The X51 is intriguing. It looks like a media centre, acts like a desktop PC and costs the same as a top end Mac Mini for the most basic of the three specs available. It’s on sale now, so who’s going to buy it?

The first thing to note about the X51 is that it’s a little bigger than I was expecting. When Alienware say it’s slightly larger than the Xbox 360 or PS3, they’re talking about the first generation designs of those consoles and not the newer, slimmer ones. At 343x318x95mm it has a small footprint for desktop machine, but it’s far from the tiniest PC I’ve seen recently. A Silverstone Sugo SG06 mini ITX case, for example, is 286x220x177mm and has space for double width graphics and the PSU to sit inside. The X51, on the other hand, has a hefty power brick trailing behind it.

You can fit a double slot graphics card upgrade to the X51, mind, and I’m told that any GPU up to 150W should be fine if you go for the upgraded 330W PSU (it comes with a 240W one as standard). Whether or not there’s room for longer cards I won’t know until I open one up.

We’ll need that information, because the X51 will have to be upgraded at some point. The basic X51, which costs £699/$699, has a Core i3 processor and GeForce GT545 graphics. That’s enough to get most games running at 1920×1080, although you’ll need to turn down things like anti-aliasing and post-processing effects for smooth framerates in most games. The higher end models comes with GTX555 graphics and cost up to £999/$999. It’s a step up from the GT545, but not an enormous one. It is considerably more powerful than the highest spec of a Mac Mini, mind, by a factor of ten in some metrics.

Like a console, the X51 can sit horizontally or vertically. As with all of Alienware’s kit there’s a lot of attention to detail in design too – so that the illuminated head logo swivels through 90 degrees depending on which way round you’ve got the PC mounted.

I can’t really say how quietly the X51 runs – with all the background noise of a launch event measuring fan noise is impossible. There is a software control panel which can be used to create cooling profiles, though, so you can manually turn down the fans if you’re using it to watch a movie.

Having played with one for a bit last night, my first impressions of the X51 are good. I like the design and I like the concept. I don’t think I’d buy it for myself, but I’m not the target audience. If I couldn’t build a PC, didn’t want to buy a high end gaming system but did want something with a bit more power than a Mac Mini or a much cheaper Inspiron 620MT from Alienware’s parent firm Dell, I think I’d be interested. In other words, it’s the sort of thing I might recommend to a family member or friend who’s asking me to build a machine for them. Spend a bit more, get it preconfigured, and it should just work out of the box.

Coincidentally, that’s exactly the kind of customer that Alienware sees going for the X51 too. It’s not being pitched as a media centre or device for playing PC games on the TV as I first suspected. I asked Eoin Leydon, product manager for the X51, whether or not he thinks people will buy the X51 as a replacement for a console.

“We’re not going to tell anyone how they should be using it,” Leydon said, “The people who’ll buy it are the people who like the look of Alienware machines, but want something smaller for whatever purpose. It works as a media streaming device, but that’s not what we see as it’s main use.”

Part of the decision to launch the X51 came from the success of Alienware’s other more mainstream product, the M11x laptop. That’s relatively low powered, compared to other Alienware notebooks, but is now into its third iteration and has attracted people who wouldn’t have bought Alienware before.

“Within the constraints of the form factor for the M11x and the X51,” says Leydon, “We think we’re delivering the best gaming performance.”

The price of the X51 isn’t outrageous compared to similarly specced machines, and there’s less of a price premium than there is for the Mac Mini, but I do wish it had been launched for about £100 less – considering Dell’s muscle in the supply chain that shouldn’t have been unreasonable. At £599 it would have been a clear recommendation to almost anyone thinking of buying a new PC. At £699 it’s going to put off those who really don’t want to spend much.

What I do like about the X51, however, is that it will be bought by people who don’t consider themselves ‘gamers’, but it cries out to be played with through the design aesthetic alone. Anything which has the potential to expand the gaming audience is generally a good thing.

For the Rig is all things to all people: if you’ve never built a PC before and want to know what kind of spec you should aim for, let the Rig be your guide. If you want a list of potential upgrades that give you the best possible value for money, let the Rig be your guide. If you want to know how to put together a complete PC for less than £1000/$1500… well, you get the idea.

So what has changed during the haitus? Not an awful lot – AMD’s new Radeon HD7000 cards have been launched at too high a price to cause a massive drop in existing midrange cards, which means NVIDIA’s GTX 560Ti remains the best value card overall.

If you want to save more money, you could opt for the even cheaper Radeon HD6870, mind. In a recent test I carried out for the mag, the HD6870 is between £30 and £40 cheaper than the GTX560Ti and is still its equal in games like Skyrim. It struggles comparatively in DX11 tessellation effects, but there’s no game I found in which the GTX560Ti ran at playable framerates but the HD6870 doesn’t. It just has that bit of extra headroom that’s worth the difference if you can afford it.

Elsewhere I’ve been convinced to downgrade the case a bit. Corsair’s Carbide 500R is a thing of beauty, but it’s also quite pricey for what’s ostensibly a good value build. Bitfenix’ Outlaw, on the other hand, is an absolute steal for £40/$50.

The most significant change, however, is the addition of an add-in sound card. While onboard sound is absolutely fine these days, ASUS’ Xonar DG costs just £20/$25 and crucially has a headphone amp circuit on board. That feature makes more practical difference to my ears than any of the expensive extras
‘audiophiles’ insist on, plus there’s some solid sound processing silicon on there too.

What’s in the Rig?

CPU

Intel Core i5 2500K

£160.79/$229.99
You could go for a cheaper Core i3 or six core Phenom, but the Core i5 2500K is the best all rounder available today.

Motherboard

Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

£77.99/$109.99
Good value for a Z68 board, and fully featured for everything bar dual graphics.

RAM

Crucial Ballistix Sport

£31.99/$51.99
Buy a spare while you’re at it, given these prices.

3D Card

GeForce GTX 560Ti

£163.20/$229.84
Hunt around for the best prices, and don’t be fooled by the extra value of the non-Ti version.

Hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB

£53.50/$89.99
If you can, use your old hard drive and buy an SSD for about the same price instead.

DVD drive

Samsung SH-222AB

£11.98/$17.50
You could consider a quieter drive if you want. Or doing away with it altogether and buying a memory stick.

Case

Bitfenix Outlaw

£39.98/$48.95
Not just good looking, but soft to the touch too.

Power supply

OCZ ZS Series 650W

£64.99/$79.99
Plenty of power for what you’ll need.

Mouse

Logitech G400

£24.66/$39.20
Classic Logitech design with a modern 3600dpi sensor.

Keyboard

Microsoft SideWinder X4

£32.36/$37.43
The price is rising. I suspect this keyboard may not be long for this world.

Sound card

ASUS Xonar DG

£20.87/$24.99
Not essential, but a great extra for £20.

Monitor

Iiyama Prolite X2377HDS/AOC i2353Ph

£155.99/$179.99
They’re not my favourite eIPS screens – but they are top value.

Headset

Steelseries Siberia v2

£52.48/$79.99
Quite a bargain at this price, but you might be better off with hifi headphones.

Total:

That’s £9.02 more/£70.20 less than last time.

FTTP OD should be available to any exchanges which have been upgraded for Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) services like the 40Mbps Infinity. Theoretically, at 300Mbps you could download a 10GB Steam game in about five minutes. So is this the death of copper?

Obviously that’s a rhetorical question. Aside from the fact you’d probably break Valve’s servers downloading at that speed, FTTP OD is unlikely to appear in homes soon. Since it involves laying new fibre cables from the street cabinet to your door, it’ll be expensive to connect to. Networking specialist site Thinkbroadband estimates an installation fee of £500-£1500, which is a bit extreme for a game of UT3.

Still, it’s a pleasant option to have, which sits alongside existing business grade FTTP services and complements the more practical fibre products BT offers for blocks of flats, where the cost of superfast broadband can be shared.

It’s been a busy day for BT, though, which also announced its Q3 results (takings down as no-one makes phone calls any more, profits up because what’s left is all high margin stuff). The more interesting news, in fact, is in the detail of this announcement – that there are more than 400,000 subscribers on BT’s Infinity FTTC service already. That’s an impressive rate of uptake considering it’s not available everywhere yet.

The best news, though, is that like rival Virgin, BT is planning to double speeds for existing customers – at least those who are on fibre-based services already. Infinity is going to accelerate from 40Mbps to 80Mbps, with a very large 20Mbps upstream bandwidth. Outside of all the gushing about superfast broadband and triple digit speeds, it’s that last figure which is most important to me. Big upstream speeds should, and I repeat should, mean better quality all round. And as I pointed out yesterday, it’s quality, not quantity, of broadband that counts for games.

Shockingly, more than a quarter of customers (27%) are on connections slower than 2Mbps.

The report is based on 572 million test results collected from a panel of 1,703 UK residential broadband users, and conducted in partnership with analysis site SamKnows.

The company which comes out best from the report – as far as download speeds go – is Virgin. According to the data collected cable customers are getting between 94% and 103% of the bandwidth they’re expecting, as well as the smallest fall off in speeds at peak times. That’s better than BT’s rival fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) service Infinity, which is delivering 36Mbps on average, or 90% of its ‘up to 40Mbps’ advertised speed. O2/Be Broadband also came out well, with significantly faster connection speeds for customers on ADSL.

The typical speed for a customer on an ADSL connection – including 2Mbps, 8Mbps and 20Mbps packages – is just 5.3Mbps, Ofcom and Samknows found.

What the report does highlight, however, is a growing speed gap. Results are slightly skewed by the fact that customers who were already on a fast connection of up to 20 or 24Mbps are migrating onto even quicker ones, leaving people already on slower connections further behind.

Ernest Dokum of comparison site uSwitch, says that the gap is predominantly a question of urban and rural location.

“Although internet providers are investing millions of pounds in bringing the UK’s broadband infrastructure into the 21st Century,” Doku said, “The reality is that many parts of Britain, and especially rural areas, are still operating in the broadband dark ages and are digitally isolated due to sluggish speeds and patchy coverage.

“At a speed of 1Mbit/s it would take around 12 hours to download a feature film and 45 minutes to download a music album…. Continued investment in the broadband infrastructure is vital if the UK is to remain a major player on the world economic stage, and if – as the Government envisages – Britain is to have the best broadband network in Europe by 2015, but it is also crucial that this investment is spread fairly across the country.”

Not all ISPs were included in the test, but it did cover 78% of the contracts current available.

For gamers, however, the really interesting stuff is buried at the end of the report in the Annex information. Headline speed is nowhere near as important as ping, jitter and packet loss, and for these metrics Virgin actually came out significantly worse than its ADSL rivals in most of the tests. While its up to 10Mbps service faired well against similarly advertised rivals in some metrics, at faster download speeds cable was noted as slower than ADSL for webpage loading times, average latency and packet loss. Especially at peak times.

Critics might be concerned that the race for high speeds, which make for good adverts, is being conducted at the expense of quality.

If you’re thinking of changing your supplier, it’s BT, O2/Be and Orange which come out looking the most promising results. But don’t take my word for it: have a read of the full report yourself here.

Don’t get too excited: it’s still not what you’d call a cheap card. Retail prices have been set at £355/$449 and upwards, which puts it pound for pound up against the erstwhile fastest current single chip GPU, the GeForce GTX580. So how does GCN compare to NVIDIA’s best?

The HD7950 has the same Tahiti processor as the HD7970, which was released just before Christmas and it also comes with the same 3GB of GDDR5 RAM on a 384bit bus width. The only difference is that four of the ‘Compute Units’ have been disabled, and clockspeeds for both the processor and memory reduced.

As is common practice for all processor manufacturers, what you’re essentially getting is a card which hasn’t met the quality control conditions for the more expensive boards but is still fully functional across most of its silicon. Given AMD’s track record for locking off disabled cores, it likely won’t be long before we see people attempt custom BIOS creations that try to turn them back on again, converting a HD7950 into a HD7970. Personally I wouldn’t hold out hope that you’ll be able to do that, but who knows?

A single Compute Unit from GCN

Since each Compute Unit within GCN’s structure has 64 shader cores arranged in four batches of 16, the HD7950 has 1792 cores compared to the 2048 in the HD7970, and these are running at 800MHz by default (HD7970 has a base speed of 925MHz). What’s interesting, though, is that there’s no reference design from AMD – so at launch there are plenty of cards from the likes of Sapphire and HIS that are overclocked out of the box. Most seem to have settled on 900MHz as a good round figure to ship with.

The most important thing is that HD7950 retains all six of the dual channel memory controllers and the 32 ROPS of the HD7970. There’s nothing to slow the card down if you’re planning on running at ludicrously high multi-monitor settings or with tons of anti-aliasing on. Apparently there is a 1.5GB version in the works which will appear at a more sane price.

Personally, since I don’t really need the extraordinary rendering power of a top end card for my single screen set-up, what I really appreciate about GCN is its exceptional power throttling. In a recent round up of HD7970s, a system built around a Core i7 2600K idled at just 65W. The HD7950 also inherits this ability to totally shut down unused cores on the card.

HIS's HD7950 looks unexciting, but expect IceQ versions to follow.

Here’s what the review sites are saying:

Anandtech politely says that “the 7950 renders the GTX580 irrelevant”.

Bit-tech, however, urges caution and says that no HD6900 or GTX580 purchaser should “rue their purchase”. They’re disappointed with the high price points of both GCN launches and expect better value soon. They think NVIDIA’s Kepler chips will be arriving before long.

TechRadar celebrates the fact that HD7950 may ship with low clockspeeds, but “even if you’ve never overclocked a graphics card in your life you owe it to all the engineers who worked on the Tahiti GPU to push it north of the 1GHz mark”.

Over at Tom’s Hardware, there’s a complaint that the HD7950 is noisy, and that some features (like video encoding) are still flaky with the new drivers. Still, they concede “there’s really no contest” when it comes to a decision to buy this or GTX580.

All positive, all couched in somewhat surprising caveats. The question now is whether or not NVIDIA can get its next generation chip, codenamed Kepler, out before all enthusiasm for it wanes. Rumours are it might turn up next month. Wait and see…

The GPU in question, says IGN, is based on the Radeon HD6670, a graphics processor that would only have been considered cutting edge in PC terms five or six years ago – around the time of the Xbox 360′s launch.

That might seem somewhat underwhelming if you’ve just tricked out a new PC with a GeForce GTX580 or Radeon HD7970. If true, however, it would mean the Xbox 720 has somewhere between six and ten times the pixel processing potential of the current console depending on how you measure. Which is a fair performance leap, all things considered.

What’s more, a relatively low power and mature processor should be fairly simple to cool without resorting to the kind of turbines that the original Xbox 360 had on board. IGN is reporting that the chip is fully capable of 1080p gaming – which should be a given – and stereoscopic rendering. Intriguingly, there’s also mention of multidisplay output. It’s also expected that the new chip will be about 20% more capable than that of the Nintendo Wii U.

All the same, it’d be hard to measure the disappointment on a hardened PC gamer’s face were you gifted a HD6670 as an upgrade you’d been forced to wait nearly eight years for.

What does it mean for PC gaming if these rumours are true? There are obvious concerns in that the gap between the relative power of a new PC compared to a new console in 2013 will be the largest ever. Given the way games engines haven’t made huge strides forward in terms of complexity over recent years, and cross platform development has been held up to blame, the suspicion would immediately be that a relatively weak console refresh will further hold the PC back.

But that’s worse news for graphics manufacturers looking to sell £500 chips than it is for us. AMD’s forthcoming Trinity APU – a processor which combines Bulldozer CPU cores with Radeon graphics on one die – is said to be 50% more powerful in terms of graphics compared to current fusion processors. As chance would have it, that would make it almost equal equal – in terms of GFLOPS at least – to the HD6670.

In other words, by the time Xbox 720 rolls around you should be able to play games at an equivalent or better quality on the cheapest laptops available.

If developers can essentially target anyone who owns a laptop with games that are more sophisticated – looks wise – than consoles, it makes the PC a far more attractive platform for big budget mainstream releases than it arguably is now. And without the lure of fancy new graphics to entice people to upgrade their current consoles, you’d better hope the selling point is something more impressive than 3D – because that’s not really working out for movie makers, is it?

Obviously there are other factors to consider, like how piracy rates affect lead platform decisions and lucrative exclusivity deals. But there’s also the fact that the next gen consoles are going to face bottom up pressure from tablets with display sharing capabilities and streaming games services built into things like Google TV too. By not aiming high in terms of graphics and pushing for things like 4K compatibility, they could be in danger of underlining their own irrelevance.

Potentially, then, the next generation of consoles won’t hold PCs back as they do now. Rather, they could be hastening their own demise.

Thanks to iOS, though, desktop customisation is going out of fashion fast and it’s not surprising that Metro introduces more limits. Even Linux is becoming more proscriptive by the day. Still, there’s hope yet. I don’t think I’m not alone as being able to say that early Windows’ backgrounds enhanced my vocabulary, as simple as they were. I’m not sure I knew what ‘teal’ was until offered it as a choice of shade, and if I remember rightly I could spot a houndstooth background pattern long before I understood its sartorial significance. I certainly owe ‘cyan’ to the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

Perhaps Microsoft could liven up the options with language? Maybe a simple niveous, or a subtle leuchroic backdrop would help Metro icons stand out. If the default smaragdine doesn’t appeal, perhaps you’d prefer a sorrel or porraceous alternative?

For those curious to find out more about Metro, the full Windows 8 beta is planned to arrive at the end of next month. It’s worth holding off until then to make up your mind.

Inspired by Alienware’s launch of its lounge friendly X51 console sized PC and a feature I’m writing for the mag, this week’s post is about a second system I’m going to try and keep up to date: The PC Gamer Media Centre-cum-Occassional-Games-Rig-With-Console-Beating-Games-Ability. Or, as I like to call it, Son of Rig.

I find putting together a spec for a living room machine much more challenging than building a static desktop PC. For a start, it has to be small enough and quiet enough to be unobtrusive by the TV. And it also has to be very cheap, and yet capable of gaming at 1080p resolutions.

Why bother when consoles are so cheap? Well, for a start your games will look better than on a console: most Xbox and PlayStation games are actually running at an upscaled 720p resolution, and I’m tired of watching Assassin’s Creed’s vast cityscapes get ruined by the Xbox’s blocky mess. With a PC you can game natively at 1080p on a HDTV.

Then there’s the hidden costs of running a console – subscribing to an online service to access other, free, online services really bugs me.

The much vaunted apps of the Xbox 360′s new dash were the final straw for me – there’s an on demand video service in the UK called Blinkbox (owned by Tesco) which isn’t brilliant, but has the appealing selling point of being a service you only pay for what you watch, there’s no monthly sub on top. Until you try and use it on Xbox, where you need to pay for Xbox Live to use it.

Plus, Xbox is still noisy for watching videos on, and no console has the kind of codec support built in for smooth streaming around the home.

Straight off, I’ve ruled out any of the nifty little Atom-based net-tops that are kicking around, like Sapphire’s Wii-sized Edge-HD, because not only are they not quite powerful enough, they can also be quite noisy and don’t have essential features like audio line out or SPDIF.

The mission I’ve set myself is to build a system as cheaply as possible. It’s strictly a second PC as far as games are concerned, so there’s no point spending loads on fully featured CPUs and GPUs. That makes the choice between AMD’s Fusion processors and an Intel Core i3.

As far as the AMD chips are concerned, I like these new hybrid chips a lot. You can just about game at 720p without any other hardware, and a cheap AMD GPUs can bolster them in Crossfire mode for up to double performance. The problem is that ‘Asymmetrical Crossfire’ is unreliable at the moment, only works with DX10 and thanks to the peculiarities of the platform, can be slower than simply using one card.

Intel’s Core i3s are better overal gaming processors, and while the quad core Llanos are better at media encoding on the CPU, Intel’s QuickSync video system makes up the difference.

In the end, I opted for Fusion. I’m not 100% behind the decision, though, and there’s a lot of customisation you could do to the base spec here to make a much better system if you want. You could save money or spend on better components by opting for a micro-ATX chassis rather than the pricey mini-ITX one here (my personal media box is in a lovely Lian Li PCV-300 chassis which has sadly been discontinued) – but I’ve opted to go for the most discrete size and sacrifice elsewhere. For example, a larger case with a bigger PSU would allow you to go for a Core i3 and a discrete GTX 550Ti. It’ll cost cost about £50-£70 more, but give you better and more consistent framerates.

Is Son of the Rig better than the X51? Without one here to benchmark against I can’t actually say for sure – certainly not when compared to the two more expensive models, but I’m fairly sure it’ll give the basic £699/$699 one a run for its money. I’m also confident that you could spend about £30 more on the GPU and comfortably beat the X51.

I haven’t had time to benchmark this rig properly at 1080p either, thanks to a technical problem in the office. But here’s the bare minimum you’ll be able to get at 720p, medium settings.

• Assassin’s Creed Revelations: 47.37 FPS
• Shogun 2: 53.43 FPS
• Skyrim: 60+ FPS

I’ll update these as I get more time.

What’s in Son of the Rig?

CPU

AMD A8-3670K
£89/$128.11
As far as quiet, budget gaming goes this is pretty unbeatable. Comes with an unlocked core, so the first thing to do is accelerate it to 3GHz for the CPU and 600MHz for the graphics, adding £20 to its value.

Motherboard

Zotac A75-ITX WiFi
£107.54/$133
Tiny, but can take an extra graphics card and has optical sound out and support for unlocked processors.

RAM

4GB Corsair Vengeance Low Profile
£23.99/$31.98
You’re not going to need much, and this has the advantage of sneaking comfortably under the heatsink.

3D Card

Sapphire Radeon HD6670
£59.80/$79.99
Adding a cheap card for CrossfireX gives the Fusion processor enough of a kick to get games running. It’s not foolproof though: DX9 games get no benefit from CFX at all. You can spend more on a HD6670 with GDDR5, I’m not convinced it will make enough of a difference. A fully silent one, on the other hand, would be worth paying more for.

Case

Silverstone Sugo SG06B
£88.32/$108.99
A tiny and gorgeous little miniITX case that’ll look good by the TV. Plus it has a built in PSU that’ll cover what we need. Just.

Heatsink

Shagon Auras ARC-118
£20/$25

Hard drive

Seagate Barracuda 1TB
£86.40/$150
it pushes the price up a bit, but we’ll match the 1TB drive in the X51. Seagate’s hybrid Momentous XT would also be a good choice if you don’t mind sacrificing a bit of space.

DVD drive

Samsung SN-208BB
£15.48/$22.12
You’ll need a slimline DVD burner for the Sugo case. It’s worth considering a Blu-ray drive for movies too.

Software

Windows 7 Home Professional
£71.20/$102.28
Of course, if it was a real media centre we’d run Linux. And there’s some good Unigine based games over there now.

Total

£566.73/$682.83

In sterling, you can save quite a bit over the X51, then. In dollars, not so much – looks like the Alienware machine is pretty good value after all.

The new warranty is good for three years and covers a one time replacement of a processor damaged by overclocking. It goes by the name of Performance Tuning Plan, and costs between $20 and $35 depending on which chip you own.

