Again the 4K-64 thread performance is largely dominated by the Intel SSD while Kingston’s flash drive delivered significantly less read and write performance. When looking at read performance, we found that the read access time actually increased when using the Intel SSD 311 while the Kingston SSDNow V+ 180 was only a modest improvement. Conversely, write access time was vastly improved from 3.399ms to just 0.137ms with Intel’s cache.

Despite its low price - $349 for an unlocked 16 GB model - the Nexus 5 packs top-of-the-line specifications. Internally there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC with a 2.3 GHz quad-core CPU, 2 GB of RAM, LTE radios worldwide (a first for Nexus devices) and a 2,300 mAh battery, complemented by a 4.95-inch 1080p IPS display. Let’s not forget the camera either, which is an 8-megapixel unit and will hopefully prove much more capable than the Nexus cameras of the past....

We’ve come away impressed with the PC version of GTA V. Rockstar has delivered on its promise of giving PC users full control over every aspect of their graphical experience. The game looks breathtaking yet it can still be played maxed out on modest hardware with FXAA. Those using graphics cards with a 2GB memory buffer will be best off using the ’normal textures’ with FXAA. When gaming at 1080p with these settings we found affordable graphics cards such as the Radeon R9 270 and GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GTX 760 or GTX 960 were able to deliver smooth playable performance....

Today, the developer behind a popular game called Axie Infinity announced that it suffered a serious breach of its Ronin cryptocurrency side-chain. The malicious actor used “hacked private keys” to break into Sky Mavis’s Ronin validator network. The hacker stole no less than 173,600 ETH ($586 million as of writing this) and a further $25.5 million in USDC, a stable coin pegged to the US dollar’s value. This hack is not the first cryptocurrency heist, but it is easily one of the largest....

On Sunday, Lapsus$ posted what seemed to be a screenshot of an internal Microsoft developer account to its Telegram channel. Motherboard reports that the Azure DevOps account in question allows developers to collaborate on Microsoft projects, including Bing and Cortana. An administrator for the channel removed the images soon after they were posted, writing, “Deleted for now will repost later.” Bleeping Computer writes that the hackers weren’t finished. On Monday, Lapsus$ posted a torrent for a 9GB 7zip archive that contained source code for over 250 Microsoft projects....

Futuremark 3Dmark Vantage results see the HIS Radeon HD 5850 easily outscoring Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 285 at all three tested resolutions. At 2560x1600 the performance of the Radeon HD 5850 was 19% greater than that of the GeForce GTX 285, and 11% slower compared to the dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2.

As you probably know, processors and most other digital technology are made of transistors. The simplest way to think of a transistor is of a controllable switch with three pins. When the gate is on, electricity is allowed to flow through the transistor. When the gate is off, current can’t flow. Just like the light switch on your wall, but much smaller, much faster, and able to be controlled electrically....

Whether you need to save information for later, collaborate with others, or share troubleshooting information, screenshots are a powerful tool that can be worth a thousand words. In this guide, we’ll show you the best ways to take screenshots with Windows built-in tools and through the best third-party tools for the job. The Basics: Using the Print Screen Key The simplest way to take a screenshot is to press the Print Screen key on your keyboard, which is usually abbreviated as PrtSc....

This year has seen HP’s net revenue fall 0.8% ($63 billion) compared to 2021, while notebook sales were down 23% to $6.4 billion. The company’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue was down 11% to $14.8 billion, while profit was 85 cents per share, both of which beat analysts’ estimates. HP forecasted a lower-than-expected profit for the first fiscal quarter, based on a predicted 10% decline in computer sales. It estimates that labor and non-labor costs related to restructuring and other charges will cost it around one billion dollars over the next three years....

Camera performance is one area of the Ascend Mate 7 that I was quite disappointed with, seemingly marred by both bad lens and bad ISP performance. Even in good lighting conditions, I struggled to get a photo from the Mate 7 that actually looked decent, which is surprising considering the camera hardware itself - most notably Sony’s IMX214 sensor - is solid enough. The easiest way to describe photos from the Mate 7 is “dull”....

