BlueSuburbia takes you to a place that is filled with a lonely kind of menace – an oppressive fear that crushes you as it tells you that no one will come save...

The post ‘BlueSuburbia’ Stirs Up a Deep, Solitary Fear appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Trailer Tuesday analyzes signals from outer space, helps a pip find its place on a die, and rushes to create an anti-shrinking formula before you get too tiny.   Voices Of The...

The post Trailer Tuesday – The 100 Super Voices appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Friends vs Friends is a chaotic shooter that introduces cards into the mix, creating custom decks to blast your enemies (and probably a few friends). Friends vs Friends is an action paced,...

The post ‘Friends vs Friends’ is a Card-Based Arena Shooter appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Tchia takes us on a stunning tropical open world adventure where you play as a young, imaginative girl who can turn into animals and objects to explore. Tchia, our protagonist, is looking to...

The post ‘Tchia’ Turns Into Animals & Objects to Explore a Tropical Island appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Blackout explores for items and tools through a house filled with corpses and unsettling creatures, but maybe things aren’t quite what they seem to be. Marilyn is a witch who finds herself...

The post ‘Blackout’ Follows a Teenage Witch Through a Creepy (Maybe?) House appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Idol Showdown sees you throwing animals, running folks over with trucks, and hopping into a shopping cart to wreck your opponents in its wild one-on-one fights. This game is a fan-made title...

The post ‘Idol Showdown’ – A Ridiculous VTuber Fighting Game appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Trailer Tuesday listens to problems over tea, plays a tense card game against an eerie creature, and quits a job by beating down your-ex colleagues.   A TAVERN FOR TEA  “A...

The post Trailer Tuesday – Untitled Tavern Override appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Kingdom Eighties is an 80’s-inspired base-building game where you need to protect your town against greed while helping your friends and learning more about your family. You play as a young character...

The post ‘Kingdom Eighties’ Overcomes Danger by Building Bases With Childhood Buddies appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Moonstone Island is a slice of life adventure game where you can fly to dozens of islands to gather local oddball creatures, grow gardens, and romance the locals. Moonstone Island is a...

The post ‘Moonstone Island’ is a Creature-Collecting Life Sim appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Debbie’s Diner Derby sees you trying to get food to the right customers. Trouble is, you’re on roller skates that make it a little bit hard to stop or steer. The game...

The post ‘Debbie’s Diner Derby’ Makes Food Deliveries on Roller Skates appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

So…what is the Monday Poll? Excellent question! It isn’t, contrary to its name, an actual poll, like with little clicky buttons. It’s just a list of more or less random questions I’ve been posting on this blog every Monday morning for the past quadrillion years (since 2007). 1. Brunch or afternoon tea? I love both,[Continue reading...]

The post Makeup and Beauty Blog Monday Poll, Vol. 837 appeared first on Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews, Swatches and How-To Makeup.

For years, whenever there was a disturbance in the force… Tabs was to blame. After all, he started as a cadet in the Galactic Empire. Eventually, though, he grew to hate the Empire and their cruelty, and so he chose the Jedi way. And now, Rosie carries on the Jedi cat legacy, helping animals and[Continue reading...]

The post Sundays With Tabs the Cat, Makeup and Beauty Blog Mascot, Vol. 818 appeared first on Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews, Swatches and How-To Makeup.

Good morning and happy Caturday from my happy heart to yours. I’m SO RELIEVED that it’s the weekend. Is it just me, or was this week a doozy? I don’t know why year after year, I trick myself into thinking our summer schedule will be less chaotic compared to the regular school year, but every[Continue reading...]

The post Summer Beauty Wishlist appeared first on Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews, Swatches and How-To Makeup.

The surgeon general recently called for health warnings on social media due to rising rates of mental health problems amongst kids and teens. This got me thinking about the mental load women carry – well, at least I carry it with me – that could have benefited from a big warning label sign. Let me[Continue reading...]

The post Some Thoughts on Being a Woman in These Crazy Times appeared first on Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews, Swatches and How-To Makeup.

So…what is the Monday Poll? Excellent question! It isn’t, contrary to its name, an actual poll, like with little clicky buttons. It’s just a list of more or less random questions I’ve been posting on this blog every Monday morning for the past quadrillion years (since 2007). 1. Lefty or a righty? Righty. 2. Always[Continue reading...]

The post Makeup and Beauty Blog Monday Poll, Vol. 836 appeared first on Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews, Swatches and How-To Makeup.

