Microsoft continues to add missing features to Windows 11 and will need to do so for quite some time if it wants more Windows 10 users to move to the latest OS. Although the company’s latest Windows Insider update doesn’t exactly set the world on fire, like making the Start menu more configurable or bringing back basic drag and drop functionality to the Taskbar, improvements to the OS’ native apps are still a welcome addition that make it more useful overall....

Android Auto’s new interface is set to arrive later this summer. Its biggest change is a new split-screen look that simultaneously displays windows for navigation, messaging, and audio control. This will let users look at a navigation map, control their music or podcasts, and communicate with contacts without switching between different apps. Google chose those three functions for multitasking after feedback indicated they were the most popular. These windows can rearrange to adapt to the different screen orientations in various cars....

The report from MyDrivers states that efforts to shift excess Nvidia and AMD graphics card stock by reducing their prices aren’t going as well as hoped. Citing the Taiwan Economic Daily and sources from the country, the publication claims a new round of price cuts will be implemented in September, one that will see deductions even larger than those implemented throughout August. It’s ironic that after consumers spent so long looking at expensive, out-of-stock graphics cards with sadness, the companies and retailers selling them are now being forced to keep dropping their prices due to excess stock....

Although nothing matched the GTX 670’s price-to-performance ratio, the $400 entry fee remained a steep one. Gamers who wanted to spend less were left with the $230 HD 7850, the $300 HD 7870 or a card from Nvidia’s last-gen lineup. Naturally, it would only be a matter of time before Nvidia tried to fill this gap with tons of hearsay about a GeForce GTX 660 Ti in the pipeline for a mid to late summer launch....

The documents, allegedly from a Chinese graphics card manufacturing factory, were spotted on Baidu by @harukaze5719. They appear to show four production slots for the RTX 4090 alongside an August 16 date, probably the production start date. The last column showing the date they will be ready is cut off, though it’s possible to see that the month is down as August. There are some specs in the document. The RTX 4090 is listed as using the AD102 GPU and 24GB of VRAM, along with four display outputs consisting of three DisplayPorts and one HDMI....

The RevoDrive 350 maxed out at just 1176MB/s in the Atto Benchmark read test and it was slower than the SSD 840 Pro and SanDisk Extreme II when working with 32K files and smaller. The Atto Disk Benchmark write results were far more impressive than the read at 1643MB/s, and the RevoDrive 350 was the fastest SSD with 644MB/s when testing with 32K data.

The Trion 150 offers a noticable performance boost over the previous model and is considerably faster than the Crucial BX200. Unfortunately it is still 18% slower than the Samsung SSD 850 Evo and therefore much slower than the leading MLC based SATA SSDs. The Trion 150 again provides a reasonable performance gain over the Trion 100, this time by 33% courtesy of its 117MB/s throughput. Despite this it was still 40% slower than the Samsung SSD 850 Evo....

A minor performance gain is seen in our game installation test as the Trion 150 shaves just a few seconds off the time previously set by the Trion 100. Therefore, while the Trion 150 is two seconds faster than the Trion 100, it is 10 seconds slower than the 850 Evo. This time the Trion 150 was just 1 second faster than the previous model, while it was 2 seconds slower than the 850 Evo....

While the Vertex 2 Pro started off very strong in the read test letting the original Vertex catch up, for the write test it does the opposite. When working with 1kb and 2kb data there was very little difference between the two drives. Jumping to 8kb data samples, the Vertex 2 Pro became 2.5x faster than the Vertex. The write performance when working with 32kb and 128kb data was also impressive as the Vertex 2 Pro led by by 46% and 41% performance margins....

With a write throughput of 301.3MB/s the Vertex 3 was 17% faster than the Samsung 470 256GB, which is always fast in its own right. When compared to the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB it was 35% faster – a significant performance jump. When running the CrystalDiskMark random 512K test we still found the Vertex 3 to be extremely fast, particularly when measuring read performance. Here it was 44% faster than the Crucial RealSSD C300 and more than twice as fast as the old Vertex 2 Pro....

Information and comparison website Merchant Machine delved into the number of countries and states that want a cashless society. This was determined by using an AI sentiment analysis tool that calculated the proportion of negative and positive geotagged tweets on the subject—not the most accurate method, but it still gives us an idea of public opinion. Focusing on the US, where four in ten people now say they don’t carry cash at all, only Alabama and Delaware were the states that felt more strongly in favor of keeping paper and coin money....

