Within the $400 to $600 range you’re likely to find Intel Pentium processors, which deliver better browser performance and are capable of running more intensive gaming apps. While it has nice specs, the Acer Aspire 5 15-inch shows some cut corners for its $600 price tag. At the $600 price, it’s stuck between some cheaper big-screen options (Dell’s Inspiron 3000 15 starts at $449) that, for an average user, might offer an indistinguishable day-to-day experience. A lot of our games also offer mobile gambling support. The 13-inch MacBook Pro has the M2 chip, while with the 14-inch and 16-inch models, you can choose between the M1 Pro or M1 Max chip. However, it was marginally slower than similar models, likely because of its lower-than-average 130W TGP power envelope. The insides, however, sport far superior hardware: Intel’s 14-core Core i9-12900HK and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU. Other relevant specs include a 7-inch, 1280×800 LCD touchscreen running at 60Hz, 5Ghz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, a standard headphone/microphone jack, and USB-C for charging and outputting video at up to 4K 120Hz. The latter will require the Steam Deck Dock, sold separately and not arriving until later this spring.

Should I spring for a Chromebook or a Windows laptop? Basemark Web 3.0: This benchmark gauges how well a Chromebook can handle web-based applications. You miss out on so much of the modern PC experience-from Windows Hello biometric log-in to a touchscreen to all-day battery life. But benchmarks are all theoretical. Jetstream 2: Jetstream 2 is a combination of WebAssembly and JavaScript benchmarks. This combination makes it quite a capable gaming machine. The port selection is a solid combination of old and new. The port selection is pretty diverse, too. You’re not likely to see the micro-USB port (and the slightly larger mini-USB port) in modern laptops, but they can still be found in many peripherals and accessories. But this laptop clearly favors function over attractive aesthetics. This test favors more powerful CPU cores.

The Acer Aspire 5 15-inch has a great number of modern features, including a zippy 12th gen Intel CPU along with plenty of RAM and a spacious SSD. Thanks to all its cores and ample cooling, the Aorus 17 chews through video encoding like a kid devouring celery and peanut butter at snack time. The M1 Ultra is equipped with a much larger copper heatsink, that likely prevents the fan from kicking on as often, and there also appears to be a problem with the M1 Max setup that causes the whine. Companies that compete with Valve and Steam aren’t going to bend over backwards to support the Steam Deck: Epic has already said it won’t build a version of Fortnite for the portable machine. The M1 Max has a video decode engine, two video encode engines, and two ProRes encode and decode engines, while the M1 Ultra has double that. It supports up to four 4K displays, one 5K display, or one Pro Display XDR. There’s a tiny amount of added sharpness, but not enough to stand out, but a very noticeable lack of blocking or artifacting in areas with big light changes or shadows. Then again, Windows 11 itself comes with enough random links like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram built-in, so much so that it’s hard to tell what Microsoft added, and what’s Acer’s doing.

The best graphics cards for PC gaming: You can finally buy GPUs again! The Aspire 5’s keyboard isn’t helped by the design of the whole laptop, which uses the rear edge of the display to slightly prop the computer towards you. A small battery, a mediocre keyboard, and the lack of premium touches make it feel less-than-modern. DVI is often your best option to output video from your laptop to external budget displays that lack more recent connections such as HDMI or DisplayPort. DisplayPort is a digital display connection used to output video and audio from your laptop to a video display, such as a monitor. USB Type-C is the newly adopted standard connector for most modern laptops and devices, and deserves its own distinct place on this list due to its unique functionality. The wireless card is a Killer/Intel Wi-Fi 6e, which can be replaced. All of this means that while there’s plenty of room to be hyped for the first accessible AV1 encoder, there’s also room to be disappointed by the very first iteration of it, with many more to come. Right-click and open in new tab to see in full resolution. I’m uploading all of my YouTube videos in AV1 moving forward and look forward to streaming in the new format as soon as platforms allow. Some casinos tend to mesmerise with their good looks and neat platforms. Shangri La App works in exactly the same way as the desktop site version to provide consistent play across the platforms.

