Cooler Master’s has announced a variety of rather, uh, unique new products as part of its 30-year anniversary celebration. This includes a new case that looks like a gigantic athletic shoe dubbed “Sneaker X”, and an even more outrageous “Shark X” chassis. While the shoe case is listed as being available for pre-order in Q3 of this year, the shark chassis is only listed as “possibly” coming. You might not want to get your hopes up. The Sneaker X case, which is bigger than it looks in photos, is a production version of a concept first created for the company’s 2020 .
Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most hotly anticipated games of the last few years. It was supposed to launch in 2019, but repeated delays pushed it back to late 2020, and even then the game was in a sorry state at launch. Developer CD Projeckt Red (CDPR) promised to work diligently to address player concerns, and the small patches that followed smoothed a few rough edges. Now, with significant changes to performance and lesser improvements to gameplay. If you’ve been waiting to enjoy Cyberpunk on your next-gen console, now is the time. Many had pointed to the incredible work CDPR did on The Witcher games as evidence Cyberpunk would be a success, and they certainly had time.
(Photo: Robina Weermeijer/Unsplash)Researchers say they’ve found and tested a method of turning lungs from donors with type A blood to lungs with Type O blood, making them universally available to anyone on a lung waiting list. Blood type has long been one of the many criteria involved in matching a donor organ to a hopeful recipient. The guidelines for this, however, aren’t exactly straightforward; for example, people with type AB blood can receive donations from any type but can only donate to others with type AB, while those with type O blood can donate to anyone but can only receive donations from others with type O.
If you’ve been thinking about getting a higher capacity SSD for your computer, an SSD for your console, or buying a few USB sticks, you would be wise to do it right now. As in, as soon as you finish reading this article, drop what you’re doing and purchase some NAND memory, because it’s about to get more expensive, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. As you might recall, last week it was announced that almost of memory were destroyed by contamination at two factories run by Western Digital (WDC) and its partner Kioxia. At the time, it was assumed that the loss of that much flash memory would cause disruptions in the global NAND markets, possibly triggering a global rise in prices.
(Photo: Newegg)E-tail giant Newegg has announced a sudden and unexpected change to some of its hardware return policies in the wake of some good old fashioned public shaming care of the Gamers Nexus (GN) YouTube channel. Going forward the company will allow “no question” returns on CPUs and motherboards purchased as “open box” items, which the company says will guarantee a “hassle free” experience. That’s the exact opposite of what Gamers Nexus experienced recently. The brouhaha started two weeks ago when the site’s owner, Steve Burke, posted a video titled, “.” In the video he describes purchasing an open box Z490 motherboard from Newegg, then says he decided he didn’t need it by the time it arrived.
(Photo: Omid Armin/Unsplash)Thanks to promises outlined in a new Microsoft blog post, Sony loyalists get to breathe easy knowing that their favorite Activision Blizzard titles aren’t leaving PlayStation anytime soon. Amid Microsoft’s pending to buy Activision, gamers have been concerned that the tech giant—which, would become the third largest game developer in the world if its acquisition is successful—could remove beloved Activision titles from PlayStation and make them only available on Xbox, Microsoft’s own console. According to a Bloomberg report from last month, Activision has contracts with Sony that guarantee several more Call of Duty games will be available on PlayStation.
When Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger returned last year, he unveiled plans for a new IDM (Integrated Device Manufacturer) 2.0 strategy. Instead of only building its own CPUs, Intel wants to manufacture chips for companies across the planet. It’s made major recent investments in the RISC-V ecosystem and pledged to license x86 designs to customers. In the future, Intel will license both hard and soft versions of various CPU cores to its customers. A “soft” core is a CPU core implemented in programmable logic, often in an FPGA. A “hard” core is a CPU core that’s implemented in physical silicon.
Motorola was among the first consumer technology companies to get into , pushing a 5G “mod” for its phones back in 2019 when 5G networks were barely live. The company’s innovation lab has continued thinking about 5G, and it has come up with something new: . It’s actually less ridiculous than it sounds. The unnamed 5G neckband is the latest innovation from Motorola’s 312 Labs, which is focused on developing new mobile technologies. The technology being advanced here isn’t 5G, though. It’s AR and VR, sometimes referred to collectively as XR. The XR neckband leverages how 5G mobile devices work right now — there’s basically an entire smartphone in the pendant.
(Image: Valve)With only a matter of days left until the Steam Deck’s official launch on February 25, Valve is hard at work making as many games as possible available to play on the new console. And the company has crossed an exciting milestone: at least 500 games would be playable on the Steam Deck if it were released today. As we back in October, Valve has implemented a “Deck Verified” program that throws Steam games into one of four categories: verified, playable, unsupported, or unknown. “Verified” means the game automatically suits the Steam Deck, while “playable” means it will require some tweaking on the player’s end—such as through the game’s options or a specific controller configuration—to work.