While the new CAMM and LPCAMM memory modules for laptops have garnered a great deal of attention in recent months, it's not just the mobile side of the PC memory industry that is looking at changes. The desktop memory market is also coming due for some upgrades to further improve DIMM performance, in the form of a new DIMM variety called the Clocked Unbuffered DIMM (CUDIMM). And while this memory isn't in use quite yet, several memory vendors had their initial CUDIMM products on display at this year's Computex trade show, offering a glimpse into the future of desktop memory.

A variation on traditional Unbuffered DIMMs (UDIMMs), Clocked UDIMMs (and Clocked SODIMMs) have been created as another solution to the ongoing signal integrity challenges presented by DDR5 memory. DDR5 allows for rather speedy transfer rates with removable (and easily installed) DIMMs, but further performance increases are running up against the laws of physics when it comes to the electrical challenges of supporting memory on a stick – particularly with so many capacity/performance combinations like we see today. And while those challenges aren't insurmountable, if DDR5 (and eventually, DDR6) are to keep increasing in speed, some changes appear to be needed to produce more electrically robust DIMMs, which is giving rise to the CUDIMM.

Standardized by JEDEC earlier this year as JESD323, CUDIMMs tweak the traditional unbuffered DIMM by adding a clock driver (CKD) to the DIMM itself, with the tiny IC responsible for regenerating the clock signal driving the actual memory chips. By generating a clean clock locally on the DIMM (rather than directly using the clock from the CPU, as is the case today), CUDIMMs are designed to offer improved stability and reliability at high memory speeds, combating the electrical issues that would otherwise cause reliability issues at faster memory speeds. In other words, adding a clock driver is the key to keeping DDR5 operating reliably at high clockspeeds.

All told, JEDEC is proposing that CUDIMMs be used for DDR5-6400 speeds and higher, with the first version of the specification covering speeds up to DDR5-7200. The new DIMMs will also be drop-in compatible with existing platforms (at least on paper), using the same 288-pin connector as today's standard DDR5 UDIMM and allowing for a relatively smooth transition towards higher DDR5 clockspeeds.

In response to the increasing popularity of compact and portable gaming PCs in the past couple of years, we've seen several PC peripheral manufacturers release larger collections of SFX form factor cases and power supplies. Chief among these has been Cooler Master, where the prolific PC part vendor recently expanded their SFX series to include ATX 3.0-compliant PSUs. This has finally given the company a modern, miniature platform that can drive the latest NVIDIA video cards.

Today we're looking at Cooler Master's V850 SFX Gold, which represents a more budget-friendly option in the SFX power supply market compared to their previously reviewed V1100 SFX Platinum. The SFX Gold series includes four models, ranging from 550W to 850W, with the 850W unit that we are reviewing today being the most potent. This 850-Watt power supply carries an 80 Plus Gold certification and is designed for high-performance gaming and workstation builds. As the top-tier model in the SFX Gold series, it offers substantial power output for an SFX unit and maintains ATX 3.0 compliance, including a 12VHPWR connector in a compact SFX format.

Western Digital expanded its WD Blue NVMe family of budget SSDs this week with the introduction of the the WD Blue SN5000 series, an updated lineup of SSDs that, among other things, adds a 4 TB model. Being budget drives, the SN5000 series is not going to be a performance monster, but their combination of capacity, reliability, and relatively low price could make them popular both among casual buyers and among enthusiasts looking for relatively cheap bulk solid-state storage.

Western Digital's WD Blue SN500 NVMe drives come in an M.2-2280 form-factor and are based around an in-house WD controller (the company rarely discloses their codenames these days). WD's controller is a 4 channel, DRAMless design, which is what we typically see for budget and mainstream SSDs. Externally, the controller supports a PCIe 4.0 x4 connection, and per WD's specifications, even this budget drive should be fast enough to put the additional bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 to good use. All of the drives are single-sided, and are covered with a thin graphene heatspreader for heat dissipation.

More surprising here is WD's choice of NAND. According to the company, they are using a mix of different generations and different types of NAND, depending on the model. The 500GB/1TB/2TB models are using WD/Kioxia's older 112 layer BiCS 5 TLC NAND. Meanwhile the new 4TB capacity is being enabled with the company's newer BiCS 6 NAND – but the QLC variety. All drive capacities are being backed by the same controller, so there is a thread of commonality between them, but at a high level WD seems to be using the higher performance of BiCS 6 to offset the switch from TLC to QLC.

