I have long relied on Logitech 5.1 speakers when playing games. I used the Z-5500s for the longest time before recently moving to the Z906s – both of which I assume audiophiles would frown upon, but they have packed enough punch for me to enjoy many games over the years. Now that I am a father, however, those speakers are too loud for me to enjoy the combined 500 Watts RMS of 5....

Pebble Time generated $20,338,986 from 78,471 backers when its campaign wrapped up in March 2015. The color e-paper smartwatch has reigned supreme as the most-funded Kickstarter campaign ever since… that is, until last month. Sanderson launched a surprise campaign for four novels he wrote in secret during the pandemic. It took less than four days for his campaign to dethrone Pebble Time, leaving more than three weeks for backers to pad the new record....

Skyguide, the air navigation service provider in Switzerland, announced the closure at 6:30 a.m. local time. Global flight tracking service Flightradar24 said inbound flights during the closure were diverted, and flights that normally go over Switzerland were forced to take a detour. A follow-up message posted two hours later said the issue had been resolved, and that operations at the national airports of Zurich and Geneva were resuming. Skyguide didn’t provide any details as to the nature of the technical malfunction but apologized for the incident and said it was doing everything in its power to keep flight delays to a minimum....

When copying our single large file on disk, the DS2413+ was able to provide a transfer rate of 55.4MB/s – slightly faster than the DS713+. However, it was 5MB/s slower than the Thecus N5550 which pushed 60.1MB/s. The DS2413+ led our game copy test with a throughput of 36.7MB/s, allowing it to outperform the DS713+ slightly. Again, we see that the DS413 does well when running our program test. That said, when copying data on disk the DS2413+ was only able to match the performance of the DS413, while it was 1MB/s faster than the DS713+....

While the market might seem barren, there are a handful of options currently or soon-to-be available. Analysts predict dozens of companies will pile into the market with similar devices of every shape, color and creed – ARM alone expects its chips to appear in over 50 tablets this year. Such an upwelling begs the question: Are tablets here to stay, or will the bubble burst in 2011 as quickly as it’s growing in 2010?...

We’ve compiled a comparative table with what we consider are the hottest tablets either currently available or announced so far. We’ll update this guide as new tablets that catch our attention are announced and approaching their release, but with more than a dozen already in the market, this will serve as a starting point for narrowing down your purchase. Click on the arrow to the right to expand and view the full comparison chart (11 tablets) Apple’s iPad remains one of the best options out there, largely due to its relatively mature ecosystem and overall polished operating system....

There has been a recent surge in an uncommon form of cosmetic surgery that adds a few inches to the patient’s height. Dr. Kevin Debiparshad, one of the few doctors who performs the procedure in the US, claims he has up to 50 new patients per month wanting to be a little bit taller. Oddly, a large number of them work in the tech industry. The reason for so many techies seeking the operation might boil down to them having plenty of money but not enough self-esteem....

Opening the TS-879 Pro is easy, which is fortunate for (or maybe because of) those who want to install the optional 10GbE network card. QNAP has gone with a traditional tower case design. A single case lid can be removed to access the internal hardware. With the lid removed, you’ll see an FSP Group FSP350-710UJ 350w power supply and one PCI Express x8 slot for the 10GbE network card. For testing, we installed an Intel Ethernet Server Adapter X520-DA2, which required us to remove the standard bracket as QNAP provides its own custom bracket design to fit the TS-879 Pro....

Amazingly, when going from 1080p to 4K we only see a 23% reduction in performance when looking at the GTX 980 Ti. This could suggest that we are running into some kind of performance bottleneck at 1080p. Again, the GTX 980 Ti was slightly faster when using DX11 and was faster than the Fury X in either rendering mode. Surprisingly, turning MSAA off had almost no impact on performance as the GTX 980 Ti maxed out at 42fps while the Fury X managed 42fps when using DX12....