The offer is being described as in pilot at the moment, available for an initial six month period. Despite the dollar pricing it is available to international customers (except for those living in trade embargoed countries). You can take out Performance Tuning Plan cover on any K or X series chip that’s under one year old, and the pricing is pretty reasonable if you need to replace a $1000 chip.

• Intel Core i5-2500K – $20.00
• Intel Core i7-2600K – $25.00
• Intel Core i7-2700K – $25.00
• Intel Core i7-3930K – $35.00
• Intel Core i7-3960X – $35.00

As a safety net for those of you who’ve heard that it’s easy to get a Core i5 2500K up to 4.5GHz on a $20 air cooler but never had the guts to try, there’s a lot of merit in this new insurance. Even if overclocking does seem to be proscribed in the terms and conditions:

“[Does not cover] Damage to the Eligible Processor due to external causes, including accident, problems with electrical power, abnormal electrical, mechanical or environmental conditions, usage not in accordance with product instructions, misuse, neglect, alteration, repair, improper installation, or improper testing”

The only thing is whether or not it’s worth it. In the best part of two decades, I don’t recall ever burning out a CPU from overclocking – although I’ve lost plenty to burnt pins, broken contacts and other physical misfortunes. With today’s CPUs pretty aware of when they get too hot and throttling back intelligently, I’m not sure many other than extreme overclockers who create extreme temperature fluctuations faster than the chip can keep up are likely to ever need to make a claim. In my experience it’s far easier to burn out mohterboard components than it is the chip itself.

Still, if you want to spend a few dollars for piece of mind, l certainly would’t blame you. Full details are here.

Seems you are not alone in your antipathy towards the dull silence of the modern microcomputer. According to a report on New Scientist, Intel has just filed a patent for WiFi routers and dongles that can literally talk to each other.

It’s not quite a return to the days when establishing an internet connection meant putting up with a couple of minutes of noise like nails on a blackboard – although it could be if you want. The patent covers a plan for fitting WiFi devices with a speaker and microphone, so that instead of typing in a passcode when you want to establish a connection for the first time a new laptop would be able to shout out its presence for the router to hear and verify.

The idea is that this could prove to be a simpler and more secure way of logging devices onto the network, especially as more everyday appliances become internet aware. Potentially, given the right interface for authorising a new device at the router side, it neatly sidesteps a lot of the potential problems of what happens when your Gran buys a new smart TV or internet enabled washing machine, for example. No trying to enter a passcode with a remote control for her, just turn it on and hear it sing.

Why bother with all this , you might ask, since the proximity of the two devices means they can talk over WiFi anyway? The reasoning seems to be that this is a more secure second factor key. A drive by hacker trying to get onto your network would need to be able to listen to and reproduce the audio tone as well as any encrypted key sent as raw data. And that’s not going to be easy unless you leave a window open.

Presumably, the success of the system hinges on the ability to customise a tone to your personal network. I hope to be able to use a wav file of Tibetan chants myself.

The biggest problem I can see, though, would be that the new device would have to be within earshot of the router – something that’s not necessarily true if your net connection comes into a spare bedroom/home office, for example.

The X51 certainly looks the part. Its all corners and curves with a slot loading DVD drive and Alienware’s trademark customisably LED lighting. Prices start at £699 (no US price has been confirmed yet) though, so what’s inside, and is it powerful enough to take on its bigger brethren?

Small is clearly the new backlit alien head for the company, which brought out an 11inch laptop last year as an alternative to its usual unportable portables. With a rather slicker and (relatively) unassuming design, the X51 looks like it wants a home near a TV or a neat desk space.

There’s three different specs currently available – £699, £849 and £949 – with a choice of Core i3, i5 or i7 processor accordingly. Each has a terabyte hard drive, no SSD and 4GB or 8GB or RAM. You get an Alienware keyboard as part of the bundle, but no monitor or mouse.

So long as it runs quietly – which we’ll have to wait to test it to see – it’s a promising little box for a cramped desktop or to sit beside the TV.

The problem as far as I can see is that the X51 comes with either NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 545 graphics in the cheaper model, or GTX 555 in the top end specs. The GPU is mounted in parallel with the motherboard. All components can be upgraded too. The GTX 555 is an OEM only card featuring 288 CUDA cores and a clockspeed of 776MHz. It’s not a terrible card, and should be fine for single monitor gaming at medium settings, but it is the weakest part of the set up. The 545 has just 144 cores and is clocked at 870MHz, so is less powerful still.

To be fair to Alienware, it’s a lot better than the Radeon HD 6630M found in a similarly priced Mac Mini,

As luck would have it, I’m in the middle of putting together a similar type of system for a feature next issue. There is a price premium attached to smaller motherboards and specialist power supplies still, but I reckon you could build a slightly more powerful similar system (including operating system) for about £150 less. I’ll be pitting the two against each other as soon as I get hold of the X51.

Especially if it’s something as important as the screen.

LG’s IPS236V, the erstwhile panel of choice for our average gamer’s system, wasn’t to everyone’s taste. A slightly flaky stand was only the start of its woes. The 23inch diagonal isn’t huge by today’s standards, when a massive 27inch screen will cost just a few pounds more.

What I do stand by, however, is the choice of an eIPS panel rather than a TN one.

The advantage of an IPS-type screen is that it produces better colours and viewing angles than even the best TN and MVA panels currently available. Before you point out that the cheaper eIPS screens use 6-bit colours and Advanced Framerate Control – AFRC – dithering to fool the eye into seeing more colours than they can actually produce, they’re still better for colour accuracy in my experience.

The disadvantage is that TN panels can change state substantially faster. You’ll see these listed as having 2ms grey to grey response times, while eIPS screens are more likely to be rated 6, 8 or even 12ms.

The controversial bit is how much difference those refresh rates actually make. Some people will argue that a 5ms or 8ms panel is unsuitable for gaming because of ghosting. They will join the fray in the comments below. As the owner of three IPS screens, I’d rather take the higher image quality over the chance of ghosting in high speed games. Especially when most new shooters turn on some form of motion blur to muddy the action in intense scenes anyway.

But I’m prepared to accept a certain amount of subjectivity here. Years of straining at brightly lit word documents and too many long raids may well have destroyed my ability to differentiate. Feel free to disagree with the choice of screen, and to recommend any others you feel strongly about.

As for the rest of the Rig, it remains unchanged. Although as prices have started to creep up on most components, next week I’m going to look at the relative value of graphics cards, and considering how much you’d really suffer by going for a Radeon HD6870 rather than the GeForce GTX 560Ti. After all, the Rig is supposed to be about good value gaming, isn’t it?

What’s in the Rig?

CPU

Intel Core i5 2500K

£167.99/$229.99
Disturbingly going up in price. Have a look at the non-K versions if you don’t plan on overclocking.

Motherboard

Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

£79.99/$109.99
Good value for a Z68 board, and fully featured for everything bar dual graphics.

RAM

Crucial Ballistix

£39.59/$51.99
Eight gigabytes of fast 1600MHz DDR3.

3D Card

GeForce GTX 560Ti

£173.72/$249.51
A good card still, but all the real bargain versions appear to have sold out. Breaking the £170 price barrier makes me uneasy using it as a choice for the Rig.

Hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB

£53.50/$99.99
Still expensive, but the good news is that prices for hard drives look to have peaked.

DVD drive

LG GH22NP21

£13.64/17.99
It’s a DVD writer. The most commoditised of all component commodities. It really doesn’t matter which you get.

Case

Corsair Carbide 500R

£85.19/$99.99
Not the cheapest case (especially in the UK) but worth spending a bit more on.

Power supply

OCZ ZS Series 650W

£64.99/$71.19
Plenty of power for what you’ll need.

Mouse

Logitech G400

£24.70/$37.49
Classic Logitech design with a modern 3600dpi sensor.

Keyboard

Microsoft SideWinder X4
£32.36/$37.43
The price is rising. I suspect this keyboard may not be long for this world.

Monitor

Iiyama Prolite X2377HDS/AOC i2353Ph
£149.99/$179.99
They’re not my favourite eIPS screens – I prefer a professional quality pivoting stand – but they are top value.

Headset

Corsair HS1A
£33.98/$47.99
Still inexplicably good value for a very good set of cans.

Total: £919.64/£1233.54

That’s £9.02 more/£70.20 less than last week.

All of the keyboards that have come through lately have had one thing in common – Cherry’s MX switches, which have a light action and that familiar clackety clack sound that evokes an old fashioned typewriter. They come in different flavours – my favourite are the smooth action Cherry MX Reds of the K60 and MK-85 – but they all make standard plastic dome keyboards feel like typing in treacle. If only there was a relatively good value ergonomic keyboard that uses them – I’d struggle to write without the layout of my Microsoft 7000 typist’s friend these days.

The question I find myself asking is this: how much longer would a mechanical keyboard really last me? Is it, at two to three times the cost, a sensible economic investment? The answer is a most definite yes: most keyboards have keys that are rated for about a million or two activations before failure. Cherry’s MX switches are supposed to last for 50 million operations before they wear out.

What does that mean, though? How many words is 50 million characters? In the interest of a lazy Friday afternoon, here’s a few things you can do with a single key of a mechanical keyboard before it breaks (assuming it makes it through to the maximum lifespan).

Things you can do…

• Play StarCraft 2 for 1,388 hours at 600APM
• Type for 772 hours the world record speed of 216 words per minute
• Make 290 copies of the entire script of Hamlet. Enough to give every cast member a copy for 15 different productions of the play
• Write out all 3 books of The Lord of the Rings 105 times each
• Produce 17 copies of the King James Bible, first produced 400 years ago and containing
• 3.1 million characters
• Coincidentally, you could also duplicate Tolstoy’s War and Peace by hand 17 times. It’s more or less the same length
• Get halfway through the first volume of Samuel Johnson’s 1785 edition of A Dictionary of the English Language (10 million characters total)
• Write 1/6 of the Encyclopedia Britannica
• Back up 0.003% of Wikipedia (13,900 million characters at the last count in 2009. It’s grown by more than a thousand articles a day since then mind)

(References are here, here, here and here).

Remember Razer teased us with its Project Fiona hardware last week? After literally days of waiting it’s drawn back the curtain to reveal that Fiona is… a tablet.

Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you? Or did you…?

Even if you did second guess Razer’s plan, Fiona’s still got enough about her to pique our interest. First up is the Core i7 processor. I suspect this is more likely to be the dual core Core i7 that features in ultrabooks than a fully fledged desktop quad, but even so it enough of a processor to make NVIDIA’s ARM-based Tegra 3 look like a bit of a weakling.

The problem with Fiona is that the Core i7 appears to be all she has to offer – there’s no separate graphics referenced in the proposed specs, which means that even though she can play PC games, she’s not going to be up to a reasonably priced laptop’s standard.

The quirkiness continues, however, with the controller. Rather than sticking a fold out keyboard underneath her rear – Fiona isn’t that sort of girl – there’s an integrated gamepad in the shape of two large handles sticking out from either side. On top of that, there’s a built in gyro and accelerometer for motion based controls.

The screen is a 1280×800, 10.1inch multitouch display.

Presumably, given that the proposed release date is Q4 2012, Fiona will pack Windows 8 as an operating system – so general tablet performance should be OK. Razer has spoken of customisations specific to a gaming interface too.

Quite how she’ll match up in terms of battery life is less clear.

The price is mooted to be ‘below $1000′, but I wouldn’t get too worked up about that yet. Fiona’s still at the concept stage, and we’ve yet to see anything like production hardware for Razer’s other recent innovations, the Blade laptop and the Switchblade netbook.

Except, perhaps, one thing. Kinect for Windows has been confirmed for an official launch on February 1st. It brings the firm’s console flavoured motion and voice controller to the desktop proper, with a few tweaks to the original design to make it more desktop suited.

The main change to Kinect is the inclusion of a ‘near mode’, which allows it to focus on gestures as close as 50cm away – about the distance you sit from your screen when reading a certain games-related news site. The original array was a little long sighted when it came to recognising movements, designed as it was for use in the living room. Quite how precise Kinect will be at the range we haven’t had chance to try out yet, but it needs to be pretty sensitive if it’s going to make us put down the mouse.

Other changes include a shorter USB cable, but sadly not a smaller physical unit. That could be a problem – with Kinect the size that it is, there’s not many desktops that will be able to make room for it.

The change no-one’s going to like is the fact that Kinect for Windows is considerably more expensive than Kinect for Xbox – at $249 it’s a bit of an indulgence, especially when there’s not really much in the way of software to support it yet.

Microsoft argues that the console controller is, to some extent, subsidised by the games people buy off the back of owning it. That may be true, but with its enormous cash reserves waiting to win it back some favour, I think the company is missing a trick here: it’s been widely rumoured that Apple will be releasing some sort of motion sensing software and cameras for a TV system later in the year that will probably make its way into MacBooks and iMacs too. Microsoft, on the other hand, has struggled to come up with many technology wins other than Kinect lately, and there’s a lot of emphasis been placed on how well the system integrates with Windows 8 and embedded Windows set-ups. If it works, it could be spectacular with the Metro interface, but at $250 who’s going to know it? A cheap and tiny Kinect which could be included with new systems almost by default would have won it a lot of much needed kudos I think.

And if you think Microsoft doesn’t need the kudos a cheap Kinect could win it, just look at Windows Phone 7. By all accounts a brilliant operating system, but utterly ignored by a public who just don’t think of Microsoft as exciting and innovative.

Right now, there’s not a huge focus on gaming for Kinect on the desktop – and with the price of Kinect starting off very high I’d be surprised if many developers spent a lot of time optimising for it just yet too.

I’ve written reams about what Kinect integration into Windows 8 might mean for Microsoft. Having just finished a round up of touchscreen PCs for another magazine, I don’t think touch is ever going to work on the desktop, but motion might – and by pricing Kinect for Windows out of most people’s range Microsoft may be in danger of letting someone else slip in and prove that a concept it has spent a long time developing and leading the way with can and does work if it’s presented properly.

Tablet 2.0? I hope not. In the meantime, here’s Kinect + LEGO.

What then, American readers, can you expect? A fair few pieces of Roccat kit have passed through PC Gamer’s seaside lab in the UK over the last couple of years, and generally scored well.

The company first came to our attention with its Smart Desktop Management System (SDMS), which is basically a way of saying peripherals should be as small as possible and includes things like the Apuri mouse bungee, which holds cables up out of the way.

While SDMS was more than a bit gimmicky, fortunately the company now concentrates more on marketing new products as standalone pieces rather than re-imagining the desktop paradigm using Battlestar-style wedged corners. The kit we’ve seen has been solidly built if a little hard to get excited about. The mice are comfortable, good performers, but expensive. I do like the tiny £45 Arvo keyboard, although again it’s up against some strong competition at the price.

Getting into the US is a good thing for the company. What I’d really like to see is for them to release a mechanical keyboard as a sign that they’re a mature gaming brand.

The first products into the US will apparently be the Kone[+] 6000dpi mouse ($79.99), the Isku keyboard ($89.99) and the Kave headset ($119.99)

Even so, and with big news like Intel’s Ivy Bridge and more affordable Southern Islands graphics cards on the horizon, now’s as good a time as any to start upgrading your system.

The first look at the PC Gamer Rig for the year doesn’t see any significant improvements in terms of processing power or component selection. But I have swapped its case again as a result of a group test recently written for the mag. The new Corsair Carbide 500R is a bit more expensive than the Cooler Master Plus 912HAF that it wore at the end of 2011, but it’s an exceptional case for the price, with tons of room inside and some excellent features. Plus, it looks good and runs quietly.

If you’re after a bargain, though, you might think about getting your hands on one of AMD’s Bulldozer chips. Just before Christmas the company announced a cashback scheme of up to £20 for potential purchasers. Not sure that’s enough to convince me to adopt one just yet, but I’ll be looking carefully at the maths involved next week.

What’s in the Rig?

CPU

Intel Core i5 2500K

£165.22/$219.99
The only reason to spend more is for Hyperthreading. Which you don’t need.

Motherboard

Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

£79.99/$109.99
Brilliant value for a Z68 board, and fully featured too.

RAM

Crucial Ballistix

£38.39/$49.99
Eight gigabytes of fast 1600MHz DDR3.

3D Card

GeForce GTX 560Ti

£167.94/$229.99
Two recent launches haven’t changed our opinion that this is the best value graphics card there is.

Hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB

£53.50/$99.99
Still expensive, but the good news is that prices for hard drives look to have peaked.

DVD drive

LG GH22NP21

£13.64/$15.99
It’s a DVD writer. The most commoditised of all component commodities. It really doesn’t matter which you get.

Case

Corsair Carbide 500R

£81.84/$99.99
Worth spending a bit extra on this case, imo.

Power supply

XFX Pro Core 650W

£69.98/$101.89
Looks like a time limited offer for a pretty pokey PSU.

Mouse

Logitech G400

£23.70/$31.99
Almost suspiciously cheap – this mouse goes up in my estimation as it goes down in price every week.

Keyboard

Microsoft SideWinder X4
£30.46/$45.00
The price is rising. I suspect this keyboard may not be long for this world.

Monitor

LG IPS236V
£153.98/$249.99
A lovely eIPS screen with excellent colours and viewing angles.

Headset

Corsair HS1A
£31.98/$48.94
Still inexplicably good value for a very good set of cans.

Total: £910.62/$1303.74

Which is £69.97/$25.73 more expensive than before Christmas.

Although the 380 wasn’t available, I did get my grubby little mitts on the 780. It’s covered in a tastefully black paint scheme with minor burgundy highlights, and it’s got a six and a half foot cable for power and audio. While you can plug the USB cord in and get your ears filled with machinegun fire and Metalocalypse music immediately, you’ll have to install the drivers (using the included CD or through Plantronic’s website) to get the authentic 7.1, THX-rated Dolby surround sound.

The 380s lack 7.1, but come in at 30 bucks cheaper.

Delivering the 7.1 virtual audio are a pair of 40mm speaker drivers, each with a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz. Since the headset doesn’t use a complex, multi-driver setup, the entire unit is light and comfy on top of your noggin, due to the lack of weight extra speakers would normally carry. Volume is controlled through a plastic rocker dial on the bottom of the left earcup (just below where the microphone squelch rests). The mic itself is of the bendy, rubberized variety, and pokes out to about the length of two index fingers. The earpads are covered in a soft, cloth cushioning, as is the headband padding.

For the accident-prone, Plantronics also includes a one-year limited warranty. As to what’s specifically covered under that warranty, well—pretty much everything. “If your headset ever breaks in a way you think it shouldn’t have,” says Product Manager Lars Ahntholz, “just give our tech department a call and we’ll see what we can do.” Ahntholz maintains that if Plantronics boasts that their headsets have “Superhero-strength cords and joints,” the user deserves confidence that if they accidentally run over the USB connector with a chair and break it, they’ll be covered.

Behold the GameCom 780. Mmmm...metal hinges.

The international release is still to be determined for both headsets, however. Ahntholz did hint that the rest of the world should see them both about a month after initial launch in the states. Keep your eyes lasered to PC Gamer for an upcoming review!

In case you were wondering, pricing and availability details haven’t yet been confirmed.

Expect a lot more of this sort of stuff next week, as CES kicks off in Las Vegas on Tuesday. This is CTA getting a pre-emptive strike in with its press release – there’ll be plenty of quality news to talk about once the show kicks off.

It’s not simple, delightful, or even magical, but it is called Fiona, and Razer say that it will bring an “all new form factor” to PC gaming. The mystery product will be revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012, which starts next Tuesday.

There’s speculation that Project Fiona could be Razer Switchblade thingy, which was shown as a concept design at CES 2011. The keys on the Switchblade are supposed to act as windows to a second screen beneath, allowing the layout to change depending on the game you’re playing. It also has a touch screen interface, and is teeny. Let this very serious man tell you all about it.

Then again, Razer could be announcing something else entirely, like a cloud of strawberry flavoured interactive nano-gas that allows gamers to hallucinate game environments at impressive resolutions. It’s unlikely, though, as that’d class as both “magical” and “delightful.” We’ll just have to wait and see.

After a brief haitus which began after the introduction of DDR3 – in the UK at least, it looks like the older style Tracer modules have continued to be available in the US – Crucial is relaunching its Orac-inspired RAM, and about time too.

This may be old news for some, but I’m just clearing through a load of Christmas period emails and stumbled across a message from UK retail site Overclockers which has bagged an exclusive on the new Tracer sticks. On sale now, an 8GB kit of Ballistix Tactical Tracer (as it has been newly branded) will cost you just under £65 – a reasonable price considering it’s specced to run at 1600MHz with tight 8-8-8-24 timings.

You’ll need to manually set it to the optimal speed as the SPD is set for 1333MHz, or use the built in XMP profile with an Intel motherboard, but even at the default setting it’s only around £10 more expensive than competitive kits.

Besides the decent performance, there’s also extra lights. The sticks are available with Blue/Orange or Red/Green lines of LEDs on the top, and an extra row of ‘ground effect’ bulbs on the bottom. Using Crucial’s MOD software utility you can also alter the blinking pattern, colour and brightness from within Windows. There’s also a temperature sensor under the heat spreader which will report to MOD.

The Tactical Tracer modules were originally shown off back at the Intel Developer Forum back in the autumn, and will apparently be going on sale elsewhere soon.

If you have a windowed case, it’s almost a must buy.

Launched as the AMD FX brand a month or so ago, Bulldozer performance was behind what most pundits were hoping for. Apparently, some of that is due to Windows not supporting new features that Bulldozer introduced. And now there’s a patch that should help.

According to the patch release notes, the Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) scheduling feature of Bulldozer isn’t compatible with Windows threading logic. Which may have been hampering AMD’s comparative performance in multithreaded tasks.

Bulldozer differs significantly from previous CPU designs in that it shares more resources between processing pipelines than traditional chips. For example, each ‘core’ of a Bulldozer chip has two integer processing units, and a single floating point unit. Thanks to this, AMD counts each ‘Bulldozer module’ as two traditional cores, so a three module chip is marketed as six core, four as eight and so on. Clearly things are a bit more complex than that both in terms of software as well as the hardware design.

In order to get hold of the patch, you’ll have to apply it manually from here – it won’t be appearing in Windows’ auto-update for the time being. It actually appeared on Friday evening (UK time) after the office shut up – so if anyone’s had chance to use it and discovered favourable results, please do let me know about it in the comments below. For various reasons, we’ve still not been able to get hold of a Bulldozer sample to review in the labs, so can’t honestly report on what difference this patch makes. I’m not sure that improved scheduling will help many game frates, but it might well help.

In the run up to Xmas 4.3 there’s a lot of bargains to be had. The best I’ve found isn’t going into the Rig, because it’s just a little too expensive for our purposes there. If you’re thinking of upgrading your graphics at the moment though, there’s an overclocked HIS Radeon HD6950 going for less than £200 over here. Well worth a look. For US readers, the price difference between an HD6950 and a GeForce GTX 560Ti is a lot smaller than it is in Europe, and I’d be tempted to say go with the slightly more powerful AMD card, like this one, every time.

