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Disk Drill PRO 2 for Windows: Lifetime License – $19.99

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Today’s a good day to upgrade your graphics card without breaking the bank. Newegg is offering a trio of excellent deals on mainstream “sweet spot” AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce GPUs.

First up is a 6GB MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming for $200 at Newegg FlashRemove non-product link after applying the promo code NEFPBC93 and receiving a $20 mail-in rebate. That works out to $220 upfront, which is a pretty good price in itself considering most 6GB GTX 1060 cards cost $240 or more. With the 6GB GTX 1060 you can expect no-compromises 1080p/60 frames per second gaming with all settings pushed to the max, and solid 1440p action at “High” settings. You’ll also get a bunch of Fortnite freebies with this card.

Next is the ASRock Phantom Gaming X Radeon RX 590 for $230Remove non-product link after a $20 mail-in rebate, so you’ll pay $250 upfront. The Radeon RX 590 only rolled out a month ago and was $60 more at the time, so this is a great price. The RX 590 is a cut above the GTX 1060. It’s the best graphics card you can buy for 1080p gaming, and it puts in a great showing at 1440p resolution too. Plus, you get three free games with your purchase: Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry 5, and Tom Clancy’s The Division 2.

Finally, Newegg’s also selling the 8GB Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 for $190Remove non-product link with the coupon code EMCTUVE25. This is where the tough decisions come in. At $190 this card is close to its Black Friday pricing, but for only $30 more after rebates you can get that faster Radeon RX 590. When we’re talking about regular pricing, the Radeon RX 580 offers better value overall with solid 60fps 1080p gaming and respectable 1440p performance. But if you can afford the Radeon RX 590 at its sale price, it’s the better deal. In addition to the card, the RX 580 comes with your choice of two free games from among the three mentioned above.

The Super Bowl is just around the corner, and you know what that means: awesome game day food, a whole lineup of unusually interesting commercials, and of course, the most exciting event of the year for football fans, all while gathered around the big screen. Even cord-cutters won’t have to miss out on the action. In fact, you can tune in on the cheap with the help of a pretty sweet discount on Amazon’s Fire TV Cube, down to $80 today from a list price of $120.

This cube-shaped streaming device is best-known for its voice control, with the smarts of Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant built right in. You can turn on your TV, play videos and music, adjust volume, change the channel, check the weather and news, and more with just the sound of your voice. You can also use it to access streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu and stream in 4K Ultra HD.

When we gave the Fire TV Cube a try, we gave it 3 stars out of 5, noting that although Alexa still has some limits when it comes to streaming, when it does work well it transforms this streamer and the TV it’s connected to into an Echo-style setup. And at this low price, all that functionality is a touchdown.

So how can cord cutters catch the big game? Check out our full guide on watching the Super Bowl without cable, as well as our roundup of the best Super Bowl big-screen TV deals to complete your entertainment center upgrade.

[Today’s deal: Amazon Fire TV Cube for $80.]

In the span of about an hour last night, things went from bad to worse for Apple. What started with the report of a seemingly unbelievable bug ended with the disabling of one of the premium features of iOS 12 as Apple scrambled to save face and prevent an epic privacy snafu.

Here’s what happened: After a tip, 9to5Mac exposed a weird FaceTime bug that let callers eavesdrop on the people they were calling, whether or not the person on the other end picked up or was even aware a call was coming in. The process isn’t exactly easy, involving adding your own number to a Group FaceTime call after dialing, but it’s not something out of the realm of inadvertently implementing it either.

Plus, once it was out there, well, it was almost certain to be abused.

At first, Apple merely said they were aware of the bug and would be issuing a fix this week. Being that it was only Monday, that could be as many as five days, an eternity when a nasty bug is out in the wild. About a half hour later, Apple did the right thing: They disabled Group FaceTime via its servers so someone couldn’t test the bug even if they wanted to.

Apple

That’s the right thing to do. Coming on the heels of a utter refusal to admit that any range of bent iPads are unacceptable, Apple handled the FaceTime bug quickly and efficiently, and fully mitigated any embarrassing stories (other than the bug itself, of course). After all, updates are generally slow to promulgate, so waiting for 12.1.4 to land and then hoping people actually install it could take weeks, leaving a very serious bug on potentially millions of phones, iPads, and Macs.

Privacy and PR 

So, let’s give Apple credit where it’s due. It shut down the root of the problem almost immediately and protected its users against nefarious activity. It took its lumps, didn’t make excuses, and sacrificed an important feature as a result. On the surface, it seems that Apple is putting the safety and security of its users ahead of its products.

