Desktop

A side-by-side video comparing the original Diablo 2 and Diablo 2 Resurrected has shown up online. It highlights UI changes, redesigned textures, character models and several other improvements that the remastered version could have in store for us.

The Intel Core i9-11900K has been proving its processing chops on both Geekbench 4 and Geekbench 5. On the former, the i9-11900K actually managed to reverse a typical result overview with the Ryzen 7 5800X, while on the latter the Rocket Lake-S chip succeeded in hitting another new height in regard to incredible single-core performance.

The Alloy Origins is the company's first 60 percent keyboard and it's now shipping for $99 USD. Its launch comes a few months after the Ducky One 2 Mini mechanical keyboard which was made in collaboration with HyperX.

The Philips Momentum 559M1RYV is the follow-up to last year's Momentum 558M1RY, which already included plenty of features. However, the Momentum 559M1RYV takes things further with a 144 Hz refresh rate, HDMI 2.1 and USB Type-C Power Delivery. All the good features of last year's model remain too, including 1,200 nit peak brightness, AMD FreeSync, NVIDIA G-Sync and Philips Ambiglow.

A new Intel Alder Lake-S has surfaced on Geekbench ahead of the platform's release later this year. The processor has eight 'big' cores, uses the LGA 1700 socket and supports DDR5 RAM. Unsurprisingly, the processor does not hold back the performance of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080, either.

The MSI PCB includes a 8+6-pin power connector instead of an 8-pin one, which should provide more stability for the overclocked core. Despite the increased boost speeds, the TGP matches the reference 170 W. The number of inductors appears to be modified as well, and the PCB supports 8 VRAM slots, of which only 6 are populated. Unfortunately, we will not be seeing 16 GB versions, due to the limitations imposed by the 192-bit memory bus.

A review for the upcoming Core i7-11700 has surfaced online, comparing Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake-S processor against its predecessor, the Core i7-10700. The review also assesses the Core i7-11700 in view of the Ryzen 7 5800X, AMD's most-comparable Vermeer processor that people can buy from retailers.

A new leak suggests that Nvidia could launch a 6GB variant of the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards soon. The Palit-branded graphics card showed up on the South Korean National Radio Research Agency website alongside other SKUs. However, Nvidia is yet to officially acknowledge the existence of such a GeForce RTX 3060 variant.

The GeForce RTX 3060 has arrived on the Ashes of the Singularity database, where it has outscored the RTX 2060 and the RTX 2070. The RTX 3060 appears to offer comparable performance to the RTX 2070 SUPER, despite having a US$170 lower MSRP.

The Intel Core i9-11900KF has taken another trip to Geekbench where it has managed a stronger performance in the multi-core test. However, the result when compared to the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X will leave desktop PC builders trying to solve the old single-core vs. multi-core quandary. The Rocket Lake i9-11900KF was pushed to almost 5.3 GHz.

Currently, it looks like only the upcoming RTX 3060 will be affected by NVIDIA's recent move to limit hash rates via drivers and firmware. NVIDIA recently launched dedicated CMP cards for miners seemingly to put more GeForce cards in the hands of gamers, but that move may not be really end user-friendly in the long run once the present cryptocurrency boom goes bust.

The most powerful Radeon RX 6900 XT has arrived, which Sapphire has paired with a 360 mm AIO. The Sapphire Radeon RX 6900 XT TOXIC should retail for £1,299 in the UK and US$1,499 in the US, but the RDNA 2 card is currently listed for up to £400 more at some retailers.

A new report has shed some light on how much some custom Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 models could cost upon launch. At US$484.99 MSI's Ventus X2 is the most affordable of the lot. On the flip side, the MSI Gaming X Trio will cost an eye-watering US$514.9. We should know for sure on its February 25 launch date.

A new set of Intel Core i5-11400 Geekbench listings have shown up online. The entry-level Rocket Lake-S CPU manages to net single-core scores of 1,490 and 1,500. Similarly, its multi-core scores are 6,576 and 6,640. We should know more about it and other Rocket Lake processors at their launch in March 2021.

Three Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 cards have appeared for sale on a Belarusian online marketplace days before the boards are officially launched. The asking price for the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Eagle OC cards is 2,800 Belarusian rubles, which is roughly about US$1,080/€891/£770. The Nvidia MSRP for the GeForce RTX 3060 is US$329.

AMD's official Reddit account has posted requesting reports from users about an increasingly well-publicized issue in which USB devices installed in or attached to 500-series chipset motherboards disconnect randomly and without warning. It seems to be fairly constant across this range and across board manufacturers.