My Core i7 came overclocked to a stable 4.8 GHz out of the box but your results may be different due to binning. The 1080 Ti GPU was also overclocked to +130MHz on the core and +120MHz on the RAM. This is an impressive feat for a computer of this form factor. Since the case is so open, you can hear a lot of things that you may not be used to....

Using Origin’s online configuration tool, nearly every component on the Neuron can be customized. You can build an entry-level system, a powerful gaming rig, an all-out workstation beast, and anything in between. The specs of the beastly unit we reviewed are as follows: Case: Phanteks Enthoo Evolv Processor: Intel Core i7 7700K Quad-Core 4.2GHz (4.5GHz TurboBoost) Motherboard: Asus Strix Z270G Memory: 32GB G.Skill TridentZ RGB 3000MHz (4 X 8GB) System Cooling: Origin Frostbyte 360 Sealed Liquid Cooling System for 1151 Socket Graphics Cards: Dual 11GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition Power Supply: 850 Watt EVGA SuperNOVA G3 Power Supply Sleeved Cable Color: White Individually Sleeved Cables EVGA Hard Drive One (OS): Samsung 960 Evo 250GB M....

It’s been widely reported that the 6500 XT is restricted to PCI Express 4.0 x4 bandwidth and although AMD hasn’t made that public yet, and we’re bound by an NDA, this was already confirmed by Asrock, so it’s no longer a secret. But what might this mean for the Radeon RX 6500 XT? Opinions are divided on this one. Some of you believe this will cripple the card, while others point to PCI Express bandwidth tests using flagship graphics cards which suggest the 6500 XT will be fine, even in a PCI Express 3....

Still we had planned to take a more in-depth look at PCIe performance with the RTX 3080, so that’s what we’re going to do today. We’ll be looking at many different PCI Express configurations using the Ryzen 9 3950X on the X570 platform using MSI’s X570 Unify motherboard, as well as the Intel Core i9-10900K on the Z490 platform using MSI’s Z490 Unify. In both instances we’re using 32GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 memory and the graphics card of choice is the RTX 3080 Founders Edition....

The metaverse seems to be the next in-thing in the tech world. Everybody is talking about it, and seemingly every Big Tech company wants in on the ground floor. Mark Zuckerberg is so enthusiastic about the metaverse he changed Facebook’s name to “Meta.” For those unfamiliar with the metaverse idea, the concept is to create a virtual universe within the real universe where people can interact without leaving their homes....

Following the rumors that Sony would reveal a new subscription for PlayStation users this week, the Japanese company announced it would relaunch PlayStation Plus. In June, Sony will be merging PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now into a single service, available in four different memberships: Essential, Extra, Premium, and Deluxe. It’s worth mentioning that the Essential and Extra plans are available everywhere, while Premium and Deluxe subscriptions are interchangeable depending on the region....

The rumor mill has pointed to an AMD Radeon 6000 series refresh for a while now, but things have been relatively quiet as the release window moved from late April to early May. RDNA 3 GPUs likely won’t be ready until late 2022 at the earliest, and that’s only if the company is still operating on the original timeline. Last month, we learned that AMD is looking to launch as many as three refreshed RX 6000 series cards — the RX 6650 XT, RX 6750 XT, and the RX 6950 XT....

The team designed the robot, named Marvel, to assist humans in performing dangerous maintenance jobs on large metal structures like oil tanks, bridges and water towers. It uses a combination of magnetic elastomers and electromagnets to magnetize and demagnetize on demand as needed, allowing the bot’s feet to stay stuck to a surface then release as it takes a step. Mimicking how a cat tests a surface before hopping on, the bot is programmed to use its front legs to test the stability of a surface before fully committing to it....

It’s been just over a year since Riot Games revealed plans to record and temporarily store voice chat in Valorant (download here). The company plans to use the recordings whenever someone’s disruptive/toxic behavior is reported to check if any rules were broken. Once the logs have been examined for violations, the recordings are removed. Riot said it won’t be actively monitor live chat; it will only check voice logs after a report has been submitted....