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With the official announcement and release of the new Comet Lake CPU's, we can now showcase all of the new Z490 boards made for the new up to 10 Core mainstream platforms from Intel. Today we look at the offerings from ASRock and what they have to offer.

The Taichi series from ASRock have been the enthusiasts pick for a reason, and that is that besides the OCF or OC Formula gear, the Taichi has proven to be a veritable powerhouse platform for enthusiasts users.

The Z490 Taichi is built to hold true to the Taichi performance we have gotten used to. Beyond the recognizable design ID, the Taichi also comes fully loaded with a VRM and features to make any right a potential powerhouse. The board is touted as supporting PCIe 4.0 which further adds credence to the rumors that Z490 and the LGA1200 socket will be a direct drop-in compatible with the future Rocket Lake architecture which is rumored to bring with it PCIe 4.0 support.

With the official announcement and release of the new Comet Lake CPU's, we can now showcase all of the new Z490 boards made for the new up to 10 Core mainstream processors from Intel. Today we look at the offerings from ASUS and what they have to offer.

First up is the Maximus series, which signifies the peak of engineering and performance form ASUS. If you are looking for an ASUS board with the latest and greatest features, the Maximus lineup is where you should start.

The Maximus XII Extreme is the peak top of the top-end series of boards for ASUS. While the Extreme used to be the top XOC board (That title now rests with the APEX models), it now has become the board with everything including the kitchen sink included and is well-targeted for extreme enthusiasts.

I want to clear up some confusion I have seen speculated online, and that is that Comet Lake is 14nm, it is not 10nm, although it is 10th gen, it is still on 14nm node. This is not necessarily a bad thing as Intel is again pulling some impressive frequency form the aging 14nm node, but this may be the swan song for the 14nm tech.

Introducing the new Comet Lake Architecture, Intel has made a substantial improvement once again to its mainstream lineup. Each CPU generation has tacked on two more cores as of recent, looking back to Kaby lake with the 4C/8T core i7 7700K. Next, we have Coffee Lake with the Core i7 8700K at 6C/12T. Next was the Coffee Lake refresh, which brought us the current mainstream beast the Core i9 9900K, which is 8C/16T of processing power with a boost of up to 5.0GHz. Please note that the NDA on performance reviews will be later in the month, so for now, we can only share some intel provided information and comment on it with our thoughts.

Not willing to give up ground to the absolute pounding AMD Ryzen has been giving to Intel's mainstream lineup, we are at it again, this time with the Core i9 10900K, a 10C/20T monster with a boost speed capable of up to 5.3Ghz. As you can see from the intel slide, the newest flagship is set up to be a major beast, but let's dig in a bit further and see what else Intel has given us to talk about.

If you happened to miss the news due to the slew of coronavirus related stories flooding the news, NASA will be launching a helicopter from the surface of Mars after they arrive.

NASA plans on landing on the red planet with its new rover Perseverance sometime in early 2021. While the rover will be doing most of the reconnaissance work that will include a wide range of testing, there is a small aircraft aboard Perseverance that will be tagging along for the fun of it. NASA will be slapping a small helicopter on the back of the Mars rover, it has no scientific value and is merely there for a technical demonstration of launching the first man-made aircraft on another planet.

Since the launching of the helicopter on Mars will mark the first time humans have launched an aircraft on another planet, NASA has decided that the helicopter deserves a name. NASA took essay submissions from students around the country for what the helicopter should be named, and high school student Vaneeza Rupani from Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, won. NASA has now officially named the helicopter 'Ingenuity'.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 3080 Ti could be an absolute world-tearing graphics card, with new rumors suggesting it will be beyond anything previous rumors have said.

A new rumor is coming from a now deleted tweet from 'chiakokhua' who has a history of predicting big movement of tech companies, where he said AMD would use a chiplet design for its new Zen design. He also drew up a block diagram of EPYC processors receiving 64 cores over 8+1 dies.

With that said, check the specs above: we have the GA100 powering the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with up to 8192 CUDA cores which is absolutely insane. These rumored specs see GA100 have up to 256 RT cores, up to 1024 Tensor cores, and GPU boost clocks of up to 1750MHz. All of the new Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series cards will have GDDR6 at 16Gbps.

Capcom's big next-gen slate of games could include a new IP or two to help vitalize the next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X install bases.