Supposed specifications for the Radeon RX 6700 series have leaked, ahead of next month's anticipated release. Apparently, AMD plans to release two RX 6700 XT models, while the RX 6700 will arrive in April with just 6 GB of GDDR6 VRAM.

It has been reported that “Phoenix” is the codename for the AMD series of chips that will eventually manifest into the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 mobile APUs. Unsurprisingly, rumors about AMD Phoenix have already started flying, with mention of support for both DDR5 memory and PCIe 5 among them.

It's one of the most affordable 27-inch monitors you can get when considering the size and long list of gaming-centric features included. Hopefully its colors and build quality will be up to snuff.

Pictures of the packaging for the upcoming Intel Core i9 members of the Rocket Lake-S series have leaked online. While some of the top-end parts get typically blue boxes in Intel’s updated livery, the speedy i9-11900K gets unusual packaging that has led some to comment that AMD and Ryzen 5000 has already crushed it.

An Intel Core i9-11900KF processor from the Rocket Lake series has been spotted on Geekbench, where it managed a maximum frequency over 5 GHz. However, despite its fast clock rate, the single-core performance result left the i9-11900KF in the same vicinity as the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 9 5900X. The Zen 3 Vermeer CPUs are lengths ahead in multi-core benchmarking, though.

Improvements over Gen 5 include 40% smaller dies, reduced production costs, 70% more bits per wafer, improved write speeds by 2.4X and lower read latency by 10%, plus increased I/O speeds by 66%. The first SSDs to use these new chips are expected to launch in Q1 2022.

Koei Tecmo’s Souls-like finally received some PC love with the addition of DLSS 2.0 support. While cards like the GeForce RTX 3080 were already capable of hitting 4K/60, DLSS 2.0 opens up that possibility to a wider range of RTX cards.

Intel's upcoming Core i5-11600K Rocket Lake-S CPU just showed up on Geekbench. Its single and multi-core scores of 1,565 and 6,220 might seem a tad disappointing compared to the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, but we can attribute it to the test bench running slow RAM clocked at 2,133MHz.

Latest rumors claim that AMD is preparing a March 18 launch for the RX 6700 XT mid-range gaming cards, even though Team Red is among the companies that have been hit the hardest by the global semiconductor shortages. This will most likely be another rushed paper launch to counter Nvidia's RTX 3060 release.

It turns out that ZOTAC has been selling both its RTX 3060 cards before NVIDIA's release embargo on February 25. Now, the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 Twin Edge OC Edition has popped up in a video about mining Ethereum. However, it seems that the RTX 3060 can tell that it is mining cryptocurrencies even without software drivers being installed, which points to NVIDIA having baked something within the BIOS, not just its drivers.

Fans of open-world FPS titles will be pleased to know that Avalanche Studios and id Software-developed Rage 2 is free on the Epic Games Store. It can be redeemed before February 25 and will be yours to keep forever.

Nvidia has announced in an official blog post that the upcoming GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards will feature drivers that limit the GPU’s performance if the board is used for crypto mining. At the same time, Team Green has also revealed the CMP HX processors that are specifically designed for digging up digital coins.

The Hong Kong-based video card maker ZOTAC has uploaded an image on Twitter that has already been met by considerable ire from gamers. The picture shows a lineup of White Edition GeForce RTX 30 Series cards that look like they are hooked up as part of a huge mining rig. Tags in the tweet are aimed at gamers but the caption is definitely for crypto miners.
Update: ZOTAC has now removed the polarizing tweet.

Intel's upcoming 11th gen Rocket Lake-S led by the Core i9-11900K will launch on March 15, according to a report from HKEPC. The publication also states that the 12th gen Alder Lake-S will be announced sometime in September, and the platform's Golden Cove cores will offer up to a 20% IPC increase over Willow Cove.

The TOPTON MU01 fits in one hand, and yet it includes quad-core Intel processors, replaceable RAM, storage and plenty of I/O. The machine starts at under US$270 as a barebones PC and can be configured with up to a Core i7-10510U.

The passively-cooled Asus TUF RTX 3080 GPU was tested in Furmark along with a Ryzen 5 5600X and the results were a bit sketchy. While the CPU was running at 40 degrees Celsius during the Furmark test, the GPU peaked at 87 degrees Celsius and it did not even level out. Total power draw appears to hover around 410 W, most likely in idle.

