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ASUS has unveiled 19 new Z690-based motherboards now that Intel's new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs are here, along with the next-gen Z690 chipset that has DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support.

First off, we have the flagship ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme Glacial motherboard which features a pre-installed EK Ultrablock water block for liquid cooling your new Core i9-12900K -- come on, you're not going to put anything else into it. No Core i5-12600K is going to go into a super-high-end motherboard like the ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme Glacial.

ASUS includes 24+1 power stages (105A) on its ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme Glacial and ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboards. Both boards of course have the Z690 chipset which unlocks DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 technologies, with 10GbE networking, dual Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, and an E-ATX form factor -- beast motherboards. The difference between the Extreme Glacial and Extreme boards is the Glacial has the integrated EK Ultrablock, the non-Glacial model does not.

Sony has made a new branch to oversee its PC gaming efforts called PlayStation PC LLC.

Sony is going all-in on PC gaming. Before now, Sony's PlayStation Mobile LLC division was responsible for publishing PlayStation games on PC. Now that's being handled by a dedicated PC branch called PlayStation PC LLC. Documents show that the company was incorporated back in April 2021.

All of Sony's games on Steam are now listed as being published by PlayStation PC LLC.

During the Facebook (now Meta) Connect keynote presentation, the company didn't have a lot to say about upcoming content. We got a hint at a new feature for Beat Saberthat would introduce a level progression system, and we found out that Population: One has more DLC just around the corner with a Winter event announced. But the thing that stood out most is the announcement that Grand Theft Auto is officially coming to Oculus Quest.

The details about the game are all but non-existent. However, we now have confirmation that Rockstar games are finally bringing its beloved franchise to the VR medium. There are no details about the release date yet, and we didn't get any screenshots or videos of the game in action, so it's probably going to be a while. Either way, this is an exciting development for VR content.

There are now and will soon be a good selection of VR headsets on the market. Great content exists, but it's few and far between, and there aren't many recognizable franchises in VR yet. Grand Theft Auto is one of the most popular games in history. If anything will attract newcomers to VR hardware, it's a title like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Sony's PlayStation division delivers record Q2 sales on the back of strong hardware, software, and FX tailwinds.

Sony's latest Q2 FY2021 earnings report showed a marked increase in segment sales due to strong FX tailwinds. The exchange rate for Q2 was up 3.67% with a rate of $1 USD = 110.1 yen, a boost that benefited Sony tremendously.

The Games and Network Services (G&NS) segment, which includes the PlayStation brand, delivered record Q2 revenues of 645.43 billion yen ($5.862 billion) as compared to 506.63 billion yen ($4.77 billion) in Q2'20, which had a 106.2 yen-to-USD exchange rate. FX boosts represented 27% of the period's 138.8 billion yen year-over-year increase.

More than half a decade ago, Mark Zuckerberg saw the future when he tried the Oculus Rift prototype for the first time. The founder of Facebook quickly realized that immersive technologies would become the next computing platform. Now he's going all-in, with a new company name to show how serious he is. Today, he's so confident in the idea of the metaverse that he's rebranding his business to match his conviction. Facebook will now be known as Meta.

During the Facebook Connect keynote presentation, Zuckerberg explained his position. Facebook has always been a company that builds technology that connects people, he said. When he founded Facebook, social media was the platform available to connect people online. In the future, the internet will be much more immersive, and Zuckerberg wants Meta to have a foundational role in crafting our future metaverse.

The vision of the metaverse the Meta laid out is a vast social world that blends the real-world with different levels of the digital world. It's what the company sees as the next iteration of the internet. It will be accessible through AR devices, VR devices, and smartglasses, as well as the mobile devices that we're used to.

Sony Corp's stock is currently at $118.20 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, the highest point in the last five years.

Sony's recent Q2 FY2021 earnings report has caused its stock to jump +4.68% in one day to $118.20, setting a new 52-week and five-year high. The highest Sony Corp. stock has even been is $156.75 on February 29, 2000.

