Latest Reviews & Articles

SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 6650 XT GAMING OC Review
SAPPHIRE's new custom NITRO+ Radeon RX 6650 XT is here: faster GPU clocks, 8GB of GDDR6 memory now at 17.5Gbps, and more.
SAPPHIRE's new custom NITRO+ Radeon RX 6650 XT is here: faster GPU clocks, 8GB of GDDR6 memory now at 17.5Gbps, and more.
Elon Musk is attempting to figure out how many Twitter users are bots and how many are authentic users.
The SpaceX and Tesla CEO recently stated that the deal to purchase Twitter was temporarily put on hold while an investigation was conducted into how many fake, spam, illegal, or duplicate accounts are on Twitter. According to Twitter's latest numbers, the social media platform estimates that below 5% of Twitter's total accounts are bots, and if that number is found to be inaccurate, it may impact the $44 billion price tag in a way that Musk gets a discount.
Musk recently took to his Twitter account to publicly say that Twitter claims >95% of daily active users are real, unique humans. The Tesla CEO then asked his followers if anyone has that experience. Musk followed up by replying to a journalist that stated the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) should investigate Twitter's numbers to see if the company lied on its official filing with the regulatory body. Musk jokingly prodded the SEC by writing the below tweet.
Continue reading: Elon Musk wants the SEC to figure out how many bots are on Twitter (full post)
Elon Musk has had bouts with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the past, and now he may be about to enter into the ring with them again following Musk's acquisition of Twitter.
In 2013 the SEC ruled that Twitter and other social media platforms are viable ways for publicly traded companies to disclose information that can affect share prices. In 2018, Elon Musk tweeted that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private, which caused Tesla's share price to skyrocket. The SEC went after Musk for his tweets which eventuated in Musk paying a $20 million fine, giving up his position as chairman of Tesla, and having information about Tesla pre-approved by colleagues at the company before publishing.
Now, an investor who has purchased more than 5% of a company's stock is forced to disclose their position within 10 days of the purchase. This SEC rule is put into place so other investors are aware that a potentially large investor has entered the scene and may be looking to gain a significant position or even take over. Musk waited 21 days to disclose his position of approximately 9.6%, which, when revealed, caused the price of Twitter's stock to skyrocket.
Continue reading: Elon Musk now under investigation, broken rules saved him $143 million (full post)
As reported yesterday, the US government conducted a public hearing with top military officials on UFOs, or as officials would prefer them to be called "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)".
During the hearing, which can be seen in full above, top Pentagon officials spoke to a House panel about UFO encounters and the risk they pose to national security. The hearing comes after a leaked military video of a UFO went viral, which eventuated into a large report on UFOs being released by the US military that stated the US had only tracked 144 encounters with UFOs.
However, there seem to be many more reports since then, as top Pentagon officials said during the hearing that the US military is "approximately 400" on record, a very sharp increase from the 144 recorded between 2004 and 2021. The spike in encounters can be attributed to the reduction in stigma attached to UFO sightings as a result of the 2021 report being released.
Continue reading: Pentagon declares publicly it has encountered nearly 400 UFOs (full post)
XMG has just announced their latest APEX 15 MAX desktop replacement laptop that is the world's first to pack AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs for the AM4 socket.
The new XMG APEX 15 MAX (E22) laptop supports AMD's flagship desktop CPUs in the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X, a B550-based chipset, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 graphics. XMG recommends the configuration using the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5700X, or Ryzen 5 5600X processors -- no matter the TDP of between 65W or 105W.
This is because the CPUs are operating within a PPT (Package Power Tracking) of up to 88W, so even the higher-end 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 5900X processor can run in the new XMG APEX 15 MAX (E22) laptop under AMD's ECO mode.
Continue reading: XMG APEX 15 MAX laptop: packs desktop AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor (full post)
ASUS has officially unveiled its new ROG Strix Scar 17 Special Edition gaming laptop, packing Intel's very latest Core i9-12950HX "Alder Lake-HX" processor with the CPU overclocked to a huge 5.2GHz when needed.
The Intel Core i9-12950HX processor has 8 Performance and 8 Efficiency cores, which boost up to 5.2GHz -- and an insane 175W of power, up from 65W -- when the GPU is disabled. This means for content creation it's perfect -- CPU cranking up to 5.2GHz -- while gaming-wise you've got the RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU.
NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU has a maximum TGP of 175W with Dynamic Boost, the highest wattage of any GPU used inside of a ROG laptop. There's a 17-inch display with the option of 1080p @ 360Hz or 1440p @ 240Hz, content creators and gamers shouldn't bother with the 1080p model, moving right into the 1440p panel (ASUS, it's disappointing to not see a 4K 120Hz option) on this high-end laptop.