Designed to look like a taller version of the Mac mini, the Mac Studio features a square-shaped 7.7-inch all-aluminum enclosure that’s 3.7-inches high. The Mac Studio models support 802.11ax WiFi 6 connectivity and Bluetooth 5.0, the latest WiFi and Bluetooth protocols. While it does fine on multi-core CPU testing, its single-core and GPU power puts it at the bottom of all of our regular tests. The machine pulls in air from the bottom and pushes it out through the more than 4,000 perforations at the back and bottom of the chassis to cool the internal components. The 13-inch MacBook Pro is actually more akin to a MacBook Air than its high-end siblings, being more than good enough for the needs of casual users. Unfortunately, despite its big 99Whr battery, the powerful components and big display are a drain on the Aorus 17. During our standard battery rundown test, in which we run a 4K video on loop, the Aorus 17 barely made it to six hours of runtime. For Mac Pro owners who purchased wheels and would rather have feet, Apple offers a $300 feet kit.

With weekend races one after another during the season, networks have to hustle to turn each event into a memorable broadcast. With the shrinking size and growing capabilities of cameras, networks place them everywhere: on the back of the pace car, on dashboards facing forward, in the back of the car facing backwards, and inside facing the driver. Usually located along the sides or back of a laptop, these ports help expand functionality and provide connection points for input devices, external drives, networking, and more. It holds up to 39 cars that are stacked up and brought down to ground level with a special car elevator. There are also some complaints just about the level of the fan noise alone without the whine, but many of the people who are unhappy with their machines seem to be experiencing the high-pitched sound rather than the typical fan noise.

There are pages of complaints on the MacRumors forums about the issue, and it seems to be affecting a number of users. Thank you for visiting our gaming pages. The WMS Gaming title offers a wide range of prizes for matching symbols like Harpoons, Telescopes, Hammerhead Sharks, Whales, Maps, and Squid. The Acer Aspire 5 is a good option for most kids, as it ticks a lot of boxes. While Valve is no doubt making every single Steam Deck it can, the reality of the current chip shortage means that even some of those early reserves might not get one on launch day. Experienced players know that when it comes to the game of roulette, there is no real strategy that can garantee steady payouts. We saw just about 6.5 hours of video run time on the GE76 Raider, which is very competitive with laptops with lower-resolution screens (albeit smaller batteries, too). Since you’re likely familiar with the GE76 Raider, we’ll skip talking up the exterior features of it here except to point out the giant RGB LED stripped across its front and go right into what matters: The inside. That said, if you frequently work in bright, sunlit rooms, or like to take your laptop outside, you might find that the screen’s LED backlight a little lacking. The future of video streaming is very bright, and significantly less blocky. That world is the future promised by AV1: A new, open source video codec that aims to dethrone H.264 as the primary video standard after its nearly 20 year-long reign. Although it has a capacious 1 TB NVMe SSD as standard in this configuration, you’ll find another unpopulated M.2 slot waiting for more storage.

It supports up to two MPX Modules or four PCI Express card slots, plus there are three full-length PCI Express Gen 3 slots and one half-length PCI Express Gen 3 slot with Apple I/O card, for a total of eight PCI Express expansion slots to work with. Updated 08/11/2022 Check out our latest review of the Dell XPS 13 Plus. Thankfully, the plastic chassis keeps the keyboard in check. Find your top favorite games and check out our reviews on the best online casinos before making your final choice. The fairly wide angle of view makes it a pretty good (especially combined with its decent speakers and microphones) choice to host Zoom calls with more than one person in front of it. YouTube and Netflix switched over to almost exclusively using VP9 (Google’s own open source video codec) but again adoption in the consumer application space has been virtually nonexistent, and it seems video streaming giants still desire even higher efficiency. At 6 and 8mbps, Intel Arc’s AV1 encoder goes back and forth between scoring higher than X264 VerySlow and scoring slightly lower (VMAF scores operate on a 0-100 scale with 100 being a perfect match for the lossless/uncompressed source material), and still scoring impressively higher than even the best GPU H.264 encoders. Much how X264 VerySlow far outperforms any of the GPU H.264 encoders, this is to be expected.

But if we look over at the lower 3.5mbps bitrate, Intel’s AV1 encoder soars above any of the H.264 encoders, including X264 VerySlow. No surprise, the GE76 Raider and its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU easily outpaces the other laptops including a stack of GeForce RTX 3080 GPU laptops. Owing to its small and narrow footprint, the USB Type-C port can fit on most ultra-thin laptops being manufactured in today’s market. At .7 inches thick at its thickest, this laptop also is decently svelte, so it should comfortably fit in a wide array of backpacks. SD Cards can be hot-plugged and hot-swapped, meaning you can insert and remove them without restarting your laptop. If you’re coming from an old, tired computer that only lasts a couple of hours it’s not so bad but this is far from the all-day battery life you can get in competing laptops. The days leading up to the race are spent unloading gear, establishing computer and communications networks, running audio and video cables, setting up cameras and preparing the mobile studio center (which we’ll discuss shortly), which can often be shipped in a single trailer. Or maybe they need a computer for back-to-school? You don’t need a ton of storage space, as you’ll be storing most of your work in the cloud. All Mac Pro storage is encrypted with the T2 chip. If your laptop does not have a microSD card reader or an SD card reader, you can use a USB adapter. MicroSD cards and card readers were introduced by SanDisk in 2005 to accommodate smaller memory cards in mobile phones.