The company reported strong Q2 sales surges of 264 billion yen to 2.369 trillion yen across multiple segments including music, gaming, pictures, image sensors, and electronics partly due to higher FX (foreign exchange) rates, which rose 3.67% with a 1 USD = 110.1 yen rate. Games and Network Services tacked on an extra 20.7 billion yen due to these FX rates.

PlayStation 4 console shipments are plummeting as Sony moves on to shipping and producing PlayStation 5 consoles.

The PS4 era is practically over. It's true that Sony expects the PS4 to make up most of FY21's earnings but that's only because of A) the massive install base that continually makes money over time, and B) there's not enough PS5s on the market yet. Sony is already selling the PS5 at a profit and supply is extremely restricted due to the component shortages. Those shortages are also affecting PS4 production and shipments, but the last-gen console market has already been saturated.

Based on Sony's recent financials it looks like the PS4 has hit its peak. Sony shipped a measly 0.2 million shipments in Q2'21, the lowest in the PS4's entire lifecycle. In fact, PS4 six-month shipments fell below 1 million for the first time ever. From June - September 2020, Sony shipped 3.4 million PS4s. That number fell to just 700,000 in 2021, representing a 79% increase.

The PlayStation 5's one year sales have missed Sony's internal sales target, but only slightly.

Sony's PS5 has now shipped 13.4 million units in its first year on the market, the company today announced. While the milestone is impressive on paper, it falls short of Sony's expectations. The Japanese tech giant had hoped the PS5 would match or exceed the PS4's one-year shipments that amounted to 13.8 million.

Read Also: PlayStation 5 Review: The golden era of console gaming

Over the weekend, the Western United States was battered by a bomb cyclone, and now reports indicate that the storm is far from being over.

According to AccuWeather, a record-setting bomb cyclone is currently moving east towards central and southern US states, where it may cause severe weather for approximately 30 million people. The warnings have come after more than a dozen tornadoes were reported across three central states as of Sunday night, with one of the hardest-hit areas being 80 miles south of St. Louis. Forecasters report that there is a risk the severe weather will trigger tornadoes that would bring winds speeds between 40 and 60 mph.

AccuWeather reports that 80 mph winds are expected through Thursday evening, and with these wind speeds, there is a considerable chance that damage can be caused to homes, roofs, mobile homes, and objects that aren't secured down. AccuWeather Meteorologist Joseph Bauer said, "From the last week of October into early November, there is a higher probability of severe weather in the eastern Red River Valley into the lower Mississippi Valley, which is roughly where damaging and dangerous storms erupted through early Wednesday."

In a new video posted to NASA's official YouTube channel, a NASA Mars technology expert has answered the following question, "How Did Perseverance Pick its Landing Spot?".

Choosing a landing location for NASA's newest Mars rover is a pivotal choice that had to be made by a selection of people that take into account all of the science goals that the rover is aiming to achieve. The primary goal for Perseverance is to locate evidence of ancient alien life being once present on the Red Planet and relay important data back to Earth about the planet's atmosphere and overall evolution. Taking all of these goals, and many more that aren't outlined here, into consideration, NASA experts selected the Jezero Crater as its landing location due to research at the time indicating that it was once an ancient lake (which was later confirmed).

While the approximate landing location was selected before Perseverance made its way down to the surface, the specific landing location wasn't, and this is where NASA experts took their hands off the wheel and let Perseverance make its own decision. According to NASA Mars Technologist Swati Mohan, Perseverance was equipped with a brand new technology called "Terrain Relative Navigation", which is essentially adding "eyes" to the rover so it could see all of the hazards on the surface as it was descending.

Late last year, researchers detected a strange radio signal coming from the direction of Earth's closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri.

It was originally speculated that the signal's origins were coming from aliens on Proxima Centauri b, a potentially habitable exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri, but at the time, the signal had not undergone thorough analysis. Now, researchers have performed the analysis on the signal and discovered its true origins, which are quite underwhelming if you were hoping that it was aliens.