What’s in the Rig?

CPU

Intel Core i5 2500K

£161.99/$219.99
An unlocked Sandy Bridge quad core, capable of all the top end features but hyperthreading.

Motherboard

Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

£76.99/$109.99
An awesome Z68 board, comes with mSATA connectors for mini SSDs and Intel’s caching technology.

RAM

Crucial Ballistic Sport/G.Skill Sniper

£45.59/$45.99
Eight gigabytes of fast 1600MHz DDR3.

3D Card

GeForce GTX 560Ti

£164.99/$229.99
Curiously, prices for the 560Ti have gone up in the US this week, but down in the UK. Is old stock being cleared out for something new…?

Hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB

£38.09/$99.99
Still expensive, but the good news is that prices for hard drives look to have peaked.

DVD drive

LG GH22NP21

£13.64/$18.69
Fast DVD writers are pretty much generic these days, and there’s no real argument for spending any more.

Case

Cooler Master HAF 912

£49.98/$60.74
A new look for the Rig this week, and an exceptionally good value one at that.

Power supply

XFX Pro Core 650W

£74.99/$101.89
Looks like a time limited offer for a pretty pokey PSU.

Mouse

Logitech G400

£24.71/$34.99
Classic Logitech style in a brand new mouse, this 3600dpi mouse is comfortable and precise.

Keyboard

Microsoft SideWinder X4
£9.97/$48.24
This is currently less than £10. Buy one for each hand.

Monitor

LG IPS236V
£145.60/$249
A lovely eIPS screen with excellent colours and viewing angles.

Headset

Corsair HS1A
£29.58/$41.99
Still inexplicably good value for a very good set of cans.

Total: £836.12/$1261.49

Sadly £38.16/$26.53 more expensive than Black Friday.

According to some industry insiders, however, water cooling is undergoing something of a renaissance. Baroque designs and piping are back in fashion, so they say, and demand for water cooling has never been higher.

Actual figures are hard to come by, mind. Gartner and other analysts don’t really track the types of cooler PC owners are custom fitting to their machines, and any evidence one way or the other is entirely anecdotal. What’s almost certain, though, is that reports of the demise of the water cooler have been greatly exaggerated.

I was first alerted to the possibility that watercooling was back by the launch of a new shop specifically designed for watercooling by Overclockers.co.uk. The site has been typical of most over recent years, gradually reducing its stock of liquid chilled heatsinks to a handful of all in one sealed units like the Antec Kuhler range which, while very effective, aren’t really as exciting or personalised as plumbing your own pipes. Last week, however, Overclockers announced its new Tech Lab, headed up by Richard O’Neill. He says the new shop is entirely a response to consumer demand.

“The way I see it is that customers speak with their money,” O’Neill says, “The activity in our watercooling section of our forums and the week on week development of watercooling is staggering, especially as it is such a niche group.”

Quite how much money speaks that loudly O’Neil didn’t mention, but he says it’s enough to make the new site worthwhile.

“I would totally agree that watercooling is making a comeback,” he says, “Many users see watercooling as an investment because their loop will last many builds with maybe only a compatibility bracket being required for a new socket.”

Looking around at popular modding forums, it does seem that O’Neil might be right. There’s a healthier number of posts at specialist sites like Bit-tech on the subject of modding than I’ve seen for years.

O’Neill, of course, has a new shop to promote, so I asked around other retailers to see what they said. Paul Lockey, from liquid cooling specialists XSPC says that he’s also seen a significant increase in sales throughout 2011.

“We’ve had over 800,000 views on some of our forum threads,” Lockey says, “That would have been unheard of two or three years ago.”

Over at QuietPC.com, another retailer which has slowly replaced most bespoke water cooling kits with off the shelf sealed units, Glenn Garrett says that there’s still a lot of interest around the stock it has kept on the shelves.

“[The Zalman Reserator] must be one of our longest standing products in its current form [unchanged since 2006]”, says Garrett, “Sales continue to be surprisingly strong.”

If water cooling – and case modding in general – is making a comeback, I’ll be very happy indeed. Without mentioning the iPad (oops), there’s a dreadful tendency to conformity and celebration of the bland within computing at the moment, which should be resisted at all costs. And since we don’t need to upgrade as often as we used to, it makes absolute sense to me to spend more time fine tuning the case and performance into something unique.

There’s an ongoing thread over on the PC Gamer forums for showing off your modded cases and watercooling set-ups. There’s some excellent designs in there already (including Luciel’s awesome horned beastie). I’m going to be keeping an eye on that thread over the next few weeks for signs of increased activity, and if we can get enough good looking PCs up there look at making it a regular feature for the mag and blog.

Show me what you’ve got.

Note – the images at the top of this post and above comes from the mighty Desk Art mod, one of my favourite designs currently doing the rounds. Beat that if you can.

According to Google, Rebecca Black (who she?) took the top spot for search term popularity, ahead of Jackass star Ryan Dunn (who died in a car accident in June) and Steve Jobs. Battlefield 3 came in at number five, just ahead of the iPhone 5.

Zeitgeist’s ranking system is based on ‘fastest growing search terms’, however, rather than overall popularity, so it’s hard to know exactly what to read in to them other than as a curious way of remembering the last year. It does throw up some curiousities, though. British news sites are all a flutter today with the information that we have an insatiable desire to know what exactly goes into scampi (for US and other overseas readers, you’re probably better off in ignorance).

My favourite from the ‘What is…’ lists goes to South Africa, though, where the nation revealed itself as true philosophers. Apparenly, ‘What is life’ was the third most popular of such terms there, just after ‘What is love’. The answer to the latter is, of course, an excellent indie game.

Google has published a chart of videogame search terms for the US, where Battlefield 3 came in a mere seventh place, behind Skyrim, Black Ops and Halo Reach.

The Tempest 210 isn’t all that large, measuring in at 19.3 inches deep, 17.9 inches tall, and 7.7 inches wide. It does manage to squeeze in a decent amount of stuff for its size, though, including two fans (a 14cm top exhaust fan and 12cm rear exhaust fan) with support for five more. There are seven PCI expansion slots, and although it comes with just three optical drive bays, it does include eight toolless hard drive bays and an SSD mount at the bottom of the case.

Three cable-routing cutouts keep the wiring neatly organized behind the motherboard, and the case accommodates extra-long graphics cards, though at the expense of some hard drive mounts. Building into the Tempest isn’t too tricky, although the cutout for the 8-pin CPU power cable is barely usable. The Tempest is still definitely a budget case. Its front panel connectors include just one USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 port, and the hard drive mounts are a little on the flimsy side. On the other hand, two fans are better than one, and given that, for budget standards, it has slightly roomier confines and better stock cooling-performance, it should definitely appeal to some.

Outlaw BitFenix
SCORE: 74

BitFenix’s Outlaw is a petite steel midtower case with a restrained, refined aesthetic. The BitFenix signature “SofTouch” coating is restricted to the front panel, while the rest of the case is painted matte black inside and out. So why is it it called the Outlaw? Probably because the motherboard mounts upside down. The Outlaw has four hard drive bays, four optical bays, and room for one SSD at the bottom of the chassis, and the hard drives and optical drives attach with thumbscrews. The case has seven PCI expansion slots. Though it has mounts for seven additional 120mm fans (two each on the top, front, and side panel and one on the bottom), the Outlaw only ships with one 12cm exhaust fan.

The odd motherboard placement works well for the Outlaw—long video cards easily clear the top of the hard drive compartment. Spare power cables fit behind the hard drive trays, so a clean-looking install is pretty easy. Though small (18.9 inches deep, 17.3 inches tall, 7 inches wide), the Outlaw is a good choice for a budget build. If USB 3.0 and multiple fans are must-haves, though, look elsewhere, cowboy—the four front-panel USB ports are 2.0 only.

Thor v12 Rosewill
SCORE: 88

Rosewill’s Thor v2 is aptly named. It’s big, it’s burly, it’s heavy, and it’s really roomy. OK, my metaphor just broke down, but the Thor is huge on the outside and even bigger on the inside, and packed with features that are standard on cases twice or thrice its price. How nice! The Thor can accommodate motherboards in Micro ATX, ATX, E-ATX, and XL-ATX form factors. Its motherboard tray has squillions of rubber-grommeted cable routing holes to make wiring your case a snap, and it also comes with three 23cm fans and one 14cm fan, with two variable-speed controllers that can control up to three fans each. Six hard drive trays and six optical drive trays mean the Thor can handle all your storage and optical drives, with room left for a water reservoir or two.

Building a system into the Thor is easy, and the stock fans keep your rig cool while running quietly. You can swap the top 23cm fan for a dual 120mm or 140mm radiator (if water-cooling’s your thing), or stick four 12cm fans on the side panel for massive intake. The top has cooling vents that can open and close, though I can’t imagine closing them unless you take out the top fan. The Thor’s build quality can’t quite match top-tier full towers like Corsair’s 800D or Silverstone’s TJ11, and its front-panel connectors can get in the way a bit, but it’s solid enough, easy to build into, and keeps your components cool quietly. For the gamer who has everything (and wants to put it all into the same build), the Thor v2 is a good case for surprisingly low price.



Carbide 400R Corsair
SCORE:83

Corsair is known for cases that are stylish, well built, and on the pricey side. The Carbide series is aimed at the budget-conscious—and $99 is cheap for a Corsair case. The Carbide 400R is a midtower, although at 20.5 inches deep by 19.2 inches tall by 8.1 inches wide, it’s slightly larger than the BitFenix or NZXT cases in this roundup, and it feels much larger inside. The 400R contains two 12cm front intake fans and a 12cm exhaust fan, with five additional 12cm/14cm fan mounts, and the top panel can accommodate a 240mm radiator. The front and bottom panels have removable dust filters.
The 400R’s four optical drive bays are toolless, and the six removable hard drive trays have toolless hard drive mounts, though screws are still required for SSDs.

The motherboard tray has four rubber-grommeted cutouts for cable routing, and in true Corsair tradition, hardware installations and cable routing are extremely easy, with plenty of room behind the right side panel for cabling. The case easily supports the longest graphics cards. The 400R’s front panel contains two USB 3.0 ports (with pass-through cable and USB 2.0 adapter), FireWire, and audio jacks, as well as a switch for the front fan’s white LEDs. At twice the price of the Tempest or Outlaw, the 400R might be too much for the extremely budget-conscious, but it has Corsair’s build quality and ease of use, though there are certainly $100 cases that offer more bang for the buck.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/13/hard-stuff-case-roundup/feed/ 9 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/13/is-it-the-end-for-ethernet/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/13/is-it-the-end-for-ethernet/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:29:36 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=66615 [..]]]> Our favourite networking alphanumeric is 802.11n, but only when it comes to web surfing and watching videos online. Dual band routers and multiple antennas are fine as far as they go, but you can still spot the house of a gamer by the ethernet cables that trail loosely up the stairs.

Are the days of wirefree gaming finally upon us? Chip manufacturer Broadcom reckons it is.

The company told analysts that it will have products based on an entirely new set of wireless standards some time late next year. Dubbed 802.11ac, the double vowel standard has yet to be ratified by the IEEE, but Broadcom is pushing ahead all the same. Given the compatibility difficulties between ‘draft’ and ‘full’ spec routers and receivers during the launch of 802.11n a few years ago, this may not be a good thing, but it does at least give us a taste of what is to come.

The new ‘ac’ spec is similar to Wireless N in that it uses multiple antennas and bonded streams to achieve faster speeds. With around 500Gbps per channel, it’s claimed to be capable of achieving 1Gbps speeds using a twin antenna array. Wikipedia cites an example nearly 7 gigabits using eight antennas.

802.11ac will be technically be backwards compatible with existing WiFi kit, but since it uses the 5GHz frequency range which is still fairly uncommon for Wireless N adaptors, that’s probably a moot point.

The really important thing is that it could mean hanging onto those sub-20ms pings even without wires – we’ll just have to wait and see. It took years for Wireless N to grow into its full potential, and even that turned out to be less than was promised.

(Via TechEye)

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/13/is-it-the-end-for-ethernet/feed/ 58 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/12/hard-stuff-maingear-vybe-super-stock-review/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/12/hard-stuff-maingear-vybe-super-stock-review/#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:54:00 +0000 PC Gamer http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=66597 [..]]]> The pitch line for the VYBE Super Stock is “Geared for gamers—priced for the masses.” But can you really get something that sports a reasonable price tag and can also meet the specialized needs of gamers?

The VYBE SS doesn’t feel like a budget box. In fact, the customized BitFenix Shinobi case has a nice quality to it and is fairly quiet. And looking inside the case, it’s obvious that Maingear didn’t skimp on CPU. Using Intel’s epically fast and cheap quad-core 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K, the VYBE SS makes no apologies to any other chip save Intel’s new Core i7-3960X, which is a hell of a lot pricier. Maingear takes advantage of a self-contained water-cooling system to overclock the 2600K by 1GHz to 4.4GHz. The Core i7 is mounted in a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3-iSSD motherboard, which features a mini 20GB Intel 311 SSD on it. This SSD is used to cache often-used files to immensely speed up access to the machine’s single 1TB 7,200rpm Hitachi hard drive. Other important specs include 8GB of Kingston DDR3/ 1600 RAM, a 24x DVD burner, and a fairly quiet Seasonic 660-watt PSU.



Who knew something's insides could look so cool.


The most important part of any gaming system is the graphics setup, and Maingear opts for two GeForce GTX 560 cards in SLI. Why not a single GeForce GTX 580 instead? The simple truth is that two GeForce GTX 560 cards often outgun a single GTX 580, and a single GTX 580 would be more expensive by about a hundred bucks too. The dual-card setup can hamstring you should you ever want to upgrade—you’ll have to jettison both older cards to do so—but for someone looking to pack in performance on a budget, the 560 cards makes immense sense.

In performance this baby doesn’t disappoint, and for kicks, I also fired up EA’s Battlefield 3 beta on the VYBE SS and found it pushing out around 50fps at 1920×1080 when set to high.
At $1,700, the Maingear VYBE SS does what it claims to do—gives gamers pretty damn good performance for a pretty damn good price. In other words, it’s all damn good.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/12/hard-stuff-maingear-vybe-super-stock-review/feed/ 27 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/09/set-up-a-your-own-steam-cloud-for-skyrim/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/09/set-up-a-your-own-steam-cloud-for-skyrim/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:07:24 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=66506 [..]]]> Steam Cloud is great. Spending a lunch hour playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, able to pick straight up at the point that you left off last night at home, is the way all games should be. Unfortunately, not all Steam published games make use of this feature. If you want to spend an hour tidying your bookshelves in Skyrim, for example, you’ll need to wait until you get back to your real home or faff around with memory sticks.

Unless you create your own private and near universal version of Steam Cloud, that is.

It’s a fairly straightforward thing to do, and almost identical to the way I showed you how to free up space on SSD drives using symbolic links, or symlinks. There are two ways to use symlinks to access data created on another machine: the first involves leaving your PC at home on, port forwarding your router and sharing the contents of your My Documents files over the net, possibly laid bare for all to see. The second involves using a simple and free online web storage service which syncs a folder on your hard drive with other PCs, like Dropbox, SugarSync or Skydrive.

We’ll be using the latter method. It’s much, much easier.

Start off on the PC that you’ve been playing Skyrim (or any other Cloud-less game in need of syncing). Install your Dropbox-alike service.



Now head over to the folder where save games are stored. In Skyrim’s case, by deafult it’s My Documents>My Games>Skyrim>Saves. Back this up by making a copy in the same folder – just in case this all goes wrong. I can’t stress how important this step is. I haven’t tested this with every game in the world, there’s a very good chance it might mess up our saves or fall foul of some obscure EULA that prohibits moving installation files around. I’ve not had any problems with it thus far, mind.

What’s more, Dropbox-alike services only have limited space, which you might easily fill up with some games.

With the Save folder safely backed up, copy the original to your desktop, so that you have two copies, just in case. Now make another copy in your Dropbox folder – it’s easiest to follow the same file structure as the game uses, for clarity’s sake if you do this with a number of titles. So I’ve created the folder Dropbox>Skyrim>Saves which contains my save game details.



Go back to the ‘real’ Skyrim folder and delete the original Saves. You did back up three times, right?

Now you need to create a symbolic link inside the Skyrim folder pointing it at your new Dropbox save folder. Assuming everything is installed according to defaults, you can do this using the Command Prompt, and typing the following:

mklink /d “C:\Users\your name\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves” “C:\Users\yourname\Dropbox\Skyrim\Saves”.



You’ll need to customise the actual directory location if you’ve changed these at installation. What we’ve done here is tell Windows that if it ever looks for a folder called Saves in My Games>Skyrim, it should head on over to Dropbox>Sykrim>Saves to find it. If the Command Prompt terrifies you, there’s a simple app called Symlinker //http://code.google.com/p/symlinker//which will do the same thing in a more friendly way.

Run the game on this PC once to make sure everything is working fine.

Now all you need to do is go to your second PC and follow exactly the same steps, except for the part about copying saves into your Dropbox folder. If you’ve done it right, they’ll already be there and you can just symlink to them.

Congratulations, whichever PC you play on you’ll now be using the latest version of your saves.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/09/set-up-a-your-own-steam-cloud-for-skyrim/feed/ 21 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/07/amds-hd7000-spotted-in-the-wild/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/07/amds-hd7000-spotted-in-the-wild/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:14:08 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=66352 [..]]]> Two laptops touting the AMD’s as-yet-unreleased HD7000 series graphics of chips have been listed in sales brochures and driver download sites, according to German website PC Games Hardware.

According to the site, the chips have been listed as part of the specification in the forthcoming ASUS’ X53TK and a new 17inch HP Envy. The ASUS features an HD7670M to supplement its Fusion processor, while the HP has the higher performing Mobility Radeon HD 7690M on board.

Neither company, nor AMD, have commented on the story, and the parts remain officially unannounced. Drivers are available for download from HP’s site, though.

The important thing is that while there’s not a lot to choose between AMD and NVIDIA graphics on the desktop at the moment, when it comes to laptops mid-range Mobility Radeon cards have been performing far better for the price recently – even though they’ve been strangely difficult to find on sale. The X53TX

Sadly, as far as we know, this is unlikely to be the first outing for AMD’s forthcoming GPU architecture that it’s calling Graphics Core Next (GCN – also known as Southern Islands). GCN has a completely new internal design to the one which AMD has used (with modifications) since the launch of DirectX 10. While the entire HD7000 series of GPUs was originally planned to be based on GCN, recently leaked slides suggest that only the top end HD7900s will use it, leaving most of the range as a die shrink to 28nm of the existing designs.

Or could it? There’s plenty of rumours flying around about GCN and its ilk – as well as suggestion of a prelaunch event some time this week.

(via Thinq_)

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/07/amds-hd7000-spotted-in-the-wild/feed/ 12 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/07/new-ssd-tech-puts-a-terabit-on-a-fingertip/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/07/new-ssd-tech-puts-a-terabit-on-a-fingertip/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:44:34 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=66401 [..]]]> Memory meisters at Intel and Micron have announced a new addition to their joint range of NAND flash modules, capable of storing a terabit of data (128GB) on a chip the size of your finger tip.

Physically, that’s between eight and sixteen times smaller than the chips commonly used in SSDs today. If the costs are right, it’s big news for the little drives.

The Tb chips are made up of eight 128Gb memory dies, which will be manufactured on a 20nm process with a high-K technology similar to the one Intel currently uses for its CPUs. Available early in 2012, they double the storage capacity per die of the largest currently available dies, which are the 20nm 64Gb ones Intel and Micron announced are moving into mass production in the same press release.

It’s been a big couple of months for SSD technology. According to analysts at Context, short supply of hard drives has led to a masssive 52.9% increase in sales for SSD suppliers. While the new chips from Intel and Micron should mean a fall in average prices per gigabyte next year, there’s likely to be some very happy shareholders in groups that manufacture and flog solid state storage this quarter.

The good news for those looking to upgrade their hard drive, however, is that Western Digital has reportedly restarted production at its Thai factories, a week ahead of schedule. That was the cause of recent price hikes, which should settle down again in the new year.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/07/new-ssd-tech-puts-a-terabit-on-a-fingertip/feed/ 24 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/03/onlive-review/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/03/onlive-review/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 10:00:20 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=66168 [..]]]> (This hands-on review first appeared in PC Gamer issue 234)

The post PC-era is upon us. Sometime soon, you won’t need to actually own any computing hardware: instead, a single browser window that opens from your tablet into the cloud will offer on-demand processing power beyond the dreams of Intel’s Core series or AMD’s Bulldozer. Everything from phone calls to videogames will be virtualised. You will want for naught. Or at least, that’s the theory.

Thanks to the UK launch of OnLive, the world’s first streaming games service, we’ve finally got a better idea of whether that future is imminent or still jetpack-commuting-distant.

OnLive comes as either a desktop program for your PC or a cigarette box-sized set-top box that plugs into the TV and plays games off the internet. It connects you to the company’s servers, and from then on everything you see on screen is being generated on their machines.



So instead of firing up Deus Ex: Human Revolution from your hard drive and loading the shaders into your GPU, for example, you simply start up the OnLive client and a virtual machine is created somewhere in their datacentre, which fires up a copy of the game.

The video feed from that instance is then divided up into 16 segments, which are individually compressed using an H.264 codec, and streamed to you via the internet. On your PC (or set-top box), the video and audio get decoded and stitched back together again. Your mouse, keyboard or game controller input signals, meanwhile, are sent the other way over the net back to their servers.

That is, clearly, an enormous amount of computing work to be done in real-time, and involves a massive physical distance to be travelled for every pixel drawn and every trigger fired – especially when, as technology stands at the moment, it’s almost impossible to throw the video output of a game across your lounge wirelessly without introducing so much lag that it becomes practically unplayable.



And yet streaming from the net via OnLive is remarkably playable. Obviously it feels a bit sluggish compared with playing on your own native hardware, but for many games, especially those designed with laggy console controllers in mind, including the likes of Arkham Asylum and Human Revolution, it’s far from unpleasant. Funnily enough, it’s some of the older games, like the “OnLive comes as either a desktop program for your PC or a fag box-sized set-top box for the TV” original Deus Ex, which are unplayable thanks to input lag.

There’s no trickery involved either. The client software is truly tiny, and takes up less than 10MB of hard drive space. I’ve tried to locate a secret local game file cache in the hidden recesses of the darkest administration folders Windows has to offer, but it’s just not there. When gaming, less than 10% of two CPU cores are utilised – roughly what you’d expect for HD video decodes, and not a complex 3D game.

But unlike other streaming services, like Spotify or iPlayer, I don’t think OnLive quite hits the right balance of loss of quality against convenience. What they’ve achieved is remarkable, but it’s hard to recommend paying for it, at least on the PC, just yet. The video isn’t just highly compressed and full of artefacts, it’s low-res in the first place too. That means details are lost and even a 2D shoot-’em-up looks fuzzy. I can’t imagine playing LA Noire or a point-and-click adventure that relies on being able to see small objects to solve puzzles over OnLive.



