UK Government Plans Huge Manipulative Ad Campaign Against Private Chat Encryption

End-to-end Encryption for most people this is something invisible they never even think about, but for just about everyone who uses messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal and many others, this is an absolute necessity for privacy. In a recent report by Rolling Stone it was revealed that the UK Government Home Office is set to launch a massive £534,000 advertising campaign against the practice of utilizing end-to-end encryption utilizing public funds. Hiring the advertising agency M&C Saatchi, a spin-off of Saatchi and Saatchi who made "Labour Isn't...

OnePlus Buds Z2 Review: Solid ANC Earbuds For Under $100

by Myriam Joire - Thu, Dec 16, 2021

Since OnePlus introduced the original and excellent OnePlus Buds ($79) a year and a half ago, the company has launched two more pairs of TWS (true wireless) earbuds – the affordable ($49) OnePlus Buds Z, and the higher end ($149) OnePlus Buds Pro with ANC and wireless charging. Today we’re taking a listen to OnePlus’ fourth set of earbuds, the brand new OnePlus Buds Z2 ($99), which feature ANC but lack wireless charging. Basically, the OnePlus Buds Z2 are to the Buds Pro what the Buds Z were to the original OnePus Buds – lower specced, but also more affordable. So, what...

NVIDIA DLSS Vs AMD FSR: F1 2021 Performance & Image Quality

by Ben Funk - Tue, Dec 14, 2021

Ignoring the difficulties securing hardware for a moment, it's a pretty glorious time to play games on the PC. We get our choice of resolutions, frame rates, and detail levels, and if our hardware isn't up to snuff there's some innovative creative technologies available that try to bridge the gap. NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling requires the green team's RTX hardware, but AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution upscales graphics on just about any modern graphics card worth owning. Since FSR's public release, the question has always been about which method is better, assuming we have a choice in...

Watch The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience And Prepare To Be Blown Away

by Jeff Butts - Tue, Dec 14, 2021

Ahead of the Christmas release of Matrix Resurrections, Epic Games has released The Matrix Awakens on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Built around the recently-unveiled Unreal Engine 5, the interactive tech demo reintroduces us to the boundary-pushing universe at the core of the Wachowski’s films. Director Lana Wachowski helped hatch the idea for the demo at a dinner with Kim Libreri, chief technology officer for Epic Games, and VR guru John Gaeta. Wachowski told the pair of her plans to make the fourth movie, asking them to spearhead the visual effects for the film. According to Libreri,...

Qualcomm And Razer Partner On Impressive Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 Android Gaming Handheld

by Paul Lilly - Wed, Dec 01, 2021

Gaming is a lucrative business, and that includes the mobile front, which generates around $175 billion per year from an audience of 2.5 billion mobile gamers. Compare that to the movie industry that raked in less than $45 billion last year and you'll understand why gaming is such an important consideration for many companies. That's all to say there is ample incentive for chip makers to focus on gaming, and so it's no surprise Qualcomm is expanding its offerings with the new Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 gaming platform, with an assist from Razer (more on that in a moment). The Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 is...

Falcon Northwest Talon (2021) Review: Alder Lake Takes Flight

by Keith May - Fri, Nov 05, 2021

It hasn't been long since we last took a look at the 2021 version of the Falcon Northwest Talon, and found it to be impressive. However, it’s finally time for Intel’s Alder Lake 12th Gen Core processor launch and we all know what that means -- a deluge of reviews with tons of charts and opinions for you to digest. Of course, we've got you covered, too, with our in-depth review of the Intel Core i9-12900K and the Core i5-12600K, for everyone wanting to sink their teeth into the finer points of Intel's new platform. However, this launch also marks a chance for OEM system builder...

LG UltraGear GP9 Review: Bluetooth Gaming Soundbar With Grunt, Lacks Grace

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Nov 02, 2021

This past Summer, LG created a new product category with its UltraGear Gaming Speaker (GP9), though not entirely from scratch. The GP9 combines aspects of a soundbar with a portable Bluetooth speaker, and also serves as an external USB soundcard with a built-in Hi-Fi Quad DAC (ESS9038 Pro) to bring your headphones to life. It works with PCs, game consoles, and anything that blasts out audio through a Bluetooth connection. It also has a distinctive gamer aesthetic, or at least what LG thinks qualifies as one with the usual RGB lighting flare. But is it any good at everything or anything it's designed...

