New Gadgets

About gush about The Expanse, let's run through a laundry list of things that are not good about The Expanse.

• The acting is frequently off, sometimes flat-out bizarre.
• The dialogue is regularly stilted and unnatural.
• Despite having to do a lot of heavy lifting, the CGI can feel creaky and low budget.
• Literally every decision made by Detective Miller (played by Thomas Jane) makes zero sense.
• Thomas Jane's hat. A terrible hat. Maybe the worst TV hat ever hatted.
• See also: Thomas Jane's haircut.

On the contrary, The Expanse is very good. Often it's good in spite of its flaws. Sometimes it's enhanced by those flaws.

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At today’s Intel Vision conference the company unveiled a new version of Alder Lake for mobile. Unlike its existing H-class mobile CPUs, the new HX variants are designed for extreme performance in a variety of workloads. It’s sort of like HEDT for laptops, if you will. Intel is even marketing the new chips as “desktop-caliber” technology.

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As expected, Google is working on a Pixel 6A phone - including many of the Pixel 6's highlight features like the Tensor chip at a lower $449 price - but it will be a few months before it goes on sale. At Google I/O on Wednesday, the tech giant revealed the new phone alongside a look at the future of Android 13, its long-awaited Pixel Watch, new Pixel Buds Pro earbuds, a tease of a Pixel Tablet in 2023 and a first look at the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones due in the fall.

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New comedy is coming from Norm Macdonald, who isn't letting a little thing like being dead stand in his way. The Canadian comedian died in September 2021 at age 61. But before that, he shot an hour-long stand-up set of new material in his own living room. The resulting show, titled Norm Macdonald: Nothing Special‚ will be released by Netflix as a posthumous comedy special on May 30.

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The pandemic-based revenue-a-thon seems to be starting to slow down, at least in the global PC market. There were predictions this would occur at the end of 2021. Now we’re seeing it play out just as the prophecy foretold. The latest company to chime in is Asus, which held a quarterly earnings call this week. On the call Asus executives predicted the company’s PC and component sales would drop significantly in the coming quarter. They also addressed crytomining’s impact on Asus’ business, revealing its importance has already been diminished.

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The constant drip of rumors about Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 40-series GPUs has now progressed from Twitter posts to actual photos. A user on the Chiphell forums has posted snapshots of what appears to be the cooling shroud for a 40-series GPU. Though it looks quite similar to the current 30-series Founder’s Edition coolers, there’s one big difference: it’s stamped with the letters RTX 4090 Ti.

The photos appear to be from a factory where the GPUs are being manufactured, via Wccftech. In them we can see the perimeter of the GPU and its backplate. The two most unsurprising aspects of the photos is the cooler looks almost exactly like the current Founder’s Edition shroud, and it’s a thick one. In fact, it looks almost exactly like an RTX 3090 Ti. The photos are in high-resolution and allow us to see how Nvidia has modified the cooler. Previously it was reported that the RTX 4090 would have a TDP of 450W, which is exactly the same as the 3090 Ti. This would explain why the coolers look so similar, but there’s a twist: one of the pieces of metal in the photos is emblazoned with the letters RTX 4090 Ti.

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PC component manufacturer Corsair has finally entered the gaming notebook market, but with a twist. Unlike other mobile gaming solutions, this one is designed for dual-duty: gaming and streaming. Since it owns streaming hardware company Elgato, it’s incorporated streaming controls directly into the hardware. The result is a first-of-its-kind laptop with unique features for streamers. It’s also one of the first laptops to launch with the AMD Advantage branding which are designed to boost gaming and overall system performance.

The laptop has a somewhat mysterious name of Voyager. Eagle-eyed storage mavens will recall Corsair used this name previously on some of its USB storage devices. It seems to be an attempt to define the laptop in vague terms so as to not pigeon hole it as only for gaming or streaming. It’s marketed as being effective at both.

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Star Wars: The High Republic readers got a taste of what's coming, as the authors of the publishing initiative gathered at a Star Wars Celebration Anaheim panel on Thursday to talk about phase 2 -- known as Quest of the Jedi -- before it kicks off later this year.

These novels, children's books and comics are set 200 years before The Phantom Menace, the earliest movie in the Star Wars timeline. Claudia Gray's excellent The Fallen Star brought Phase 1 to a fiery conclusion earlier in 2022, and Lucasfilm surprised fans this year by revealing that phase 2 will be set 150 years before the events of phase 1.

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The Galaxy Z Fold 4's camera might be similar to the Galaxy S22's, if the leaks are true.
Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 4 will reportedly come with a slimmer hinge and an upgraded camera that's similar to the Galaxy S22's. That's according to Ice Universe, a Twitter account known for publishing Samsung leaks.


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When AMD announced it would add support for the Ryzen 5000 family to the old 300 series motherboard chipsets it raised interesting questions about how these chips would perform when plugged in as upgrades. We suspected CPUs like the Ryzen 7 5800X3D might prove to be unusually strong upgrade options thanks to the large amount of onboard L3 cache.

Now that we’ve spent some time evaluating the question, we can confirm it: Any enthusiast gamer still running a Ryzen 7 1800X or below should seriously consider either the Ryzen 7 5800X or the Ryzen 7 5800X3D as an upgrade option. The 5800X3D is a particularly good choice if you are stuck with slower RAM clocked at DDR4-2667 or below. Performance improvements of 1.5x – 2x are possible at 1080p with an appropriately powerful GPU.

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