The Asus ROG Flow X13 is a laptop that breaks all the conventions. It looks like a typical ultraportable, but its CPU performance rivals or surpasses that of many laptops twice its weight. And while most thin-and-light laptops make serious sacrifices in performance, the ROG Flow X13 is actually one of the fastest gaming laptops in town.If all this sounds great, we have two caveats. First, this unique take on a thin and powerful laptop does come with a few compromises, which some will gladly a
Intel’s newly released 670p M.2 NVMe SSD will offer better performance for “real world” usage loads that regular nerds care about, the company said on Monday. If that promise holds true, this new drive could wind up on our list of the best SSDs.The Intel 670p is built on 4th-gen, 144-layer quad-level cell (QLC) NAND that increases the density over the previous 96-layer QLC by 50 percent. Besides the enhanced density, the drive features an updated controller and firmware, along with an improve
Both Nvidia and AMD switched from blower-style to axial-fan coolers for their in-house reference cards in recent years, and it was a good decision. Axial designs offer better cooling performance and lower noise levels in the single GPU setup used by much gamers. But blower-style coolers remain popular in workstations that use GeForce graphics cards for getting things done, leading Nvidia partners like Asus and MSI to release blower-style GeForce RTX 3090 editions to satisfy those professional
It’s glad tidings that the Intel 670p SSD finally makes 4-bit QLC NAND perform well enough to compete with TLC NVMe drives. The drive had no issues with synthetic benchmarks and even managed a livable pace when it ran out of secondary cache—about three times what its predecessor, the 660p, managed. Now if the company could just explain the unusually low TBW ratings, we’d be all good. This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best SSDs. Go there for information on competing drives and
Create stronger, more secure passwords: We are nagged to do it all the time, but few of us actually make the effort. Meanwhile, passwords continue to be stolen, leaked, and cracked on a regular basis. So this time we’re hoping to get your attention by looking at it from the attacker’s side! We'll show you how passwords are cracked and even how to do it yourself, so you can see exactly why a strong password matters.As our brief foray with a cracking tool will show you, your only protection aga
It's hard to tell the difference between the new M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, so we've broken them all down for you. https://www.macworld.com/article/3596752/apple-m1-chip-13-inch-macbook-pro-macbook-air-performance-battery-ram-storage-design-display-price.html#tk.rss_all
An upgradeable laptop has long been the Holy Grail of laptop features. And much like the famed Grail, it's never been found.Many have tried and all have failed. The most recent attempt was Alienware's Area 51m R1, which launched with lofty goals but ultimately never offered meaningful upgrades.Enter Framework, which pledges to finally bring the Holy Grail home to Camelot with a modular, do-it-yourself and upgradeable laptop. Being a witness to all of the prior quest failures, well, we have ou
In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Ung, Brad Chacos, and Adam Patrick Murray talk about new graphics cards you probably can’t buy anytime soon.Not that you’d probably want to at today’s wildly inflated prices. We kick things off by talking about Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060, which launched this week. It ostensibly costs $330, and several custom models were revealed at that point, but most RTX 3060 graphics cards cost $470 or more at retail. Oof. We explain everything you need to know about
Editor's Note: PCWorld originally published this story in 2014. This year, 2021, marks the 25th anniversary of Charles O'Rear's iconic photo in 1996, which became the basis of the Windows XP desktop wallpaper. The vineyards are still there today.It’s not too far-fetched to believe that a billion people have viewed the “Bliss” image that defines the desktop view of Windows XP, the seminal OS that Microsoft is retiring Tuesday. But you’d barely notice the real-world “Bliss” scene if you stepped
Over the past couple of months I’ve been gaming with an eGPU enclosure that had Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 stuffed inside of it. While the limitations of Thunderbolt 3 are well documented, I was curious to see just how limited that monster card would be in such a setup. In the above video you can check out the results from over 10 of the hottest games of the past year, including Cyberpunk 2077 and Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020).Getting the whole system up and running required a bit of work