pcworld.com

The luxurious HP Spectre x360 14 is back with some new bling—Intel’s Tiger Lake CPU. The results are as impressive as we’d hoped, with some of the fastest multi-core benchmark scores we’ve ever seen.The features spoil you as much as the speed. With its roomy display, powerful graphics, and exceptional battery life, the Spectre x360 14 will please productivity mavens and content creators alike. Facial and fingerprint recognition, a physical camera shutter, and a Thunderbolt 4 port round out the perks.
This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best laptops. Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them.To read this article in full, please click here
www.pcworld.com/article/3607730/hp-spect ...

Facing a headwind of short supply and customer frustration, AMD will debut its latest Radeon RX 6000 graphics card to dejected and beaten-down gamers next week.The company announced via Twitter to save the date for March 3 at 8 a.m. PST to see “Where gaming begins: EP. 3.” The company also included an image of a full-size dual-fan GPU, which many expect will be a lower-cost Radeon RX 6700 XT built on its Navi architecture.The card will likely go head-to-head with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060, which is expected to hit the streets soon as well.While AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce announcements were once met with excitement by gamers, more recently they have been punctuated with groans, face-palm memes, and pure exasperation.To read this article in full, please click here
www.pcworld.com/article/3609509/amd-will ...

Intel’s 11th gen Rocket Lake-S is still sitting on the launch pad, but the company isn’t wasting any time in promoting it. On Tuesday, Intel teased storage performance results that show a Rocket Lake-S outperforming a Ryzen 9 5950X by 11 percent.The results were tweeted by Intel’s Ryan Shrout, who works as Intel’s Chief Performance Strategist. You can see the 11 percent delta below. Intel

Intel says the upcoming 11th gen Core i9 will outperform AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X in PCMark 10’s storage test of PCIe 4.0 storage.To read this article in full, please click here
www.pcworld.com/article/3609350/intel-fi ...

HP is already one of the top PC vendors in the world, but now it wants to become a big player in the devices you plug into your PC as well. On Wednesday, the company announced that it is buying the HyperX brand of gaming peripherals from Kingston for $425 million.HyperX crafts a wide array of PC accessories, including our favorite overall gaming headset, the HyperX Cloud Alpha. The company also creates gaming-focused keyboards, mice, microphones, earbuds, and even Qi wireless chargers. We’ve reviewed many HyperX keyboards and headsets over the years and they’re ranged from good to great. They’ll be a good fit for HP, which has offered its own peripherals in the past (like the radical, ear-chilling Mindframe headset) but seemingly hasn’t struck gold with its in-house gear. HyperX’s peripherals will be a no-brainer upgrade to offer alongside prebuilt HP systems and gamer-grade Omen desktops.To read this article in full, please click here
www.pcworld.com/article/3609388/hp-buys- ...

If M1 Macs are performing too many writes on the SSD, that could lead to drive problems down the road.
www.macworld.com/article/3609096/apple-s ...

The “Premium only” error that Spotify Free users saw while trying to cast music to Google Assistant-powered speakers was just a bug, Spotify says.
www.techhive.com/article/3608940/don-t-w ...

Fry’s, one of the last dedicated electronics retailers in the U.S. and a once-beloved institution on the west coast, permanently closed its doors late Tuesday night. Its Twitter feed is set to private, its Facebook page is gone, and the Fry’s website itself has been replaced by an announcement of the closure, along with information on where past customers can find help going forward.“After nearly 36 years in business as the one-stop-shop and online resource for high-tech professionals across nine states and 31 stores, Fry’s Electronics, Inc., has made the difficult decision to shut down its operations and close its business permanently as a result of changes in the retail industry and the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic,” the website now reads.To read this article in full, please click here
www.pcworld.com/article/3609348/frys-ele ...

If you ever wanted to change your appearance in a Zoom call without having to download plug-ins like a Zoom camera, you’re in luck. Zoom now has its own ways of changing your appearance into a pirate or a cat, right within the application, as part of its new Video Filters and Studio Effects.The new filters add the ability to surround yourself with a custom video frame using a Video Filter, or overlay the ‘Deal with It’ sunglasses on your eyes. The Studio Effects (Beta) tool is designed more to add to your appearance, with fake lipstick, mustaches, and a beard. Both are fun, and more than a little weird.Here’s how to launch both. (Note that if you’re accessing Zoom via a university, or via a call that someone else administers, these options may not be available to you.)To read this article in full, please click here
www.pcworld.com/article/3608969/how-to-u ...

When I reviewed Roon at its launch, back in 2015, I called it “must-have software for hardcore music fans.” I stand by that characterization, although in retrospect, I shouldn’t have restricted its appeal to the hardcore. Anyone who derives deep enjoyment from music will reap tremendous benefits from this one-of-a-kind—albeit incredibly complex—software.That said, if you don’t consider music essential to life, you’ll probably have difficulty justifying the cost of a Roon license and the relatively steep hardware requirements you’ll need to run it. In addition to the client software that you’ll run on a smartphone, tablet, or personal computer, you’ll need to run server software (the Roon Core) on some other computer on your home network. Developer Roon Labs recommends the server have a least an Intel Core i3 (Ivy Bridge architecture or later) CPU, and it strongly recommends that the Roon database be installed on an SSD.To read this article in full, please click here
www.pcworld.com/article/2923915/roon-1-8 ...

The Acer Swift 3X builds upon an already-strong foundation by adding a dash of Intel’s special sauce.Our review of last year’s Intel-based Acer Swift 3 was torn. “How do you rate a laptop that you really enjoyed using, yet whose performance is otherwise disappointingly weak?” we mused at the beginning. The eminently portable Swift 3 ticked all the boxes that made for a great notebook but lagged far behind its rivals in raw horsepower.Enter the Acer Swift 3X. Moving from Intel’s 10th-gen Core processors to the latest 11th-gen Tiger Lake offerings alone provides a significant speed boost, but the ‘X’ in the name hints at the true star of this show. The Swift 3X is the first Acer laptop with Intel’s new Iris Xe Max discrete graphics chip inside, complete with “Deep Link” software tricks that lets it join forces—sometimes—with Tiger Lake’s integrated Xe graphics to boost performance in productivity tasks. It’s also the first Intel Iris Xe Max laptop to cross our test bench.To read this article in full, please click here
www.pcworld.com/article/3609170/acer-swi ...