM markets. It won't officially come to retail channels, though. Excellent sequential throughput Very good latency and IOPs at high queue depths Solid...
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It wasn't all that long ago that we had our first experience with Intel's 4th-generation Scalable Xeons, code-named Sapphire Rapids, and checked out some live benchmarks. In the demonstration, Intel put its pre-release silicon up against...
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ASUS TUF Dash F15 - Starting MSRP: $879 This NVIDIA RTX Laptop for STEM Students program is very portable, with a nice display, excellent performance, good-enough battery life. NVIDIA's Drivers Accelerate STEM Apps GeForce RTX...
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At the launch of its Ryzen 6000 mobile processors, AMD made some bold claims about power efficiency. While the first systems out of the gate, like the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14, boasted some pretty impressive performance and good battery...
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Lenovo ThinkPad X13s - Starting MSRP: $1085 Lenovo's new Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 notebook brings a big performance uplift over previous models without sacrificing its incredible battery life Big Windows on Arm...
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Machine learning is everywhere. It's an integral part of our smartphones and smart home appliances, running customer service chat bots for big retailers, and hard at work recognizing people and actions in security systems, among numerous...
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While it's only been about six months since Apple introduced the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs that would power the 16-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pro, the architecture within those chips can trace its roots back another full year to the dawn of...
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Artificial intelligence and robotics go together like peanut butter and chocolate. To be truly useful, a service robot needs to be smart enough to perform its assigned tasks, stay out of danger, and not run over its human coworkers in the...
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The USB Type-C connector was devised to be the be-all and end-all of external connectivity. Whether it's carrying DisplayPort video signals, Thunderbolt high-speed data transfers, power delivery, or plain old USB, this port can do just...
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The pixels output by your PC's graphics card are only as good as the monitor that displays them. Attach a shiny new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti to a bargain basement, slow 1080p panel with a refresh rate of 60Hz and you'll likely get what you had...
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By most accounts, Intel's 12th Gen Core processors based on the hybrid Alder Lake mobile architecture have been a smashing success for gaming laptops. From class-leading desktop performance to outstanding mobile prowess, the blue team's Alder Lake family has shown strong gains in...
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At the heart of every autonomous machine, modern industrial robot, and automated manufacturing apparatus is some form artificial intelligence. These things are amazingly complex, too—not only are there models to train, but there are...
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The trend of OLED displays in laptops is typically reserved for flagship devices that cost a pretty penny. Logically, the extreme contrast ratio, total lack of ghosting, and colors that pop are the sort of thing that most PC shoppers...
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Acer's Predator series of gaming displays is one of the longest-running lines of high-refresh monitors with G-Sync in the PC industry. The newest X32 and X32 FP entries really push the bar on what a gaming monitor can be with some pretty...
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Razer warned us at the end of last year that gaming laptops were about to get more expensive. One of the only consistent ways for gamers to get their hands on current-generation GPUs was to buy a whole system, so the laws (and sad...
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2021 was a big year for graphics, despite all the shortages, in large part thanks to dueling upscaling technologies. While NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling gets a lot of attention, Fidelity FX Super Resolution knocked our socks off...
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Lightweight gaming notebooks don't have to be slow: something that has been proven out time and time again by products like Razer's Blade series and ASUS's ROG Zephyrus G14. Because of that, more and more gaming notebooks are thinner and...
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SK Hynix Platinum P41 SSD Hits A Blistering 7,000MB/s Over PCIe 4 And Is Backed By A 5-Year Warranty
SK Hynix isn't necessarily the first name one thinks of when conjuring up images of PCI Express SSDs, but in the years to come it certainly will be. The company is the second-biggest producer of memory on this planet Earth, although its...
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For gamers of a certain age, Sonic the Hedgehog is synonymous with blazing speed, intricate two-dimensional platforming, and of course Blast Processing on the Sega Genesis, which was reborn on the Genesis Mini. However, gamers on the go...
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Amazon has come under quite a bit of fire over the last week due to tornadoes that ripped through the midwest last Friday night. In the wake of those storms, there's been a lot of finger pointing in particular over a warehouse that...
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Ignoring the difficulties securing hardware for a moment, it's a pretty glorious time to play games on the PC. We get our choice of resolutions, frame rates, and detail levels, and if our hardware isn't up to snuff there's some innovative creative technologies available that try to bridge the...
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