Sabrent USA was in a boastful mood yesterday, and proceeded to gloat on Twitter about an upcoming gargantuan storage solution: "At Sabrent, we run on the cutting edge of technology. Working with Apex, we received one of these new cards and currently running it through tests. We call this the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer. 21X 8 TB SSDs for 168 TB of storage on single card!" The company has revealed that it is collaborating with Apex Solutions on the single PCIe card offering, but the smattering of text and two photos uploaded to Twitter are just teaser material for the moment. There have been no reports of preview units getting sent to potential testers or hardware influencers. Sabrent and Apex will continue to tweak and evaluate.

The Destroyer is formed of already existing parts, namely Apex Solution's own x21 NVMe mounting platform card, and twenty-one of Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus SSD 8 TB NVMe 4.0 Gen 4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD model (SB-RKT4P-8TB). A single Apex x21 card will set you back $2800, and the 8 TB Rocket 4 Plus SSD is currently discounted to $1099 (from $1499). That grand total comes to a whopping $25,879, and extra expenses are expected in the form of adequate cooling solutions and a hardware controller capable of managing that unruly gang of SSDs. Sabrent is expected to post updates about finalized fittings, features and exact pricing in the near future.

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Elon Musk AI-Powered Empire Expands Again, X.AI Startup Incorporated in Nevada
Elon Musk has formed a new AI-focused company, as reported by the Wall Street Journal yesterday. The entity dubbed with the name X.AI was incorporated via a filing in Nevada last month, and Musk appears to be listed as the company's only director with Jared Birchall joining him under the role of secretary. Birchall heads the Musk family office, Excession LLC, and he serves as CEO of Neuralink - a neurotechnology company that was co-founded by Musk back in 2016. It is widely speculated that Birchall serves as a type of fixer - go watch the TV series "Ray Donovan" if you would like to observe a crude example - in corporate affairs.

Reports emerged earlier this week, with Musk being at the forefront of a massive purchase of GPUs destined to arrive shortly at his data centers - this impressive chunk of hardware is speculated to power AI-related number crunching at Twitter in the near future. The founding of X.AI could provide another home for a portion of the 10,000 GPU order, but industry insiders firmly believe that Twitter will need to tool up quickly for its new AI-driven endeavor - the GPUs will likely be set to work on a ChatBot system to underpin the social media platform. Musk has already recruited researchers from DeepMind and setup a lab for them at one of his operations. It remains to be seen how the X.AI startup will run alongside efforts at other Musk-owned companies - it is theorized that he wants to beat OpenAI at their own game, and compete with similar undertakings at Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

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Activision, Bungie and Ubisoft Cracking Down on Input Device Hardware Modifications
The Call of Duty RICOCHET Anti-Cheat team announced earlier this month that their newly updated system was capable of detecting "third-party hardware devices that alter the Call of Duty gameplay experience" - this makes reference to a plethora of gaming input modification devices including the Cronus Zen/Max, XIM Apex and FPS Boost Strike Pack. All readily available from direct stores, Amazon and various e-tailers. These hardware modules are hooked up to a gamepad or mouse plus keyboard combination, and allow the user to bypass the legitimate control input detection on the host hardware, be it a games console or PC. Stock scripts and macros can be utilized - for example - to boost in-game aim assist to unprecedented levels, mitigate weapon recoil, and add support for mouse and keyboard in otherwise non-compatible games. Anti-cheat software suites have been unable to detect the extra layer of code, since it runs on an external device - until now.

CoD's security team elaborates on their cheat spotter: "Since our previous progress report, TeamRICOCHET has developed and tested a detection for third-party hardware devices that alter the Call of Duty gameplay experience. These devices act as a passthrough for controllers on PC and console and, when used improperly or maliciously, can provide a player with the ability to gain an unfair gameplay advantage, such as reducing or eliminating recoil. Testing is complete: This detection is deployed globally on all platforms. Users across PC or console who are detected to be using third-party hardware devices to impact the Modern Warfare II or Warzone 2.0 gameplay experience will first see a warning about the improper use of these devices..."
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Intel Compares Arc A750 with RTX 3060 With Latest Driver Update
Intel has released a couple of new performance slides for the Arc A750, claiming better performance per dollar than RTX 3060 with the latest driver update. Intel has been pushing hard to improve its Arc GPU drivers, both fixing issues, bringing Game On support, and performance improvements. The latest Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4311 beta update brought several Game On optimizations as well as some performance uplifts, mostly focused on the Arc A750 and DirectX 12, ranging from 4 percent up to 63 percent, depending on the game and the resolution.

Although the Arc A750 has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory has less memory than the RTX 3060 which comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, bear in mind that the Arc A750 has a 256-bit memory interface compared to a 192-bit one on the RTX 3060 12 GB graphics card, leaving it with a higher 512 GB/s maximum memory bandwidth. The Intel Arc A750 is also less expensive, retailing at $249, compared to RTX 3060 12 GB, which sells at around $350.
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The Last of Us Part 1 Gets New v1.0.3.0 Patch
Naughty Dog has released the newest patch for the PC version of The Last of Us Part 1, v1.0.3.0, mostly focused on audio, UI, and visual fixes. It adds new Audio Compatibility options, with audio output mode and latency setting, and fixes quite a few issues that were noticed in the game.

Surprisingly it fixes some issues on Steam Deck, and also issues seen with AMD FSR 2 and NVIDIA DLSS. There is an extensive list of fixes for various issues. Naughty Dog was keen to note that they are still watching reports for future improvements and patches and actively optimizing, working on game stability, and implementing additional fixes.
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Anker Emergency Power Supplies and Solar Power Generators: Why You Need Them, and Why They're Better than Engine-Gensets
An unexpected power outage can be your worst experience as it disrupts your daily routine. We live in an era where we cannot imagine life without electricity. However, power blackouts can be commonplace during natural disasters or other scenarios. Such a situation leaves you to be without power for long periods. The best defense in such a situation is to have your own power backup solution. So, in this article, we would like to teach you about what is emergency power supply and why you may need it during a power cut.
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ASUS ROG Ally Could Launch Sooner Than Expected
ASUS is keeping the hype up for its upcoming ROG Ally handheld console, and now it has confirmed the worldwide release and teased that it could come sooner than anyone expected, which is pretty impressive. Announced on April 1st, the ASUS ROG Ally has impressive specifications, running on yet to be detailed AMD 4 nm custom APU based on Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 GPU architecture.

The ASUS ROG Ally measures at 280 x 133 x 39 mm and weighs 608 grams, making it shorter, narrower, thinner, and lighter than its competitor, Valve's Steam Deck. It has a 7-inch display with 1920x1080 resolution, 120 Hz refresh rate, 5 ms response time, and 500 nits of brightness. According to earlier hands-on previews of the prototype from Dave2D and LinusTechTips, ASUS did a great job with the dual-fan cooling solution, making it very quite. It will also have a dedicated PCIE Gen 3 x8 XG connector, which allows it to connect to the recently launched XG Mobile GPU, an external RTX 4090 GPU which retails at $1999.99 in the US. Linus also noted that the ROG Ally will offer 50 percent higher performance at 15 W and twice the performance at 35 W, compared to the Steam Deck. As noted, ASUS has now confirmed that the ROG Ally will launch worldwide, and that it might be sooner that we expect, linking to Best Buy for those that live in North America.

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