Last summer, I finished building and fine-tuning a new gaming PC. It was a rewarding, maddening, exciting, terrifying, and ultimately enjoyable experience. Shortly after finishing, I made a list of the ten best things about building a new PC. Note: This feature was originally published on 03/30/2015. We have bumped it because it’s as relevant today as it was before. Part of our #ThrowbackThursday initiative. 1. Telling people you’re building a new PC It’s fun to tell people you’re building a new PC....

When the Apple Watch launched, Apple was selling an average of one smartwatch for every 10 iPhones. The attach rate has steadily grown over the years, reflecting its evolution in consumers’ eyes from a neat fashion accessory that did not add a ton of value to an addition with utility that truly serves a purpose. Indeed, the early Apple Watch struggled to serve a purpose or meet a need. While it did allow users to pay for items with Apple Pay and message / place calls, it would be another few years before Apple truly tapped into the synergy between the Apple Watch and the iPhone....

Serious Overwatch players on a budget will do well with these GPUs. Using the high quality preset the RX 560 and GTX 1050 both managed to keep frame rates over 90fps for the most part and surprisingly the RX 560 was 6% faster than the GTX 1050, an unexpected result for this title which generally favors Nvidia hardware. Doom is possibly the only game of the 30 tested that will favor the 4GB RX 560 over the 2GB model....

Our recommendations for the best 1440p gaming monitors cover four key categories: medium refresh rates, high refresh rates, 32-inch monitors, and HDR options if there are any. As for the actual recommendations, we do tend to discuss and recommend monitors we’ve personally tested and know to be excellent options, or monitors that are very similar to the ones we have tested. It’s always worth going back and checking out the dedicated monitor reviews we produce for more in-depth thoughts on each product....

It’s no secret that the AMD FX series lacks the firepower of Intel’s solutions when it comes to memory bandwidth. Even the Core i3-4360 has a little over 20% more memory bandwidth at its disposal than the FX-8320E. Overclocking the FX-8320E didn’t help either, which we admit to being a little surprised about. Comparing the FX-8320E to the slightly more expensive Core i5-4430 seems like an unfair fight as the Intel processor boasts a 65% memory bandwidth advantage reaching 29GB/s....

Update (Nov 2022): Our current picks remain up-to-date on the different price brackets, with most emphasis on the $300-400 GPU segment where you can finally get really great mainstream graphics cards for gaming at a good price. Meanwhile, on the higher-end, Nvidia has now launched their next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs but they are overly expensive options. Come December, AMD will counter with RDNA3 GPUs at more affordable prices....

A single Titan X provided an average of 90fps at 1440p in Far Cry Primal and adding a second card boosted the frame rate to 106fps, a rather dismal 18% performance gain – not great news for those with 120-144Hz monitors. It seems as though we were running into some kind of system bottleneck at 1440p. Moving to 4K removes that apparent limitation somewhat and sees Titan X SLI scale by almost 90%....

After being a China-exclusive for the past two months, Nubia has just announced the global availability of its new flagship gaming smartphone. The Nubia Red Magic 7 Pro features Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset paired with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 512GB of non-expandable UFS 3.1 storage. All this is kept cool by an integrated 20,000 RPM fan. You also get an impressive 6.8-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080 x 2400, a 120Hz refresh rate, and a 960Hz touch sampling rate, so it should feel fluid and responsive....

Given how little utilization we saw when using Core i7 and even Core i5 processors in our Titanfall 2 test, we were keen to try some lowly dual-core processors. Sadly, however, the game wouldn’t load on our Celeron and Pentium systems. Nothing seemed to happen at all, we hit play in Origin and the client acted as if the game had been launched but nothing happened. In the end we gave up and I’m honestly not 100% sure if it was just a bug with our system or if the game won’t work at all on a dual-core....

Considering that we see much higher frame rates in this game we left the 4xAA setting in place for the tests which saw the GeForce GTX 590 deliver 92fps on average at 5040x1050 making it 11% faster than the Radeon HD 6990. This margin was reduced to just 6% in favor of the GeForce GTX 590 at 5760x1200 and then at the resolution of 7680x1600 everything went wrong for the GTX 590....