Continue reading: ASUS ROG Strix Scar 17 SE gaming laptop: Core i9-12950HX + RTX 3080 Ti (full post)
ASUS has revealed some interesting information in their recent earnings report, with ASUS Co-CEO Sy Hsu explaining GPU demand for crypto miners is dying, while prices could stabilize soon, but maybe not.
ASUS's Co-CEO, Sy Hsu explained: "Because the demand for cryptocurrency mining on GPU shipments has been slowly coming down, the demand for graphics cards across the market is normalizing. Because the demand from cryptocurrency is disappearing, it's made us wonder if the pricing for GPUs will also normalize. In reality, the demand for gaming is still strong, so we still don't think we can necessarily meet all of the demand".
We've seen GPU prices skyrocketing over the last year or so, where prices were hitting 150-300% of their regular MSRP... but now, now they're floating back down to reality. This isn't just for one company, but rather both -- AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards are seeing most retailers and e-tailers pricing Radeon and GeForce GPUs at 5-10% above MSRP on average.
Continue reading: ASUS: crypto GPU demand is slowing down, gaming demand is still strong (full post)
AMD's next-gen RDNA 3 architecture will debut later this year, with the introduction of the flagship Navi 31 GPU that we're now hearing is codenamed "Plum Bonito".
The new codename Plum Bonito GPU is the Navi 31 ASIC board according to leaker "Kepler", who recently said that the Navi 31-based purported Radeon RX 7950 XT graphics card will arrive on the next-gen PCIe 5.0 interface. We can also see that a Navi 31 board is reportedly called "Gemini" which could be a dual-GPU version of Navi 31 (workstation-class GPU possibly).
But if you look close, the next-next-gen Navi 41 GPU was teased in very early form as "gfx1200". AMD's current-gen Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards are based on the RDNA 2 GPU architecture, while next-gen Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards will be powered by the RDNA 3 GPU architecture. After that, we have the Radeon RX 8000 series powered by RDNA 4... of which we're now being teased.
Continue reading: AMD Radeon RX 7950 XT: Navi 31 GPU rumored codename is 'Plum Bonito' (full post)
The last 12-18 hours of Elon Musk vs Twitter vs the world has been illuminating... to say the least... with an undercover Project Veritas journalist talking with Twitter executives. Now they've got Alex Martinez, Twitter's Lead Client Partner, saying some rather awful things on video:
Right out of the gate, this is what Martinez said about Elon Musk:
In the full clip, Martinez continues blabbering: "well, right now we don't make profit. So, it's gonna say ideology, which is what's led us into not being profitable. The rest of us who have been here, believe in something that's good for the planet and not just to give people free speech".
"Cause again, like these people (Twitter employees) really do believe in what we're doing. There are the policies we (Twitter) put in place for misinformation or mislabeling media or whatever. Why do you think this should be taken down? Those are the questions they're going to ask him (Elon Musk). And it's going to be hard for him (Elon Musk) to be like, 'uh, because people should make their own decision'".
Continue reading: Twitter exec: Elon Musk 'mentally handicapped', insults his Asperger's (full post)
If you've been wanting to benchmark Unreal Engine 5, then now is your chance with the release of EzBench: a new Unreal Engine 5-powered benchmark with ray tracing and even 8K textures.
You'll need a monster GPU to handle it at 4K, with NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti being the fastest on the planet, and the highest score on EzBench without a doubt. I just ran it on my Intel Core i9-12900K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and scored just under 37,000 points. I'll run all my GPUs through it tomorrow, and have an article up ASAP.
EzBench developers recommend people use a GPU with at least 8GB of memory, where you can rewind back to the GeForce GTX 1080, but with ray tracing support you're going to need an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 or RTX 30 series GPU or AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPU.
Continue reading: EzBench: a new Unreal Engine 5 benchmark + 8K textures, FREE on Steam (full post)
We have been hearing plenty about NVIDIA's next-gen Ada Lovelace GPU-powered GeForce RTX 4090, but now it's time for the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti -- and more specifically -- NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 4090 Ti Founders Edition graphics card.
In some of the latest rounds of rumors, we've been hearing whispers that NVIDIA would unleash the GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs sooner rather than later -- a possibly mid-July release -- meaning we're just months away. NVIDIA looks to be providing some rather impressive cooling array to the RTX 40 series Founders Edition GPUs so that they can handle the 450W to 600W of power we're also hearing about.
NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 4090 Ti (this name could change) Founders Edition graphics card has three different parts: first up we have the silver-themed metal skeleton that goes around the heat sink for that beautiful finish. You can see the nice little "RTX 4090 Ti" logo there, too.
Continue reading: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Ti Founders Edition leaked: cooler is HUUUUGE (full post)