Let’s start with the good stuff: The Mate 10 is a better buy than the ‘higher-end’ Mate 10 Pro because it includes a headphone jack, a microSD card slot, and it features a larger, higher-resolution display. Headphone jacks are still essential inclusions on modern smartphones in my opinion, while the screen on this handset is hard to top. It’s big, thanks to its 16:9 aspect ratio, and it’s the first Huawei device to push up to a 1440p resolution, which provides extra clarity at this size....

About a year ago, we covered Intel’s Architecture Day 2021 where they detailed Arc Alchemist GPUs along with XeSS for AI-based upscaling. This was exciting stuff at the time due to an industry-wide shortage of graphics cards, so a new player in the GPU market, let alone from Intel, would have been very welcome. Sadly though, Intel missed that incredible window of opportunity by about a year. Today marks the introduction of the Arc A750 and A770 graphics cards....

MaxxMem² was used to measure the read and write performance of the Core i5 750 processor which utilizes dual-channel DDR3-1333 memory. The Phenom II X4 965 and Core 2 Quad Q9650 also use dual-channel DDR3-1333 memory, so it’s interesting to note that the Core i5 produces a far superior memory bandwidth. In fact, the Core i5 750 was only slightly slower than the Core i7 920 processor, with a read throughput of 11641MB/s and a write speed of 9493MB/s....

Overclocking the Core i7-5775C to 4.2GHz increased the Cinebench multi-threaded score by 12%, though this wasn’t quite enough to beat the Core i7-4790K which at up to 4.4GHz still has a clock speed advantage. This time the overclock allows for just a 6% increase in score as the Core i7-5775C now managed 6644pts, making it slightly slower than the i7-4790K. The 3D Particle Movement test saw a 13% increase in single and multi-threaded performance for the overclocked Core i7-5775C....

Time for a few quick gaming benchmarks before we look at power consumption and temperatures. Here we tested Battlefield 1 using the DX12 API with the ultra quality preset enabled. All the games have been tested using the GTX 1080 Ti and Vega 64 GPUs. Even with a GTX 1080 Ti at 1080p, we are GPU limited in Battlefield 1 using the ultra quality settings. For that reason the 8700K is limited to the same 157 fps as the 7700K....

Intel’s 13th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs are still a few months away from launch, but that hasn’t stopped a Chinese tech site from obtaining and testing an early sample of the i9-13900. It features 8 Performance cores and a whopping 16 Efficient cores, twice that of its predecessor, the i9-12900. Other notable differences are a new microarchitecture for the P-cores, codenamed Raptor Cove, and an increased amount of L2 and L3 cache....

Similar trends are seen in x264 HD Benchmark 4.0: the DH61AG was only slightly slower than the Z68M-ITX/HT and the Core i3-2120 was on par with the AMD A6-3650. When testing with TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress, the DH61AG was 5% slower than the Z68M-ITX/HT while the Core i3-2120 delivered similar performance to the Phenom II X6 1100T.

According to two estimates from 2020, data centers consume anywhere from 1.5% to 2% of the world’s energy and could be consuming as much as 13% within ten years. Around half of that energy is used by the computers themselves and 25% to 40% is used by air conditioning, says the US Department of Energy. Some data centers have made strides to improve their cooling efficiency lately but they’ve been negated by the rising power consumption of new hardware....

Still, the Asus Hyper Express enclosure is a good way for us to test SATA Express performance, or at least we thought so. First Asus sent its Hyper Express to us with a pair of ultra-slow Kingston 120GB mSATA SSDs inside. These drives placed in RAID0 can’t out pace a year old high-performance SATA 6Gb/s SSD, so they are pretty useless for showing off the SATA Express bus. We spoke to our good friends at Crucial and got a pair of M550 512GB MSATA SSDs to help spice things up....

Following on from our last giveaway earlier this year, Good Old Games is just reaching its first anniversary, so we thought it would be a good idea to check back on them to see how things were going (and get more freebies for our readers, of course). Read on as the service’s PR manager, Lukasz Kukawski, comments on the challenges of offering a digital download service for classic PC games, their DRM-free model, and a few other tidbits on the GoG operation....