And that’s when it’s working well. Nothing breaks a game’s sense of immersion more than tearing video, vocoder-like sound errors and a flashing “Network quality too low” button at the top of the screen. Which does happen.

From a technical point of view, it uses over 2GB an hour bandwidth too: that’s bad news for anyone on a capped service or whose fair use policy will throttle their connection for ‘heavy use’. BT currently excludes OnLive traffic from its cap, but it’s not worth switching ISP for.

One conclusion, then, might be that OnLive is a great proof of concept, but we should really wait until it gets better – except that it is up against the limitations of the internet, not its own hardware. I’m not sure they can reduce latency further, at least over the existing public IP infrastructure. The technical hurdles of the future – improving quality and reliability – may actually be a bigger challenge than all of those the company has already overcome.

Even in its current state, though, I could see the service as a great supplement for gaming on a tablet or getting rid of consoles. What I’d love to see is a partnership between OnLive and, say, Steam – so if I’m at my PC I can play a high-quality local client, and if I’m out and about I’ll settle for second-best and stream from the same save points.



The problem is that there’s no business model there for either company; the convenience just wouldn’t be worth the premium they’d need to charge.

Even now, price is not OnLive’s friend. You can pay £6.99 a month for free access to a library of over 100 games, which would be great – except that new releases are excluded from that archive.

You can compare this directly with Spotify, the music streaming service that offers unlimited access to millions of tracks at exceptionally high quality on any device for just £3 more a month.

I really admire what OnLive has achieved: I genuinely didn’t think it was possible to get the service to be as good as it is. But with the gaming capabilities of even budget laptops so good these days, it’s hard to see it as an alternative for PC gaming.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/03/onlive-review/feed/ 52 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/02/passive-cooling-for-core-i7s/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/02/passive-cooling-for-core-i7s/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:46:56 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=66191 [..]]]> Bit of Friday fun for you – I’m testing a group of heatsinks for the next issue of the mag and was persuaded to try this out by the chaps at QuietPC.com. It’s the Nofan CR-95C, a completely passive cooler that claims to be able to chill a 95W quad core Core i7 processor.

Naturally, I was a little bit skeptical.

Even though the latest generation of CPUs run almost impossibly cool for their processing power output, and the Intel stock cooler that ships with a Sandy Bridge Core i7 is the smallest I’ve seen since we had Pentium 3s in the lab, the idea of using a fanless heatsink seems utterly bonkers. There’s no way you can possibly remove enough heat without using a fan, surely?

Apparently so. In the tests I’ve been running, the CR-95C actually beat the stock cooler on the testbed rig shown above. That’s without the assistance of a single case fan to help disperse heat. In terms of temperatures, I used Prime95 to load all four hyperthreaded cores up to their maximum ability, and the heat peaked at 77 degrees – around five degress less than using the Intel cooler.

Cooling the chip back down after use took longer, of course, but within five minutes of idling it was back to under 30 degrees Celsius. And the best thing is that in a proper case, with well designed airflows and case fans, it should work even better.

You’ll need a big case mind. The CR-95C really is enormous.

The thing is, even though I’ve seen it working, I think I’d still be skeptical of installing it my gaming rig. It might be illogical to worry about the ‘what if it falls over after eight hours’ scenario, but I can’t get rid of that niggling doubt, and feel like I need the reassurance of fans if things start to get out of control. So I’m going to test it further over the weekend to be sure.

The other downside is that at £100 it’s a lot of money to shave off a few decibels – with cheap air coolers being so efficient and quiet any way, you’ll need an almost slient room and very quiet power supply to actually hear the difference.

Still, it’s a remarkable achievement all the same.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/02/passive-cooling-for-core-i7s/feed/ 27 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/01/wearable-huds-arrive-in-europe/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/01/wearable-huds-arrive-in-europe/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:44:50 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=66036 [..]]]> Looking to perfect your Adam Jensen look in time for the office Christmas party? Vuzix’ new AR eyewear might be just the aug you’re looking for: a pair of glasses designed to withstand high velocity projectile impact with their own tiny heads up display.

Vuzix has been making virtual reality eyewear for a long time now, but the problem with most of its glasses is that they entirely block you off from the world around you. Their tiny LCD screens can replicate the look of a cinema display, but it’s still a computer desktop you’re looking at rather than the analogue clarity of the real world.

It’s latest virtual world goggles look altogether more interesting. They’re called the Tay-Eye LT.

The Tac-Eye LT is, as far as I’m aware, one of the first ‘real’ augmented reality systems, which overlays information on to what you see, rather than a camera image of what’s in front of you.

The glasses have actually been in use in the US, mostly for military applications, since May, but according to the company they’re now more generally available across Europe. General in the sense that you have to contact Vuzix to arrange pricing per order, that is.

They look very much like the description of a project Vuzix was developing on behalf of the US Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center in Massachusetts and is apparently part of the Future Force Warrior program, but now designed to work with an iPhone.

I for one hope some gadget distributor picks them up. Not only will they look good at parties, they could be an ace gaming peripheral. Removing the HUD from the monitor would be particularly interesting with a three screen set-up.

The real future of wearable computing, though, is more likely to be in another project Vuzix recently announced, which uses technology from Nokia to overlay video directly onto the lenses of see-through sunglasses. It’s a way off being commercially available, but hopefully there’ll be more news next year.

(Via Engadget)

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/01/wearable-huds-arrive-in-europe/feed/ 21 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/29/limited-edition-geforce-560s-launched-review-round-up/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/29/limited-edition-geforce-560s-launched-review-round-up/#comments Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:02:47 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65960 [..]]]> Graphics vendor NVIDIA has launched a limited edition version of its sub-£200 GeForce GTX 560Ti card, which features more shader cores and a wider memory bus than a standard version. It’s not entirely clear how limited the production run is – although the card won’t be on sale in all regions – but the GeForce GTX 560Ti 448 Edition is available from today, and reviews are appearing across the web.

Zotac, Inno3D, EVGA, Palit, Gainward, ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI will all have their own spins on the 560Ti 448 for sale, with prices starting at around £240/$289. That compares to about £180/$240 for a standard GTX 560Ti, the likes of which we recommend in the current PC Gamer Rig.

Should you grab one while you can?

Your first impression might be that NVIDIA isn’t doing itself any favours with the naming conventions here. There’s already at least three different versions of the 560 out there, namely the GTX 560, GTX 560Ti 1GB and GTX 560Ti 2GB. What’s a ’448 Edition’ when it’s at home any way?

The extra suffix refers to the number of shader cores on the chip: a standard GTX 560 Ti has 384 unified shaders, and this new limited edition has 448. The default clockspeed on the new card is slightly slower, 732MHz compared to 822MHz for a 560Ti, but the extra processing grunt means that the 448 Edition should be a bit faster when it comes to high resolution displays, anti-aliasing and DX11 effects like tessellation.

The key difference, however, is that the 448 Edition is built using NVIDIA’s GF110 chip rather than the GF114. The GF110 is the same core that’s used on its highest end GTX580 cards, which has 512 shader cores. The GTX 560Ti 448 is, like the 480 core GTX 570, simply one of those chips that has had a number of cores disabled, because they didn’t meet the grade for the highest performing boards.

This is standard practice for all types of chip, not just graphics cards, and is likely a sign that NVIDIA has built up a large stockpile of these processors which it wants to clear before it’s next big launch, codenamed Kepler.

It’s been stressed to us that the new 560 Ti 448 isn’t a replacement for any existing chip, hence the high price point compared to a standard 560 Ti. Unless a customised BIOS which allows you turn on some of those disabled cores becomes available, it’s unlikely that the 448 will change our recommendation for the PC Gamer Rig.

Here’s what the web has to say about the new chip:

Ryan over at Anandtech quite likes it, but reckons you’re better off with the cheaper Radeon HD6950.

Dave at TechRadar gives an ASUS special edition 3.5/5, arguing it’s not bad if you’re prepared to overclock it manually.

At Hexus, Parm can’t quite get over disappointment with the name, but thinks that prices will drop soon to around £200. Which would be nice.

As ever, I’ll fill in our thoughts once I’ve had chance to review a GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Edition thoroughly.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/29/limited-edition-geforce-560s-launched-review-round-up/feed/ 19 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/28/nvidia-beta-drivers-boost-skyrim-modern-warfare-3-battlefield-3-and-batman-arkham-city/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/28/nvidia-beta-drivers-boost-skyrim-modern-warfare-3-battlefield-3-and-batman-arkham-city/#comments Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:41:21 +0000 Tom Senior http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65837 [..]]]> Here’s a quick heads up for anyone running an Nvidia card. New GeForce 290.36 Beta drivers have been released that add ambient occlusion support for Skyrim and Modern Warfare 3. Screen flickering and triangular artifacts in Battlefield 3 should also be fixed by the new drivers, and Nvidia recommend the update to Batman: Arkham City players. The update streamlines PhysX support, so players experiencing performance problems in Arkham City might want to give this a download.

The Skyrim and Modern Warfare 3 ambient occlusion settings can be turned on via the Nvidia control panel. You’ll find instructions on how to enable the advanced shadowing effect on the Nvidia site where the new beta are now available to download. You’ll find the full release notes below.

NVIDIA Ambient Occlusion

• Adds NVIDIA Control Panel ambient occlusion support for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
• Adds NVIDIA Control Panel ambient occlusion support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

 
NVIDIA PhysX

• Updates PhysX System Software to version 9.11.1107 for the best PhysX experience in Batman: Arkham City.

 
NVIDIA Surround

• Enables NVIDIA Surround support for Intel X79 SLI-certified motherboards.

 
NVIDIA SLI

• Added or updated SLI profiles for Crysis 2, Heroes and Generals, Inversion, Stronghold 3, and Syndicate.

 
3D Vision

• Adds support for 3D Vision over native DisplayPort 1.1 connection – available on BenQ XL2420T and BenQ XL2420TX monitors.
• Added or updated the following 3D Vision game profiles:
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – Rated Good
  • Cang Sheng – Rated Good
  • Diablo 3 – Rated Good
  • Fei fei – Rated Good
  • Final Combat – Rated Good
  • L.A. Noire – Updated Rating To 3D Vision Ready
  • LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 – Rated Fair
  • Qian Nv You Hun Online – Rated Good
  • QQ Xi You – Rated Good
  • Sonic Generations – Rated Good
  • Xian Tu – Rated Good
  • Yong Bing Tian Xia Online – Rated Good

   

HD Audio

• Updates HD Audio driver to version 1.3.9.0.

 
Bug Fixes

• Fixes random flickering as Windows boot logo is loading or fading away.
• Fixes corruption in Crysis 2 with SLI and lower quality shadow settings.
• Fixes ability to set Surround resolutions to 5760×1080 using custom resolutions.
• Fixes some random instances of triangular artifacts when playing Battlefield 3.
• Fixes corruption and flickering of some objects in Battlefield 3 in the New York single-player level when anti-aliasing is enabled.
• Fixes corruption seen in Settlers 7 with the NVIDIA 275.33 drivers.
• Fixes playback of videos or live TV using Window Media Center resulting in a black screen.
• Fixes the issue where 1920×1080 @60Hz PC resolution mode switched down to @59Hz.
• Fixes mouse cursor flickering and shaking in Crysis 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Deus Ex and Civilization V when SLI is enabled when using 3DTV Play.

 

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/28/nvidia-beta-drivers-boost-skyrim-modern-warfare-3-battlefield-3-and-batman-arkham-city/feed/ 42 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/26/thanksgiving-sales-and-the-pc-gamer-rig/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/26/thanksgiving-sales-and-the-pc-gamer-rig/#comments Sat, 26 Nov 2011 19:04:30 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65797 [..]]]> How much money could you save by buying the PC Gamer Rig this week, thanks to the various Black Friday bargains that are going around? Are PC components even included in any of these seasonal fire sales?

To find out, we’ve done the shopping around for you.

Yes, Black Friday was technically yesterday, but the whole phenomenon is a relatively new one on these shores and I’m really only just starting to be aware of it. Besides, it seems to be more of a week long event than just one now, and this weekend is really when the bargains are to be found.

So if you’re looking to build or upgrade your PC before Christmas, today could be the best day to do it.

A reminder – the PC Gamer Rig is our desktop for the average gamer. It’s not the fastest PC you can build, or the cheapest, but it is the one that we think is the best possible value and will comfortably play any game now and in the foreseeable future for £1000/$1500.

As thorough as I’ve been in deal hunting, though, I’m fairly sure you can find some better. Any tips for other readers gratefully received in the comments below.

What’s in the Rig?

CPU

Intel Core i5 2500K

£155.99/$199.99
An unlocked Sandy Bridge quad core, capable of all the top end features but hyperthreading.

Motherboard

Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

£76.99/$109.99
An awesome Z68 board, comes with mSATA connectors for mini SSDs and Intel’s caching technology.

RAM

Crucial Ballistic Sport/G.Skill Ripjaws X

£45.59/$44.99
Eight gigabytes of fast 1600MHz DDR3.

3D Card

GeForce GTX 560Ti

£152.48/$239.49
Curiously, prices for the 560Ti have gone up in the US this week, but down in the UK. Is old stock being cleared out for something new…?

Hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB

£38.09/$109.99
Short supply of hard drives means you’ll probably have to settle for a lot less storage than you’re used to.

DVD drive

LG GH22NP21

£13.64/$21.99
Fast DVD writers are pretty much generic these days, and there’s no real argument for spending any more.

Case

BitFenix Shinobi

£51.59/$64.99
Easy access to all components and not too noisy either, our favourite budget case looks better than others too.

Power supply

OCZ ZS 650W

£56.99/$74.99.00
A decent 650W PSU that’s rated well for efficiency. The minimum you should try to get away with.

Mouse

Logitech G400

£26.03/$34.99
Classic Logitech style in a brand new mouse, this 3600dpi mouse is comfortable and precise.

Keyboard

Microsoft SideWinder X4
£9.97/$48.24
This is currently less than £10. There is nothing more to say.

Monitor

LG IPS236V
£139.96/$249.99
Some of you think that an IPS screen is no good for gaming because of low response times. You are wrong.

Total: £797.31/$1234.96

Which is a wonderful $47.10/$98.73 less than last week.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/26/thanksgiving-sales-and-the-pc-gamer-rig/feed/ 29 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/25/choose-your-own-switch-keyboards-from-qpad/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/25/choose-your-own-switch-keyboards-from-qpad/#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:29:33 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65785 [..]]]> It’s a dilemma we’ve all faced and I’m sure is familiar to all: ‘Which Cherry MX switches should I get in my next keyboard, red or blue?’* Swedish peripheral designer QPAD understands the agony of being forced into the wrong decision for your fingertips, and is giving you the freedom to choose your own key types next time you buy a ‘board.

There’s been a marked improvement in the availability of mechanical keyboards as of late – just the other day Razer’s Battlefield 3 branded Black Widow turned up in the PCG labs, and Corsair’s K60 and K90 are due any day. Don’t rush out and grab one just yet, though: QPAD’s brace of new designs to consider is launching over at Dreamhack this weekend.

The MK-85 Pro and MK-50 Pro are very similar – the main difference is that the former has backlit keys while the latter is all dark. The MK-85 Pro also has an audio lead extension and USB hub built in.



Both feature Cherry MX red switches, which have a lighter and slightly quieter action than the more common Cherry MX blues of the Razer Black Widow, and are the same switches Corsair has settled on for the K60. For the truly discerning typist, QPAD is apparently allowing an unspecified number of customers to customise their own key type from the full range of Cherry MX choices.

The real selling point, however, is that QPAD claims to have solved the problem of n-key rollover (NKRO) on a USB keyboard. Often referred to as anti-ghosting, this is the ability to press every key button simultaneously without the keyboard returning an error. Most USB keyboards marketed with ‘anti-ghosting’ can only manage six or so keys at a time before they lock up, which may not be accurate enough if you’re playing Starcraft at 300apm.

The clickety click of mechanical keyboards does sound unnervingly like a cash register, though, especially when the MK-85 Pro is being priced at EURO 149. The MK-50 Pro is a far more reasonable EURO 79.

*Well, some of us have.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/25/choose-your-own-switch-keyboards-from-qpad/feed/ 15 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/24/new-rules-on-fups-from-ofcom/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/24/new-rules-on-fups-from-ofcom/#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:00:58 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65733 [..]]]> Tired of your broadband connection slowing to a crawl just as that sniper appears on the BF3 horizon? New rules from Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, aren’t going to end the problem of randomly rising ping times, but at least they’ll help you understand why.

In a document published today, Ofcom’s approach to net neutrality, the regulator spells out its thoughts on traffic management. ISPs should be clear about their policy, and describe in an easily accessible format that customers can use to compare services transparently.

Ofcom’s main concern is net neutrality and the risk that premium rate services – like IPTV – will be prioritised on networks at the expense of other traffic. While there’s no concerns in the UK at the moment, it says, at some point in the future there could be a deliberate blocking of competitor services which needs to be avoided. Its a protection against a possible scenario in which an ISP did a deal with one direct download service, for example, and then blocked Steam traffic on its network.

Any service advertised as ‘internet access’, it says, should offer unrestricted access to all internet services lawfully available on the internet. “If a service does not provide full access to the internet,” the document says, “We would not expect it to be marketed as internet access”.

It’s a strong statement of support for net neutrality, which is good. Sadly it’s not an end to the kinds of Fair Use Policy (FUP) which throttle users who go over an arbitrary cap during peak hours or shut down P2P traffic at particular times of the day – which can cripple the ability to download game patches or legitimate traffic. More and more ISPs are introducing these kinds of restrictions, and burying the details in cleverly hidden hyperlinks within other Ts&C – under the new Ofcom guidelines these kinds of service restrictions should be clearly signposted and obvious before you sign a contract and then find you’re getting pings of several hundred milliseconds.

Broadband comparison site uSwitch was quick to release a press statement welcoming the report.

“Nobody questions the need for suppliers to manage broadband traffic,” said uSwitch’s Ernest Doku, “It’s becoming ever more congested as people increasingly use the internet for bandwidth-heavy services such as downloading movies and music, as well as watching TV online.

“”Following today’s move, we can now expect consumers to know upfront about average speeds and the effects of traffic management on those speeds before they sign up to a broadband package. This is a huge step forward for broadband customers.”

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/24/new-rules-on-fups-from-ofcom/feed/ 21 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/23/tuning-skyrim-on-the-pc-gamer-rig/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/23/tuning-skyrim-on-the-pc-gamer-rig/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:57:07 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65402 [..]]]> Another week, another chance to hunt down bargains for the PC Gamer Rig. Like the well loved broom that’s had many new handles and quite a few heads over the years, the Rig is continually evolving to be the best value machine for under £1,000/£1,500 it possibly can be. No part is the same as it was this time last year: but its essence of Rigginess remains.

This week, as you might expect, it’s been mostly playing Skyrim.

Here’s the thing, without touching a single ini file or mod, the Rig runs Skyrim on Ultra settings (8xAA, 16xAF) without really straining. At its lowest, performance drops to around 30 frames per second, and usually maintains a steady 60 or so indoors.

Given the fact that mod site Skyrim Nexus was offline for a lot of yesterday due to overwhelming demand, you’ve probably already realised that there’s a lot you can do to tweak performance further. Tom’s already rounded up a list of the most popular hacks for Skyrim.ini and Skyrimprefs.ini (both found in your Documents>My Games>Skyrim folder), but here’s the two things which I’ve found really make a difference on the Rig.

First of all, you must install the FXAA Post-Process Injector mod. If you only do one thing to Skyrim, do this – the game looks indescribably better as a result.



Second, overclock your CPU.

Forget about all those hacks and finely balancing one CVAR against another. Skyrim is a massively CPU limited game, which isn’t especially well multithreaded. Bumping the maximum Turbo multiplier on our Core i5 2500K up from 38x to 45x on all four cores give you a 4.5GHz processor took that minimum framerate up closer to 40fps. That’s a straight 33% increase for 30 seconds’ work.

The best thing? Because only two cores are ever really in use, we did all of this on the stock cooler that’s supplied with the chip. It’s a good idea to invest in something a little more chilly, like the Arctic Freezer Pro 7, but not absolutely essential.

Bear in mind you do do this at your own risk, of course. Overclocking a CPU can result in shortening its lifespan and invalidating any warranties.

If your problem with Skyrim is at the other end of the scale – ie you’re struggling with a lower end machine and want it to run faster – the best settings to change are the draw distances. I’m going to put up a post with some detailed benchmarks early next week, but so far testing with an AMD Mobily Radeon HD6750 has shown that anti-aliasing and the like doesn’t make a huge amount of difference (and may not be working anyway), but dropping draw distances for characters and grass can add 10fps onto outdoor scenes.

But enough of the tuning talk. What’s in the Rig this week?

What’s in the Rig?

CPU

Intel Core i5 2500K

£159.67/$209.99
An unlocked Sandy Bridge quad core, capable of all the top end features but hyperthreading.

Motherboard

Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

£84.98/$119.99
An awesome Z68 board, comes with mSATA connectors for mini SSDs and Intel’s caching technology.

RAM

Crucial Ballistic Sport

£45.59/$53.99
Eight gigabytes of fast 1600MHz DDR3 for £50. Grab it quick, just in case it’s a misprint.

3D Card

GeForce GTX 560Ti

£161.99/$249.82
Curiously, prices for the 560Ti have gone up in the US this week, but down in the UK. Is old stock being cleared out for something new…?

Hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB

£38.09/$119.99
Short supply of hard drives means you’ll probably have to settle for a lot less storage than you’re used to.

DVD drive

LG GH22NP21

£14.03/$21.99
Fast DVD writers are pretty much generic these days, and there’s no real argument for spending any more.

Case

BitFenix Shinobi

£59.99/$64.99
Easy access to all components and not too noisy either, our favourite budget case looks better than others too.

Power supply

Cooler Master 80+

£57.98/$112.00
A decent 650W PSU that’s rated well for efficiency. The minimum you should try to get away with.

Mouse

Logitech G400

£24.98/$39.99
Classic Logitech style in a brand new mouse, this 3600dpi mouse is comfortable and precise.

Keyboard

Microsoft SideWinder X4
£24.97/$55.63
Backlighting, macros and anti-ghosting for £25? Yes please.

Monitor

LG IPS236V
£142.15/$249.99
Some of you think that an IPS screen is no good for gaming because of low response times. You are wrong.

Headset

Corsair HS1A
£29.99/$44.32
Being phased out for a newer model, so grab a bargain while they last.

Total: £844.41/$1342.69

£22.12 less/$84.80 more than last week.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/23/tuning-skyrim-on-the-pc-gamer-rig/feed/ 40 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/22/in-simulation-thrustmaster-hotas-warthog-flightstick-and-throttle/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/22/in-simulation-thrustmaster-hotas-warthog-flightstick-and-throttle/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:52:26 +0000 Andy Mahood http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65600 [..]]]> Andy Mahood takes to the skies, race tracks, and battlefields in our monthly In Simulation column to showcase the best that sim games have to offer. This month, Andy test drives the Ferrari of flightsticks and shows how it can take your flight sim experience to the next level.