The signal was deemed a "signal of interest" and was also dubbed Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1 (BLC1). After conducting the analysis, the researchers concluded that the signal wasn't aliens attempting to communicate with Earth, but instead, it was two different Earth-bound transmitters mixing with each other. While the confirmation that the signal is "definitely not aliens", the researchers behind the analysis say that the detection of these signals represents that their instruments are working as intended, which is, at the very least, a reassurance.

NASA has published a photograph of a nebula taken by its now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope, and the image resembles a space "monster".

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has published the image, and it states in a new article on its website that the colorful image seen above is of nebula located within the constellation Sagittarius about 7,800 light-years from Earth. Using Spitzer's GLIMPSE Survey, Caltech astronomer Robert Hurt processed the image and noticed the resemblance to Godzilla within the image.

"I wasn't looking for monsters. I just happened to glance at a region of sky that I've browsed many times before, but I'd never zoomed in on. Sometimes if you just crop an area differently, it brings out something that you didn't see before. It was the eyes and mouth that roared 'Godzilla' to me," said Hurt. NASA's JPL states in its article that much like on Earth, when we observe a cloud of gas our imaginations proceed to run wild by creating images and shapes, and the very same happens out in space when observing a cloud of gas and dust.

The chief of Russia's space corporation has said that he is planning on making moves towards getting cosmonauts to the International Space Station via SpaceX.

According to Futurism, the news from the head of the Russian state space corporation, Dmitry Rogozin, is a complete "reversal" on the agency's previous statements about partnering with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The publication reports that Rogozin had previously stated that jokes and negative comments were made towards his agency by Musk when Rogozin said that without Russia, the US might as well "deliver its astronauts to the ISS by using a trampoline", to which Musk replied, "The trampoline is working".

Those statements were made some years ago, and since then, Rogozin has changed his tone towards working with NASA and SpaceX - even inviting Musk to tea at his home in Russia last month. Now, Rogozin has said, "In our view, SpaceX has already acquired enough experience for us to be able to put our cosmonauts on Crew Dragon", according to SpaceNews. Adding, "I believe we will be in a position to discuss candidates who may be flying to the space station onboard the Crew Dragon - Russian cosmonauts, and American astronauts who will be flying to the space station on Russian spacecraft."

NASA has posted a new Halloween-themed image on its website and socials. The image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and showcases a "space pumpkin".

With Halloween right around the corner, NASA has published an image that resembles jack-o-lantern but is actually a snapshot of a collision between two galaxies. The image is of galaxies NGC 2292 and NGC 2293, which looks like two glowing eyes and a crooked carved smile with a pumpkin-ish color.

The collision of the two galaxies results in a loss of the iconic flat spiral disks that are constantly seen throughout the universe, but in this image, the spiral disk can still be seen making the "smile," and it features a subtle blue hue as a result of newborn star clusters. The two galaxies reside 120 million years away from Earth within the constellation Canis Major. Additionally, NASA states that the entire view is nearly 109,000 light-years across, which is approximately the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has certainly come a long way since its inception, and the company wants you to remember that with a short new hype video released onto its Twitter account.

The video showcases a behind-the-scenes look at the construction process occurring at SpaceX's Starbase in Texas. The video reveals the several stages of development for the Starship launch vehicle that only recently completed its first successful firing of a Raptor vacuum engine attached to a Starship prototype. The video is captioned "Gateway to Mars", reminding everyone that Mars is the destination and that Starship will be the vehicle that will take humanity there.

After the successful test firing of the Raptor vacuum engine attached to a Starship prototype, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted out that "If all goes well, Starship will be ready for its first orbital launch attempt next month, pending regulatory approval". SpaceX, along with everyone else that is interested in Starships first orbital launch, is now patiently waiting for launch approval by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). For more information on this story, and Starship, check out this link here.