The new HBM-PIM chips will deliver over twice the system performance of the current HBM2 solutions and reduce energy consumption by more than 70%. Samsung designed this new memory architecture in order to accelerate large-scale processing in data centers, high performance computing systems and AI-enabled mobile applications.

The latest full-year analysis of the PC market show that devices that run ChromeOS gained more and more market share during 2020 compared to those running macOS. Windows remained the market leader, although its share did fall compared to 2019. These changes might be related to the overwhelming demand for home-learning and -working solutions that marked the year just gone.

The AMD Ryzen 7 5750G has appeared online and overclocked to 4.8 GHz. The Cezanne APU comes within a whisker of the Ryzen 7 5800X in CPU-Z and outscores the Core i9-10900K on single-core performance. The Comet Lake-S has the edge in CPU-Z multi-core thanks to its two additional cores, though.

An Intel Alder Lake-S processor has been spotted being tested on UserBenchmark, where it recorded an average boost rate of 0.8 GHz and was awarded with a 24.9% average bench. But before AMD fans start celebrating the untimely demise of Alder Lake, it seems likely that the 12th Gen chip’s hybrid architecture is fudging the numbers.

COVID-19 has caused some internet cafes to pivot their business models, with RTX 30 series graphics cards replacing people. Unsurprisingly these new graphics cards are being used for mining cryptocurrencies.

News about the RTX 3070 Ti has been quiet in recent weeks, with FinalWire adding support for the card to AIDA64 Extreme in December. Now, a retailer briefly listed an RTX 3070 Ti with 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM on its website as part of a pre-built PC.

Sources close to Moore's Law Is Dead claim that the Alder Lake-U CPUs with up to 6 big cores and 8 little cores can deliver double the multi-core performance of current Tiger Lake-U models, and the single-core Alder Lake performance should be 20% better, as well. The top desktop Alder Lake CPUs with 8 big cores and 8 little cores may thus beat AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X models in multi-core loads.

AMD Ryzen 5000 desktop processors can now boost to 5 GHz and even higher, thanks to the CTR 2.1 update. Overclocking Zen 3 Vermeer processors to these frequencies should be simple with CTR 2.1, which is available to download now.

Google has effectively given up on making first-party games for its streaming service Stadia. However, it has committed to bringing more titles from external studios to the platform in the course of 2021. They are slated to include Far Cry 6, FIFA 21 and Hello Engineer, although not all of those will form part of the first wave of these new games.

There have been reports of computer part retailers in Europe hiking prices of GeForce RTX 3060 AIB boards before the graphics card is even launched. Nvidia’s MSRPs for the GeForce RTX 3060 are US$329/€329/£299 but retailer prices have gone beyond double in some cases. Gamers have been blaming the hikes on cryptocurrency miners.

Intel has referenced three unreleased Comet Lake-S processors in a support document. The processors include a Core i9-10900KS, which may be a special edition of the Core i9-10900K. The Core i9-10900KS would have ten cores, two more than the upcoming Core i9-11900K, Intel's flagship Rocket Lake-S processor.

Samsung and Microsoft's efforts to form a joint Android/Windows ecosystem to rival that of Apple's has reached a potentially critical stage. The OEMs are working to bring Quick Share (an AirDrop counterpart found on Galaxy-series smartphones) to PCs. Samsung's Free service is also to arrive on Windows 10 soon, as is a new app called "O".

The RPCS3 PlayStation 3 emulator has improved considerably over the years. A recent YouTube videos shows an updated version of the emulator running Uncharted: Drake's Fortune at roughly 40 FPS on a Comet Lake i5: Ryzen chips like the 3600X and the newer Ryzen 5000 lineup should do even better.

According to a photo posted to Reddit, Intel has released a heretofore-unheard of new version of a Comet Lake processor in Malaysia. This "i3-10105F" would on the face of it be a refresh of the i3-10100F, which is in turn a renewed i3-9100F. Then again, there are no official database entries to verify this new alleged leak at present.

HBO Max is an upcoming streaming service from the TV studio in question, but also offers content from partners that range from DC to New Line. It will replace the existing Go product in many Latin and South America in June 2021, migrating its existing users to the new platform as it does. A similar transition is planned for European customers, although this lacks a concrete roll-out schedule at present.

An Intel Core i7-11700 has passed through Geekbench testing with flying colors, hitting 4.8 GHz and recording an incredible single-core performance score that easily surpasses the i7-10700K and just squeezes past the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. A separate benchmark revealed the capabilities of the i7-11700’s UHD Graphics 750 iGPU.