The Evad3rs Are Breaking Up, No More Jailbreaks for iOS 7.1/iOS

A sketchy report by the Air Herald states that “Enthusiastic jailbreakers have been suggested by hacking group Evad3rs not to upgrade to the iOS 7.1 and stay away from it.” The reasons are unknown, but it is being suggested that the team is breaking up.

According to the report in question, the team didn’t provide any solid reason as to why jailbreakers should refrain from getting iOS 7.1, but it most likely has to do with the fact that Apple killed off all known jailbreaks in this particular update. Since iOS 7.1.1 supersedes iOS 7.1, the same warning applies for the newer firmware. It’s also common knowledge that iOS 7.1 poses a battery drain risk, so that’s another thing to look after. Nevertheless, most of the iDevice customer base (and by most I mean almost everyone) is already on iOS 7. The report adds, “...one of the members of it said it seems evad3rs won’t be focusing any more on [iOS 7.1] as a team,” suggesting that the crew is breaking up. This wouldn’t be the first time a dev-team fails to get along and its members move on to work on separate projects.

The notorious Dev-Team, of which famous hacker pod2g was a member, broke up and then got reunited (adding a few new members while losing others) to become the evad3rs. It seems this team has also run its course. Evad3rs team member pod2g tells us "there are no plans of breaking up I am aware of."

Evad3rs header
Image credits to Evad3rs

Read more »

8 GB Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X Shipping for €730 in Europe

The Radeon R9 290X graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices is pretty powerful even in its base form, but Sapphire decided not only to overclock it, but also add a cooler and, to make matters even more serious, double the memory too.

So instead of a 1 GHz Radeon R9 290X with 4 GB GDDR5 VRAM at 5 GHz frequency, we have the Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X with 1.060 MHz GPU clock and 8 GB of GDDR5 operating at 5.6 GHz. It's like having a dual-GPU video card, only without the extra GPU and the whole extra power consumption that comes with it. Or the hybrid cooler. Or the reputation. Or the expectations for that matter. No one will expect Sapphire's Radeon R9 29)X Vapor-X to play Lichdom: Battlemage on three 4K UHD displays any time soon.

The price of the board in the UK is of £599.99, while the tag in the EU is €730. That should mean roughly $1,016. Look for the triple-fan cooler with a mixed color theme of dark grey and light blue. You can't miss it, especially given the very distinctive box holding everything. You could just add another 50% to the sum and just buy the dual-GPU Radeon R9 295 X2 though. Just a thought.

Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X 8GB
Image credits to Overclockers UK

Read more »

Intel's Core i7-4770K CPU No Longer the Fastest

Reviews can be really enlightening things, and the one that TweakTown posted not long ago did us the nice favor of showing that the strongest unlocked CPU in Intel's lineup is not the strongest of all CPUs anymore.

You would think that it would take a bit longer for this to happen. After all, Intel hasn't released the fourth generation "refresh" unlocked CPUs. That range, known as Devil's Canyon, will only come out during the summer. That didn't stop the newest Haswell fourth-generation processor from outdoing the Core i7-4770K though. Sure, the Core i7-4770K can be overclocked like nobody's business, but in its base form, it loses to the Core i7-4790. Granted, the name of the latter kind of spoils that, but there was enough room to wonder about the performance difference.

In the end, the review has confirmed that the newcomer is incrementally faster than the Core i7-4770K, as the 100 MHz extra clock speed implied. For those who want a reminder as to what the specs of the chips sound like, here they are: the Core i7-4770K runs at 3.5 GHz most of the time, but can reach 3.9 GHz in a pinch. Meanwhile, the Core i7-4790 has a base clock of 3.6 GHz, but can attain 4 GHz when the Turbo Boost Technology comes into play. It makes it seem odd that there could be any doubt as to whether the 4790 is any faster than the 4770K, but the latter is a top-tier chip, and could have had an advantage over the other in spite of refraining from overclocking. That's not the case, so if you're the sort of person that wants a very strong computer to play games on, but don't plan to tweak the clocks any, you can go ahead and get the Core i7-4790 without any worries.

The K chips often only get bought by people seeking to set new records, or to just go wild with liquid nitrogen cooling and the like. Well, there are also those folks who prefer unlocked multipliers because it ensures that they can steadily push performance higher as years pass, postponing the necessity of purchasing a new CPU for longer than two or three years. Indeed, the Core i7-4770K (and whatever Devil's Canyon equivalent is on the way) should be good for five to ten years. Especially if you eventually invest in a water cooling system, of the all-in-one, closed-loop variety or otherwise.

Intel Core i7 flagship CPU proven second fastest
Image credits to Intel

Read more »