The head of NASA has said that it's likely that we aren't completely alone in the universe, hinting at the existence of other life out there in the cosmos.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson recently spoke at the University of Virginia Center for Politics via a livestream and was asked about life outside of Earth. Nelson said that he "certainly" thinks there are other planet Earths out in the universe, considering how big the universe is. Nelson also made a possible connection between the recent UFO or UAP sightings made by US military pilots and alien life.

Nelson said, "I've talked to those pilots and they know they saw something, and their radars locked on to it. And they don't know what is. And we don't know what it is. We hope it's not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology." Adding, "But it's something. And so this is a mission that we're constantly looking, 'Who is out there?' Who are we?' How did we get here? How did we become as we are? How did we develop? How did we civilize? And are those same conditions out there in a universe that has billions of other suns and billions of other galaxies?' It's so large I can't conceive it."

COLORFUL has unveiled its new enthusiast-class iGame Z690 Ultra D5 motherboard, ready for Intel's just-released 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs and the flagship Core i9-12900K processor.

COLORFUL's new iGame Z690 Ultra D5 motherboard has the expected LGA 1700 socket, ready for any of the 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs, with 4 x DDR5 DIMM slots ready for up to 128GB of DDR5 memory. COLORFUL has a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot here, with another PCIe 4.0 x16 backing it up.

There's active cooling on the Z690 chipset, with a unique design on the heat sink and fan of the COLORFUL iGame Z690 Ultra D5 motherboard. COLORFUL is calling it the Ice Terrace Space 1.0 Heatsink, which is a name I love. It sounds so ridiculous, but it suits the style of aesthetic.

JEDEC announced the publication of the DDR5 SDRAM standard update which included new features to enhance reliability and performance across a wide range of applications, in systems and high-performance servers.

The new features for DDR5 memory from JEDEC include bounded fault error-correction support, Soft Post-Package Repair (sPPR) undo and lock, Memory Built-In Self-Test Post Package Repair (MBIST and mPPR), Adaptive RFM, and an MR4 extension.

JEDEC also expanded the timing definition and transfer speed of DDR5, ramping up to 6400 MT/s for DRAM core timings and 5600 MT/s for IO AC timings to help the industry build an ecosystem up to 5600 MT/s. JEDEC Chairman Mian Quddus explains: "The fact that this update to DDR5 is being published so soon after the initial launch of DDR5 in July 2020 underscores JEDEC's ongoing commitment to continual improvement, and represents a collective effort on the part of all involved member companies to better serve the industry".

EVGA has unleashed its new Z690 range of motherboards, with the introduction of the new Z690 DARK and Z690 CLASSIFIED motherboards ready for Intel's just-released 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs.

Starting off with the EVGA Z690 DARK KINGPIN motherboard we have the LGA 1700 socket, ready for an Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPU right up to the flagship Core i9-12900K. There's 2 x DDR5 DIMM slots, PCIe 5.0 x16 for your top slot and PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD support -- while there's a slew of other connectivity.

EVGA's new Z690 DARK KINGPIN motherboard has 8 x SATA III ports (6Gbps), a butt-load of USB connectivity, 7,1-channel HD audio, 2 x 2.5Gbps NICs as well as Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity. EVGA has provided round-outs with 2 pump headers that are ready for an all-in-one (AIO) cooling solution... but exclusive to the EVGA Z690 DARK KINGPIN motherboard.

ASUS has just taken the wraps off of its new ROG Thor 1600W Titanium PSU, ready for Intel's next-gen Alder Lake CPUs and new Z690 motherboards and PCIe 5.0 power connectors.

NVIDIA is expected to have its new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card with PCIe 5.0 power connectors, which it will be the first in the world with, and ASUS will now have your back with its ROG Thor 1600W Titanium PSU. It has PCIe 5.0 power connectors, as well as the usual 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors for your GPU.

You're not going to buy the new ASUS ROG Thor 1600W Titanium PSU for your GeForce GTX 1650, you're meant to have this with a new system... something like the just-announced Intel Core i9-12900K processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card, which isn't quite out yet.