Capcom has been beefing up its RE Engine to handle next-gen consoles for a while now, and recently teased some ambitious projects on the new consoles. We don't know exactly what the company is working on, but now we have some hints that new IP are included. According to Capcom USA chief operating officer Rob Dyer, next-gen console launches are a perfect opportunity to launch a new IP.

"This is the best time to introduce a new IP. It's a big deal to bring something to market that is going to be new and different, that not only the publisher can get behind, but the platform can get behind," Dyer said in a recent GamesBeat 2020 Summit.

Ubisoft today announced Assasssin's Creed: Valhalla, the new Viking-themed game in the series that's due out in 2020.

After a lengthy and quite illuminating concept art live stream, Ubisoft finally confirmed Assasssin's Creed: Valhalla is on the way with a big world premiere trailer set for tomorrow, April 30, 2020 at 8AM PST/11AM EST. Tomorrow's footage will be cinematic and won't include any gameplay, so don't get your hopes up.

The game is set in the Viking era, but we don't know exactly when (the era technically spans hundreds of years). Early reports say the game will chronicle the Siege of Paris which puts it in the mid-800s after Charlemagne's reign. Other reports say mythical creatures from Norse mythology will be included like the world-serpent Jormundur alongside gods like Odin and Loki, culminating in epic boss battles and spiritual sequences.

The coronavirus pandemic around the world has hit automakers extremely hard. Automakers, such as GM, Ford, and others have been forced to shut down production around the world. Demand for new vehicles has also plummeted, leaving many automakers losing vast sums of money. Lincoln parent company Ford invested heavily into electric auto firm Rivian, and the investment landed it the right to use the skateboard platform for a future electric vehicle.

Lincoln announced only a couple of months ago that it would build an electric vehicle using the Rivian skateboard platform. That announcement was before the coronavirus pandemic, and Lincoln has now reportedly told dealers that it had canceled that electric vehicle. Lincoln blamed the "current environment" for the cancellation of the vehicle, insisting that its commitment to electrification and Rivian will continue.

The Lincoln electric vehicle on the Rivian platform was scheduled to launch in 2022. The skateboard platform will be used by Rivian with its R1S and R1T electric vehicles. The coronavirus pandemic has stopped construction on the assembly plant where those vehicles will be built in Illinois. While Lincoln won't be making a vehicle on the skateboard platform now, it says it still plans to build an electric vehicle.

Anchor is a platform designed to allow users to create, distribute, and make money from podcasts on any device at no cost. It's a popular service, and Anchor has now announced a new tool that will automatically convert video to audio. The video-to-audio conversion allows users to turn video files into podcasts that are ready for audio distribution platforms.

Anchor says that the next time users have a conversation on Zoom, Google Meet, Instagram Live, or other video chat tools, those can be shared as a podcast for everyone to listen to. The anchor tool launched this week and makes it possible for users to convert video files into editable audio that can be shared and heard by anyone in the form of a podcast. The tool can be used to make it easy to turn interviews conducted via videoconferencing solutions into podcasts.

The tool could also help podcast cohosts who can't be in the same location due to the coronavirus pandemic maintain a natural workflow by hosting together via videoconferencing. Anchor says that transforming video chats in the podcasts requires only a few clicks when using your favorite video chat or streaming tool. Users upload the video file to Anchor on the web, and it's automatically converted to audio.

Ubisoft is slowly revealing its new Viking-themed Assassin's Creed game, but we at least know what it'll be called now.

A new domain filing for Assassin's Creed Valhalla.com pretty much confirms the game's finalized name. The domain was filed with Gandi.net, which masks the original registrar's data (in this case it's Ubisoft) to protect privacy, so there's no official confirmation per say. But Ubisoft also used Gandi.net to secure Assassin's Creed Origins.com, which redirects to the main Assassin's Creed website. The Valhalla domain will undoubtedly do the same.

Ubisoft has yet to formally unveil Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. The company is currently hosting an unconventional live stream showing an artist creating concept art from the ground up. There's no flashy gameplay, no sizzle reel, no enigmatic logos. Just really beautiful art that slowly takes shape before your eyes and crystallizes the Viking era.

