Recent content by TheSecondPower

A lot of people I know work in manufacturing. This idea that Americans don't want manufacturing jobs is absurd. We value work. The idea that we don't is just an excuse greedy CEOs use to justify cheaper labor.

If I found a laptop I wanted and then found I could get the same laptop made with ethical US labor, I would pay 20% more for it. Years ago a foreign manufacturer was in the news here on Tom's Hardware for building nets around its roof to try to cut down on the completed suicide rate. In the US...

That's especially sad given the flexibility of Intel's advanced packaging. AMD mobile chips are monolithic so the little CPU and little GPU are doomed to the same die. But Intel's chips could combine a little CPU tile with a big GPU tile, Intel just chooses not to. The same could be said of...

I doubt LPDDR6 will change the relative performance of iGPUs to dGPUs; as dGPUs continue to advance iGPUs need faster memory just to stay the same distance behind. Although I'm remembering now that Arrow Lake or Meteor Lake added more cache to its Xe cores and you said Xe2 does more with the...

It's nice to see laptop reviews here pushing for haptic touchpads. It's sad one wasn't used in this laptop.

All games copy and paste some resources. Surely not every tree in Breath of the Wild is unique. In the old Flight Simulator X game, you can fly anywhere in the world, but if you fly over farmland it looks like a giant grid of identical squares; Microsoft copied and pasted the same terrain many...

Strix Halo does seem to be a hit for running LLMs and is selling for a great deal of money so Intel may be smart to copy that formula. Phoenix, Meteor Lake, Strix Point, Lunar Lake, and Arrow Lake have mostly different iGPUs yet all come pretty close in performance. I'm not pleased with where...

The Strix Halo packaging is more similar to Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake packaging than other AMD lines. In Strix Halo AMD uses power-optimized bins of their desktop chiplets, and assuming Nova Lake is similar to Arrow Lake then Nova Lake-AX could do the same thing. It would need a SoC tile with a...

I bought an Arc A310 just for the media encoder (for a Jellyfin server). I wanted the encoder in an Arc B570 or RTX 4060 but the A310 was good enough and a lot cheaper. Now the 5050 is a viable alternative to the B570 for anyone who needs more than the A310 encoder can do. There is still a...

Also I'm left questioning more and more why USB type-C as a display and power connector needs to be ubiquitous. It's useful as a docking station port (although it's far less convenient than the Dell docking station I used at work years ago). But it's not helpful when I need to connect a display...

Couldn't Windows just be programmed to tell the user why a plugged-in decice isn't working? Making specific port requirements for laptops will reduce the options to manufacturers, won't solve cable incompatibilities, and won't help desktop users.

I usually turn secure boot off because I haven't figured out how to dual boot Linux with it on. So games that require just won't work for me.

Sure you can wait 3 minutes for one small movie rip or 12 minutes to transfer a larger blac ray rip, but at some point you're going to need to transfer the entire collection to a new NAS, and now you're looking at hours or even days.

Intel kept promising Panther Lake was on track for a 2025 launch, with a wider release in 2026. That sounded similar to how Meteor Lake launched so I believed it. I should've believed the rumors. Still at least it's finally coming.

Physical buttons would be better. My Benq Zowie mouse has DPI and polling rate indicators and buttons underneath it so I can change the levels without any software at all.