When it comes to performance, the WD Blue SN5000 series drives are rated for read speeds between 5000 MB/sec and 5500 MB/sec depending on the capacity, while write speeds range from 4000 MB/sec to 5000 MB/sec. As for random performance, we are looking at up to 690K 4K IOPS random read speeds as well as up to 900K 4K IOPS random write speeds for the highest capacity model, while the lower-end 500 GB model is rated for 460K/770K 4K random read/write IOPS.

Overall, even with the 4TB model using QLC NAND, WD is touting it at offering better performance than any of the lower capacity models. We're accustomed to seeing QLC drives come in behind TLC drives in this respect, so that newer generation of NAND is doing a lot of heavy lifting to put it ahead of the other models.

This goes for write endurance as well; the 4TB QLC model has the highest endurance rating, at 1200 TB written, followed by 900, 600, and 300 TBW for the lower capacity models respectively. Depending on the specific drive model, this works out to between 300 to 600 drive writes in total, or around 0.164 drive writes per day, which is typical for drives in this class.

Overall, the new drive family supplants WD's previous generation of Blue drives, last year's SN580 series. Comparatively, the SN5000 drives are rated to offer better sequential and random drive performance at every tier. And the the tiny 250GB drive has been dropped entirely, making room for the new high-capacity 4TB model at the high-end while the 500GB drive model is the new entry-level capacity.

While the WD Blue SN5000 NVMe family seems to be well positioned to be a low-cost drives meant to compete aggressively on the pricing, for now WD's launch prices are a bit ambitious. The $70 price tag for the 500 GB version is pretty typical, while the $280 recommended price for a 4TB model puts it in a weird spot between a number of other 4TB drives. The tad slower Crucial P3 Plus 4TB can be found for $217, while WD's own considerably faster WD_Black SN850X 4TB is only $30 more, at $310. Ultimately, given that Western Digital's Blue drives are meant to be inexpensive SSDs, we expect retail drive prices to catch up with market realities shortly.

Thanks to the success of the burgeoning market for AI accelerators, NVIDIA has been on a tear this year. And the only place that’s even more apparent than the company’s rapidly growing revenues is in the company’s stock price and market capitalization. After breaking into the top 5 most valuable companies only earlier this year, NVIDIA has reached the apex of Wall Street, closing out today as the world’s most valuable company.

With a closing price of $135.58 on a day that saw NVIDIA’s stock pop up another 3.5%, NVIDIA has topped both Microsoft and Apple in valuation, reaching a market capitalization of $3.335 trillion. This follows a rapid rise in the company’s stock price, which has increased by 47% in the last month alone – particularly on the back of NVIDIA’s most recent estimates-beating earnings report – as well as a recent 10-for-1 stock split. And looking at the company’s performance over a longer time period, NVIDIA’s stock jumped a staggering 218% over the last year, or a mere 3,474% over the last 5 years.

NVIDIA’s ascension continues a trend over the last several years of tech companies all holding the top spots in the market capitalization rankings. Though this is the first time in quite a while that the traditional tech leaders of Apple and Microsoft have been pushed aside.

Driving the rapid growth of NVIDIA and its market capitalization has been demand for AI accelerators from NVIDIA, particularly the company’s server-grade H100, H200, and GH200 accelerators for AI training. As the demand for these products has spiked, NVIDIA has been scaling up accordingly, repeatedly beating market expectations for how many of the accelerators they can ship – and what price they can charge. And despite all that growth, orders for NVIDIA’s high-end accelerators are still backlogged, underscoring how NVIDIA still isn’t meeting the full demands of hyperscalers and other enterprises.

Consequently, NVIDIA’s stock price and market capitalization have been on a tear on the basis of these future expectations. With a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 76.7 – more than twice that of Microsoft or Apple – NVIDIA is priced more like a start-up than a 30-year-old tech company. But then it goes without saying that most 30-year-old tech companies aren’t tripling their revenue in a single year, placing NVIDIA in a rather unique situation at this time.

Like the stock market itself, market capitalizations are highly volatile. And historically speaking, it’s far from guaranteed that NVIDIA will be able to hold the top spot for long, never mind day-to-day fluctuations. NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft’s valuations are all within $50 billion (1.%) of each other, so for the moment at least, it’s still a tight race between all three companies. But no matter what happens from here, NVIDIA gets the exceptionally rare claim of having been the most valuable company in the world at some point.

(Carousel image courtesy MSN Money)