NVIDIA GeForce NOW RTX 3080 Review: Your Killer Gaming Rig In The Cloud

by Ben Funk - Thu, Oct 28, 2021

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is not a new product, but today the company's game streaming service is expanding in a couple of key ways to bring more performance and better visuals to gamers everywhere. Announced last week, NVIDIA is bringing a whole new tier of graphics horsepower to its service, dubbed GeForce NOW RTX 3080. Gone is GFN's previous limit of 1920X1080 FHD resolution running at 60 frames per second. Replacing those previous top-end limits now, in the RTX 3080 tier, are a higher resolution of 2560x1440 at up to 120 FPS. We could end things right here, but there's a lot more to this upgrade,...

Back 4 Blood Performance Review: A Worthy Successor To L4D?

by Ben Funk - Tue, Oct 19, 2021

The Left 4 Dead games were great cooperative fun. For the uninitiated, four players blasted their way through frantic zombie hordes in the L4D games, working together as a team just trying to survive. Developer Turtle Rock Studios, which was acquired by Valve prior to the release of the first game, re-established itself as an independent studio following the release of the second. Now Turtle Rock is back with a third title that's not an actual addition to the Left 4 Dead franchise, but is clearly a spiritual successor nonetheless. Valve still owns the L4D franchise, but that wasn't going to stop...

Alienware X15 Gaming Laptop Review: A Svelte Stunner With Caveats

by Dave Altavilla - Thu, Oct 14, 2021

Thin and light gaming laptops are a bit of an enigma. They essentially aim to defy the laws of physics, eschewing size and thermal dissipation area in an effort to strike a more portable, stylish design while still maintaining respectable gaming chops. Let's face it, no one really likes the bulk and chunky demeanor of most high-end gaming laptops that are designed for all-out performance. It's a difficult, fine line to walk, but a worthy, noble one to develop a compelling, quality thin and light gaming laptop, and that's exactly what Dell went all-out for with the new Alienware X15. The new...

Far Cry 6 With Ray Tracing And FSR Performance Review: Bring On The Eye Candy

by Ben Funk - Wed, Oct 06, 2021

The raid on this fort is reminiscent of infiltration missions in Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag A whole new crop of blockbuster games are lining up for a big holiday shopping season. Ubisoft didn't really intend for that to be the case for Far Cry 6, but early this year the COVID-19 pandemic had other plans. The game had been hit by some delays, but at the end of May the company set a date: October 7, 2021. Finally, the latest Far Cry title has arrived and the open-world first-person shooter is ready for players to take down its repressive government and maybe learn a little something along the...

Analysts Forecast Continued PC Gaming Growth After COVID Bump Through 2025

by Zak Killian - Fri, Oct 01, 2021

Have you heard about the death of PC gaming? It was a popular topic among certain folks for years. They haven't said much about it lately, though—probably because PC gaming is bigger than it has ever been. Year-over-year growth has been immense, with gaming monitor and gaming PC shipments in the second quarter increasing 19.3% over last year despite shipping delays and component shortages. Market analysis firm IDC itself notes that the rapid growth in the gaming market through last year and into this year was driven by the global COVID-19 pandemic, and that some analysts expect this growth...

TCL MoveAudio S600 ANC Earbuds Review: Great Sound At $99

by Dave Altavilla - Thu, Sep 23, 2021

When it comes to wireless earbuds, you might say we're fairly particular and almost snooty about them. It's not easy to reproduce decent acoustics with such tiny drivers, never mind with quality active noise cancellation (ANC) that doesn't make it sound like you're listening to music in some kind of weird anechoic chamber. Regardless, at under $100, that's what the TCL MoveAudio S600 True Wireless Earbuds try to achieve. We recently looked at OnePlus' $149 ANC wireless buds offering with the Buds Pro, and found them to be a quality set of wireless buds with a few caveats, most of which could...

Logitech Combo Touch Review: Making A Laptop Out Of An iPad?

by Ben Funk - Tue, Sep 07, 2021

Apple's 4th generation iPad Air has a lot going for it. The A14 Bionic SoC at the heart of the device offers great performance in a wide variety of apps and games, and the 10.9" Liquid Retina display looks great under many different conditions. In fact, for some use cases, the iPad Air could rival a full-fledged computer, if only it had the necessary input devices to maximize productivity. There are numerous companies attempting to address this deficiency of the iPad Air though, including industry stalwart, Logitech. Recently, Logitech introduced the Combo Touch, a form-fitting series of cases...

MSI GE76 Raider Laptop Review: Tiger Lake With RTX Gladiator

by Ben Funk - Thu, Sep 02, 2021

More powerful, more capable and feature-rich -- the current crop of gaming laptops with the most recent CPU and GPU platforms can offer a major upgrade to the enthusiast laptop experience. That's especially true these days with discrete graphics cards being hard to come by and marked up by factors of two or three above their MSRP. Suddenly dropping $3,000+ on a whole-system upgrade via portable powerhouses like these starts to make more sense financially. New desktop builds are great (if you can find components and all), but then you also have to factor in a new display, keyboard, and just about...

