Tech News

• April Fools: Sorry no gag this year

  Published: Friday, April 1, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Lots of April Fools jokes are floating around today.  Saw the P67 UD13 on Facyspaces, and how Techpowerup and Fudzilla switches sites but I didn't have time to come up with a gag this year.

  If you find come cool ones post them up in the forum. 

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• Homefront (PC) Review @ GamingHeaven

  Published: Wednesday, March 30, 2011 | By: Dennis

  I was extremely excited about this game.  The backstory was awesome, the fact they hired the writer of Red Dawn to help with the storyline was the right move, but in typical game developer fashion they concentrated on the console aspects of gameplay and totally ignored what makes for a great PC game.  At least from the single player aspect of the game.

  The single player part of Homefront left me wanting more, A LOT more, the reason being that they spend a ton of time on the story but totally failed to deliver on that story.  For instance on the Homefront website there is a map that explains what is going on in different parts of the country, Sadly you are not able to visit those parts or even have a mission there.  Instead you are limited to breaking out of a town in Colorado to deliver fuel to the US Military in San Francisco. (spoiler blah) What happened to the irradiated Mississippi river?, or the mining camps? if you can't go there so why even mention it??

  While I can agree with the views of GamingHeaven on this game I cannot even remotely support their rating of it

  As we fired up the game we were greeted by one of the most amazing introductions to any game we've come across. The video documents the "past" 16 years up until the year in which the game is set, 2027 and it begins with various news flashes and headlines documenting the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, with the subsequent rise to power of the dictators son, Kim Jong Un. A revolutionist, the youngster manages to unite both North and South Korea, forming the Greater Korean Republic. At the same time as the rise of Korea we witness an America gripped in crisis, oil shortages have ravaged the military thanks to an on-going war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
  

  I will still suggest that everyone play Homefront and try out the mulitplayer but buy the game because it's a different take on the FPS shooter genre and not because you are looking for something more than your standard shooter since it hardly delivers the story it promises. 

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• OC3D: MSI Big Bang Marshal P67 Review

  Published: Monday, March 28, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Out of everything that MSI makes this one board really caught my attention this year at CES, but I am also a sucker for the overkill. .  The review, if you can call it that, is extremely short but does cover all of the features of the board, minus how MSI opted to split up the PCI Express lanes to accommodate 4 full video cards.

  Regardless they seem to like it, lets hope future reviews include a little more information.

  Today we're taking a look at the latest high-end motherboard from MSI, the Big Bang Marshal. How does it perform?

  We do hope to get a sample of this board in for testing, just as soon as they go on sale.

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• Funky Kit Article: Voltmodding an old GPU to increase performance

  Published: Friday, March 25, 2011 | By: Dennis

  As overclockers we are often limited by the tools provided to us by the mfg.  While many of these limitations have gone away in recent years we are still often plagued by not having enough voltage to make our overclocks "stick".

  Volt modding is a way around that but requires skill with a soldering iron and the steady hand of a surgeon.

  In the video card end of things, the benchmarks involve rendering specific scenes either as fast as possible, or with the largest number of frames per second possible.  The higher you can overclock, the more frames you can render and the higher your score will be.  Overclocking to the extreme limit requires very good cooling, and rather more voltage then the manufacturers want you putting through the cards, that means it's time to bust out the soldering iron and have some fun! 

  Personally I stil have yet to take on the voltmodding challenge myself but that doesn't mean you shouldn't. 

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• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti Review @ Techgage

  Published: Friday, March 25, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Picking a midrange video card for your gaming rig can be a difficult task but with the help of good reviews you can make an informed decision or reaffirm what you already know.

  Catering to those who demand great GPU performance for a modest price, NVIDIA has launched its $130 GeForce GTX 550 Ti. Compared to the GTS 450 which it replaces, the GTX 550 Ti delivers faster performance, a beefier memory bus and what NVIDIA touts as being one of the best performance per watt ratios around.

  We have looked at two different versions of the GTX 550 Ti, one reference design and another GTX 550 Ti from EVGA.  While we often look at much faster cards for our systems you cannot ignore the efficiency of these lower end products.

