Techreport

Avalanche Studios has revealed the system specs required to play its upcoming, explosion-packed Just Cause 3. If you were concerned that your PC wouldn't handle the game's bangs and kabooms, fear not—the requirements seem quite reasonable to us....Read more...

All good things must come to an end. AMD has officially ended driver development efforts for older, non-GCN-based Radeon cards. All cards in the Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series are now considered legacy products. Radeon HD 7600 and lower cards, along with HD 8400 and lower cards, are also entering sunset status today.The company says those products have reached their "peak performance optimization" as of today. AMD is now focusing its software development efforts on products built with the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The company isn't ...Read more...

Yesterday, some concerned Dell PC owners brought a Superfish-y issue to light. It turns out that Dell had installed self-signed root certificates on some of its PCs, and it also included the private key used to generate the certificate. With those tools in hand, an attacker could have generated a valid certificate for any secure website on the Internet, allowing them to carry out a man-in-the-middle attack on affected PCs. Now, Dell has officially acknowledged this vulnerability, and it's provided instructions for removing the rogue certificates.According to Dell, the "eDellRoot" and other self-signed root certificates on its PCs were installed as part of the Dell Foundation Services support application. The company says the certificates were meant ...Read more...

Downloading popular Android apps from non-official sources is a bad idea, but even legit apps can do potentially unwanted things in the background without drawing attention. Researchers from MIT dug through some of the most popular apps on Google Play and found that most of them access the network covertly.The research team pored over the top 500 popular applications on Google Play, though some—mostly chat apps, since they require readily available and somewhat unpredictable ...Read more...

Remember the Superfish debacle, when Lenovo shipped computers with a preinstalled rogue root certification authority (CA)? Dell seems to think that was a good idea, as it's shipping laptops and desktop PCs with a similar self-signed "eDellRoot" root CA. An attacker can use this root CA to issue valid-looking certificates for any website. In turn, those certificates will be accepted by any affected Dell machines as legit, leaving the user none the wiser.For the unitiated, secure connections to websites (among other things) rely on a chain of trusted certificates to guarantee the safety of data in transit. Operating systems and web browsers come preinstalled with a set ...Read more...

Welcome to the first of what could be several deals posts this week. Black Friday has stretched its tempting bargains all into the surrounding days, as retailers clamor for our attention. Newegg is kicking off its shower of discounts and bargains this afternoon, and a number of appealing deals have already surfaced there. Here are the best of the lot so far.Those are the best deals we could find in today's early volley. If we missed any ...Read more...

Back in August, Mozilla announced plans to adopt a Chrome-like extension framework for Firefox called WebExtensions. In turn, the company plans to deprecate its existing XUL and XPCOM plug-in APIs. These changes are part of a larger project to make Firefox a more modern browser. According to a couple of entries in Mozilla's Bugzilla tracker, some less popular features of Firefox are going to be retired as part of this project, too.The first feature to hit the trashbin is support for "heavyweight" themes that rely on older add-on technologies. According to the Bugzilla entry for this change, themes that replace chrome packages (not to be confused with the Chrome browser) ...Read more...

Way back in June 2014, Intel announced its intent to develop a Xeon with x86 cores and an integrated FPGA to accelerate certain processing tasks. That FPGA-accelerated future may arrive early next year, according to a report from PC World.Diane Bryant, senior VP of Intel's datacenter group, announced the impending release of these FPGA-equipped Xeons during an on-stage interview at Structure Conference in San Francisco last week. PC World ...Read more...

Happy Friday, gerbils. Black Friday may be just around the corner, but retailers are already offering a wide range of tempting deals. We've sorted through the mountain of "Black November" offers out there right now to bring you some of the best of the bunch.Those are the best deals we could find this week. If you find a great offer ...Read more...

Uh-oh. There's some bad news for those (like me) that were eager for another adventure in the skin and augmentations of Adam Jensen. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the upcoming title in the Deus Ex series, will be delayed for six months. The game's release is now set for August 23, 2016.David Anfossi, head of Eidos-Montreal, says the studio wants to take advantage of the extra time for "[post-production] tuning, iterations, and refinements to ...Read more...

