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Tom’s Hardware Verdict Asus’ ROG Maximus Z790 Formula’s ($724.99) high-end hardware, premium appearance, and hybrid cooling solution make it a unique board in the market. Look no further if your custom water cooling build calls for VRM cooling and some of the finest hardware available. Hybrid cooling for VRMs Two Thunderbolt 4 ports Five M.2 sockets (incl. 5.0 x4) Flagship-class audio solution Cons PCIe 5.0 M.2 drive disables second PCIe slot...

Handheld maker Ayaneo hasannouncedan upcoming handheld gaming PC sporting a dedicated GPU inside. The Ayaneo Next 2 will seemingly ship AMD’s top-of-the-line Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU, featuring aRadeon8060S GPU with 40 CUs. The new model will be one of the first regular handheld gaming PCs to come with this level of performance. TheGPD Win 5has also been announced, sporting the same chip, but compromises by opting for an external battery....

MajorPC brands like Acerand HP typically use other companies to produce memory and storage products. One such supplier, Biwin, plans to take on the likes of Kingston,Seagate, and others as a first-party consumer brand for SSDs, memory, and USB flash drives. The company will showcase its upcoming retail products atComputex 2024in June.Biwin has long manufactured consumer NAND flash and DRAM products for HP and Acer, among others. It also provides legacyNVMe and SATA SSDoptions, including a line of Lenovo-branded PCIe 4....

Following controversy earlier last year around avery risquéStreet Fighter 6modthat was accidentally broadcast during an online tournament between Europe’s top players, Capcom has been on something of a warpath against all modding of its games. This has been going on for some time, but until recently, there was no evidence of the new “Enigma” DRM being patched into Capcom games fundamentally breaking compatibility or even mods – until now. As reflected inthe official patch notesfor Ver....

Over the past several days, multiplereportshave emerged that various China-based third-party memory module makers have begun selling DDR5 DRAM sticks for enthusiasts based on DDR5 chips produced by the China-based ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT). CXMT has never publicly announced its DDR5, so if it mass-produces enough DDR5 chips to sell to third-party module makers, this could have significant market implications — particularly if it begins dumping products on the market that undercut the standard pricing....

Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), China’s leading producer of NAND memory, has been onthe Entity List of the U.S. Commerce Department since late 2022, which essentially bars its access to advanced fab tools. Despite sanctions and restrictions, YMTC plans to expand its production capacity this year, aiming to capture a 15% share of NAND memory production by the end of 2026, reportsDigiTimes. The company also plans to build a trial production line that exclusively uses Chinese fab tools....

Reutersreports that despite a third round of US export restrictions, China’s semiconductor industry says it’ll be business as usual thanks to stockpiles. The latest US sanctions, announced yesterday, add 140 Chinese companies to the ban list. This prevents them from importing 24 kinds of chip manufacturing tools and high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a crucial component forAI-optimized GPUs such as Nvidia’s B200. However, in the long term, the ban on chipmaking tools will likely have more impact....

The latest generation ofChromecast with Google TVcomes with an official voice remote that allows you to control the device conveniently. Although at some point, the remote might stop working, which makes it difficult to browse through the menu. Sometimes, you may encounter a solid white LED light on your remote. The indicator means that the remote is updating the latest firmware and will disconnect temporarily. Other times, a simple issue like a defective battery can also be responsible....

Following theRyzen 5 9600X L1 and L2 cache storywe wrote earlier today, benchmark results of AMD’s new Zen 5 mid-range chip in CPU-Z have cropped up, showing a 12% performance increase for the 9600X over its predecessor, theRyzen 5 7600X. The new benchmark was discovered byHXL on X(formally Twitter). At first glance, CPU-Z’s performance estimations suggest the 9600X’s performance is weaker than what AMD claimed in itsComputex announcement. The Ryzen 5 9600X’s performance gap applies to both its single- and multi-core performance....

Elon Musk’s supercomputing exploits continue to press forward this week, as the technocrat shared a video of his newly renamed “Cortex” AI supercluster on X. Therecent expansion to Tesla’s “Giga Texas” plantwill contain 70,000 AI servers and will require 130 megawatts (MW) of cooling and power at launch, upscaling to 500 MW by 2026. Video of the inside of Cortex today, the giant new AI training supercluster being built at Tesla HQ in Austin to solve real-world AI pic....

Contemporary high-level programming languages and advanced compilers greatly simplify software development and lower its costs. However, this way of programming can hide the performance capabilities of modern hardware, partly due to inefficiencies of application programming interfaces (APIs). Apparently, a good old assembly code path can improve performance by between three and 94 times, depending on the workload, according toFFmpeg. The hardware this multiplied performance was achieved on was not disclosed....

Antimalware Service Executable takes high system memory, especially when Windows Defender’s Virus & threat protection is running a scan. While it releases the memory once the scan completes, you may notice a significant drop in performance during this process. Although you cannot end this task since it is a system process, you can stop the scan and release the memory. If Windows Defender is not performing any scan, features like Real-time protection or cloud-delivered protection might still cause the process to take high memory resources....

The ntoskrnl.exe is a kernel image of the Windows operating system which is responsible for numerous system services such as process, memory management, and hardware virtualization. The cache manager, executive, kernel, security reference monitor, and scheduler are all part of the ntoskernel.exe. The default driver in Windows rarely causes a ntoskrnl.exe BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). However, if a custom, overclocked or obsolete driver corrupts the memory unit used by ntoskrnl....