Reza Pahlevi

HP’s Elite Folio is the first laptop we’ve seen to be powered by Qualcomm’s latest Arm chip, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2. Yes, the Gen 2—supposedly a faster, more powerful upgrade to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx. Is it? We tested the HP Elite Folio and the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 chip to find out just how fast it is.

This isn’t a formal review. What we did was to take HP’s elegant, vegan-leather-wrapped tablet and run a few early tests on it, to draw some immediate comparisons to previous reviews. While we typically run benchmarks several times to determine the average performance, in this case we’ve run our benchmark suite just twice—enough to ensure our results are accurate, however.

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Is the performance of AMD Ryzen mobile on battery really that bad? 

If you’re even asking that question, you’ve no doubt heard Intel’s claims that Ryzen 4000 CPU performance tanked when running on battery. Plugged-in performance was dandy, but in tests of multiple Ryzen 4000U-based laptops, performance dropped huge amounts on battery, depending on the task.

While some reviewers checked AC and DC performance and found some nuggets of truth to Intel’s claims, the issue has mostly lain dormant for the last six months. Now that Ryzen 5000 is out, we decided to circle back and see if the claims still held. As you’ll see in our tests, what’s “good” or “bad” depends on whether you care more about performance or battery life. 

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“Frames win games,” Nvidia likes to say, but there’s more to esports domination than raw frame rates. How those frames get delivered matters too. Latency—the time it takes for an on-screen action to happen after you press a button—reigns supreme in the blink-and-you’re-dead competitive esports scene. If your game looks beautiful but feels sluggish, you’ll find yourself outgunned by rivals playing with crummy visual settings to increase responsiveness.

Enter Nvidia Reflex, introduced alongside the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. If you’ve heard of it before, you probably associate it with low-latency features being added to games like Call of Duty: Warzone, Valorant, and Fortnite. But Reflex is actually Nvidia’s overarching brand name for a wide range of new latency-obsessed tools. Yes, the Low Latency Mode being added to games is part of it, but on Tuesday, Nvidia and its partners are also rolling out blisteringly fast 360Hz G-Sync Esports monitors with Reflex Latency Analyzer built in. If you’ve invested in compatible accessories, Reflex Latency Analyzer keeps tabs on the entire pipeline from the millisecond you click your mouse to the millisecond the game renders your gun shooting, helping you identify which parts of your system are acting as a bottleneck.

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Most security experts agree that two-factor authentication (2FA) is a critical part of securing your online accounts. Google agrees, but it’s taking an extra step: It’s going to automatically sign Google account holders up for two-factor accounts.

In a way, Google sees two-factor authentication as a replacement for passwords, which Mark Risher, Google’s director of product management for identity and user security, in a statement called “the single biggest threat to your online security.” Because they’re easy to steal and hard to remember, users will end up reusing passwords. If stolen, they can be used to unlock multiple user accounts, adding to the risk.

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