Any platform where people can share news or their personal beliefs tends to have a problem with viral messages that may or may not be true. Facebook-owned WhatsApp certainly has a problem with viral forwarded messages being sent, and it's currently bragging about a 70% drop in the number of viral forwarded messages. The significant decline in forwarded messages comes three weeks after WhatsApp imposed a limit on shared messages to stop the spread of coronavirus misinformation.

WhatsApp imposed a Highly Forwarded Message Limit on April 7 as a response to what it calls a "significant increase" in the number of forwarded messages since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. With the limit imposed, people are only allowed to forward viral messages to one chat instead of five as previously allowed.

WhatsApp issued a statement that said, "Since putting into place this new limit, globally, there has been a 70% reduction in the number of highly forwarded messages sent on WhatsApp. This change is helping keep WhatsApp a place for personal and private conversations." Like many other social networking, videoconferencing, and chat apps, WhatsApp has partnered with governments, the World Health Organization, and other organizations to create trustworthy information sources for users.

Techland just announced one of the most creative DLCs I've ever seen in the games industry. It's called Hellraid, and it pulls you into a cursed arcade machine straight out of hell.

Dying Light released in 2015, but Techland is still making awesome DLC for the game five years later. Case in point: The new Hellraid DLC, which basically transports you into a supernatural arcade cabinet to play Techland's unreleased Hellraid fantasy slasher. This idea is just plain fun and it had to be a blast for the devs. They got to dust off one of their old IPs and use Dying Light as a kind of bloody canvas to converge the two worlds. The Hellraid arcade machine will consume your soul and transport you to a world of mayhem and destruction.

This idea is pretty interesting and reminds me of the urban legend of Polybius, that infamous arcade machine planted by the government in the 1980s that supposedly turned people insane. There's also some inspiration from an old super obscure 1983 horror anthology film called Nightmares, where a gaming-obsessed Emilio Estevez got trapped inside of an arcade machine.

The Google Project Zero team announced this week that it had discovered significant flaws in Apple's Image I/O that were likely candidates to be targeted by zero-click attack vectors. The bugs were discovered in Apple's Image I/O software, which ships with iOS, MacOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The flaws were present on every major platform that Apple offers.

The Project Zero team withheld any publication of the bugs until they were patched by Apple. The team says that the Image I/O problems Apple had linked to relatively well-known issues surrounding image format parsers. Flaws of this sort are commonly targeted by hackers because they could allow the various multimedia assets to be processed with the ability to run code on a target system without user interaction.

Google's team used a process called "fuzzing" to determine how the Image I/O framework responded to malformed image files. The team chose that particular technique because Apple restricts access to a majority of the tool source code. During the research, the Google team successfully found six vulnerabilities in Image I/O, along with another eight vulnerabilities in OpenEXR, which is a third-party HDR image file format.

The next Assassin's Creed game will center around the bloody carnage of seafaring Vikings, Ubisoft today confirmed.

Ubisoft is doing something different with this year's Assassin's Creed reveal. Instead of revealing AC Vikings with an action-packed teaser or sizzle reel, Ubisoft is using art to slowly uncovering the game's setting in a live stream. The stream follows BossLogic as he crafts some interesting concept art that gives away the game's Viking-themed timeline in bits and pieces. The game's setting, time frame, and overall feel slowly come into focus as BossLogic adds more depth to the art.

The main image shows two scenes with a protagonist in the middle: On the left, there's Viking longships sailing the emerald seas amidst towering, frozen mountains in the back, obviously a nod to the Northern climes of Scandinavia. The longships have the Viking's signature decorated shields.

YouTube has published an official blog post that talks about its expanded fact checks for YouTube in the United States. The video service says that over the last two years, more and more people have begun coming to YouTube for news and information. That information runs the gamut from election coverage to perspectives on different topics and information about breaking news events.

One of the events that have brought more people to YouTube in recent months is the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. YouTube says that it's continuing to improve the news experience on the service, including raising authoritative sources of information across the site. YouTube is now expanding its fact check information panels that were launched in Brazil and India last year to the United States.

The fact check feature will expand on other ways that YouTube is using to connect people with authoritative sources. YouTube says that it started introducing information panels in 2018 with a wide range of contextual information from links to sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia for topics that were prone to misinformation. More recently, that has been expanded to cover coronavirus and includes links to the WHO, CDC, or local health authorities.