EVGA Z12 Gaming Keyboard, X20 And X15 Mice Review: Value-Priced Arsenal

by Nathan Ord - Tue, Aug 31, 2021

As enthusiasts, we're often most enamored by the latest and greatest graphics cards, processors, and storage technology in our endeavors to squeeze as much performance from our systems as possible. However, it is the human interface devices -- like our keyboards, mice, and monitors -- that can have the most significant impact on our user experience. A high-quality keyboard and mouse, for example, can make you more productive, reduce fatigue, and even improve your gaming chops. So, when EVGA offered up their upcoming X20 and X15 gaming mice and Z12 RGB keyboard, we were eager to take a look. After...

Here's How To Upgrade Your PlayStation 5 With A Fast SSD

by Ben Funk - Thu, Aug 26, 2021

Sony's PlayStation 5 launched in November of 2020 somewhat incomplete. While the hardware had an M.2 slot to expand the internal storage needed by PS5 games, the software didn't know what to do with it out of the box. Earlier this year though, Sony opened up a beta program with early access to firmware that can use that slot, and we managed to get in. To make the most of that, we teamed up with the folks at Sabrent, who sent along a 2 TB Rocket 4 Plus NVMe SSD and a heat sink solution to keep the drive cool. Unfortunately, the PS5's limited internal space prevented us from using the heatsink,...

Dell UltraSharp 4K Webcam Review: Up Your WFH Video Quality

by Chris Goetting - Wed, Aug 25, 2021

The humble webcam has seen a surge to prominence fueled by the rise of web conferencing and remote work, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Only a few short years ago, a webcam could be buried away below the display of a laptop and few users would complain or even notice. With those days behind us, consumers and professionals alike have been scrambling to improve their on-screen presence to the point of creating a shortage of the now critical device. That same demand has drawn more players into the discrete webcam space, including Dell. Dell's recently released 4K-capable UltraSharp Webcam aims...

OnePlus Buds Pro Review: Terrific Features, Tunable Sound

by Dave Altavilla, Myriam Joire - Mon, Aug 23, 2021

After releasing the excellent $79 half in-ear OnePlus Buds last summer (now just $59), followed by the decent $49 full in-ear OnePlus Buds Z last fall, OnePlus just launched its most stylish and expensive TWS (true wireless stereo) earbuds to date, the $149 full in-ear OnePlus Buds Pro, which crank things up a notch by adding ANC (active noise cancellation) and wireless charging to the standard feature list. While OnePlus is clearly targeting Apple's $249 AirPods Pro (currently $179 on sale) and Samsung’s brand new $149 Galaxy Buds2, it’s also competing with more affordable, yet...

Doom Eternal Ray Tracing Tested: The Devil's In The Details

by Ben Funk - Tue, Jul 06, 2021

In the spring, Id Software and Bethesda announced that they would bring real-time ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 to the Vulkan-powered Doom Eternal. When we reviewed thsi latest Doom title, we found that it was already pretty stunning graphically while running really well on all kinds of different hardware. High performance and a bevy of graphics configuration settings means that Doom can run on just about any discrete graphics card from the last few years.  Now the Doom Eternal ray tracing update is here, though the tricky part about adding ray tracing effects to Doom is whether...

Alienware m17 R4 Review: The Fastest Gaming Laptop Yet

by Paul Lilly - Wed, Jun 16, 2021

Just a few months ago, we reviewed the Alienware m15 R4, a seriously powerful 15.6-inch form factor laptop that, at the time, posted the best gaming performance benchmark results we had ever seen from a notebook. Not that we were particularly surprised—armed with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU based on Ampere and a 10th Generation Intel Core i7-10870H CPU (Comet Lake) CPU, it packs some serious artillery. Well, we've now tested an even faster gaming laptop, and it just so happens to be the 17-inch Alienware m17 R4. Call it sibling rivalry, if you wish, but the bigger 17.3-inch brother to...

WD_Black D50 Game Dock Review: Wicked-Fast External Storage

by Ben Funk - Mon, Jun 14, 2021

Notebooks often have limited storage capacity, despite significant advancements over the last few years. An M.2 drive is only the size of a stick of gum, but not every laptop can fit more than one or two drives at a time, and some users aren't comfortable opening up their machine to upgrade them, which ultimately limits their storage capabilities. This is particularly painful in gaming notebooks, when many games can take up dozens of gigabytes a piece. Western Digital thinks it has a solution, though. The WD Black D50 Game Dock is an all-in-one Thunderbolt 3 dock and PCI Express NVMe storage controller...