Tech News
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NL: PC Game Reviews Roundup
Published: Monday, October 19, 2009 | By: WillHere is a couple more games for the PC gamer inside all of us to enjoy. One of them is even a MMORPG built on the famous Crysis Crytech Engine.
Aion: The Tower Of Eternity (PC) Review @ Gamingheaven
The MMORPG genre has been dominated for so long by World Of Warcraft that it seems almost impossible for any other titles to get a long term foothold. Developers keep trying however because this market is so lucrative and today we look at the much hyped MMO entitled 'Aion' from far east developer NCSoft.
Left4Dead Crash Course (PC) Review @ Gamingheaven
Valve are due to release Left 4 Dead 2 in November but they have just updated the original Left 4 Dead with some new downloadable content which is aimed to appease the zombie loving masses. Called Crash Course it comprises a brand new campaign featuring two chapters and best of all, its free.
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DFI LanParty BI G41-T33 Motherboard Review @ Legit Reviews
Published: Friday, October 16, 2009 | By: DennisWhen our review of the BloodIron G41 went live I had a quick chat with them in regards to the feedback the get from other editors. Seems that most people have a hard time understanding that a mainstream motherboard is designed to be cheap and not a gamers dream board.
I think some of that stems from a change in how DFI is marketing the company. In previous years everything DFI did in relation to the LanParty brand was focused on the high-end. The verbal minority (ie people reading this) did a great job at spreading the word and things were good. Fast forward to now, more companies have come forth with high-end enthusiast platforms to sell alongside their mid and low range stuff. DFI never really had a low-end but instead focused on the OEM market, so the bottom line here is if DFI is going excel at what they do they need to expand the product line and start focusing on some of their other products.
Today we have the opportunity to take a look at another board in the LanParty series from DFI. The LanParty series has always been a favorite of mine because of the tweaking options and the overclocking ability that they have. The board we get to look at today, though, was one that most would not think would belong in that series of boards. It is a micro board, uses the older LGA775 socket coupled with DDR3 memory, and has the G41 chipset that sports the GMA X4500 on-board graphics chip...
I would expect to see many more BloodIron products hitting the streets and various review sites, the interesting part will be to see what sites buy into the change which ones will resist.
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Windows 7 : ATI DX10 V DX11 Article @ DriverHeaven
Published: Friday, October 16, 2009 | By: WillWindows 7 is here and so is DirectX 11. So what does all this really mean to us PC gamers? Well check out this article to get a better understanding of it.
"Since our last articles on Windows 7 the ATI Radeon 5800/5700 series of graphics cards have launched and two games are now available which have DirectX 11 features. Today we take a look at performance and image quality differences between DirectX 10.0 /10.1 and DirectX 11 when running Windows 7 on ATIs latest hardware. The article also includes the worlds first detailed look at S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat running in DirectX 11 mode."
Good stuff here!
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12 Hottest Geek Girls
Published: Thursday, October 15, 2009 | By: WillOkay this is not exactly news, but I know all of us geeks need some Geek Girl action every once in a while. So have a look over each one of these geek gals, and the things they have done. Good read right here.
There has been a sharp rise recently of so-called geek girls, and the sad fact is that many, if not most, of these women are nothing near geeky. While the elusive geek girl does, in fact, exist, she's much less common than most would care to admit. There are criteria that must be met to make a proper geek girl; she must be geeky, she must be a techie, and she must be hot.
Yes, if you look hard enough there is more than just pictures on this page.
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XFX HD 5750 Review @ OCC
Published: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 | By: WillATI has really been on a roll lately with the new releases on video cards. ATI is all DirectX 11 ready and has no games to play with. Oh well give it time and enough marketing and it will make sense.
"To overclock the XFX HD 5750, the ATI Catalyst Control Center will be used since the maximum stable overclock fell under the overall limit of 870MHz core and 1430MHz memory. The XFX HD 5750 overclocked roughly 20% extra on both the core and memory to a nice 845MHz and 1385MHz. Fan control is also possible now in the ATI Overdrive suite. Temperatures were in the low 30's at idle and low 60's at load. The R6 driver overclocked the 5750 without any major hiccups except that clock speed wasn't always properly reported. I used other software to verify that the overclock was where it was suppose to be and it was so this bug is only minor."
I'm not bitter just wondering where our review sample is at.
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Corsair Obsidian 800D Chassis Review @ Driverheaven
Published: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 | By: WillThis is the case that has been all the buz for the longest time. Then once it is released the case is bearly even mentioned. It does look very cool though.
Today we have a product on our review bench which is Corsair's latest foray into a new area. The Obsidian 800D is an enthusiast orientated PC chassis which at first glance has the makings of a fantastic product. Today we find out if Corsair has yet another success on their hands or if their latest product expansion is a step too far.
It does look like one heavy beast.
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The Steamy Issue Of Digital Distribution
Published: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 | By: WillI do ask myself many times if Steam is really doing the right thing for the consumer and the small developers. Prices sometimes just don't add up against retail as well. Time to read up on it a little bit.
As mentioned in the Sunday Papers yesterday, there has been some controversy sparked after remarks made by Gearbox's Randy Pitchford to Maximum PC regarding Steam, where he stated that the digital distribution service from Valve was "exploiting a lot of small guys." This was later countered by an article on Gamasutra where Tripwire's John Gibson retorted, "Ask the Tripwire Interactive employees if they feel exploited, as they move into their new offices paid for by the money the company has made on Steam."
Step back everyone I see a flame heading for me.
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An Inconvenient Truth: Intel Larrabee Story Revealed
Published: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 | By: WillHere is a great article found by our wonderful forum mod Slngsht about the new Intel Larrabee Graphic Card. It's a long read, but every bit worth it though.
"Over the course of the last couple of years, I have closely followed Larrabee with on and off-the-record discussions with a significant number of Intel employees. As time progressed, the warning lights stopped being blips in the distance and became big flashing lights right in front of our faces. After discussing what happened at the Intel Developer Forum and the Larrabee demo with Intel's own engineers, industry analysts and the like, there was no point in going back."
Get the popcorn for this one.
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Zotac GeForce GT 220 1 GB @ techPowerUp
Published: Monday, October 12, 2009 | By: WillWith all the doom and gloom take that we have been hearing about AM...NVidia here recently. Looks like they just do have some 40nm GPU proof that things are not all bad.
"Zotac's new GeForce GT 220 is based on NVIDIA's new GT 216 GPU which features 48 shader processors. While this is certainly not enough to play games at high resolutions it is sure fine for casual gaming. Windows desktop use and HD video playback is what this card is really targeted at and here it shines with extremely low power consumption and good feature set."
I just started thinking about it, and noticed that last year about this time AMD was all the doom and gloom talk.
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Intel graphics drivers employ questionable 3DMark Vantage optimizations
Published: Monday, October 12, 2009 | By: WillOnce again this is another reason that synthetic benchmarks are cool, but need to be taken with a grain of salt. Then numbers may look good, but they just might lie.
Intel's latest graphics drivers for Windows 7 appear to violate Futuremark's optimization guidelines for 3DMark Vantage. We investigate, and make some interesting discoveries in the process.
Good read right there.