Apple

But the question remains: How did it happen in the first place? Group FaceTime was delayed from the initial iOS 12 launch, so it’s not like Apple rushed things. And while it’s not an easy bug to duplicate, it’s also not a particularly intricate one, so Apple’s engineers should have spotted it before it released or at some point over the past three months since it’s been live.

It’s something of a trend at Apple that should have gone out of style by now. Last year, Apple dealt with so many high-profile iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra bugs that it promised it was “auditing our development processes to help prevent this from happening again.” A year later, it seems as though Apple hasn’t actually learned anything from its mistakes.

And what’s worse, Apple seems to have been alerted to this bug before it had a chance to spread around the interwebs. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg spotted a tweet posted on Jan. 20 by Twitter user MGT7 that describes this exact bug. The Arizona-based user tagged Apple Support in the tweet and said they submitted a bug report, so it’s likely someone at Apple saw it. And if they didn’t, why aren’t they taking every privacy complaint seriously, even if it’s from a faceless Twitter user?

Apple

So why didn’t Apple take action then? Or at least sooner than last night? Even if they didn’t take the report seriously, someone could have at least tried to replicate it. Had someone done so, it would have set off immediate alarm bells and Apple could have taken the appropriate action before it became headline news. This isn’t an autocorrect bug or a crashing message. It’s a serious flaw with massive privacy implications that could have had catastrophic results.

But the reality is Apple is the richest company in the world and privacy is primarily a PR move. While I believe that privacy does matter to Tim Cook and Apple, I also think the company’s profits and PR matter more, and assuming Apple knew about the bug before last night, it was hoping to skate by without needing to publicly disclose the FaceTime bug. And it may have been knowingly putting its customers at risk for weeks, if not months.

The irony of all this is that the bug was discovered on Data Privacy Day, which was marked with a tweet by CEO Tim Cook saying “The dangers are real and the consequences are too important.” It’s hard to argue with those words, especially when it’s your own iPhone that poses the danger.

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX GPU for laptops has arrived, hot on the heels of its announcement at CES. Unfortunately, all the hand-wringing and chest-beating that surrounded the original GeForce RTX has followed. It may magnify further with the newest GeForce RTX laptop GPUs, as detractors look for more evidence that Nvidia’s pursuit of a hybrid ray tracing future is the wrong path.

While it’s far too early to pass any judgment on GeForce RTX in laptops, we can at least walk you through the reasons you may actually want to buy a GeForce RTX-based laptop—or not.

Reasons to buy a GeForce RTX laptop

Put on your green t-shirt and queue up the ray tracing demos so you can rub your friends’ faces in them. Yes, if you’re a fan of what Nvidia has achieved with ray tracing, here are some of the reasons you might just want to buy a GeForce RTX laptop.

RTX is the fastest gaming laptop GPU in town!

One of the biggest reasons to buy a new laptop with GeForce RTX is they’re likely to be faster than previous-generation laptops. For example, the MSI GS75 Stealth that we just tested, with an RTX 2080 Max-Q, is clearly faster than GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q laptops we’ve seen. In fact, in several benchmarks, the GS75 Stealth is faster than laptops that weight 50 percent more and feature much hotter and power-hungry graphics cards inside.

Daniel Masaoka/IDG

Much of that performance we’ve seen is based on today’s conventional gaming—that is, games that don’t use hybrid ray tracing. Even if ray tracing is the future, you’ll still be playing these games for a while.

For example, check out the pure graphics performance results from 3DMark Time Spy, which gives the RTX 2080 Max-Q a definite lead over all other laptops we’ve seen lately. While we haven’t seen a full-tilt GeForce RTX 2080 laptop yet, we imagine that in, say, an Alienware Area-51m, that 2080 might sing.

IDG

You want a thin and light, yet powerful gaming laptop

While thin-and-light gaming laptops aren’t exclusively GeForce RTX-based, the push for making more of them is kicking into high gear with this generation.

In fact, Nvidia said of the 40 laptops that support RTX, 17 will use the Max-Q version, which pretty much means they’re going to be thin. The thin-and-light gaming choices will simply be better on models with GeForce RTX.

Adam Patrick Murray

Ray tracing is the future!

Hybrid ray tracing is either the future of PC gaming or its bane, depending on who’s talking. After seeing Nvidia’s hybrid ray tracing demos though, you’re sold. We’ve seen them too, and ray tracing represents a true night-and-day difference when fully implemented.