“Always use the right tool for the job.” Sage advice from my father many years ago, but his words rang especially true this past month when I finally got my paws on Thrustmaster’s latest HOTAS Warthog A-10C flightstick and throttle.Weighing in at almost 15 pounds, the mostly metal HOTAS Warthog is the Rolls Royce of Hands-On-Throttle-And-Stick controllers for current-generation flight sims. It ain’t cheap (the best online price I could find was $350), but if you’re serious about your virtual combat flying, it’s one of the best investments you can make.




Two reasons every boy wants to fly: choppers and missles.


The natural successor to Thrustmaster’s decade-old all-steel F-16 replica HOTAS Cougar, the HOTAS Warthog improves on its forebearer by using 3D magnetic sensors rather than potentio­meters (which notoriously wore out under heavy use with the Cougar). The flightstick—which feels so solid and responsive you’ll never want to go back to plastic—features an eight-way point-of-view hat, three four-way hats, a dual-stage trigger, and four push buttons including a removable paddle switch (for A-10C realism zealots who don’t want this F-16 feature on their Hogs).

The throttle body is similarly impressive. Crafted from mostly steel components, the weighted base incorporates an impressive array of LED-illuminated buttons and military-quality switches that emulate
the exact throw and resistance of the real thing (Thrustmaster purportedly even measured the “volume” of each switch click for additional authenticity). Friction resistance on the split throttle is easily adjustable and, in keeping with the “hands-on” principle of the original USAF design, incorporates a mouse hat with push button, an eight-way POV hat, a four-way hat, and assorted three-position switches. You can lock the throttles together for synchronized operation, and there are also lift and push/pull detents for the idle and afterburner ranges.

The greatest of ease



It's not the size of your Thrustmaster that matters, just how you use it.


For all of its apparent complexity, the HOTAS Warthog is plug-and-play from the get-go. There’s no disc to install, and you can be up and running in minutes once you connect it to the USB ports on your PC. Picking the first test sim was a no-brainer: I fired up Eagle Dynamics’ DCS: A-10C Warthog for its maiden flight with the new controller. I was thrilled to discover that the simulation auto-detected the device and delivered a preset configuration of button presses and axis assignments that worked perfectly without any tailoring or adjustments on my part.

The Warthog doesn’t ship with rudder pedals, so I had to draft a set of CH Products Pro-Pedals into service, but once I had my plane airborne, I was flying more efficiently than ever before. With its 16-bit axis resolution, the controller delivered surgical stick and throttle response and it was a treat having most of my significant commands—weapons, flaps, speed brakes, targeting slew control—within fingertip range. You’ll feel like a USAF pilot after an hour with this product.




Even planes can get heartburn.


Making the HOTAS work with other modern flight sims (such as Flaming Cliffs 2, Black Shark, Rise of Flight, and IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover) took a little more effort, as they typically only detect the control axes and a few buttons. However, you can download a software client from Thrust­master called TARGET that offers additional presets and virtually limitless configurability. Once I’d gotten all the various specifications set up to my liking, I developed an entirely new appreciation for these sims, especially the non-historical ones where button-festooned HOTAS cockpits are the order of the day.
I still struggle occasionally with the nuances of rotary-wing flight in DCS: Black Shark, but I’m enjoying the hell out of DCS: A-10C and Flaming Cliffs 2 right now and anticipate exhaustively honing my skills in the weeks and months ahead.

Having the right tool for the job really makes a helluva difference.

What do you think? Send Andy your thoughts and questions at insimulation@pcgamer.com

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/22/in-simulation-thrustmaster-hotas-warthog-flightstick-and-throttle/feed/ 20 http://www.pcgamer.com/review/nvidia-3d-vision-wired-glasses-review/ http://www.pcgamer.com/review/nvidia-3d-vision-wired-glasses-review/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 20:00:50 +0000 Alex Castle http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65498 [..]]]> Although I’m a little sick of 3D hype, I have to admit that gaming in 3D is more immersive, more tactile, and generally a lot of fun. Nvidia must agree, as it’s expanding its 3D Vision line with a less-expensive wired model of its 3D glasses. That lower price comes hand in hand with easy setup—as long as you’ve got the necessary components (3D Vision-ready monitor, Nvidia GeForce video card, up-to-date drivers) the glasses are pretty much plug-and-play.

Most games work with very little configuration, but some, like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, simply will not run with Nvidia’s 3D Vision (thanks to an exclusive deal for AMD’s 3D products; you can check Nvidia’s site for a mostly comprehensive list of which games will work). And as with most 3D hardware, 3D Vision effectively halves your monitor’s brightness, meaning you won’t want to use it in a well-lit room.
The glasses themselves are largely the same as the wireless version, though the build quality is noticeably cheaper on the wired model. The set is matte instead of shiny, has more visible seams, and just generally feels a bit more plasticky than the wireless version. The wire is a long 10 feet and never left me feeling overly tethered, though it did have an unfortunate tendency to get tangled up.
The glasses come with swappable nose-pads, but even with them, I’ve never found the 3D Vision set to be very comfortable. Also, as with most active shutter glasses, the lenses are pretty narrow, which means they intrude on my peripheral vision more than I’d like.

At $99, the wired 3D Vision glasses are two-thirds the price of the wireless alternative. I’m not crazy about the build quality or design, but the 3D technology is a lot of fun, and these glasses are the cheapest, fastest way to get it on your PC.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/review/nvidia-3d-vision-wired-glasses-review/feed/ 16 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/21/a-look-at-eight-new-mouse-pads-to-ramp-up-your-game/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/21/a-look-at-eight-new-mouse-pads-to-ramp-up-your-game/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:35:45 +0000 PC Gamer http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65417 [..]]]> Mousepads are an often overlooked piece of gaming hardware. I tend to consider mine more of a coaster for coffee than something that can improve my gaming. Yet thin sheets beneath our mice can go a long ways in helping define comfort and precision. These mouse pads just scratch the surface on the multitude of options to aid your next killstreak.


GP-MP8000


Some people say that size doesn’t matter, but I guarantee you that those people haven’t actually experienced anything this big. So, yeah—this sucker’s as big as a 13-inch laptop (and it’ll invade your precious desk space, shoving your keyboard aside with its imposing dimensions), but it’s worth it. Heavy-duty MMO raiders and StarCraft strategists will drool over the real estate; they’ll also adore the fact that the mouse doesn’t drop off the pad while they’re swinging about frantically. As long as you’ve got a gigantic desk and some long arms to accommodate it, this monster will last you for years.
Score: 85

9HD


The 9HD is a bare-bones professional mousepad, but it still performs like the big guys. It’s roughly the size of a magazine, is easy to slide in and out of your backpack, and can be cleaned with a quick wipe of a damp cloth. Mice coast across it effortlessly, and you won’t lose tracking even with sporadic gesticulations as you’re struggling to heal your troops in Team Fortress 2. If your focus is more on travel and LAN parties (and you’re not bathing in cash), the 9HD is a terrific choice.
Score: 85

Microtracker


The MicroTracker Mousepad’s makers posit that it’ll eliminate all of your mouse frustrations forever. They’re wrong. Very, very wrong. Guiding an optical or laser mouse across the MicroTracker’s microfiber surface is like pushing a vacuum cleaner over a shag carpet—it drags along and pulls the microfibers every which way, which is damned aggravating. Don’t think about playing games on this thing, or even moving your mouse across it for simple tasks like opening a document. On the other hand, you could always just use the MicroTracker for its other advertised use—cleaning your screen.
Score: 40

Ironclad


If only life were as smooth sailing as a mouse on the Ironclad’s delightful, aluminum surface. This entire pad is literally a metal sheet, and its sandblasted surface is perfect for lining up long-distance headshots. Better yet, the Ironclad’s rubber base stays put while you’re focusing on the important stuff such as machine-gunning Tangos in Counter-Strike. The surface is easy to clean and doesn’t attract any mouse gunk, and it’s perfectly safe to transport in the included (and stout) plastic carrying case.
Score: 95

Behemoth Regulator


This mousepad’s texture is a total throwback to the ’90s, when foam reigned supreme. (I vaguely recall buying one like this in a bargain bin at Fry’s.) Despite its chintzy appearance, however, it’s surprisingly comfortable—like a Tempur-Pedic mattress for your wrists. Its long, rectangular shape means tons of tracking room, so there’s a considerable safety net to avoid your mouse dropping off the edges. But because of its surface, it’s a dust-bunny magnet, which is annoying when you’ve gotta pick them off the bottom of your mouse. It’s a decent pad overall, but its large shape isn’t for everyone.
Score: 73

Fierce Teflon and Steel


Because of the Teflon’s frictionless, metallic surface, your mouse will coast across this pad just as easily as your breakfast comes off a Teflon pan. Its overall size is roughly identical to the SteelSeries 9HD, but much more brawny. It’s pleasantly smooth to the touch, though it’s a magnet for greasy fingerprints. It’s a good feel for first-person shooter fans who need the quick reaction time, but if you also use your mouse for things like graphic design, the tracking feels a little loose. If you’re looking for a smooth metal surface, Rude’s Teflon mouse surface is a fair buy. But if you can afford it, stick with the Ironclad.
Score: 74

Warpad


The WarPad’s 17- by 14-inch surface clips to the edge of your desk, which prevents the mousepad from slipping backward during feverish gameplay. Additionally, it enables fantastic wrist support, which is key for ergonomics—something that gamers should always take into consideration when they’re shopping for gear. The WarPad’s design also leaves your desk space’s sovereignty intact since it lies vertically rather than horizontally, and the tracking is nice and easy. Finally—a cloth mousepad that does it right!
Score: 92

Mionix Sargus 460


There are big mousepads, and then there are some so maddeningly bloated that you have to start charging them rent. Mionix’s Sargas 460 is one such offender. Measuring in at about the same size as a standard 21-inch monitor, dealing with where to put your keyboard so it’s still accessible (and level) is a frustrating conundrum. Fortunately, mice feel amazing as they shoot across the surface, and you can get away with orienting it vertically to save some space on your desktop. But again, as the Sargus proves, there is such thing as overkill.
Score: 70

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/21/a-look-at-eight-new-mouse-pads-to-ramp-up-your-game/feed/ 36 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/21/steelseries-simraceway-srw-s1-out-now/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/21/steelseries-simraceway-srw-s1-out-now/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:48:44 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65466 [..]]]> Wheels? Where we’re going we don’t need wheels. At least, not in the traditional sense of bolting a giant steering column to your desk and planting huge metal pedals beneath your chair.

Steelseries’ new Simraceway SRW-S1 is a motion sensitive controller which works like the one that came with Mario Kart for the Wii, but has enough buttons to keep even the simmiest of driving sim fans happy.

Currently available in the US only, the Simraceway has 15 buttons, three mode dials, a D-pad and four rear paddles for manual gear changes, accelerate and brake. Thankfully, give that means there’s more controls in about four square inches than most cars have on their entire dash, Steelseries reckons that it has preconfigured set-ups for most games built into the driver.

That’s the software, not the cockpit jockey, of course.

At $119.99 it’s not cheap and no amount of customisable buttons can make up for the inevitable loss of real force feedback that a ‘real’ steering column has. As a flat (or ‘apartment’ for international audiences) dweller whose had to sacrifice peripheral space for parenting in recent years, though, I really like the look of the SRW-S1. So long as the floating feeling of an unsupported wheel isn’t too weird, it might make it onto a Christmas list.

(Via Technobob)

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/21/steelseries-simraceway-srw-s1-out-now/feed/ 16 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/17/broadband-slows-by-over-a-third-in-the-evenings/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/17/broadband-slows-by-over-a-third-in-the-evenings/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:54:31 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65252 [..]]]> Utilities comparison service uSwitch has published figures today that say average internet connection speeds in the UK drop by 35% during peak times. The busiest times of the day are between 7 and 9pm, when speeds fall from an average of 9.6Mbps to 6.2Mbps.

uSwitch singled out Evesham in Worcestershire for particularly bad performance. Connection speeds dropped from 15.5Mbps to 4.9Mbps after 7pm, a fall of 69%.

The current internet infrastructure is struggling to cope with a massive increase in internet activity as people download more and watch more online TV.

It’s not exactly news that internet speeds fall when more users log on, as anyone who’s tried to play Battlefield 3 can attest to. In some areas of Brighton it’s anecdotally noticeable (and confirmed by engineers) that connections slow down during university term times, when the population rises. But it is useful to quantify it like this. The headlines, however, only tell half of the story. As the pressure is on ISPs in the UK to catch up with the rest of the world in basic download speeds, there are additional problems for gamers.

In order to hit those headline figures of 20, 50 or 100Mbps, other issues like packet loss and ping can get sacrificed in order to achieve raw throughput. From experience, my Virgin Media connection at home has been regularly hitting decent download speeds in the evening, but with triple figure latency at the same times – so web browsing is fast, but trying to game or watch a YouTube video over the last three weeks has been impossible.

I should add that the problem seems to have been fixed for the time being, by switching me to a different route through the core network, and that this isn’t meant to single Virgin out – many ISPs have the same set up. What’s disturbing is that just when we’re starting to really need them, most of the dedicated ‘gamer’ ISP packages – which use Quality of Service to prioritise real time traffic – seem to have been phased out.

One option might be to invest in a business account. These are often similarly priced to residential broadband, but guarantee prioritised traffic over other customers.

What’s your broadband been like lately? It’s an area that we need to cover more, but can’t reliably benchmark without help. I feel another Google form coming on…

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/17/broadband-slows-by-over-a-third-in-the-evenings/feed/ 53 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/16/review-lg-flatron-d2342p-passive-3d-monitor/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/16/review-lg-flatron-d2342p-passive-3d-monitor/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:39:18 +0000 Seamus Bellamy http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65285 [..]]]> Good news! LG’s Flatron D2342P monitor allows for 3D gaming on the cheap! That said, the 3D experience it offers is, well, kind of cheap.

The D2342P looks great on paper: it’s got a tasty 23-inch serving of 1080p-capable 3D gaming and movie glory. And with sleek lines, a glossy piano-black bezel, and matching stand, it looks even better when it’s assembled and sitting on your desk. Sadly, looks aren’t everything, and once you get past this beauty’s aesthetics, there’s not a lot left to love.


For starters, the external housing feels pretty flimsy. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if you could be confident that the monitor would stay where you put it, but one of the first things I noticed after setup is that it moves around on the desk in response to the mild vibrations caused by typing. Even worse, anything more than a light touch to the side of its bezel left it wobbling back and forth like a Weeble on a bender. It never fell over, but if your rage-quits include a lot of gesticulation, this ain’t the monitor you’re looking for.

You could also run into problems if your desk sits on the low side, as the D2342P’s stand only offers 15 degrees of backward tilt. However, as the monitor is VESA compatible, it can be mounted on a wall or an articulated arm, making up for the shallow amount of out-of-the-box tilt LG provides for. As for connections, the D2342P covers the bases, and comes equipped with a headphone jack, HDMI, DVI and VGA ports.

Even if you’re able to get past setup issues, the performance isn’t great. While the D2342P is capable of rocking a resolution of 1920×1080, its color quality is a washed-out disappointment in both 2D and 3D, with black tones—something that LED displays have traditionally handled well—often appearing in both games and movies as dark grays.

The big selling point for this bad boy is that the D2342P is capable of providing 3D video at a significantly lower price point than hardware that uses Nvidia’s 3D Vision Kit technology. LG delivers this by outfitting the D2342P with its own proprietary passive 3D technology. Despite the rest of the monitor’s failings, the D2342P does serve up a satisfactory 3D gaming and video experience, albeit with some pretty substantial ghosting whenever there is a large amount of movement on screen. It just goes to show that in life, and in this case, with 3D monitors, you get what you pay for.

Price:  $350 ◆ Size: 23” (diagonal) ◆ Resolution: 1920×1080 ◆ Aspect Ratio: 16:9 ◆ Ports: HDMI, DVI, VGA ◆ Type: Passive 3D ◆ Link: www.lg.com ◆ Category: Mid

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/16/review-lg-flatron-d2342p-passive-3d-monitor/feed/ 15 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/16/tiny-holes-a-bigger-battery-make/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/16/tiny-holes-a-bigger-battery-make/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:48:02 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65256 [..]]]> What’s the worst thing about using a laptop for gaming these days? Now that portable processors and graphics cards are good enough for most PC titles, the only problem left to overcome is battery life. I can’t think of a laptop I’ve looked at recently that could manage more than an hour and a half of unplugged play. Not great if you’re planning a raid.

Fortunately, science may have an answer to a plight.

According to a report over on the BBC this morning, researchers at Northwestern University in the US have been experimenting with lithium-ion cells to find ways to improve their performance. They reckon they’ve found ways to increase capacity by a factor of ten, and improved charging times by a similar amount.

The most intriguing part of the research involved punching tiny holes less than 40nm wide in sheets of graphene, in order to accelerate the charging process. The technique, callled “In-plane vacanc-enabled high-power si-graphene composite electrode for lithium-ion batteries” is described in the latest issue of the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

Professor Harold Kung, lead scientist, believes that new batteries using their findings could be commercially available in five years.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/16/tiny-holes-a-bigger-battery-make/feed/ 19 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/14/intels-sandy-bridge-e-launched-review-round-up/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/14/intels-sandy-bridge-e-launched-review-round-up/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:28:57 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65149 [..]]]> The last few months have been a bit of a disappointment as far as components news goes. As well as the damp squib that was AMD’s Bulldozer launch, there’s no sign of NVIDIA’s Kepler or AMD’s GCN graphics cards yet either.

Today, however, is the day that Intel releases it’s new Sandy Bridge E processors into the world. Are they enough to bring some end of year cheer?

Sandy Bridge E, also known as second generation Core i7 Extreme Edition, processors are the ultra-elite-enthusiast-super incarnations of the likes of the Core i7 2600K. Costing up to $999 a piece, they’re the very pinnacle of desktop performance and replace current Gulftown processors like the Core i7 990X in Intel’s line up.



There’s three new chips out today, and you can spot them by their ’3′ prefix to the codename. They are as follows:

• Core i7-3960X
  (3.3GHz, 3.9GHz Turbo, six cores, hyperthreading, unlocked multiplier 15MB L3 cache)
• Core i7-3930K
  (3.2GHz, 3.8GHz Turbo, six cores, hyperthreading, unlocked multiplier 15MB L3 cache)
• Core i7 3820
  (3.6GHz, 3.9GHz Turbo, four cores, hyperthreading, partially unlocked multiplier 10MB L3 cache)

So what’s new about Sandy Bridge E? In terms of the CPU architecture, the differences are largely esoteric. The top two chips have six, rather than four, cores for multhreaded applications to draw upon, and there’s a larger amount of cache memory shared between them to keep them fed. Future versions of the Sandy Bridge E will have eight cores, all hyperthreaded to show 16 possible processor targets for Windows.

Perhaps more interestingly, Sandy Bridge E is the first desktop chips to support quad channel RAM, which doubles the available bandwidth over cheaper Sandy Bridge processors. With 1600MHz DDR 3 on board, that’s a theoretical 51.2GB/s of data it can chuck around.

In order to do these things, however, the new Core i7 Extreme Editions do require a new motherboard socket only available on X79 chipsets. It has, serendipitously, 2011 pins – up from the 1366 of the previous X58 boards.

Easy to remember, given the date.



Taking the cost of a new motherboard as well as memory into account, it’s not an upgrade you’ll want to make without seriously considering the law of diminishing returns over a much cheaper Core i7 2600K or Core i5 system.

The cheaper chips actually have a couple of advantages, too. One of the biggest differences between the Core i7 2011s and the socket 1155 i7s and i5s is that there’s no integrated graphics core. That’s not a concern for gaming, but it does mean you miss out on Intel’s impressive QuickSync video encoding trick, which can outperform multithreaded CPUs and any GPGPU stuff from NVIDIA and AMD.

Also, the new X79 motherboards don’t have Intel’s excellent Smart Response Technology, and its clever SSD caching techniques.

Our review sample should be arriving some time this week. In the meantime, here’s what the internet thinks of Sandy Bridge E:

My colleague Jeremy over on TechRadar thinks that the Core i7-3960X is a worthwhile improvement over 1366 Core i7s, but is fuming that there are two disabled cores on the 3960X. There’s no reason for them to have been switched off, he reckons.

PCMag’s Matthew Murray has nothing bad to say about the new chips, and thinks that support for “40 full lanes of PCI Express… alone will seal the deal for some”. Of course it will, Matt.

Anand Lai Shrimpi is, like many of us, bothered by the fact that the new chips don’t support QuickSync for video encoding. It’s a workstation chip, he says, not really for gaming. “If your livelihood depends on it, the 3960X is worth its entry fee.”

Meanwhile, over at Tom’s Hardware Chris Angelini has a neat summation: “A symbolic king in a crowd full of value”. There’s no reason to buy one of the new Core i7s, but it demonstrates what Intel is capable of. You’re better off waiting until next year’s Ivy Bridge chips to upgrade.

If you are tempted, though, all of the major motherboard vendors have also announced support for the X79 chipset, with some very glittery high end boards to choose from. We’ll round up the best of those later today.



]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/14/intels-sandy-bridge-e-launched-review-round-up/feed/ 16 http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/exclusive-reveal-of-the-new-m-m-o-7-gaming-mouse-from-madcatz/ http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/exclusive-reveal-of-the-new-m-m-o-7-gaming-mouse-from-madcatz/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:58:39 +0000 Chris Comiskey http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65075 [..]]]> Building off the massive popularity of the Cyborg R.A.T. 7 (PC Gamer’s highest-scored mouse ever at 98%), Madcatz gave us—and sister mag Maximum PC—an exclusive peak at the newest addition to the R.A.T. family: the M.M.O. 7.

While the one I put my hands on was a pre-production model (the finalized mouse should be available in late-December), it looks and feels pretty damn sweet. The M.M.O. 7’s aimed at—you guessed it—the MMO gang. As such, there’s a programmable mini-thumb stick on the side, as well as a plethora of extra buttons peppered along the chassis, all programmable and within easy reach of the fingers. Other than the added buttons, the construction is mostly identical to the R.A.T 7, so the mouse should be equally as customizable as its sibling (allowing folks to tweak the size of chassis accordingly to fit their mitts).

Pricing on the M.M.O. 7 is undetermined as of now, but we’ll keep you updated as more info comes in. In the meantime, check out the pics below (revealed for the first time ever), and let us know what you think. As for me, I can’t wait to give it a test-run in non-MMO games such as Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City. The more buttons on my mouse, the better!

















]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/exclusive-reveal-of-the-new-m-m-o-7-gaming-mouse-from-madcatz/feed/ 59 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/11/nvidia-says-desktop-gpu-sales-up-23/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/11/nvidia-says-desktop-gpu-sales-up-23/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:17:23 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=65040 [..]]]> Graphics chip vendor NVIDIA saw its share price rise overnight after a conference call yesterday evening in which it discussed its third quarter results with analysts. The company says it took in a massive $1.07billion in the three months to October 30th, beating analysts expectations by a small margin.