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• nVidia GTX 590 Introduction - The Worlds Fastest Single Card System

  Published: Thursday, March 24, 2011 | By: Dennis

  When dealing with competitive benchmarking you are always lusting after the super high-end hardware since that is the gear to get you real performance points.  That's not to say you can't get points using cheaper and more common components, however the points are simply not the same.
  
  This is where having the fastest GPU on the planet can really help your points position and the GTX 590 is the new speed king.  Check out our introduction article for more information on this new dual GPU video card based on the awesome GTX 580.

  As we mentioned before the GTX 590 is the world's fastest GPU, but what makes it the fastest GPU?? Is it a mystery chip discovered in the basement graphics lab? Or is it an innovative product that leverages the best that nVidia has to offer in a compact package? Actually, it's a little of both.
  

  
  The card looks awesome, however the card architecture is designed for raw speed and not so much for overclocking.  Yes there is a 10 phase PWM on board, but 5 phases pre GPU seems a little low considering some of the enthusiast friendly GTX 580s you can buy.

  Then again overclocking the primary driver behind what makes the GTX 590 so cool.

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• nVidia GTX 590 Launch Day - Need Speed?

  Published: Thursday, March 24, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Would you like to have the fastest GPU on the planet??  Of course you would.  Not only could you rule HWBot but you could also run triple displays and 3D Vision Sourround from a single PCB.

  

  Here are some reviews from around the web

  - ASUS GeForce GTX 590 @ PureOverclock
  - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590: Dual GF110s, One PCB @ HotHardware
  - Nvidia's GeForce GTX 590 graphics card @ TR
  - ASUS GeForce GTX 590 3GB Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews
  - Nvidia GeForce GTX 590: The Dual-GF110 Beast @ Bjorn3D
  - NVIDIA GTX 590 Dual GF110 Review @ ocaholic
  - ASUS GeForce GTX 590 3 GB @ techPowerUp
  - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 3GB Review @ Hardware Canucks

  Be sure to read the reviews carefully, I have seen at least one instance today where the review was nothing but a rehash of stock photos and estimated performance numbers.

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• Is DirectX Holding Back PC Game Development?

  Published: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 | By: Dennis

  I found this interesting article over at Tested today that discusses the impact of development APIs on game development.  In the early days of computer games you had 2 basic directions you could go when building a new game, either OpenGL/Glide or MS DirectX.  After the fall of 3DFx and rise of "good" DirectX code it was only a matter of time before we saw games actually depend on DirectX version and performance.
  
  Since the rise of DirectX we see games being released to all platforms at once.  This for the lack of another term indicates they all are almost direct console ports with very little time spent to actually show off what PC hardware is capable of.
  
  

  In many ways, though, the benefits of APIs outweigh the disadvantages. Without APIs, devs would have to write all the low-level hardware code themselves, making sure their games worked on an enormous range of PC hardware. Additionally, saying PC games "don't look ten times as good" as console games seems to be bordering on a logical fallacy. Ten times the raw processing power doesn't necessarily indicate that the game should look ten times as amazing. As we draw closer to photorealistic graphics, generational improvements will become more subtle than ever.
  

  While I am all for new technology it takes years before these new features make it into PC games and in an age where computer hardware is refreshing every 6-8 months by the time games come out to support the latest technologies the hardware it was built for is often obsolete.

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• PCMark 7 Coming soon

  Published: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 | By: Jim

  Designed for Windows 7, PCMark 7 includes more than 20 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. These workloads are combined into a range of convenient suites each giving a different view of your system’s performance.
  
  Will be nice to see what improvements this has over PCMark Vantage. No date given yet, but I suspect it will be out soon.

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• Crysis 2 Available in North America - Will it be the new benchmark?

  Published: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Crysis 2 has officially launched in North America and promises to be the next great shooter in the Crysis franchise.  There are rumors floating around that this game will not support DX11 which would indicate that the game will suffer from consolitis and be nothing more than a new story applied to the original Crysis game engine.
  
  We can hope this isn't the case, but only time will tell.

  

  It's 2023, terrifying alien invaders stalk the New York City streets. Only you can prevail, wielding the supersoldier enhancements of Nanosuit 2.
  

  I'll be picking up Crysis 2 this afternoon, wish me luck.

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