With the system at idle the Silverstone Fortress FT04 had no trouble keeping the hard drives and graphics card extremely cool. The passively cooled Prolimatech Megahalems heatsink on the other hand just wasn’t getting enough direct air-flow with the 3.5" drives in the way and the GTX 580 was blocking most of the air from the top of the case. As a result the Phenom II X6 1100T ran with an idle temperature of 47 degrees which is very high....

The atomic clock was introduced in 1967 as a precise measure of the passage of time. It uses the vibrations of radioactive atoms and is accurate up to 1/15 billionth of a second per year, depending on the element used. Unfortunately, the Earth’s rotation is not nearly as consistent as it varies and decays. So in 1972, timekeeping authorities introduced the leap second to keep Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and the standard day/night cycle in sync....

Highlights include half off Ghostwire: Tokyo and Back 4 Blood, a respectable 60 percent off Deathloop, Far Cry 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2, a full 75 percent off Borderlands 3 and NBA 2K22 and Mortal Kombat 11, and 80 percent off Mortal Kombat 11 and Need for Speed Heat. Two of Quantum Dream’s classic action-adventure games, Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain, are 60 percent off, yours for $5.99 and $11....

Following that performance review, many readers reported seeing much lower performance than what was shown with the 5800X3D, and you were of course using a slower processor, but now we’re going to get a good look at just how much difference your CPU can make when it comes to frame rates in Spider-Man Remastered. For this CPU benchmark test we’ll be using the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and Game Ready display drivers 516....

You can access your own Steam year in review by going to the storefront via the website or desktop app, clicking on the New & Noteworthy tab at the top, and selecting the Steam Reply 2022 option. Or you can use this direct link: https://store.steampowered.com/replay/. The summary starts with the year’s game-playing highlights. This writer spent most of their Steam time split between Days Gone and Dying Light 2: Stay Human, both of which I was determined to finish even as their appeal started to wane, Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition....

Motherboard recently requested incident reports from multiple police departments that specifically mentioned Apple AirTags. It received 150 documents involving the device spanning the last eight months. One-third were stalking-related. Most were from women, with only one man reporting his ex had used an AirTag to stalk him. The device was planted in the victim’s car in half the incidents. Most of the other reports were robbery- and theft-related. Although these stats seem to show a significant amount of incidents involving AirTag stalking, it is something that has not thoroughly been looked into before....

Although it’s true Link Aggregation can boost read and write performance to those rates under certain circumstances, this extra headroom is often unavailable. In fact, the DS1512+ and other Atom-driven NAS devices are only likely to exceed Gigabit Ethernet’s 1.0Gb/s limitation when maybe two or three clients are transferring large 1GB+ files. Atom chips simply lack the horsepower to sustain such high speeds when working with multiple small files, as demonstrated by our game and program tests....

Synology’s DSx15 series began rolling out about a year ago now with initial models including the affordable DS415play, a multimedia NAS designed to allow home users to centralize their videos, photos, and music in one place. The DS415play was built around Intel’s Atom CE5335 and to date the majority of the DSx15 series has an Atom SoC inside – the DS415+, DS1515+ and DS1815+ for example all feature the Atom C2538....

As was the case with the large single file download test, we find that the DS216+ has no trouble maxing out a single Gigabit network connection when uploading the same large file. BTRFS sacrifices write performance in favour for greater data integrity and this is why the DS216+ performs slightly better with the older and frankly less desirable EXT4 file system. Moving over to the BTRFS we see that the DS216+ is again able to deliver similar performance to the DS716+ as well as the older DS713+, making it one of the fastest two-bay NAS devices tested....

We recorded similar trends when measuring write performance, though Link Aggregation had less of an effect this time, as the DS2411+ couldn’t fully utilize the available network bandwidth.

The game copy evaluation is a mixture of small and large, compressed and non-compressed files (1336 files weighing 2.70GB). When working with multiple smaller files the throughput of these devices is well below 100MB/s, rendering Link Aggregation pointless. The Synology DS1511+ remains the fastest NAS device tested while the DS2411+ was a close second with 58.2MB/s. The cheaper DS411+ wasn’t far behind at 53.2MB/s while our Core 2 Duo test system managed just 43....

A modder named Luke Ross (pseudonym), who has been making a decent living by creating mods that allow regular games to run through VR, has received a cease and desist from Take-Two Interactive. The game publisher recently filed a copyright claim with Patreon demanding that Ross remove content related to Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Mafia Definitive Edition. The problem is that T2 did not specify which content violated its copyrights....

Editor’s Note: Guest author Jonathan Goldberg is the founder of D2D Advisory, a multi-functional consulting firm. Jonathan has developed growth strategies and alliances for companies in the mobile, networking, gaming, and software industries. The table below details the performance of a dozen of what we consider typical semis stocks in the hopes of gauging which sectors have felt the pain of this cycle and which may still have more downside....

Motherboard, Processor, Memory Our last budget choice, the Pentium G4600 was impossible to beat last year. Now replaced by the Pentium Gold G5400, it doesn’t bring anything new to the table aside from a 200MHz bump in frequency. Intel’s CPU does hit the mark on pricing but the integrated graphics leave much to be desired if you don’t want to spend extra money on add-in graphics. With its Vega 8 integrated GPU and true quad-core status, the slightly more expensive Ryzen 3 2200G is a superior option....

Motherboard, Processor, Cooler, Memory Intel recently updated its LGA1150 platform with a Haswell refresh bringing slightly faster processors and more importantly the new 9-series chipsets. The Core i5-4670K was previously available at $240 and truth be told the 4790K is essentially the same CPU, hence the same price. Intel has bumped up the frequency by just 100MHz but that doesn’t really matter since this is an unlocked K-series SKU. Want to see how the Enthusiast’s PC performs?...

For enthusiasts, the MLC-based Vertex 2 will come in 50, 100, 200, and 400GB capacities and use the SandForce SF-1200 controller. The drive is capable of read and write speeds of 270 and 260MB/s, respectively, and 9,500 4KB random write IOPS. OCZ will also have a Vertex 2 Pro that pairs the enterprise-grade SF-1500 controller with MLC memory for up to 280MB/s reads and 270MB/s writes, and an impressive 19,000 IOPS rating at 4K random writes....

Unfortunately, the scaling seen in DOOM was rather sad - we saw a meager 21% increase in performance when adding a second Palit GTX 1080 GameRock PE graphics card. Up until recently, SLI didn’t work at all in Tom Clancy’s The Division, so seeing the performance scale by up to 65% isn’t too bad, considering. This also meant that the game went from a slightly choppy 43fps to a silky smooth 71fps at 4K....

When it comes to encoding with HandBrake, the quad-core FX-8320E isn’t nearly as potent as one might expect. With just 125.1fps it was 26% slower than the dual-core Core i3-4360 and 45% slower than the Core i5-4430. Overclocking the FX-8320E only improved performance by 8%, still 20% slower than the Core i3-4360. If it weren’t enough for the FX-8320E to be 26% slower than a dual-core processor in this test, it had to consume the same amount of power to achieve that bummer of a result....