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
Watching Fry’s Electronics finally shut down this week was truly the end of an era for me.When I was younger, I’d cobble together a PC by combing through ads placed in the local computer weekly newspaper (yes, they had those) and driving to some non-descript industrial building in Silicon Valley.After getting the stink-eye from the person eating lunch in the lobby, I’d leave with some ISA sound card or motherboard. It felt more like I was buying illegal fireworks than building a PC.
Fry’
Impeccable sonic goodness in an itty-bitty box. https://www.techhive.com/article/3609710/technics-ottava-review.html#tk.rss_all
Learn how to set up the Terminal in macOS so you can install and run smartmontools, a utility that provides data on the health of your SSD. https://www.macworld.com/article/3609512/how-to-m1-intel-mac-ssd-health-terminal-smartmontools.html#tk.rss_all
Nvidia’s next-gen “Ampere” GPU architecture finally goes mainstream today with the launch of the $329 GeForce RTX 3060. Normally, the release of Nvidia’s 60-class graphics cards spark a lot of excitement. They tend to be the best-selling cards of any GeForce generation.But this time around, graphics cards are mired in a months-long shortage driven by a mixture of sky-high demand, logistics woes caused by the pandemic, a cryptocurrency boom that’s driving miners to gobble up GPUs, and some com
At a time when version updates are becoming less of an issue and major phone makers are finally beginning to guarantee years of updates, Google might have found a way to end Android fragmentation once and for all: by turning it into a service.The signs are there. On February 11, Google announced that several “Pixel-first” features in Google Photos—Portrait Blur, Portrait Light, and Color Pop—won’t actually be coming to all Android phones as expected. Instead, Google is offering them as a bene
These planar ribbon headphones sound fantastic, especially in the sub-bass region, but they could use more padding on the headband. https://www.techhive.com/article/3606718/drop-thx-panda-headphone-review.html#tk.rss_all