Month: December 2024

We touched on AMD’s plans for future CPUs with 3D V-cache based on its latest Zen 5 CPUs, otherwise known as the Ryzen 9000 series, last week. But it’s interesting to note that AMD itself says that its existing Ryzen 7000 X3D chips with 3D V-cache will remain the fastest gaming CPUs around, even with the arrival of Zen 5 technology.

Speaking to Tom’s Hardware, AMD’s Senior Technical Marketing Manager of Consumer Processors Donny Woligroski confirmed that Ryzen 9000 will not quite knock the Ryzen 7 7800X3D off its gaming perch. When asked if the hot new Ryzen 9000 CPUs would be the fastest gaming CPUs yet, he had this to say:

“Is it the fastest in gaming? It’s faster than the competition in our tests. X3D is still the king of the hill, but by a much smaller margin than typically between X3D and non-X3D. So a 7800X3D would, yes, be faster than 9700X, but maybe not by as much as you would expect.”

You might think that’s surprising. After all, the new Zen 5 architecture delivers a 16% increase in IPC according to AMD. But that’s an average figure, not a flat 16% with all software in all situations.

Moreover, this is not unprecedented. When AMD rolled out its …

2024 games: Upcoming releases
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best MMOs: Massive worlds
Best RPGs: Grand adventures

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that’s a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.If nothing catches your fancy this week, we’ve gathered thebest PC gamesyou can play right now and a running list of the2024 gamesthat are launching this year.

Debtors’ Club

Steam ‌page‌‌
Release:‌ August 27
Developer:‌ mecagames

In Debtors’ Club you play as a tax collector working fo…

As a renter all too familiar with the faraday cages that make up much of Bath’s Georgian architecture, I’ve found TP-Link WiFi adapters often come in clutch (that Bridgerton fanfic isn’t going to read itself, and certainly not on a dodgy internet connection). Unfortunately these adapters, alongside many of TP-Link’s networking products, seem to be extremely vulnerable to hackers.

It gets worse: thousands of TP-Link routers have been hijacked by hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government, according to Ars Technica. The affected routers have been leveraged into a botnet that’s hammering Microsoft Azure accounts with password spray attacks, sending massive amounts of login attempts from a rotating roster of IP addresses.

A dizzying 16,000 compromised devices have been pulled together into what’s been dubbed the 7777 (or Quad7) botnet. The name is a reference to the TCP port that exposes the intrusion on the compromised device, and this name was coined by the researcher who first documented it—back in October 2023.

As for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud services have already been the subject of similar attacks, most recently leading to the illicit access …