Epic

Put simply, buying a GeForce RTX laptop “future-proofs” you for that shiny and reflective day, justifying the cash output now rather than later. The next chart, for example, shows how a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q laptop stacks up in 3DMark’s Port Royal ray tracing test. 

Sure, that’s not a stupendous score, but for all those other, non-ray-tracing laptops, 0 times 0 is zero.

IDG

GeForce RTX laptops may be surprisingly quiet

One thing we haven’t mentioned is just how well-behaved a GeForce RTX Max-Q laptop can be. By well-behaved, we mean a laptop that’s so quiet, even when running a game, that you may wonder whether something is wrong—as we initially did when we tested the MSI GS75 Stealth. Not every GeForce RTX Max-Q laptop will be as discreet, but if you can find one that whispers while still belting out more frames than a GeForce GTX 1080, then that’s a win.

Adam Patrick Murray

You really can’t lose on GeForce RTX

One of the arguments against buying into GeForce RTX has been the lack of game support for the new technology. While we agree that’s a valid point, the counterpoint is you don’t really give up anything. For example, here’s another chart that shows you where a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q laptop sits even without that hybrid ray tracing or DLSS support. No matter what, GeForce RTX laptops are likely to outpace the generation they just replaced, so you’re still going forward and you’re “ready for the future.”

IDG

Reasons not to buy a GeForce RTX laptop

We just gave you plenty of truly legitimate reasons to buy a new GeForce RTX laptop, but there are also plenty of reasons we can give you not to buy one. So let’s run through the fear, uncertainty, and doubt tree and ruin your RTX fantasy.

Adam Patrick Murray

GTX 10-series laptops are plenty fast and a lot cheaper today

Although Nvidia has never disclosed the price difference between the older 10-series laptops and its new 20-series laptops, we’ve had vendors tell us that it’s not the huge sticker shock desktop gamers got. In fact, around a hundred bucks is what we’ve loosely settled on for the price difference. We also know that laptops with GeForce GTX, not RTX, are where the deals are today.

We’ve seen GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q laptops in the $1,500 range, with GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q laptops available for several hundred dollars less than one with a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q. Think of it this way: It’s always easier to make a deal on end-of-model-year cars than the ones coming in for next year. The performance of GTX 10-series laptops remains good enough that we wouldn’t feel bad pocketing the difference.

Nvidia

GeForce RTX is a dismal failure

Even fans of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX initiative can admit there is a significant resistance to the company’s RTX line of cards. In fact, the company itself had to say as much when updating investors recently by saying: “In addition, sales of certain high-end GPUs using Nvidia’s new Turing architecture were lower than expected. These products deliver a revolutionary leap in performance and innovation with real-time ray tracing and AI, but some customers may have delayed their purchase while waiting for lower price points and further demonstrations of RTX technology in actual games.”

As a certified hater of all things ray tracing, you’re sure this is going to fizzle out. Those who buy into RTX are going to be left with expensive GPUs and nothing to do. While that’s probably going to make some fans of technology and PC gaming sad, everyone is entitled to decide how to spend their cash. So hate on all you want.

Gordon Mah Ung

One word: AMD

AMD CPUs have rocked Intel’s world the last few years. Many expect the company to finally get back into the graphics game enough to hassle Nvidia too. Whether that extends to gaming laptops—particularly high-end ones—anytime soon is an unknown. But with the company’s Radeon VII breaking cover, maybe, just maybe, this will be the year we see some serious competition.

IDG

Ray tracing performance of RTX laptops sucks

While desktop RTX performance on conventional games is simply splendid, the unknown is how well it will translate across all of the the different laptop GPUs, and  across future shipping games with RTX support.

What we do know is GeForce RTX parts are mostly transplants of the desktop versions in feature set. Where they fall behind is in power and thermal limitations. That’s a fancy way to say slower clock speeds.

For reference, we compiled the public information Nvidia has released on the new GPUs. As you can see in the chart above, there’s a pretty massive difference between desktop and laptop RTX. A GeForce RTX 2080 can have a boost clock as low as 1,095MHz, technically, compared to a desktop’s 1,800MHz.

Those swings will vary from laptop to laptop based on design. After flipping on the DirectX Ray Trace switch with Battlefield V on a $3,000 MSI GS75 Stealth with GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q, we saw performance go from 90 fps to 45 fps. That’s just painful. Running 3DMark’s Port Royal Ray Trace test also put the GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q uncomfortably close to the desktop GeForce RTX 2060.

These might be early hardware bugs to be shaken off, but if you’re the kind of nerd whose glass is half-empty and shattered on the ground, you’ll likely want to wait and see how full-power RTX laptops perform.

IDG