The GTS 450 Sonic Platinum measures 19cm long (7.5in) making it a centimeter shorter than the Radeon HD 5770 and 2cm shorter than the Nvidia reference design. The card is so compact that it’s just a bit longer than the PCI Express x16 slot. This is a nice feat though we have also caught wind of plans for a low-profile version of this graphics card from Palit which should also be very interesting....

The reason for this is of course Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1050, which we have to admit is even more impressive than we anticipated. Throughout the review we compared the 1050 2GB with the RX 460 4GB and yet Nvidia’s new budget GPU came out on top delivering almost 10% more performance on average. Compounding the problem for AMD is the fact that the 1050 series consumes less power and overclocked slightly better (assuming 1050 cards with 6-pin power connectors don’t overclock much better)....

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti averaged 60fps in Battlefield Bad Company 2 at 1920x1200, making it 14% slower than the GTX 570 and just 6% slower than the Radeon HD 6950. Meanwhile, it was 9% faster than the old GeForce GTX 470 and 2% slower than the Radeon HD 6870. Splinter Cell: Conviction We relied on Fraps to measure in-game performance recording 60 seconds of the first level, “Merchant’s Street Market”....

According to reliable GPU leaker kopite7kimi, Nvidia might release their GeForce RTX 40 series in early Q3. While just a rumor at this point, it means that we could see an announcement of the eagerly-anticipated GPU lineup as early as July. Such a launch wouldn’t be without precedent. The GeForce RTX 20 Super lineup was made public on July 2, 2019, while the first RTX 30-series graphics cards got announced in early September 2020....

Next week, Nvidia will launch a limited-time closed beta to allow mobile gamers to play Fortnite with built-in touch support via GeForce Now. iOS users will be allowed to play Epic Games’ battle royale through the Safari web browser, while those on Android can do it via the GeForce Now Android app. For Android users, this news might come just as an alternative method to play Fortnite. However, iOS users have been deprived of the game since Apple removed the battle royale from the App Store in August 2020 after Epic added a direct payment option within its title....

We were pleased to find some familiar faces. On display were the GeForce GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060. The very same GeForce 10 Series GPUs released in the past three months, with a twist. These revisions were designed for mobile gaming, a.k.a. gaming laptops. Typically I don’t cover mobile gaming gear and instead stick to the desktop stuff, but this time around they are one and the same, for the most part....

Once fully loaded with data the Arc 100 240GB dropped 11% of its original performance in our single large file copy test. We saw a massive 29% reduction in performance when running our program copy test with the Arc 100 fully loaded – the biggest dip we’ve seen in quite some time. The game copy test showed a 15% drop in performance once the Arc 100 was loaded with data and while that’s still a fairly substantial decline, it’s nothing like what we saw in the program copy test....

The AS SSD Benchmark results of OCZ’s new PCIe SSD were incredible, reaching 1638MB/s in the sequential read test, 111% better than the RevoDrive 3 X2 and 220% above the absolute fastest SATA SSDs. The RevoDrive 350’s sequential write throughput hit 903.4MB/s, which works out to 74% faster than the RevoDrive 3 X2 and 84% quicker than the fastest SATA SSDs. The 4K-64 thread read results were great with the RevoDrive 350 hitting 642....

Evidently, Game Captures were mistaken released to only a handful of PS5 owners. This time it’s for real, as indicated by Sony’s official announcement on Twitter—something it did not do back in January. As we suspected last time, it will be a gradual rollout to reduce the load on servers and give Sony time to adjust to the added traffic. Sony will first introduce it in North, South, and Central American countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the US, and Uruguay....

And at the time, 133MB/s was plenty. No devices could achieve that kind of throughput for a few reasons. First, PATA used the PCI bus which was shared with many other devices, all of which were competing for bandwidth. This congestion on the host bus limited the maximum burst transfer rate and no hard drives could sustain transfer rates of above 80MB/s – even by 2005. However, as early as 2003 desktops were pumping 3GB/s of bandwidth between their system memory and processor, while graphics cards were exceeding 30GB/s....

Even though the initial impression of the yellow hue effect might shock you, your eyes will ease into the change. Once the colors settle in, you won’t want to go back to the regular colors during the night as they difference in eye strain will be significant. We’ll provide brief walkthroughs for some of those operating systems, but F.lux has been around for about a decade now and is available on every major platform (download here)....

An anonymous collector in the San Francisco Bay Area just bought the only known Apple-1 prototype in existence for $677,196 at an auction. While we’ve seen Apple-1 computers sell for similar amounts at auctions before, this one is particularly unique as it’s the prototype Apple co-founder Steve Jobs used as a demo. The Apple-1 released in 1976 and was Apple’s first-ever product. It came with a MOS 6502 CPU running at 1 MHz, a whopping 4KB of RAM, and an optional cassette interface card that allowed users to store programs on audio cassette tapes....

The black front and aluminum chassis gives it a very sleek and professional look. You’ll immediately get the impression that it’s worth quite a lot of money – and you’d be right. Although it’s designed to be a budget NAS with an asking price of $460, the TS-412 is still certainly a luxury item for most home users. Like all good NAS devices, the TS-412 allows drives to be hot-swapped during operation....

The option is called “Reset this PC” which will boot you into a fresh installation of Windows while preserving your documents/files. However do note, your installed programs will be gone (OEM and otherwise). Along with saving and restoring your core data, the utility creates a Windows.old folder of your previous installation, so you can retrieve something if necessary. In our tests we were able to launch some of our old programs from Windows....

Resident Evil 7, along with the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3, will get upgrades for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. The new versions will introduce ray tracing, higher frame rates, and 3D audio. The PS5 version will receive haptic feedback for its DualSense controller. A PC makeover is also coming later this year. Those who already own the games will get the updates for free on all platforms....

Quality games almost unanimously also have great sound and music. Quality games almost unanimously also have great sound and music. Hamstrung by hardware limitations, composers of yesteryear often had to get creative in order to conquer shortcomings associated with the platforms of the time. Here are 10 prime examples where composers did just that… The Legend of Zelda - 1986 - NES A fragment of the Triforce of Wisdom The Legend of Zelda wasn’t the first game I ever played on NES....

Nightdive Studios keeps on remaking good old shooters of yore, even though the next project from the Vancouver developer isn’t what people were expecting. Fans were waiting for Heretic, Quake II, or even some Wolfenstein 3D news, while the company has just announced a Rise of the Triad remaster instead. So Nightdive is renovating another FPS from the 90s, using a “modern” engine with many features and graphics improvements gamers give for granted these days....

On Friday, Russian authorities announced they are blocking Facebook in response to the company’s recent actions against Russian state media. Reports indicate Russia has already blocked multiple social media networks, app stores, and Western news networks. This comes following restrictions Russia had already begun at the end of last week. The head of Der Spiegel tweeted that Russia blocked Facebook, Twitter, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and various app stores. According to numerous reports, Facebook and Twitter are now inaccessible in Russia even through VPNs, but Instagram and the Google Play Store still load (as of writing)....

Following the invasion of Ukraine, Russia got hit with an unprecedented amount of international sanctions. While this has undoubtedly crippled the Russian economy, it also cut off their access to an essential resource in this day and age, semiconductors. Companies like Intel, AMD, and IBM have stopped selling their products in Russia, leaving the country unable to source western chips. While they could design the silicon themselves, manufacturing them wouldn’t be possible as foundries like TSMC and GlobalFoundries also halted sales to Russia and third parties that supplied to Russia....