While a lot of the talk in the call was about the company’s booming tablet processor business, where it’s Tegra 2 and forthcoming Tegra 3 dominate Android manufacturers’ designed, desktop hardware sales were above expectations. Notebook graphics sales were – surprisingly – down but the company says that thanks to Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: MW3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic (funny they didn’t mention Skyrim…), there’s been an increase in demand from gamers for upgrades over and above the seasonal norm.

Of course, it also helps that a lot of new PCs were sold to first time buyers in China and other emerging markets, but things are looking good for a company which many had thought would be threatened by the ubiquity of hybrid CPU/GPUs. Interim Chief Financial Officer Karen Burns made a point of the fact that growth in discrete card sales has more than compensated for loss of business in integrated chips.

With rumours starting to appear that the company is hoping to have it’s next GeForce revision – codenamed Kepler – in shops in time for Christmas it could be a very happy new year for executive bonuses in Santa Clara.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/11/nvidia-says-desktop-gpu-sales-up-23/feed/ 24 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/10/the-most-frustrating-windows-7-audio-problem-solved/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/10/the-most-frustrating-windows-7-audio-problem-solved/#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:27:10 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=64838 [..]]]> What’s the sound of one hand clapping? There’s nothing Zen-like about that question for those of us who’ve come up against a strange and surprisingly common audio bug in Windows 7. Nothing makes any noise at all, no matter how many hands you have.

Here’s the issue: you have a fully functioning sound card, probably built into your motherboard. Up until now, it’s been working fine. Your drivers are up to date, it’s listed in Device Manager and shows up just fine as the default device when you right click the volume icon in the task tray.

If you’ve had this problem – and a few of you will – you’ll share my frustration with it. And I’m about to make you very happy indeed.

The problem in a bit more detail: The audio mixer is working perfectly, and headphones or speakers are detected when you plug them into the green jack around the back of your PC. But when you try to load a game or listen to music, there’s nothing.

Opening up ‘Playback devices’ from the Sound control panel and choosing ‘Levels’ reveals a blank bar where the gain control should be. There’s a white cross on a red background over the audio icon by the clock, and a message saying no speakers or headphones are detected.

The automatic troubleshooter says “Audio device is disabled”, even though it’s not.

I’ve had this problem for a while now on one machine in my office. I’ve read all kinds of advice telling me to return the motherboard as there’s a hardware fault (there isn’t, I’ve run functioning installations from a separate hard drive on the same PC) or reinstall Windows. I’d normally have done the latter any way by now, in the course of my normal work. But I’ve kept this system alive until I could find out the fault.

I hate reinstalling Windows to fix a fault. There should always be another way.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the Realtek drivers supplied with my motherboard (an Intel DP67BG) didn’t change anything. Curiously, even plugging in a USB sound card or a PCI-E one didn’t work either – indicating that the fault lies deeper than that.

Fortunately, there is a solution.

What’s happened is that the something has changed a registry value which give users rights to make changes to the Windows audio process. And in this case ‘users’ doesn’t refer to people logging into your machine, it’s other programs as well. By locking them out of the process in question, they can no longer playback sound.

You can check this by opening up Regedit and going to HkeyLocalMachine>Software>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>MMDevices>Audio>Renderer and right clicking any of the keys in this stack. In the Permissions tab of the properties dialogue, there should be a user called ‘AudioEndpointBuilder’ and another one called ‘Audioserv’. If they aren’t present, something has gone awry.



You could, of course, go through the enormous list of keys under this Audio Renderer and manually change each one to look like the above, or you could upgrade the rights of programs trying to access the audio services so they can read and write to correctly.

To do the latter, open up a Command Prompt as an administrator (right click the icon in the Start menu, then choose ‘Run as Administrator’) and type:

net localgroup Administrators /add networkservice
net localgroup Administrators /add localservice



Then restart your machine. Be warned, you are lowering the security of your PC by doing this – feel free to advise strongly against it in the comments below. If ever you want to go back to how it was, re-run the same commands substuting ‘delete’ for ‘add’.

Or just reinstall Windows.

Many thanks to jenae, the Microsoft Support person who posted the solution here. You have made my life immeasurably less stressful.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/10/the-most-frustrating-windows-7-audio-problem-solved/feed/ 26 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/05/keep-your-pc-up-to-date-with-the-pc-gamer-rig-2/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/05/keep-your-pc-up-to-date-with-the-pc-gamer-rig-2/#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 09:00:17 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=64559 [..]]]> Ah, PC Gamer Rig, how your very averageness excites us. This is the machine which we keep alive and well in the office as representative of a ‘normal’ reader’s PC, against which we can benchmark the performance of new hardware and games releases.

And also, something to round up the week with.

The point of the Rig is to demonstrate the best value games system possible for less £1,000/$1,500 – and as such it’s also a reasonably good guide to getting value for money when upgrading. You might spend more per part, but if we were to start building a new PC today, these are the very minimum specs we’d go for.

What’s new this week? Mostly it’s been used for testing hardware for the reviews section next month – although there’s nothing suitable to replace any of the existing components. So instead, some advice. As I wrote a couple of days ago, hard drive prices are astronomically high as a result of flooding in Thailand – and they’re likely to increase again yet. But one component you should be snapping up if you can is RAM.

Memory prices do tend to fluctuate over time, and they go up as well as down. Right now, you can get 4GB of DDR3 RAM for as little as £20/$26, which is ridiculously cheap. Going from 4GB to 8GB RAM can make your system noticeably faster, but more importantly it will help to keep things running smoothly – raising those minimum framerates and helping with multitasking.

A quick – and not particularly scientific – Battlefield 3 benchmark on the Rig showed that going from 4GB to 8GB increased the average framearate rising from 55fps to 62fps – which is very good. The minimum framerate leapt from 41fps to 56fps – which is excellent.

If you are upgrading, it’s a good idea to go for new modules that are as close in timings and even brand as you can – I’ve found DDR3 to be far more finicky when it comes to mixing and matching different chips than DDR2 ever was. On the upside, you really don’t need to worry about speed too much. Now that all new CPUs have the memory controller on board the base clockspeed of RAM makes very little – if any – difference to overall performance.

What’s in the Rig?

CPU

Intel Core i5 2500K

£161.60/$209.99
An unlocked Sandy Bridge quad core, capable of all the top end features but hyperthreading.

Motherboard

Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

£79.99/$109.99
An awesome Z68 board, comes with mSATA connectors for mini SSDs and Intel’s caching technology.

RAM

Crucial Ballistic Sport

£41.99/$55.99
Eight gigabytes of fast 1600MHz DDR3, unbelievably nearly a tenner less than last week already.

3D Card

GeForce GTX 560Ti

£179.99/$219.82
A good mid range card that’ll get you gaming at decent framerates on a single monitor.

Hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB

£38.09/$57.66
If you have to buy a hard drive this week, there are few that remain as competitively priced as this.

DVD drive

LG GH22NP21

£16.84/$21.99
Fast DVD writers are pretty much generic these days, and there’s no real argument for spending any more.

Case

BitFenix Shinobi

£59.99/$64.99
Easy access to all components and not too noisy either, our favourite budget case looks better than others too.

Power supply

Cooler Master 80+

£69.98/$112.20
A decent 650W PSU that’s rated well for efficiency. The minimum you should try to get away with.

Mouse

Logitech G400

£29.78/$36.49
Classic Logitech style in a brand new mouse, this 3600dpi mouse is comfortable and precise.

Keyboard

Microsoft SideWinder X4
£24.97/$54.84
Backlighting, macros and anti-ghosting for £25? Yes please.

Monitor

LG IPS236V
£142.15/$249
Some of you think that an IPS screen is no good for gaming because of low response times. All I can say is: your loss.

Headset

Corsair HS1A
£33.98//$47.44
Being phased out for a newer model, so grab a bargain while they last.

Total: £879.35/$1240.40

(£126.83/$74.37 less than last week)

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/05/keep-your-pc-up-to-date-with-the-pc-gamer-rig-2/feed/ 39 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/04/the-pc-gamer-battlefield-3-benchtest-experiment-send-us-your-stats/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/04/the-pc-gamer-battlefield-3-benchtest-experiment-send-us-your-stats/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:02:55 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=64165 [..]]]> I’m still waiting for my copy of Battlefield 3 to finish installing and updating and all that, but as soon as it does I’ll be putting to the test the many claims of hardware vendors that you need to spend a fortune on new kit to get it playing perfectly.

While I’m waiting, however, here’s a little experiment I’d like you all to try at home.

There’s no way I can benchmark every combination of kit available to see how it performs running Battlefield 3 in the lab. But you want to know which graphics processor you should buy if you own x, or how much better y CPU is going to be than z.

So here’s a better idea: discuss amongst yourselves. With our help, of course.

We want as many of you to benchmark your PC or laptop running Battlefield 3 as possible, so that we can create the most comprehensive test of a program’s framerates ever. If it works, you should be able to compare your performance with similar set ups, and figure out the best upgrade by finding other combinations of kit already tested.

If it doesn’t I’ll delete this post and we shall never speak of it again.

It’s entirely unscientific, since proper testing would require everyone to be running the same version of Windows and the same drivers and using exactly the same sequence to benchmark in. But as a rough guide to what’s good for performance, it’s more than just a bit of fun.

All you have to do to take part is install Battlefield 3 and FRAPS. Start FRAPS first, and set it to record the minimum, average and maximum framerates (Min/Max/Avg), bound to your favourite hotkey. Then, when you’re in the game press the hotkey once to start the test, and press it again a minute or two later to stop it. Check the log in your FRAPS folder (usually C:\FRAPS), and enter the results, along with some hardware information, in the form below.

To try and keep things roughly comparable, if you could perform the test sometime around the start of Operation Metro, where you’re running around and fighting outside, that keeps things simple and more or less the same. Needless to say if you die while benchmarking you’ll probably need to start again after you spawn.

The important thing is that we’re all using the same settings and – as far as possible – resolution. So if you could use a generic ‘High’ profile for graphics and submit one set of scores at 1920×1080, that’d be much appreciated too.

If you want to share the results on your triple-monitor 3D capable machine for bragging rights, that’s fine – but getting as many as possible at the same resolution is what will make this work. So feel free to run the test twice. If you have a smaller screen, then you can also take part but just make it clear in the question about res.

Once results start to come in, I’ll publish a live version of the spreadsheet as a separate post. If you’re really keen, though, you can see the rawdata by following this link.

I should point out that no personal details are collected in this Q&A or held by myself or Future Publishing. It’s all as anonymous as anything on the web can be.

So get benchmarking and fill in the form below. And when you’ve done so, invite your friends to do the same.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/04/the-pc-gamer-battlefield-3-benchtest-experiment-send-us-your-stats/feed/ 57 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/04/just-arrived-samsung-700g7a/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/04/just-arrived-samsung-700g7a/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:42:54 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=64537 [..]]]> Not a name you’d normally associate with gaming notebooks, Samsung’s latest 700G7A has just turned up in the office ready for review in issue 235. With its 17.3inch, 1080p screen and £1500 price tag, it’s up against some fairly serious opposition from the likes of Alienware and ASUS, but I think it’ll do rather well.

Here’s why.

First off, it’s got a great screen – which is sadly still unusual for a high price laptop in which you’d expect everything to be the best. Part of the reason is that Samsung has a lot of know how when it comes to display technology, but it’s also because this is a high frequency monitor designed for 120Hz 3D.

Which means that in 2D mode, it’s as good as any laptop display I’ve seen barring Apple’s IPS ones.

Secondly, it’s got great specs. Unlike most of its peers in the 3D-laptop world, the 700G7A uses an AMD video card rather than an NVIDIA one. If you watch stereoscopic movies, the glasses are lightly and slightly cooler looking – more like a character in a Daniel Suarez novel than the lead from Joe 90.

More pertinently, though, AMD’s notebook video chips are much better value than NVIDIA’s at the moment. A similarly priced laptop with a GeForce on board would likely come with a GTX 560M. The Samsung 700G7A packs a Mobility Radeon HD6970M, which more or less doubles most of the benchmarks I’ve run at high detail settings. That’s because the AMD chip is roughly the same as a respectable Radeon HD6850 on the desktop, while the GTX 560M is somewhere between a GT 545 and a GTS 450

Shogun 2′s high detail 1080p benchmark goes from 14fps on the GTX 560M to 30 on the HD6970.

Aside from performance, the 700G7A is also really well built. The mostly plastic chassis isn’t particularly good looking, but at 3.5Kgs its reasonably light for a 17inch. Most importantly the keyboard is well designed for gaming and there’s plenty of I/O connectors, including an easy to upgrade hard drive bay for adding extra storage if you need it.

There’s also a rotating dial on the side for switching between an overclocked game mode, general purpose mode, silent ‘library’ mode and maximum battery saving mode. The last is a bit of a joke – even with the dial locked here you’ll be lucky to get two hours out of it because it doesn’t switch to the on-board Intel graphics – but you can customise each setting far better than on other laptops, and there’s something about its physical presence I love.

There’ll be a full review with more benchmarks in issue 235, but based on first impressions it’s likely that the 700G7A will do very well indeed.


]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/04/just-arrived-samsung-700g7a/feed/ 12 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/03/pc-market-still-growing-lenovo-more-than-others/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/03/pc-market-still-growing-lenovo-more-than-others/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:37:39 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=63302 [..]]]> Market research companies IDC and Gartner have released their quarterly report on PC sales. Amusingly, on the day that we’re supposed to be entering the post-PC era with the launch of Apple’s iOS 5, they show interesting – if uneven – growth in shipments across the world.

Sales of PCs compared to this time last year were flat in the US, and down in Europe, but across the whole world IDC reckons they’re up 3.6%, and Gartner broadly concurs with a 3.2% estimate. The numbers are short of estimates, which were rather hopeful at around the 5% mark, but still – all things considered – not bad. In total, both firms reckon 91.8m PCs were sold in the last quarter, give or take a little.

That doesn’t include tablets, of course.

The biggest winner is apparently Chinese manufacturer Lenovo, whose market share increased 25.2% according to Gartner. Both analysts say that they have leapt into second place behind HP – whose PC portfolio they’ve also been widely tipped to buy. If that happened, more than one in three PCs sold would be manufactured by Lenovo.

Apple also sold a lot more OSX machines, especially in the US where they’re now the third largest vendor. It’s suspected that this is largely as a result of the performance boost and price drop in the MacBook Air line up earlier in the year. I know my father in law, who’s never really liked Apple, went out and bought one off the back of that, and no doubt many others did too.

So there you are: Apple – technology your Dad likes. And he also listens to Status Quo. Never let that image leave your mind – is it any surprise all the young ‘uns use BlackBerry’s these days?

It’s also a good news day for ASUS, who also increased their marketshare considerably and put on more than a million sales depending on whose figures you read.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/03/pc-market-still-growing-lenovo-more-than-others/feed/ 28 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/03/hard-drive-shortages-to-last-until-march/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/03/hard-drive-shortages-to-last-until-march/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:56:13 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=64477 [..]]]> The water may be starting to recede, but devastating floods in Thailand are going to affect the cost of computers and components for at least another six months, according to analysts at IDC and IHS iSupply this week.

Prices for hard drives have rocketed in the last few weeks as a result of factory closures in Thailand as the country has been battered by storms since July. The cost of storage has more than doubled at UK online retailers, and the US is following suit. Consumer prices are rising faster than business costs due to the rapid buying up of any surpluses by IT channel companies keen to guarantee the best deals for their customers.

The Thai floods are the worst the country has faced in over 50 years and have affected over nine million people, including most of the capital Bangkok. Rural and poor areas have suffered the worst: over 400 people have been killed already and the Red Cross is warning of a potential typhoid epidemic to follow.

It might seem spurious to talk about hard drives in the face of such terrible natural disaster –but the country is a major hub within the hard drive industry and home to major fabrication plants owned by Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba, as well as manufacturers of smaller components for export to other fabs overseas. Western Digital has been the worst hit, and it alone was producing more than 10 million drives a month from its Thai operation.

With the temporary closure of these facilities the knock on effects to other devices, like laptops and cameras, could be long term.

My advice? Put off upgrading your hard drive for a bit and consider donating some of the money you’ll save to a charity involved in the clean up work there, like Save the Children.

(Photo via Facebook/The Register)

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/03/hard-drive-shortages-to-last-until-march/feed/ 28 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/31/kinect-for-windows-to-go-commercial/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/31/kinect-for-windows-to-go-commercial/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:17:58 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=64318 [..]]]> Microsoft has announced that developers will soon be able to charge for Windows software that uses a Kinect as an input device. A non-commercial beta SDK for Windows development has been available to download from Microsoft Research since April, along with various programming resources. But profiting from desktop development has so far been prohibited.

That restriction should be lifted soon after the new year, apparently.

Last Christmas, Microsoft’s Kinect was by far and away the most interesting thing happening on consoles. The web cam based motion controller with built in voice recognition rather showed PlayStation Move and the Wii Wand what for and threatened to revolutionise something or other about the way we interact with computers.

A year on, and things have gone bizarrely quiet. There still aren’t many Kinect games for Xbox 360, and while there’s a pretty good unofficial driver for getting Kinect working with Windows games, it’s still more of a curiosity than a must-try.

Perhaps wisely, Microsoft isn’t targeting PC gamers in the built up to a proper Kinect for Windows launch. Instead it’s quoting some 200+ companies that are investigating the potential of the motion sensor around the office. What Microsoft is definitely not saying – but which seems obvious to any observer – is that the Metro interface of Windows 8 should work rather well with a gesture-based controller, and not just touch screens.

But there is enormous game potential on the PC. Check out the video of Rome: Total War running with Kinect and voice commands below.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/31/kinect-for-windows-to-go-commercial/feed/ 21 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/29/keep-your-pc-up-to-date-with-the-pc-gamer-rig/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/29/keep-your-pc-up-to-date-with-the-pc-gamer-rig/#comments Sat, 29 Oct 2011 10:00:28 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=64224 [..]]]> Readers of the UK mag (and our forum) will be aware of the PC Gamer Rig. It’s what we keep in various stages of disrepair in the office and consider to be the ‘average’ PC – one that’s not too expensive, but specced up well enough to run any game past or present at a respectable lick. It functions both as a guide to the sort of base system we’d expect anyone buying or building a new machine from scratch, and as a guide to upgrades if you’re looking to just replace a single part.

And now it’s online, in a new weekly feature we’re calling ‘The PC Gamer Rig’. Catchy, isn’t it?

The arbitrary budget we set ourselves for The Rig is £1,000/$1,500, but we’ll always try to get the best value possible out of it. We’re a little bit over budget this month before of the sudden rise in hard drive prices as a result of flooding in Thailand, but we reckon they’ll be back down again soon. The general idea is that if you want to put together a PC that’s better – be our guest. But this is a sort of ‘PC Gamer Recommended Specs’ – generally speaking, spending less will be a false saving as performance or longevity will suffer.

In its new online incarnation, we’ll be using The Rig to flag up new hardware releases and kit we’re testing in the office, find new and better bargains online, and benchmark new games as they come out.

This week’s set-up was benchmarked running Battlefield 3 at generic ‘High’ settings, 1920×1080 resolution, at a steady 55 frames per second.

The prices shown below are based on various shopping comparisons and best value finds, linked to where possible.

One final thing – for reference, although the Rig should look like it does in the picture at the top, it usually looks more like this (and no, that’s not the right motherboard…):



Kit list

CPU

Intel Core i5 2500K

£168.08/$209.99
An unlocked Sandy Bridge quad core, capable of all the top end features but hyperthreading.

Motherboard

Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

£81.98/$119.99
An awesome Z68 board, comes with mSATA connectors for mini SSDs and Intel’s caching technology.

RAM

Crucial Ballistic Sport

£50.39/$55.99
Eight gigabytes of fast 1600MHz DDR3 for £50. Grab it quick, just in case it’s a misprint.

3D Card

GeForce GTX 560Ti

£173.99/$219.82
A good low cost card that’ll get you gaming at decent framerates on a single monitor.

Hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB

£161.42/$139.99
Hard drive prices have shot through the roof over the last week, doubling as a result of flooding in Thailand. Expect this to come down again soon.

DVD drive

LG GH22NP21

£16.84/$21.99
Fast DVD writers are pretty much generic these days, and there’s no real argument for spending any more.

Case

BitFenix Shinobi

£59.99/$64.99
Easy access to all components and not too noisy either, our favourite budget case looks better than others too.

Power supply

Cooler Master 80+

£69.98/$112.20
A decent 650W PSU that’s rated well for efficiency. The minimum you should try to get away with.

Mouse

Logitech G400

£26.38/$34.99
Classic Logitech style in a brand new mouse, this 3600dpi mouse is comfortable and precise.

Keyboard

Microsoft SideWinder X4
£24.99/$54.84
Backlighting, macros and anti-ghosting for £25? Yes please.

Monitor

LG IPS236V
£142.15/$229.99
Astonishingly low price for an IPS screen, and the LED backlight means it’s thin, so hardly takes up any space on your desk.

Headset

Corsair HS1A
£29.99/$49.99
Being phased out for a newer model, so grab a bargain while they last.

Total: £1006.18/$1314.77

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/29/keep-your-pc-up-to-date-with-the-pc-gamer-rig/feed/ 62 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/26/toshiba-launches-usb-powered-monitor/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/26/toshiba-launches-usb-powered-monitor/#comments Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:56:15 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=64071 [..]]]> Remember when USB was for gamepads and mice? It seems that the future for the data transfer port includes fuelling low energy monitors.

Toshiba is the latest manufacturer to announce an LED screen which can be powered entirely from a standard USB 2.0 port. The cunningly named Toshiba USB LCD Mobile Monitor is exactly that, and while it’s not what we’d normally look for in a gaming screen, there’s a few things that make it look worth trying out.

For starters, this isn’t the first USB powered monitor we’ve seen, that honour went to AOC a few months ago. But AOC’s screens are desktop monitors which require the combined power of two USB ports to light up. Toshiba’s rather smaller 14inch panel uses a single USB link to your PC, which also carries the video signal and allows for a small control panel built into the monitor surround for playing back media files.

The USB LCD Mobile Monitor is also very small; just 15.5mm thick and 795g. It’s really not a screen designed for gaming, however. The resolution’s only 1366×768, it’s about half as bright as a desktop panel (220nits), the contrast ratio is just 400:1 and the response time is a lethargic 16ms. All these things would seem to be designed to reduce power consumption, for obvious reasons – the maximum total power draw must be below 3.15W to work across USB.

Three things really attract me, though. First off, the price. At £150/$240, if you can run games across both screens it could be a – niche – idea to buy two for triple head play on a laptop, or to carry to a LAN party and so on. The press shot above could be great for spectators.

Then there’s what this might mean for the future. Making monitors ultra energy efficient is far more important to my mind than adding 3D and so on.

