Reviews

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 was released to a wary consumer public in late 2020. Here it was, the least expensive of the RTX 30 graphics cards from NVIDIA, ready to roll with power that out-performed its predecessors in almost every way, available at approximately $500 USD. The "wary" part comes thanks to supply issues with other RTX cards this year, issues that messed with the minds and pocketbooks of potential users that, now, might be relying on the RTX 3070 to fill the void left for them after the hype of the reveal and the subsequent failure to meet demand.

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Although not as common as towering desktops, the mini PC form factor has enjoyed increased popularity in recent years as consumers looked towards more general-purpose home computers. These relatively tiny PCs, however, are not exactly known for their performance and power, leaning more towards space-savings and power-efficiency, enough for basic computing tasks.

MINISFORUM, however, has long been trying to move away from such stereotypes with the likes of the H31G and its discrete NVIDIA GPU. With the MINISFORUM X35G, the company takes things in a slightly different direction, cramming in Intel's latest CPU generation and data storage tech to turn the small box into a capable workstation.

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2020 is the year of big phone families, and Samsung's Galaxy S20 Series is nearing Brady Bunch numbers. Latest to arrive is the Galaxy S20 FE 5G, described as the "Fan Edition" but also the most affordable of the line-up. As always that means what's absent from the spec sheet is as important to note as what's present, but for once the compromise may all be worth it.

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What's old is new again, and the Philips Hue Iris table lamp returns with a welcome 2020 upgrade. Brighter, more flexible, and more competitively priced, the new Iris taps all of the features Signify has added to the Hue platform in the six years since the original table lamp launched, now with a $99.99 price tag.

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VW is teetering on the edge. On the one side, the exciting side, there are all-electric cars like the 2021 ID.4 crossover: zero-emissions, instantaneous electric torque, and eye-catching styling that screams "this is Volkswagen's future." The 2020 VW Passat R-Line 2.0T represents the other side of that line, and while that doesn't automatically make the sedan bad, it does make it trickier to get enthusiastic.

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The Nintendo Switch game Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is a masterpiece of simple yet extraordinary at-home gaming fun. It combines good game design with the magic of successfully bridging the gap between reality and virtual reality with one of the most ideal implementations of augmented reality we've experienced so far. One considerable limitation is the size of the physical space in which one hopes to race. Is that limitation enough to avoid buying and playing the game at all?

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It's fair to say that the big Beats Flex news last week got buried under confirmation that you won't get headphones in the iPhone 12 box. Apple's thinking is that most people either have earbuds already, or have their eye on something more rewarding than the old, bundled EarPods - for those who don't, there's now a significantly more attainable set of Beats that might just fit the bill.

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There's a thing magicians do called misdirection, where they catch your eye with one thing while something more important happens elsewhere. Whether modern smartphones count as magic is probably a little too philosophical for here, but I certainly got the misdirection feeling from the Pixel 4a 5G. The headline feature, its 5G connectivity, is right there in the name, but I'm not sure anybody should buy one simply for its potential for higher-speed data.

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Smartphones have come a long way in just the past few years alone, rapidly changing in design as well as introducing new, sometimes outlandish features. Almost every smartphone has a gimmick these days in an attempt to stand out from the crowd and it gets harder to think of novel ways to differentiate one model from the next. That's true even for "mid-range" tier phones like Vivo's latest selfie-centric phone, the Vivo V20. But does it have enough to actually make it worth noticing? We dig in to find out.

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The Pixel 5 has a lot to prove. Google's 2020 flagship not only needs to convince shoppers to open their wallets in an unusually challenging year, but demonstrate that the sins of last year's Pixel 4 are not to be repeated. If there was anything to give us confidence it could do that, it was the pitch-perfect Pixel 4a: now, the question is how much of that magic can rub off on the Pixel 5.

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This is the official OnePlus 8T review as conducted by SlashGear. The OnePlus 8T may not agree with you if you've become accustomed to living the "Pro" smartphone life. Over the past few years, smartphones with "premium" features have clobbered our pocketbooks and looked to capitalize on the latest trends in "new for the sake of newness" in ways I've not been particularly pumped about. With the OnePlus 8T, it feels to me that OnePlus has returned from a brief stint of wild indulgence in over-the-top flashy features - back, here, to a place where the company's delivered a smartphone that's solid for all the right reasons.

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The Microsoft Surface Laptop Go arrives at a time when it feels like everyone needs a computer of their own. The expectations we have of our computers - and the access we need to them - has changed immeasurably this year: a rise in home-schooling, remote-schooling, and working-from-home has in part turned the laptop market into a numbers game. A shared PC or Mac just isn't going to cut it any more, not when multiple members of the same household now each need hours of access.

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