A new malicious campaign on the Google Play Store targeting Android devices dubbed PhantomLance has been discovered. According to the security researchers, the campaign has been active since at least 2015 and is ongoing. The campaign features multiple versions of sophisticated spyware that was created to gather the data of victims and targeted devices.

Another hallmark of the campaign is that it used smart distribution tactics such as distribution via dozens of applications on the Google Play store, according to researchers at Kaspersky. The spyware campaign also used alternative Android app stores for distribution such as APKpure and APKCombo. Kaspersky researchers say that the PhantomLance spyware overlapped with other attacks that targeted Windows and MacOS that were attributed toa hacker group known as OceanLotus believed to be based in Vietnam that was also tracked as APT32.

Researchers say that the malware used in this particular campaign is a lot more complicated than the typical malware used by cybercriminals to steal financial information and credentials from Southeast Asian Android users. The majority of users impacted by this campaign are located in Vietnam, with a small number located in China. Information that the malware campaigns are targeting included information about geolocation, call logs, contacts, text messages, lists of installed apps, and device information.

A court filing surfaced earlier this week that shows Apple has settled a class-action lawsuit brought against it by users of older iPhone models. According to the lawsuit, Apple intentionally broke FaceTime on older iPhone devices. Apple has agreed to pay out $18 million to the claimants who argued that Apple had disabled FaceTime on iPhone 4 and 4s smartphones as a cost-saving measure in 2014.

The $18 million common fund covers nearly 30% of the total average damages estimated by expert witnesses the plaintiffs called in the case. Apple is worth such a massive amount of money that $18 million is nothing to the company, and the settlement really means nothing to those involved in the class-action lawsuit either. Each of the class members will receive about $3 from the settlement.

The $3 could increase if other claimants in the suit fail to cash their checks. Honestly, $3 isn't worth a trip to the bank, so a number of participants in the suit may not cash the checks. The two-class representatives in the lawsuit will come out much better than the average iPhone 4 user. Christina Grace and Ken Potter, the class representatives, stand to gain $7500 each for participation in the case.

Google is looking to keep all of its customers on its apps, and with so many people working from home right now and using Zoom, why not release another app that will entice them back onto Google?

Google will soon be rolling out a new free service called Google Meet. Google Meet will be free for anyone who has a Gmail account, and will have a slew of features that will no doubt steal some of Zoom's users back over to Google for the sheer convenience. Meet users will be able to create and host meetings with up to 100 participants by using Meet's website, or iOS and Android apps.

Google users will also be able to schedule meetings on their Google Calendar and go straight to meetings from the Google Calendar app or website. Meet will also be able to use real-time captions and have an expanded tile view layout. At the moment, Google Meet sessions are unlimited, but after September 30th sessions will be limited to 60 minutes each. Google is uncapping the session time to allow for everyone who is required to work from home due to the coronavirus. If you are interested in Google Meet, check out more here.

The sale of RuneScape developer Jagex has been rumored for quite some time now, and now it's finally happened.

According to GamesIndustry.biz, Jagex, the developer of the popular MMO RuneScape, has been officially acquired by a US-based global management firm, Macarthur Fortune Holding. Jagex was previously owned by Shanghai Hongtou Network Technology, a subsidiary company of Shanghai Fukong. Macarthur Fortune Holding has now purchased Jagex through one of its funds called Platinum Fortune.

Macarthur plans on investing in the future of Jagex by implementing marketing strategies that will hopefully continue the slow growth of its MMOs. Macarthur plans on increasing the player base of Jagex's MMO's, and will also be keeping Jagex's management team at its Cambridge headquarters the same. If you are interested in checking out RuneScape, head on over to the Old School RuneScape website here.

Google just reported its Q1'20 earnings, and the results see strong growth across the company's key billion-dollar segments.

Google recorded stellar Q1 results driven by earnings spikes in key advertisement and search segments. The company pulled in $4.028 billion from YouTube advertisements in the three-month period ending March 31, 2020, up a significant 33% from last year. This jump is likely caused by COVID-19 stay-at-home orders issued across the globe in late March, leading to a massive influx of viewers watching ads placed over videos.

The titan's main breadwinner is of course monetizing searches across its juggernaut search engine. The company raked in a tremendous $24.5 billion in search revenue in Q1, up 8.67% from last year, and total advertisement revenues across YouTube and search tallied up to $33.7 billion, up 10.38% from Q1'19.