Ben Funk
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When GeForce NOW launched, NVIDIA's cutting-edge gaming service supported streaming games that were rendered in cloud data centers to devices running a dedicated app. Over the course of 2020, the company opened up its cloud gaming service to browsers, starting with Chrome on ChromeOS. Adding GeForce NOW support to...
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Overclocking a CPU used to be a pretty simple process: change a bus speed or a multiplier, set an appropriate voltage, and voila: your Celeron 300A was running at 450 MHz, or your 600 MHz Duron was knocking on the 1 GHz barrier. These days with the advent of dynamic boost speeds and optimized frequency and voltage curves, processors intelligently...
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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 from our favorite PC and console games. Today, that tradition lives on with...
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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 Geekbench results database. AMD CEO Lisa Su all but confirmed rumors about...
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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 has one of NVIDIA's latest mobile Ampere...
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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 to outright opposition to the transaction. Arm has a history of licensing its...
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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 end of Flash, its long-lived and much maligned multimedia plugin, way back in...
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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 console brethren trying to play it on their seven-year-old PlayStations and...
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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 its systems with Intel Core processors. With the advent of Apple Silicon Macs...
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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 arrived. So far we've reviewed two such notebooks from...
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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 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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