Assassin's Creed Syndicate hits store shelves today, and Nvidia's holiday driver update onslaught continues in tandem with that game's launch. The WHQL-certified 359.00 drivers include "Game Ready optimizations" and an SLI profile for Syndicate, along with updates to prepare GeForce owners for the upcoming Overwatch beta test this weekend....Read more...

Microsoft seems to be taking the security of its Edge browser seriously. Last May, the company announced Edge would drop support for the much hated ActiveX and Browser Helper Objects. This time around, the company is taking a hard stance against code injection.Until recently, users could be affected by certain strains of malware which would hook unsigned DLLs directly into the Edge process without consent. One of the most "popular" outcomes was the ...Read more...

AMD may have announced that the refreshed Radeon Crimson drivers and control panel software will be released by the end of this year, but Catalyst isn't dead just yet. The Catalyst 15.11.1 beta is hot off the presses with support for some recently-released and upcoming games.Performance and quality optimizations for four November releases headline this version's release notes. Star Wars Battlefront , Fallout 4 , Assassin's Creed Syndicate , and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 ...Read more...

The Pick 6

AMD wants to make software development easier for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, like those based on its FirePro S9170. At SC15 this week, AMD is showing off a set of tools called the Boltzmann Initiative that it says will help developers move CUDA-based applications to C++, and make HPC development more accessible to a wider audience.The most important part of the Boltzmann Initiative seems to be a Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) for C++. The company says the HCC will make HPC applications easier to write because of that language's popularity. The HCC can ...Read more...

Intel's Haswell-E processors already pack as many as eight cores and 16 threads, but the next generation of the company's extreme desktop CPUs could offer more multi-threaded goodness yet. Chinese site Xfastest claims to have gotten its hands on a juicy document with the specifications of Intel's Broadwell-E desktop chips.If that information is correct, the Broadwell-E desktop lineup may include six-core, 12-thread chips called the Core i7-6800K and i7-6850K, an eight-core, 16-thread ...Read more...

Samsung may have inadvertently given the world a sneak peek at its 750 EVO SSDs. According to Tom's Hardware, a product page for these drives briefly went up on Samsung's Japanese site over the weekend. The site believes these new drives likely use planar TLC NAND, given their "EVO" branding and the absence of 3D V-NAND from the spec sheet. Those specs also seem to indicate that the 750 EVO series will be targeted at the budget end of the SSD market.According to Tom's Hardware, the now-removed product page listed a 120GB 750 EVO, and contained a link to a 240GB version. The site captured the 120GB drive's detailed specs before the page went down. If that information is correct, the controller in these drives is ...Read more...

The Tech Report is looking for a staff writer to help expand our CPU and graphics coverage. This staffer will be responsible for assisting our senior staff with reviews of graphics cards and CPUs, along with daily news posts. We may also assign reviews of other hardware to this writer as needed.The ideal candidate will be a computing enthusiast with experience building and maintaining PCs. You should be passionate about and familiar with the personal computing technology we use today in ...Read more...

Last time Lenovo released quarterly financial results, the world's biggest PC maker missed targets and planned job cuts. In the second quarter (PDF) of its 2015-2016 fiscal year, the company is still on stormy seas. Revenue grew 16% year-over-year to $12.2 billion, but those gains didn't stop Lenovo from losing $714 million. That loss is due in part to one-time charges related to the restructuring plan announced last quarter, as well as a $324 million write-down of unsold smartphone inventory.Lenovo continues to solidify its position as the number-one PC maker in the world. It says its products now account for 21.2% of all ...Read more...

The first major Windows 10 update has arrived, and a plethora of tweaks and a handful of new features comes with it. Microsoft says this update brings performance and compatibility improvements, as well as some new business-oriented features. The company also claims that Win10's boot time and performance in common tasks should be improved nearly 30% versus Windows 7 on the same machine.According to HowToGeek , the Windows activation confusion has been finally cleared up: users can activate Windows 10 with any Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 product key, even when performing a clean install. Colored title bars have finally ...Read more...