Reviews
With the massive uptick in people working from home due to the current COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing guidelines in place, the load on our broadband infrastructure has skyrocketed. Here are some tips – mostly free – to maximize and optimize your Wi-Fi and broadband performance so that you can get work done...
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It was seven months ago that NVIDIA announced it was working to give Minecraft a makeover, thanks to the ray tracing hardware acceleration hardware built into its GeForce RTX line of graphics cards. Well, unless you've been living under a rock -- or haven't been spending as much time on our news page as you should -- you know that Minecraft...
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We first got a taste of the Intel NUC 9 Extreme, codenamed Ghost Canyon, back at CES 2020 earlier this year. Like previous Intel NUCs, the NUC 9 is a small form factor system that will be sold in a variety of flavors. The NUC 9 extreme will be offered in barebones configurations, where customers must purchase memory...
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It's been nine months since AMD unleashed its Zen 2 processors and, more importantly as it related to this article, the X570 chipset with its PCI Express 4 connectivity, into the world. In the time since then, there hasn't been a torrent of extra-fast flash released by all that many storage vendors; even at launch, we only had Gigabyte's Aorus...
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AMD is further fleshing out its professional workstation graphics cards line-up, with an additional Navi-based offering that targets a more affordable price point. The Radeon Pro W5500 we will be showing you here offers essentially the same feature set as its more powerful cousin, the Radeon Pro W5700, but it's outfitted with a scaled down...
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When we evaluated the late 2019 model of Dell's XPS 13, we thought a few small things kept that ultraportable from achieving complete perfection. That machine shipped with Intel's Comet Lake-U family of processors, which are plenty fast on the CPU side of things. However, they lack the graphics "oomph" of Intel's latest Iris Plus graphics,...
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It’s fair to say that when you think of flagship phones, LG may not be the first brand that comes to mind. Although the company's made some strong devices over the years, including some of Google's Nexus and Pixel-branded phones, the South Korean giant hasn't had the same kind of success in the mobile space as some of its larger competitors....
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We first got our hands on the AMD Ryzen 4000-powered ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 during CES early this year. If you are unfamiliar with the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14, it is a new breed of thin and light gaming notebook, that packs the performance of a much larger desktop-replacement type machine into a slimmer and sleeker...
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Back when the GeForce RTX family launched in late 2018, NVIDIA unveiled its Deep Learning Super Sampling anti-aliasing method, which upscales low-resolution images via machine learning on the GPU's Tensor cores. While the technology was promising, there were some drawbacks. First of all, image quality was typically...
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Doom is a game franchise that needs no introduction. In 1992, id Software laid down the groundwork for first-person shooters with Wolfenstein 3D. When Doom came along a year later, the studio cemented its status among elite American game developers, thanks in no small part to the game's outstanding graphics and...
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Managing Editor Marco Chiappetta's home office is pretty sweet You don't need us to tell you that the Coronavirus (COVID-19) is dominating the news and sits at the forefront of just about everybody's mind. Across the nation, state governments are closing schools, local governments are banning folks from gathering, and leagues are canceling...
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AMD announced its Zen 2-based Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors a couple of months back at CES 2020. The information disseminated at AMD’s press conference, however, was relatively high-level, and as it turns out, wasn’t quite complete. Since the show, we’ve been made privy to much more...
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Samsung's Galaxy S line is the company's premier family of flagship Android phones. Over the years it has been underpinned by a recurring theme of bigger, faster, and prettier, with a ever-growing list of features. This year's Galaxy S20 family is no exception, starting out at a bold 6.2-inch format for the smallest Galaxy S20 5G device, 6.7-inches...
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Over the last few years, integrated graphics in modern processors have seen something of a revival, particularly from AMD's camp. Raven Ridge's Vega-based (Ryzen 3000 series) integrated GPU provides a surprisingly capable IGP solution that lets folks play some of the latest games, albeit with the resolution and detail...
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Over the last few years the USB connectivity has gone through some major changes. We've been through USB 3.0, USB 3.1, and now USB 3.2. And that's not even taking into account all the different generations that were released. Like USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB 3.2 Gen 1, USB 3.2 Gen 2, and now USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. Oh, and don't forget, Gen 4 is coming soon...
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AMD held its Financial Analyst Day today and the company offered up a broad overview of what we should expect in terms of roadmap technologies execution over the next few years. Some of the topics that were touched on included next-generation RDNA 2 Navi GPU architectures, completely new CDNA GPUs optimized for the...
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Samsung has been at the forefront of the solid-state storage market for a number of years now. We’re not just talking about its mainstream internal SSDs either, which have been popular amongst enthusiasts. Samsung offers a wide array of solid-state storage solutions, ranging from miniscule microSD cards, all the way on up to monstrous,...
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It doesn't matter if you're playing Call of Duty, Counterstrike, Fortnite, or StarCraft, there's usually a benefit to having the highest frame rates possible when playing games competitively. That requires a couple of things, namely a very fast PC and a 120 - 144Hz or other high-refresh rate gaming monitor. Today, we'll look at the PC components...
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Gaming on a much larger screen has always had this almost unnatural appeal. Over the years, many enthusiasts likely have tried to hook up a PC to a much larger display for gaming bliss, whether it was a TV or projector via S-Video, component or DVI, or nowadays, the biggest possible LCD one can afford. When LCD TVs...
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Fully-assembled MiSTer FPGA DIY console It seems like it wasn't too long ago that we crowned the Raspberry Pi 4 as one of the best retro game consoles around. Indeed, the Raspberry Pi foundation's latest single-board computer still a low-cost DIY powerhouse. However, retro gamers are picky about one thing that haunts...
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SilverStone has been in the AIO (all-in-one) liquid cooling game since 2013, so the cooler we're reviewing today should be a fairly refined product with years of deep feedback and iteration built in. Back in the day, closed loop, AIO liquid coolers were relatively limited in terms of options, but SilverStone was able...
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Although it was somewhat of a foregone conclusion that AMD would launch a monstrous 64-core / 128-thread 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper processor ever since the initial line-up was announced a few months back, the company made it official at CES 2020 last month. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su took to the stage during a glitzy...
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