And finally, I miss the (very) old days when monitors plugged into an external power out port on the back of your PC, rather than the mains. One cable to the mains and everything daisy chained off of your desktop means fewer cables over all, and that means I’ll finally stop tripping over that eight way mains adaptor that takes up most of the room under my desk and present a rather obvious fire hazard.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/26/toshiba-launches-usb-powered-monitor/feed/ 8 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/25/happy-birthday-windows-xp/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/25/happy-birthday-windows-xp/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:00:13 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=64046 [..]]]> Many happy returns, Windows XP, and congratulations on reaching the double digits of old age. Microsoft’s venerable operating system turns ten today, which in computer years is the equivalent of you being born in the time of Augustus Caesar.

According to the latest Steam hardware survey, almost one in five of you are still using XP, and it’s a remarkably well loved OS for one which had such a mixed reception at its birth. Greeted cautiously by those who feared the friendly nature of its large green Start button and colourful icons (compared to the austerity of Windows 98, at least), by the time it’s replacement rolled round many refused to give it up. Indeed, they clung to XP so adamantly that Microsoft was forced to extend support for XP (ie continue updating security patches) until April 2014.

Possibly that says more about its successor than it does about XP, but the point remains.

Thanks to this and the fact that netbooks with XP preinstalled were still available 12 months ago, Windows XP was the most commonly used operating system in world up until July this year.

My colleague Gary Marshall has a potted history of XP over on our sister site, TechRadar, where he argues it’s time for those clinging on to its familiar interface should let go and embrace the future. I quite like the fact that it’s still popular with gamers though, I picture a small hardcore holding out against the artificial DX10/11-exclusivity of Windows 7 as being quite romantic at heart. But then I use Linux, so what do I know?

In the meantime, I’ll be cracking open that old laptop at the back of cupboard and reminding myself that despite its shortcomings – the biggest one being a registry which could turn feral with the first badly coded program – it was an OS from a happier, simpler time and might yet be ultimately remembered as Microsoft’s best.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/25/happy-birthday-windows-xp/feed/ 64 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/23/get-your-pc-ready-for-battlefield-3/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/23/get-your-pc-ready-for-battlefield-3/#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:00:33 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=63722 [..]]]> There aren’t many game launches which get people looking at their PC and wondering if it’s powerful enough. But the seemingly high system specs of Battlefield 3 have got a lot of us suddenly concerned about the state of our hardware.

With just one weekend to go until it’s released, it’s time to face the question: do you need to upgrade for Battlefield 3?

Confession time: I didn’t get enough hands on time with the beta to do reliable benchmarking, but since there’s a day one patch and new graphics drivers already confirmed, even if I had it wouldn’t mean much. If you do want to see a very thorough analysis of graphics card performance in the beta, though, I can recommend Ryan from PC Perspective‘s work comparing 10 different chips at a range of settings here.

What I can say is that I think a lot of concerns will turn out unfounded. It ran flawlessly at Ultra settings on my generation old Radeon HD5870 from 2009. That was backed up by an embarrassingly good CPU, mind you.

Then again, perhaps I’m in the minority in thinking that. According to a report on IGN a couple of days ago, Battlefield 3 has already resulted in $1bn of PC sales and upgrades in the last year. I’m a little sceptical about that figure – NVIDIA’s last three month sales figure are good, but only $100m more in GPUs than last year.

To recap, here’s the official specs:

Minimum System Requirements

Processor: 2 GHz Dual Core (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHz)
Memory: 2 GB
Hard Drive: 20 GB
Graphics card (NVIDIA): DirectX 10.0 compatible with 512 MB RAM

Recommended System Requirements

Processor: Quad-core CPU
Memory: 4 GB
Hard Drive: 20 GB
Graphics Card: DirectX 11 compatible with 1024 MB RAM

Not too demanding, huh? I’d argue any PC built in the last few years should meet the highest recommended specs. But if you are planning to upgrade, here’s the kit I’d recommend for playing BF3 on a single standard 1920×1080 desktop monitor.

CPU

Any quad core CPU should be able to run Battlefield 3 flat out, but the best buy at the moment is Intel’s Core i5 2500K, which costs around £170/ $220. There are lower cost, slower Core i5s – and I’d argue that the performance difference is going to be negligible – but the K designation means this chip is unlocked for overclocking, which is a useful talent to have for just ~£10/$10 more. If you afford the extra £100/$100 for a Core i7 chip, you’ll get four extra virtual cores thanks to Intel’s Hyperthreading technology. Again, nice to have, but not essential just for Battlefield 3.

Remember that a CPU upgrade almost always involves changing your motherboard and RAM too (these chips all require a motherboard with an Intel Socket 1155 compatible chipset). The point being that if you’re on limited funds and already have a Core 2 quad or later, you’ll probably find a much bigger performance upgrade by changing your…




Graphics card

The recommended specs include a reference to a GeForce GTX 560 (approx £140/$210). That should get you running at Ultra settings. It’s worth reiterating that there’s more than one type of GTX 560, though. Those that have the ‘Ti’ suffix have more shader cores and a higher clockspeed. The Ti versions cost £40/$40-ish more, but will likely give you headroom to add things like anti-aliasing if you want better image quality.

If it’s a Radeon you’re after, the HD6870 is an incredible bargain at the moment, at around £120/$180. It’s broadly similar to the plain GTX 560 in performance. Given that there’s not that much difference between image quality at High settings and Ultra settings in the game, I wouldn’t blame you at all if you wanted to save the cash and go for this. To give yourself a comfortable amount of headroom for maximum settings if you can afford the 2GB version of the HD6950 (£220/$280) it’ll likely last you for years – although it is more expensive than the GeForce GTX 560Ti.

More expensive GPUs like the GeForce GTX 580 or Radeon HD6990, or even a Crossfire or SLI set-up, are really only likely to be necessary if you’re thinking about triple monitor set-ups or using 3D. There’s a whole other article in that for another time.




Keyboard, Mice and Headsets

Given that the differences between Ultra settings and High settings in Battlefield 3 really are cosmetic, and if you’re looking at aliased outlines you’re not paying enough attention to the game, there’s a good chance you won’t need to upgrade at all. In which case, if you have the money to spare, you might be thinking about new peripherals. There are some great new mechanical keyboards coming through at the moment, like Razer’s Black Widow Stealth Ultimate or Corsair’s K60, which are amazing if you can afford them. Otherwise it’s hard to beat Microsoft’s X4 if you’re on a budget.

Headset wise, you’ll want something to help you communicate with team-mates. As anyone who regularly reads the mag will know, I’m normally quite dismissive of cheap headsets, but Corsair’s HS1A is currently available for just £30 over at Overclockers, and at that price is pretty much unbeatable.

Feel free to add your own recommendations/reviews/bargain finds below…

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/23/get-your-pc-ready-for-battlefield-3/feed/ 188 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/18/hard-drives-are-six-times-bigger-with-seasoning/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/18/hard-drives-are-six-times-bigger-with-seasoning/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:26:00 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=63489 [..]]]> Cooking fans rejoice: hard drive capacity can be increased more than six fold, and all it takes is a pinch of salt. Wired is reporting that a research team from Singapore has been experimenting with the world’s favourite condiment. They’ve come to the conclusion that sodium chloride can turn a normal 500gigabit/inch drive platter into a massively dense 3.3terabit/inch one.

Before you go all Heston Blumenthal on your hard disk, though, it should be added that the salt has to be added at the manufacturing stage and not afterwards. Also, it requires judicious use of high resolution electron beam lithography. And you don’t have a high resolution e-beam lithograph next to your Magimix, do you?

The reason for the increased capacity is that the salt additive and lithographic technique cause the magnetic grains which used to store data can be grown to a larger size and arrange themselves in a pattern that allows one bit to be saved per grain. What the impacts of this would be on long term storage – normally groups of grains are used for each bit providing some resilience – haven’t been discussed yet.

With the physical limits of today’s storage techniquesfast being reached, all manufacturers are looking for new ways to continue increasing drive capacity in line with historical trends – roughly double the space for the same cost every two years. While salt-powered storage is still strictly in the laboratory only, we may start seeing the first ‘heat assisted’ hard drives – which promise up to ten times current capacity – some time next year.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/18/hard-drives-are-six-times-bigger-with-seasoning/feed/ 60 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/17/nvidia-improves-depth-perception-with-3d-vision-2/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/17/nvidia-improves-depth-perception-with-3d-vision-2/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:15:29 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=63372 [..]]]> Just when you thought it was safe to put your regular sunglasses back on, NVIDIA releases a sequel to its stereoscopic rendering technology 3D Vision. It’s called 3D Vision 2, and funnily enough doesn’t have much to do with graphics cards.

The current crop of 3D Vision cards and drivers are already more than competent at adding a second camera angle to games, and work with pretty much any DirectX game. For 3D Vision 2, then, NVIDIA have focussed on the supporting hardware.

For starters, there’s a new set of active shutter glasses, with larger lenses for larger screens and a new, apparently more comfortable, frame. The new lenses are also better at blocking out light, which should make it less likely that you see left eye pictures in your right eye and vice versa.

Perhaps more interesting is a new feature for monitors called 3D LightBoost. This ups the brightness and contrast levels, in order to overcome the fact then when you look through the dark lenses of a pair of 3D glasses, everything goes, well, a bit dark. The new spec also covers better antighosting.

I’ve unknowingly tested one of these screens in the last week, on the Toshiba X770 laptop which was sent in for a group test appearing next month. While I’m still not personally sold on 3D, it is probably the best laptop screen I’ve ever used for 2D – especially on a 17inch machine.

Other screens which will support 3D Vision 2 and 3D LightBoost include the 27inch ASUS VG278H.


Is 3D there yet? NVIDIA’s general manager of 3D Vision, Phil Eisner, reckons that people who have the hardware use it stereoscopically about 50% of the time, and that there are 60 plus screens and laptops which support 3D Vision on sale.

My concern is that the new 3D Vision 2 spec doesn’t cover graphics hardware – and Eisner says there are no plans to in the future either. In his place, I’d consider that just as important as getting the screens right.

The reason is that there’s a trend with gaming laptops at the moment for manufacturers to kit out machines with expensive screens and glasses, and then use a second tier GPUs to keep the price down. Like putting a GeForce GTX 560M in a £1,500-ish laptop, when AMD’s Mobility Radeon HD6990 is available in competitors for the same price. In my experience so far, the GTX 560M is not a chip which can produce playable framerates consistently in native resolutions with 3D on. The worry would be that if anyone is buying a laptop specifically for 3D gaming (does such a person exist?) they’re going to find it hard to get games running smoohtly, and be put off the technology for several more revisions.

At this stage, where the technology is way ahead of consumer demand, it would make more sense to ensure the best possible experience at the expense of getting the 3D Vision logo onto everything. That’s my two penn’orth, anyway.

Like it or not, though, 3D is here to stay and with near ubiquitous hardware and software compatibility it’s likely just a matter of time before everything is 3D compatible. And if things like 3D LightBoost benefit us all, maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

NVIDIA says there are over 550 current PC games compatible with the 3D Vision and 3D Vision 2, by virtue of the fact it works with almost any DirectX software. They’re doing all they can to ensure new releases are supported at launch too, so Batman: Arkham Asylum, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and LA Noire will (should) all work with your 3D specs straight away.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/17/nvidia-improves-depth-perception-with-3d-vision-2/feed/ 46 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/12/amds-8-core-bulldozer-fx-chips-launch-full-review-round-up/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/12/amds-8-core-bulldozer-fx-chips-launch-full-review-round-up/#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:04:47 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=63136 [..]]]> AMD’s FX series processors are finally released into the world today. Based on the company’s brand new Bulldozer architecture, the first FX CPUs have between four and eight core designs, are sold with liquid cooling, and will cost from $119 to $245 (SRP).

Bulldozer is the first CPU that AMD has designed from the ground up since the Athlon 64 in 2003. If it feels like we’ve been waiting years for it, that’s because we have. The processor launched today first appeared on AMD roadmaps back in 2007, and was originally scheduled to arrive in 2009. There’s been much speculation about its potential performance and whether or not it’s a viable competitor for Intel’s Core series, which something AMD has been lacking for some time. Today’s the big day that we finally find out.

The important thing is that the Bulldozer design will underpin future chips the AMD line-up for some time to come, just as the K8 design of the Athlon 64 was the basis of Phenom and Phenom II. A revision to Bulldozer which includes on-board graphics, called Trinity, has already been confirmed for next year, as have server versions of the chip with up to 20 cores.

Today, however, AMD is launching seven chips, ranging from the low cost, four core FX-4100 to the eight core flagship, the FX-8150. Behind the names, there’s an unusual design, which requires a bit more explanation than the traditional CPU divided up into self contained ‘cores’.

In the Bulldozer design, what AMD has done is to look at the way parts of a core are utilised and throw more silicon at the bits that need it. A basic Bulldozer building block, or module, has two separate integer cores but just one floating point core and a shared prefetch and decode unit. As a result, AMD counts each of these modules as two cores, so a four module chip is an eight core processor in AMD terminology. Technically, they aren’t true dual core modules in the truest sense, but should perform like one in most circumstances – moreso than Intel’s Hyperthreading, for example.

The top end FX-8150 processor is a four module, eight core chip with a base clockspeed of 3.6GHz. Just like Core CPUs and Phenoms, the FX base clockspeed is the one it rarely runs up. It has two automatic overclocking modes which allow the chip to run faster when required, provided that the maximum power draw isn’t exceeded, and can shut down cores when not in use to save power. The first auto-overclocking mode is ‘Turbo Core’, which can speed up every core on the die for multithreaded opertations, the second is a more aggressive ‘Max Turbo’ which kicks in if less then half the cores are being utilised and allows for even higher speeds.

All FX processors have an unlocked multiplier to enable BIOS overclocking by the owner too, and AMD has also launched a revision to its Overdrive desktop software to tune the chips from within Windows.

One very useful thing about Bulldozer is that from a hardware perspective, it should drop into current generation 900 series motherboards as an easy upgrade for existing AMD-based PCs. It’s also compatible with older motherboards that have an AM3 socket, if the manufacturer releases an appropriate BIOS update.

Does Bulldozer live to our expectations? What were our expectations? It may not come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the story of Bulldozer’s development thus far, but it is disappointing to find out that AMD is pitching the first FX chips as superior to Intel’s four core Core i5 range, but not as a competitor to the higher performing Core i7s which can handle 8-12 threads thanks to hyperthreading. According to the official blurb, AMD reckons it’ll beat a top end Core i5 2500K in gaming benchmarks, although it falls short of Core i7 performance.

Still, says AMD, it’s a lot cheaper than an i7 and in applications that make a lot of use of multithreading, like video encoding (without GOU acceleration) and photoediting, it’s close to the performance of Intel’s current six core chips.

I haven’t had a chance to test Bulldozer fully just yet, so I’ll reserve my judgement until I’ve been able to put it through it’s paces. But what does the web think? Here’s a round up of the best reviews so far, and unfortunately none of them make happy reading for AMD. I’ll be adding our own as soon as we get hold of a sample chip to test.

Our sister site TechRadar says that the flagship FX-8150 is “inevitably… something of a disappointment“. In games, especially, they find the FX-8150 lags behind the cheaper Core i5 2500K, and it’s quite power hungry too.

Anandtech is also deflated. “The improvement over the previous generation Phenom II X6 simply isn’t enough to justify an upgrade for existing AM3+ platform owners” says Mr Lal Shrimpi. Still, he optimistic about future processors based on Bulldozer.

Tomshardware concurs, saying that FX does well in multithreaded programs but doesn’t have the overall performance to compete. “The processor falls on its face in apps that clearly weren’t written for the “go wide” approach to procuring performance“, they say. Whatever that means.

The ever thorough X-Bit says “AMD didn’t succeed in launching a revolutionary desktop CPU“.

And then there’s…. well, you get the picture. There are scores of other reviews but they all couch their findings in the same language of disappointment. Which isn’t just bad news for AMD, it’s a problem for anyone who thinks competition is a good thing for innovation and price in the processor world.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/12/amds-8-core-bulldozer-fx-chips-launch-full-review-round-up/feed/ 39 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/07/cornwall-gets-4g-first-in-the-uk/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/07/cornwall-gets-4g-first-in-the-uk/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:18:25 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=63028 [..]]]> Residents of St Newlyn East and South Newquay in Cornwall have become the first in the UK to receive 4G LTE services on their mobile phones, thanks to trials of the technology which have kicked off today.

Mobile provider Everything Everywhere – known as T-Mobile and Orange in old money – is running the trial of 200 subscribers, which was first announced back in May.


LTE is one of several potential successors to the current 3G standards for mobile broadband access, and the one likely to be most widely adopted as 4G around the globe. It promises theoretical transfer speeds of up to 300Mbps directly to a handset, although it’s unlikely that the denizens of Cornwall will be getting anything like that.

Note for Americans. HSPA+ is not 4G. Doesn’t matter what the ITU say.

The 25 square kilometre area in Cornwall was chosen because it’s one of the UK’s many rural ‘not spots’, where traditional ADSL can’t be used to provide a reliable service. Everything Everywhere has partnered with BT Wholesale for the test, in order to see if their network has the capability to extend domestic as well as mobile internet services in to hard to reach areas. Of the 200 participants, 100 have been issued with next gen handsets, while the rest are testing fixed line kit.

Telecoms regulator Ofcom is planning to auction off licences for the 800MHz and 2.6GHz wireless spectrum suitable for 4G LTE next year. It announced today, however, that there will be holding another round of consultations on the subject, pushing the actual auction back to late summer 2012 or beyond. The government will no doubt be hoping for a repeat of the 2001 windfall of £22.5bn that a similar process for 3G licences raised. The first nationwide networks are expected to appear in 2013, which will leave the UK behind only such technological trailblazers as, um, Uzbekistan for mobile connectivity.

In the meantime, if anyone in St Newlyn East fancies letting me know what their Battlefield 3 ping is like over 4G, I’d really like to know.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/07/cornwall-gets-4g-first-in-the-uk/feed/ 8 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/01/nvidia-experiments-with-3d-storytelling/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/01/nvidia-experiments-with-3d-storytelling/#comments Sat, 01 Oct 2011 11:00:56 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=62583 [..]]]> What do 3D effects add in terms of storytelling? That’s a discussion which comes up a lot no matter what visual medium you’re working in at the moment, be it games, films or photography.

While not at all game related, it is has been interesting to look at techniques involved in one experiment for 3D storytelling that’s taken place in Spitalfields Market, London, this week. Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), an NGO which sponsors doctors and hospital workers in crisis regions and the developing world, teamed up with NVIDIA and one of the best photojournalism outfits around to create a short piece of 3D photojournalism about one of their midwives in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Why I think this is important for PCG readers is that it’s about what 3D can do to improve an already great story. From a film making perspective, we’re still waiting for 3D movies to have their ‘Hitchcock moment’, when the technology is used to create a more compelling narrative than could ever have done before. Right now, the common complaint about 3D movies is that story has become subservient to the effect rather than the other way around: in many big budget films plot mechanics often seem to exist purely for something to be thrown dramatically out towards the audience.

The argument takes a slightly different form in games production. Games are created in fully 3D worlds, so applying stereoscopic camera angles is technically trivial. But should more effort be spent making sequences that are designed to be watched in 3D, rather than simply letting the graphics card drivers do their bit and let the ‘moments’ come from being in a more immersive world?

Sony made the bold claim a couple of days ago that gamers can improve their scores by using 3D screens. Others reckon that the effect often looks forced and distracting, like cardboard cutout scenery at the local am dram panto. Personally, I struggle with 3D because its unreliable and has innately high barriers to enjoyment – cost of kit and the necessity of wearing glasses being the obvious ones.

So the question is, how does 3D move beyond gimmickry and become an integral part of the storytelling mechanic?

Which is why, even though it’s not about games, NVIDIA’s latest application of its 3D Vision technology is worth looking at – it’s a story in its purest form. The MSF installation was shot by a photographers from duckrabbit (one of the best multimedia/editorial agencies in the world whose blog is required reading if you care at all about photography) using a Fuji W3. NVIDIA has donated PCs, screens and glasses for public showings of the film, and for the last six days MSF volunteers have been encouraging passers-by at Spitalfields Market in London to view it. 2D and 3D versions of the pics are being hosted over on NVIDIA’s 3D Vision site, and there’ll be a 3D version of the film up there soon too. In the meantime, you can watch the same film in 2D over at MSF’s pages.

What I found interesting is that it was the scenes directors and producers would expect to work well in 3D which felt a bit flat – cars splashing through water and people standing looking at the camera feel a little bit artificial. Where the 3D was most powerful was where it added something to the drama – forcing you to really focus on the baby or face which was closer to the camera than the team of surgeons behind it, for example. Where the stereoscopy brings out an element of the story that might otherwise be missed – and that’s a lesson anyone working in 3D can learn.

It reminded me of something mentioned at a recent round table hosted by Alienware on the subject – that there’s an art to 3D which is waiting to be mastered by someone, but no-one’s sure who just yet.

Which is exactly why you should look at the best examples of this emerging form where ever they come from.

Plus, it’s a great film and a worthy cause, of course.



]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/01/nvidia-experiments-with-3d-storytelling/feed/ 22 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/30/lian-li-produces-pick-upable-pc-case/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/30/lian-li-produces-pick-upable-pc-case/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 08:55:45 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=62420 [..]]]> I wouldn’t recommend it if you want to build a rig capable of maxing out Battlefield 3, but for anything less Lian-Li has just announced an elegantly sized and extremely good looking case, the PC-TU200.

Standing just 32cm high by 21cm wide, its luggage-like looks are set off by a large handle on the top. Obvious uses are for a system you plan on hauling around to LAN parties, although it’s one with awesome modding potential if you’re that way inclined too.

The thing is, with modern components running so cool and quiet, it’s getting harder and harder to justify the giant towers of the past for gaming. The PC-TU200 may be designed to fit a Micro-ITX motherboard, but that doesn’t mean a computer full of compromise. I was eyeing up Zotac’s Z68ITX-A-E just the other day – that’s a tiny mobo that’ll take the latest Core i7 processors, if you’ll let it.

That may not leave you a lot of options for expansion (it only has one PCI-E port) but if you’re aren’t planning on going for SLI or Crossfire graphics, it should have all you need. The PC-TU200 has plenty of space inside for four hard drives and a full length 300mm graphics card, which should be enough to squeeze in an HD6950 or HD6970 if you try.

I should mention that I’m a big fan of Lian-Li’s cases. While I haven’t seen the PC-TU200 yet – and will hold off making a final judgement about packing a high end GPU and CPU in there together until I do – if it’s any where near as well engineered as the majority of their product range to date then there’s a good chance I’ll be rebuilding my media centre machine again.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/30/lian-li-produces-pick-upable-pc-case/feed/ 13 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/29/will-windows-store-take-on-steam/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/29/will-windows-store-take-on-steam/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:00:52 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61923 [..]]]> Have you tried Windows 8 yet? According to Microsoft, over half a million people downloaded the developer build of the new operating system within 24 hours of it being released to the public at the start of the BUILD conference in Seattle this week.

You can get your copy of Windows 8 to try out here, although you should be warned that it’s not stable enough to use as an everyday OS just yet.

We’ve already talked a bit about the integration of Xbox Live into Windows 8, and what ARM compatibility means for gaming. There is one more big change coming through, though: the Windows Store.

