Tech News
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NVIDIA Talks PC Gaming Trends @ Techgage
Published: Friday, September 23, 2011 | By: DennisNVidia has always pushed the PC when it comes to gaming and even helped game developers implement nVidia technology in their upcoming titles. While we like to complain that consoles have killed PC game development it would seem that isn't always the case.
Some claim that PC gaming is dying, but recent trends disagree. In fact, it looks to be console gaming that's soon to see a decline, thanks in part to a growing number of compelling aspects that PCs offer - including at the very least free-to-play games. Let's take a look at these and other trends, and the reasons behind them.
I don't mind paying for games just so long as they provide me with some enjoyment and have a good single player story line. Sadly very few games can deliver.
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GIGABYTE GTX 570 Super Overclock SOC @ OCAU
Published: Thursday, September 22, 2011 | By: DennisWhen it comes to high-end super cards you can't go wrong with the SOC from Gigabyte. The card comes "hot clocked" from the factory and features their triple fan "Windforce" GPU cooler to help control overclocked heat loads. Of course if mortal cooling isn't your style simply press the LN2 button, strap on a GPU pot and pour for broke.
GIGABYTE's Super Overclock series of products is well known for pushing the envelope of overclocker-friendly features and high factory-shipped clock speeds. After reviewing their GTX 580 SOC, we thought it would be worth benchmarking its more affordable brother, the GTX 570 SOC. At first look we noticed that it was, like its big brother the GTX 580, a complete redesign - from the cooling, PCB design, power circuitry and amped up clock speeds. The GTX 570 SOC maintains a dual slot design and familiar form factor seen with the GTX 580 SOC. So how does this perform against NVIDIA's pricier GTX 580, and what features does it bring to the table? Let's fire up our test bench and find out!
From what we can tell the SOC line is the only one that is specifically designed for overclocking with a custom PCB that remains well within ATX spec.
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Intel's Next-Gen Sandy Bridge-E Extreme Chip to Boost Performance by 65%
Published: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 | By: DennisThis is some good news for us Workstation enthusiasts, now if the processor will also overclock like the 900 series we'll have a great tweaking processor as well.
According to a document with Intel's performance estimates of the Core i7-3960X processor (six cores, 3.30GHz, 15MB cache) seen by X-bit labs, the forthcoming chip for the LGA2011 platform is clearly faster than its predecessor Core i7-990X (six cores, 3.46GHz, 12MB cache) across a range of benchmarks despite of lower clock-speed amid the same amount of cores due to advantages of the Sandy Bridge micro-architecture over Nehalem/Westmere micro-architecture, quad-channel memory controller and other innovations.
I'm beginning to wonder what the difference is between X and K skus besides the L3 cache size. According to the chart they both have unlocked multipliers and we already know 8 core CPUs will be "Xeon" branded for servers. So, what does X mean? Multi processor maybe?
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Intel Core i7-3930K compared to Core i7-980X
Published: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 | By: DennisAfter IDF I started doing some more research into what will come with the LGA2011 processors and X79. Of course the information is sparse and likely to change but the rumor mill appears to be quite knowledgeable.
With Sandy Bridge as the foundation the processors will be tweaked with a quad-core DDR3 memory controller, better overclocking and up to six cores in retail - eight for servers.
We knwo since earlier that Intel is planning at least three Sandy Bridge-E processors in the Intel Core i7-3000 series this fall and it is the middle child Core i7-3930K that Cooler has. The processor will operate at 3.2 GHz, but can overclock to 3.8GHz in Turbo mode. it was locked at the nominal frequency and then compared to Intel's current Gulftown architecture at the same clock frequency and number of cores.Minus the misspellings the article is quite interesting and talks about 3 basic skus with the high end editions being X and K complete with unlocked multipliers. All processors will feature a 130w TDP and quad memory channels so they almost mimic the 1155 lineup.
The 130w TDP is quite high considering SandyBridge-E appears to be nothing more than two 1155 processors smashed together, I guess they need a little extra juice to get all of the cores and PCI Express lanes to work.
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NVIDIA GeForce LAN 6 BYOC Sells out in 2 Hours!
Published: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 | By: DennisGamers Sign Up in Droves for This Fall’s Hottest Gaming Event; Gives Gamers First Chance Ever to Play Three Battlefield 3 Multiplayer Maps
SANTA CLARA, Calif.—September 20, 2011— NVIDIA today opened registration for GeForce LAN 6, which was met with an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from PC gamers.
Just two hours after opening registration, seats for the highly-anticipated bring-your-own computer (BYOC) gaming area sold out, as gamers reserved their spots to play in the highly anticipated 64-person LAN featuring Battlefield 3.Check the Ninjalane Message Forum for the full press release
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NL: Review Block - Motherboards Pimp Video Cards and SSD
Published: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 | By: DennisQuick review block to start your Tuesday with.
Motherboards
- Funky Kit Review: Zotac Z68-ITX WiFi Motherboard
- GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 2 @ Bjorn3D
- Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 @ PureOverclock
- GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD (Intel Z68) Motherboard Review
Video Cards
- EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Classified Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews
- His IceQX Radeon 6770 Videocard @ Rbmods
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 1280MB SOC Review @ APH Networks
Storage
- Kingston HyperX 240GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD Review @ TechgageMore to come so stay tuned.
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Portal free on steam
Published: Friday, September 16, 2011 | By: DeanWho doesn't like free stuff? Well Steam is giving away Portal once again for free. You have till September 20th so act soon.
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Windows 8 on a laptop in-depth preview
Published: Friday, September 16, 2011 | By: DeanMany of you might have known that a developers build of Windows 8 has been released to the general public already. Heres a great preview of what's inside.
Less than 24 hours after it went live on Microsoft's site, Steve Ballmer reported a whopping 500,000 downloads of Windows 8 Developer Preview. That's half a million copies, if not eager Windows fans. Well, you can count us among them. Although we were treated to some private hands-on time with a tablet optimized for the OS, we hadn't, until now, had a chance to use it on a laptop -- i.e., the computing environment where we spend most of our time, and the one where we're most used to seeing Windows, in particular.
If you don't have time yourself to install, this preview will tide you over just fine. Very in depth and informative.
If you want to grab it yourself and give it a go, you can do so from here.
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Off to Watch the Boise Open
Published: Friday, September 16, 2011 | By: DennisNot much more I can say. I'm off to watch the Boise Open today and likely won't be able to post any news. Don't fret normal operations will resume before you know it.
Oh wait, I said that already
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ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z LGA1155 @ techPowerUp
Published: Friday, September 16, 2011 | By: DennisThe Maximus IV Gene-Z that we reviewed was actually a really fun board to mess with. It didn't have all the cool stuff found on the Maximus IV Extreme but reacted and performed exactly the same, which is saying a lot since it’s only half the size.
ASUS has updated their microATX ROG offerings with the latest chipset from Intel, and we take a look. A red and black racer, the ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z is ready for high speed gaming without a doubt, and packs in many exclusive features that just might see it hit the finish line first. Ready? Set? GO!
The ROG features are what really separate these motherboards from the competition and I think the TPU folks agree..
