PCWorld October 2022

The GPU shortage appears to have well and truly ended, if market prices are anything to go by. After literally years of insane inflation seeing graphics cards go for double or even triple their retail value, street prices have fallen off a cliff in 2022. A combination of factors appears to be at play, including the long-awaited bursting of the cryptocurrency bubble and an easing of the chip shortage. But the end result is that prices for graphics cards have dropped by almost exactly half in the last year. That’s according to market data gathered by Jon Peddie Research and analyzed by German site 3DCenter. In the third quarter of 2021 the average selling price of a new desktop GPU rose to an all-time high of US$1,077, more than tripling in…

It’s official: Ryzen 7000 has arrived. In late August, AMD took the wraps off its upcoming Zen 4 processors, giving us the details on price, availability, launch processors, and much more during its live stream from Austin, Texas. In late September, they launched. We’ve got the full technical rundown for you in our recap of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 launch event, but if you’re looking for the highlights, here are the top five takeaways. PRICING, RELEASE DATE, AND LAUNCH LINEUP UNVEILED The first Ryzen 7000 processors hit shelves on September 27. The initial lineup of AMD’s first 5nm chips almost mimics that of its predecessor, Ryzen 5000, but with some interesting deviations. The Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X sport the same number of cores and threads…

If you use Microsoft Edge, you may notice something new to the right of your browser as of late last week: a small vertical sidebar of icons. Some, specifically a collection of widgets called Tools, are actually worth using. Adding sidebars functionality isn’t new; other browsers, such as Vivaldi, have made it one of their centerpiece features. And Edge, too, has offered sidebar functionality for some time, with the ability to search for a term in a sidebar, so as to avoid the need to move to a new window or tab. But the new icons are essentially a control panel for many of the functions you’ll use in Windows. First, if you want to turn the Edge sidebar off, you can: there’s a small window-ish icon to the bottom. Click it,…

Last year, Amazon spiffed up the Kindle Paperwhite, infusing its mid-tier e-reader with an array of premium hardware upgrades. The tweaks were enough to push the humbler entry-level Kindle firmly out of the spotlight given its inferior screen, lower number of front light LEDs, and lack of waterproofing. But now the basic Kindle is getting its own luxe touches. The 2022 Kindle sports a much higher-resolution screen and double the storage of its predecessor. Its 6-inch display jumps to 300 ppi from 167 ppi in previous generations, the same resolution of more expensive models (like the Paperwhite). You get 16GB of onboard storage now, too, which is twice that of the 2019 model…and the current Paperwhite. Battery life also has improved. You’ll now get up to six weeks on a single charge,…

Web users are becoming more and more aware of their privacy—or lack thereof—on the modern internet. Search engine DuckDuckGo has always catered to those concerns, and doubled down on them with a dedicated Webkit-based browser for the Mac earlier this year. Now the company is completing its hat trick with a privacy-focused email service. Naturally, new accounts get the @duck.com domain. The DuckDuckGo email service has been in closed beta, but the company just removed the waitlist and made the service open for all. The service is called Email Protection, though in practice it works more or less like any web email system. DuckDuckGo provides users with a forwarding service—a “PCWorldMichael@duck.com” address, for example. Emails sent through this alias will have embedded tracking cookies and other methods of observation removed, and…

If you want to build the fastest PC you can around AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 processor, you’ll have to wait until November. New SSDs built using the PCI Express 5.0 interface will debut then, AMD executives said during the late August launch of the Ryzen 7000 in Texas. PCI Express 5.0 will be built into Ryzen 7000 and its four supporting AM5 motherboard chipsets: the X670 Extreme, the X670, and the B650 Extreme and B650. Current Ryzen 5000 PCs use PCIe 4.0, and while Intel’s rival 12th-gen Alder Lake chips incorporated PCIe 5.0 when they launched last fall, no PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs have been released thus far. AMD didn’t say much about the new chipsets at its Monday evening launch. We do know, however, that the two Extreme chipsets will…