Computing

HP was first, but won’t be the last HP was first with Tile integration with its excellent Elite Dragonfly business 2-in-1. Nestled inside the chassis, specifically plugged into an M.2 PCIe slot, is a Tile module that draws just the tiniest bit of power from the battery — HP estimates a total battery life reduction of 1.2 seconds (!) from Tile usage. One downside is that the M.2 slot is the same one used for LTE, meaning that you can’t have both Tile and always-on wireless connectivity at the same time. … [Read more...] about Built-in Tile is one of my favorite laptop features to ever exist

Over the past few weeks, cracks have begun to appear in the security of the video-calling tools we evidently can no longer live without. None of them, including the likes of Zoom and Google Meet, secure your calls end-to-end, which means your data can be potentially accessed and viewed by these companies. … [Read more...] about Privacy-focused Brave browser tests end-to-end encrypted video calling

In the GPU department, Apple offers options for the AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR6 memory. These AMD parts are all custom chips designed for Apple’s devices. Based on AMD’s next generation of Zen 2 7nm graphics architecture, we found these GPUs help make the MacBook a video-editing workhorse, with the ability to complete a video in 4 minutes, twice as fast as last year’s MacBook Pro 15-inch. … [Read more...] about Dell XPS 17 vs. MacBook Pro 16-inch: Which big laptop reigns supreme?

In terms of synthetic benchmarks, the first test I ran was Geekbench 4 (Geekbench 5 isn’t available for the Duet, likely due to the processor) The Duet scored 1,376 on the single-core test and 5528 on the multi-core test. That’s near the bottom of our database, particularly the single-core test that is beat out by older Intel Pentium processors. Next, I ran the Speedometer 2.0 test to see how well the MediaTek CPU performs compared to the Intel alternatives on web-related tasks. The Duet scored 27 on the test, which places it at the very bottom of our rankings. Again, you have to look at older Intel Pentium processors to see the same level of performance. … [Read more...] about Lenovo IdeaPad Duet review: Great Chrome tablet at nice price

Ray tracing and DLSS Outside of raw power, the two main selling points for Nvidia’s RTX 20 Series graphics cards are ray tracing and deep learning super sampling (DLSS). Much like in our comparison of the AMD Radeon VII and Nvidia’s RTX 2080, there is a stark difference between the two cards we’re comparing here: One has hardware supporting these features and the other does not. … [Read more...] about Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti vs. RTX 2060