Laptops with limited onboard storage, such as some Chromebooks, sometimes utilize microSD cards for additional storage capacity. Typically very difficult to encode, real-time AV1 encoding is now available to consumers via Intel’s debut Arc Alchemist graphics cards (though the launch has been limited to China so far, with a U.S. I put Intel’s GPU encoder to the test using a custom Gunnir Arc A380 desktop card to see if it delivers the promises we’ve seen from AV1 thus far, and how it competes against the existing H.264 encoders typically used for live streaming. The idea is to push the laptop beyond its limits and then compare it against others we’ve tested. With a 90% screen-to-body ratio, the footprint of this device would have been in the 15-inch class only a few years ago, making it TARDIS-like in its bigger-on-the-inside feeling. Although the machines are around the same thickness, the 14-inch and 16-inch models do not feature tapered edges, making them appear thicker and bulkier. As an avowed hardware head, I love a laptop that gives you a lot of options. This, along with the fact that USB Type-C can accept Thunderbolt connections in the same port, gives it the edge over other USB types. Acer gives you a lot of this stuff for not a whole lot of money with its latest Acer Aspire 5 15-inch model. Wireless isn’t skimped on, and the Acer Aspire 5 includes Intel Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. Internet connectivity worked as expected, but if you’re ever in a situation gasp without Wi-Fi, it even has a good old-fashioned RJ-45 ethernet jack. That might be worth it for players who want access to the full gamut of games available for Windows. It will be worth getting the high-end MacBook Pro models for viewing and editing HDR content, as well as watching high-framerate video such as sports. One thing certainly worth whining over is the price.

Some Mac Studio owners have noticed that their machines are making a high-pitched “whining” sound that appears to be coming from the fan. We measured only 250 nits peak brightness, making it way dimmer than other laptops in this category. The display offers 1,600 nits peak brightness and 1,000 nits sustained brightness, it features a super-wide viewing angle, and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio for what Apple calls extreme HDR. The Mac Studio is Apple’s most powerful custom silicon-based Mac, offering extreme performance and a wide range of ports in a modular, desktop form factor. 28 cores is the most ever that Apple has ever made available in a Mac, but there are also several other lower-end options. On the other hand, if the Mac Studio is out of your price range but you still want a similar Apple silicon-based desktop Mac, there is the entry-level Mac mini, which starts at just $699.

Despite both being MacBook Pros, the M2 model and the high-end models are very different machines, so should you consider purchasing the lower-cost MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,299, to save money, or do you need the higher-end 14- or 16-inch MacBook Pro, which costs at least $700 more? This is especially impressive given that the Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra chip starts at $3,999, while a Mac Pro tower configured with a 28-core processor is over three times more expensive at $12,999. Kings of Cash – is a 5 reel,50 payline and three hundred coin slot machine at the online casino gambling Black Jack Ballroom. The Radeon Pro W6800X Duo is a full-height MPX Module and supports up to eight 4K displays, four 5K displays, or six Pro Display XDRs. While you cannot convert VGA to any other display standard (HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort), you can convert any of them to VGA (with a subsequent drop in quality) by using the proper cable or adapter. I certainly was, as it ate into valuable mousing area on a smaller desktop. The Mac Studio is a pro-oriented desktop Mac that’s a hybrid between a Mac mini and a Mac Pro. While all of this is happening, things are hopping back at the main network studio and mobile editing units on site. Lower bandwidth costs, higher-quality product, and easier interoperability for whatever the future of streaming media might hold seems to beat out the benefits of prior philosophies around everyone developing their own walled-off solutions. Promotion of NASCAR — no matter on which TV channel that promotion occurs — benefits all of the broadcasters in both the short and long run. It may seem strange for so many big corporations (and competing ones at that) to be working together on a singular project, but ultimately this is an endeavor that benefits all of them. When the broadcast “cuts back” to the studio, one of the top drivers may be briefly interviewed, or commentators may talk racing with a reporter working the pit road, both being featured on a split screen.