Just like Apple’s App Store, which started on the iPhone and is now an integral part of the OSX desktop, this is designed to be a simple shop front for a software repository. It’s not the first time Microsoft has tried something similar – Games for Windows and Windows Vista Ultimate Extras spring to mind – but the world knows how to do these things properly now, and from what we’ve seen so far the Windows Store is a vast improvement over its predecessors.

The main purpose of the Windows Store is to provide apps for the Metro interface. That’s the tile-based, touch screen friendly tablet part of Windows 8 which is proving rather controversial among the gaming community. Indeed, it will be the only way to install Metro apps on a PC or tablet, and work as a one click to buy and install model, just like the App Store and Marketplace. Similarly, there will be quality control and approvals to go through to get an app published, plus – Microsoft says – a much more secure installation model compared to traditional desktop programs.

But that isn’t it’s exclusive purpose. There aren’t many details about how the Store will work with the more traditional side of Windows, but there will definitely be an area for downloading x86 programs too. Microsoft talks about “the tools you know and love” being in the store, which presumably includes games as well as stuff like Office and Quicken (which was demoed on stage).

What’s interesting for games publishers is that Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows and Windows Live, has said that there’ll be no requirements to change licensing models for existing programs.

For Metro apps, at least, you’ll be have access to all the programs you’ve paid for on up to five client machines – and the assumption is that you’ll be able to do the same thing with desktop programs too. That will make Windows Store a pretty strong competitor for Steam and other download services like Direct2Drive.

The only thing is that right now, Microsoft’s attention seems to be focussed on using the Store to deliver tablet apps. Which is great, but since programs compiled for Windows on ARM won’t run on Windows x86 and vice versa, the desktop shopfront may yet end up as an afterthought, and it’ll need to be much more than that if it’s to attract people away from the established services.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/29/will-windows-store-take-on-steam/feed/ 60 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/29/hp-wins-ironically-named-new-pc-award/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/29/hp-wins-ironically-named-new-pc-award/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:13:23 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61611 [..]]]> Someone in HP’s marketing department has very dark sense of humour, or events have conspired to produce one of the most serendipitous pieces of product name irony I can remember. Barely three weeks after announcing to analysts that they were looking to either spin off its PC business as a separate company or sell it off altogether, HP have launched a brand new gaming PC.

It’s called the Phoenix.

The HP Pavillion HPE Phoenix to be exact, but the question is whether or not this is a deliberate reference to the fact that HP were hauled over the coals after their statement about the Personal Systems Group (PSG)? It would be a less than subtle reflection of UK PSG MD* Paul Hunter’s defensive statement that “the team in the UK remains committed to creating and supporting great products and services.”

Look, see, you thought we were dead, but we rise again and all that.

I suspect, however, that given the length of time it takes to develop product marketing and the fact HP’s announcement was a surprise to almost everyone, this is just one of those instances of perfect timing.

So what of the Phoenix itself?

There’s not much in the way of specs available at the moment, beyond 16GB of RAM and a “250W graphics card” – which is co-incidentally the TDP of a very nice Radeon HD6970. But it looks acceptably garish and – if my GPU guess is right – has an even more attractive price tag of £949. Especially if the monitor and peripherals pictured are included.

It’ll go on sale next month, and I’ll update with more specs as they become available.

*Beat that, acronym fans.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/29/hp-wins-ironically-named-new-pc-award/feed/ 14 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/23/nvidia-says-pc-games-to-overtake-consoles-by-2014/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/23/nvidia-says-pc-games-to-overtake-consoles-by-2014/#comments Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:40:31 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=62387 [..]]]> Graphics vendor NVIDIA reckons that the total amount of money spent on PC games will be greater than that splashed out on console titles within the next three years.

That’s according to a report over at Techgage, which says that the claims were made during a conference call with analysts yesterday.

The figures come from research firm DFC Intelligence, and appear to relate to the US only – a couple of weeks ago the same firm produced a report which said global online sales alone are worth $19.3bn in 2010, compared to the $15bn total for PC software in the graph above.

Before we get too excited, though, a lot of the money that’s being talked about isn’t from retail sales or even digital downloads – PC gaming in the traditional sense is not going to be a bigger market than all the consoles combined any time soon. Rather it’s a reflection of booming growth in free-to-play models and microtransactions for Facebook games et al – which won’t sell many graphics cards.

It doesn’t include smartphones and tablet games, however, but does reflect DFC’s belief that by 2013 online games sales and new business models will surpass sales of retail software.

The one thing that is worth taking away from this is that publishers might want to reconsider creating unique IP for PC games again.

(Via PCPer.com)

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/23/nvidia-says-pc-games-to-overtake-consoles-by-2014/feed/ 23 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/20/hands-on-with-sonys-external-graphics-card-its-superb/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/20/hands-on-with-sonys-external-graphics-card-its-superb/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 16:03:08 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61970 [..]]]> Over the last week or so I’ve been playing around with Sony’s new Vaio Z laptop. It’s not really relevant for a PC games blog – I was looking at it for Stuff magazine – except for one thing. This ultralight notebook comes with an optional dock which adds an optical drive and USB hub along with extra monitor ports for when you’re sat at your desk rather than staring at an Excel sheet on the train. Inside that dock, there’s an auxiliary graphics card which adds an AMD Radeon HD6650 GPU to the on-board Sandy Bridge processor. And it’s stunningly good.

While it’s not on a par with a high end desktop – obviously – the HD6650 does have enough graphics power to make Crysis and Deus Ex: Human Revolution playable on the laptop’s 1600×900 13 inch screen. That’s with graphics options set to medium or above, as well. It’ll struggle a bit if you use an external monitor running at 1080p, but on the notebook’s screen Crysis framerates are consistently in the mid to high 40s, while DX:HR goes from being a slideshow on the Intel HD 3000 graphics to smooth and sneaky with the dock plugged in.

That’s not to say you should rush out and buy a Sony Z series. At almost £2,000/$2,500 for the laptop plus dock you’re almost certainly better off with a cheaper thin and light that has NVIDIA Optimus graphics, or a proper gaming laptop like the ASUS G73. However, the astonishing point about the Vaio Z is that the dock connects over USB 3.0. None of your flashy Thunderbolt or Expressport stuff, just a bog standard peripherals port like everything else.

The idea of external graphics, transforming a highly portable PC into a poly-pushing powerhouse, has been around for a long time. ASUS and Dell both had docks in the past which never quite made it market, and Creative was one of the first to talk about modular designs over a decade ago. As far as I’m aware, though, no-one’s pulled it off like Sony – and even if the laptop isn’t quite as successful as the company hoped (it’s up against stiff competition from newer, cheaper ‘ultrabooks’) I really hope that it develops the dock concept further into something more universal and compatible with other machines.

Because if it does, and can get the price down in future iterations, it’ll be quite something for those of us who want a laptop that’s both properly portable but doesn’t force us to compromise in games.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/20/hands-on-with-sonys-external-graphics-card-its-superb/feed/ 42 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/16/corsair-gets-into-keyboards-and-mice/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/16/corsair-gets-into-keyboards-and-mice/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:00:11 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61962 [..]]]> Hard drive and case manufacturer Corsair has announced that it’s launching its first ever range of gaming keyboards and mice today, with two separate lines dedicated to MMO and FPS gaming.

The K90 MMO keyboard and K90 MMO mouse, along with the FPS friendly K60 and M60 keyboard and mouse have been developed under the auspices of Ruben Mookerjee, who in a previous incarnatiuon oversaw the launch of Logitech’s G-series of gear.

Mookerjee takes his new role at Corsair seriously. For some people, he says, getting the right peripherals “is a matter of life or death. At Corsair, we say it’s more important than that.”

One assumes he’s speaking figuratively about shrugging of the mortal coil in-game. Hopefully.

The peripherals don’t need much in the way of build up, however. Last month I reviewed the Mionix Zibal Z60, and thought it was one of the best keyboards I’ve ever tested. First impressions of the Corsair K60 suggest I should probably have been a bit less effuse with praise.

Both the K90 and M90 keyboards are built around an aluminium chassis and feature Cherry MX Red mechanical switches. These don’t have the same hard ‘click’ into position as the Cherry MX Blacks of the Mionix Z60 and Blues of the Razer Black Widow, and as a result feel slightly softer, but they are quieter while being just as responsive. Mookerjee explained that noise from the keyboards is further reduced by not putting a plastic cover over the aluminium base – there’s nothing for the sound to resonate through. An interesting theory that seems to work.

The K90 features 18 extra macro buttons down the right hand side which can be programmed into three presets for class changes in MMOs. The K60, meawhile, doesn’t have extra keys but it does include a truly awesome one-sided wrist rest. As well as providing all the support you need without taking up your entire desk, it opens up to store the black capped WASD and number keys as well as the tool for switching them out. By default, these keys are coloured red and have a different texture and contour to the rest of layout.



As far as mice go, both have aluminium bases designed to lower the centre of gravity and provide a flat, durable surface to the desk, as well as 5600 DPI sensors. The M90 has nine macro keys arranged in a circle around the thumb, which should be easier to reach than those on, say, the Razer Naga. The M60, meanwhile, has a ‘sniper button’ on the thumb rest, which acts as a shift key for temporarily lowering the resolution. The idea, Mookerjee says, is that instead of scrolling up and down resolutions while sniping, for example, you simply hold this key down and release it when done.



The best bit – especially for the keyboards – is the price. The K90 is pricey, at £109/$129, but the K60 is – by my reckoning – one of the best value mechanical keyboards around at $89/$109. Plus it looks amazing.

Production samples for a full review should be available closer to the on sale date, which is scheduled for next month.





]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/16/corsair-gets-into-keyboards-and-mice/feed/ 48 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/15/what-are-your-favourite-pc-gaming-peripherals/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/15/what-are-your-favourite-pc-gaming-peripherals/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:31:15 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61521 [..]]]> The one thing we don’t review enough of in the PC Gamer hardware pages is game controllers. A fair number of wheels and joysticks with nasty plastic cases and pseudo rumble reactions pass through The Labs, but very few of the old fashioned, real-world simulation kits which used to be a stalwart of PC gaming get strapped to the test bench these days.

Partly, this is because gaming tastes have changed and the sims that require this gear aren’t as popular as they were – it’s been five years since the last Flight Sim, for example. Partly it’s because there just aren’t as many industrial strength peripherals around any more, and what there is can be very niche and usable only by the kind of sim fans who already have a real helicopter pilot’s licence.

This is an oversight I hope to fix in the hardware section I’m putting together at the moment (issue 233). I’m on the hunt for the best controllers out there, and let the devil take the price. These are the wheels, sticks and pads that make games more like real life and command collector’s prices.

The local couriers are not so happy. Not only does Thrustmaster’s T500 RS GT wheel (pictured above) cost almost as much as a second hand car, it weighs about the same too. And that’s not including the crash cage-solid frame that supports the pedals. My office is up a fairly tight flight of stairs. Sorry, UPS man.

I don’t tend to play many sim games nowadays, being more of an FPS and RTS fan, but playing with this kind of kit is proving to be a highly nostalgic exercise which brings back many memories from when I did. Without wanting to sound too geeky, a really good peripheral can create just as many memorable moments as a well designed game, especially when the two are almost perfectly matched (and I don’t mean in a Guitar Hero kind of way).

I’d be enormously grateful, for example, if our sister mag PCFormat would return my Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2, the best joystick ever made bar none. They borrowed it for a photoshoot several years ago and it hasn’t been seen since. I still mourn its loss, and the memories of Mechwarrior 4 and Crimson Skies it left behind.

Any suggestions for favoured kit you’d like to see included in the round up gladly received.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/15/what-are-your-favourite-pc-gaming-peripherals/feed/ 65 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/13/is-your-router-killing-the-planet/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/13/is-your-router-killing-the-planet/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:31:27 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61806 [..]]]> The European Commission is meeting with industry groups tomorrow to try and agree new regulations for power use in network adaptors. On the table are amendments to the European Ecodesign Directive which covers energy use for white goods around the home.

The changes being discussed involve the introduction of a compulsory standby mode for network adaptors, with maximum power consumption phased in over several years. Adaptors that need to wake within under one second will be allowed draw slightly more power in standby than those which are less essential. The actual limits are what will be on the table tomorrow.

The maximum limits being suggested are 4W for kit that doesn’t need to turn on instantly and 12W for kit that does. The plan is to introduce those limits in 2014, and reduce them to 2W and 8W respectively by 2016. According to the European Commission, 40TWh per year – the equivalent of the residential electricity consumption of Sweden – can be saved across all of Europe plans are adopted.

Lobby group ECOS, the European Environmental Citizens Organisation for Standardisation, which represents environmental NGOs in Europe, reckon that an extra 8TWh per year of energy could be saved by giving consumers more ways to turn off their kit that don’t involve reaching behind the sofa to pull out a plug. It recommends management software that let’s you program shutdown times when you know you won’t be using it. Like the early hours of the morning, for example.

Fortunately, this is an area which it shouldn’t be too hard for manufacturers to agree to targets. Electricity is the single most important cost in datacentre design, and enormous amounts of R&D dollars have been spent making computing kit more efficient in exactly this area over the last few years.

The technology is already in use too: a quick test of equipment around my flat shows that Sitecom’s enormously powerful Gaming Router II, with its dual band antennas and packet prioritisation engine, already draws just 4W when simply surfing the web use. The bigger culprit is the cable modem it’s attached to, which is eating 6W consistently. That means together they meet the first phase requirements for a single device. While on the whole, the initiative is to be applauded, it might be that the energy savings hoped for are ambitious.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/13/is-your-router-killing-the-planet/feed/ 60 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/08/creative-3d-tactic-wireless-headsets-demoed-at-ifa/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/08/creative-3d-tactic-wireless-headsets-demoed-at-ifa/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:05:42 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61393 [..]]]> It’s the annual IFA tradeshow over in Berlin at the moment, which is pretty much the European equivalent of CES. If big TVs and tablet computers are your thing, our sister site TechRadar has all the latest news from the show floor.

As far as PC gaming goes, Creative is using the show to demo its new wireless headsets, the 3D Tactic Omega and 3D Tactic Wrath (pictured above). Both look very similar from the tech specs, featuring 50mm drivers, closed back circumaural cans and a detachable mic. The USB sound card-cum-transmitter comes with the usual X-Fi/THXTruStudio enhancements with EAX support and positional sound.


As chance would have it, I’ve already played around with the 3DTactic Omegas for a forthcoming headset grouptest in the mag. I won’t give too much away just yet, but they are indeed, as Creative put it, “built like a tank”, thanks to a steel support running across the top of your head. And yet also quite light. Sound quality is good, if initially balanced – like most Creative headsets – a little too far towards the bass end of the spectrum.

I’m looking forward to testing the Wrath Special Edition, though. Firstly, they are considerably cheaper than the Omegas – £99 (c.$150) versus £150 (c.$200). And secondly the Omegas also requires a large stand which takes up a lot of deskspace. It’s not a terrible idea, but defeats the object of clutter free wireless a bit.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/08/creative-3d-tactic-wireless-headsets-demoed-at-ifa/feed/ 13 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/02/are-ultrabooks-the-future-of-pc-gaming/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/02/are-ultrabooks-the-future-of-pc-gaming/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:47:59 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61401 [..]]]> How powerful does a laptop need to be? It’s a pertinent question. Last week Razer unveiled a laptop it proclaimed the “saviour of PC gaming”. But the big laptop news is that we’re about to be deluged by ‘ultrabooks’ – thin and light MacBook Air clones which weigh just over a kilo, but pack powerful Core i5/i7 processors.

Earlier in the year, Intel demonstrated its commitment to ultrabooks by setting aside a $300m fund to support laptop manufacturers trying to build affordable lightweight laptops. The MacBook Air is very nice, but it isn’t cheap. The chip maker is keen on the idea because it’s hoping that potential tablet buyers will be tempted to get a real laptop that’s very nearly as portable.

There’s absolutely no reason to buy an Intel-based tablet right now, as they’re power hungry, heavy and run Windows. The iPad and Android tablets are all doing much better with processors derived from ARM’s architecture. As tablets eat into one of Intel’s core markets – netbook shipments fell by over 50% in Europe last quarter – it’s clear they have to do something.

Over at IFA in Berlin this week, quite a few manufacturers have been showing off ultrabooks. Toshiba’s Portege Z830 (pictured above) looks fantastic, as does ASUS’ UX31, and Acer’s Aspire S3 packs a (dual core) Core i7 chip into a machine that’s thinner, lighter and cheaper than an Air. Samsung’s Series 9 and Sony’s Vaio Z have both been out for a few weeks now, although they’re a bit pricier.

As far as gaming goes, most of these ultrabooks feature the higher specced option from Intel’s Sandy Bridge hybrid GPUs, the HD Graphics 3000. It’s not great, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not entirely useless either. I’ve been playing around with an ultrabook – although I can’t say which one – for a couple of days. It’s obviously very limited for gaming, but Deus Ex: Human Revolution is just about playable at its lowest detail settings. Even there, it looks better than most Xbox games.

I wouldn’t recommend buying an ultrabook for games just yet, but next year’s models with better GPUs should be really interesting. With the Steam Cloud syncing save games between your desktop PC and an ultraportable laptop so you can fill in a few puzzles or levels while you’re on the train, the convenience more than makes up for the temporary loss in resolution and details.

As much as I like the look of the Razer’s LED laptop touchpads, I’d be willing to bet that there’ll be more ultrabooks figuring in the future of PC gaming than there will be Blades.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/02/are-ultrabooks-the-future-of-pc-gaming/feed/ 45 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/02/ocz-momentous-xt-claims-to-be-the-worlds-first-true-hybrid-drive/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/02/ocz-momentous-xt-claims-to-be-the-worlds-first-true-hybrid-drive/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 10:30:17 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61281 [..]]]> Hard drive manufacturers OCZ reckon they have the ‘world’s first true hybrid drive’ on their hands, with the solid state/magnetic mix of the RevoDrive.

Hybrid drives use traditional spinning platter storage to hold large amounts of data, but add a portion of Flash memory to cache regularly used files for fast access. Despite the claim, OCZ isn’t the first company to release a hybrid drive, as Seagate’s Momentous XT has been around for ages, but there are some key differences that make the RevoDrive stand out.

For a start, OCZ argues that the Momentous XT isn’t a ‘true’ hybrid, since its Flash cache is only 4GB and therefore not really an SSD, just a buffer. The RevoDrive, meanwhile, pairs a 100GB SSD with a 1TB HDD, so there’s ample space in the Flash portion to hold nearly every file that’ll make a difference to the performance of your PC without constantly swapping data out to the magnetic platters and back again. Which means more speed and a longer lifespan.

What’s really interesting about the RevoDrive, though, is that it hasn’t been designed to use the standard hard drive SATA ports. SSDs are getting so fast that even the 6Gb/s bandwidth of the newest SATA III interface can’t keep up under ideal conditions. Instead, this is mounted on a PCI Express card, which OCZ claims gives it maximum read speeds of 910MB/s – roughly on a par with the two Sandforce SF2281 drives in a RAID 0 configuration I tested for PCG 231.

In that test, I got Just Cause 2 to load in three seconds.

If the RevoDrive lives up to those claims, it’ll be a much faster – if less flexible – way of using an SSD cache than Intel’s Smart Response Technology (available on Z68 motherboards) or IcyDock’s promising SSD Xpander. It does, however, require nvelo’s Dataplex software to work, which might be problematic for dual boot machines or anything non-Windows. I’ll be finding out more about this from OCZ tomorrow.

There is, of course, the end caveat which seems to accompany all new and exciting tech these days. The RevoDrive is going to cost $499 (no word on UK pricing yet), or nearly ten times the cost of the cheapest 1TB you can buy. A 120GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD currently costs $195 on Newegg.com.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/02/ocz-momentous-xt-claims-to-be-the-worlds-first-true-hybrid-drive/feed/ 28 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/26/razer-pc-gaming-is-not-dead-its-portable/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/26/razer-pc-gaming-is-not-dead-its-portable/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:26:37 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=61063 [..]]]> Very very shiny. I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical about Razer’s viral marketing site, www.pcgamingisnotdead.com, but it turns out to have been worth hanging around for on this Friday afternoon before the bank holiday.

The big announcement is the Razer Blade, which is being billed as the “world’s first gaming laptop”. I imagine Alienware, ASUS, MSI, and Dell might have something to day about that, but there you go.

The Blade, though, does look very nice. It has a 17inch screen, but is just two and a quarter centimetres deep, which earns it the right to the name at least. That makes it thinner than an equivalent MacBook Pro, although it’s fractionally heavier at 3.2kg.

Inside, there’s a 2.8GHz Core i7 processor with 8GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive. The graphics card is a bit disappointing – the NVIDIA GeForce GT555M it sports is OK, but may struggle to doi justice at the 1920×1080 resolution of the screen.



The really interesting bit, though, is that it lifts the ‘Switchblade user interface’ lock and stock, so the keypad on the right hand side is replaced with a multitouch LCD panel and 10 ‘adaptive’.

Curiously, this makes Razer the only other producer of PCs other than Dell based outside of Asia now that HP is leaving the market. The Blade will cost $2799.99 and go on sale late autumn by the looks of it. You can find out more at the Blade’s official site.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/26/razer-pc-gaming-is-not-dead-its-portable/feed/ 115 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/26/pc-sales-down-but-high-end-graphics-holds-steady/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/26/pc-sales-down-but-high-end-graphics-holds-steady/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:00:24 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=60993 [..]]]> With summer already approaching its end, it’s Q2 reporting season already and time for naysayers of the world to unite around statistics. We’ve seen a few quarterly snapshots which have made glum reading for PC fans already.

Gartner’s analysis, for example, that PC shipments in Western Europe were down by nearly 19% was bleak indeed. Acer was especially badly hit, losing over a third of its sales compared to last year.

No-one, it seems, is buying anything but iPads. Which is one of the reasons HP spectacularly announced last week that it is selling off its PC business altogether. That’s the world’s number one PC vendor leaving us to focus on cloud stuff. Ouch.

Despite what Razer might have you believe, though, things are actually looking quite good as far as PC gaming hardware goes. Jon Peddie Research – one of the few analyst firms that track sales of graphics cards – published its quarterly report yesterday. In this, it showed that shipments of graphics cards were below slightly below average for the last three months.

However, it included this interesting qualifier:

“The add-in board (AIB) market is fuelled at the high-end by the enthusiast gamer, small in volume (~3m a year) but high in dollars (average spend for an AIB ~$300). The AIB shipment volume comes from the Performance and Mainstream segments. GPU-compute is adding to sales on the high end.”

That’s a figure which surprised me, and pleasantly so. If high performance GPUs are still near enough to a billion dollar market, that’s big enough to keep the big graphics companies interested for some time to come. To check I wasn’t viewing this through the proverbial rose tinted contacts, I mailed Dr Jon Peddie and asked him to clarify his thoughts.

“The remarkable thing about the AIB market,” he explained, “Is that the high-end enthusiast segment is the most stable. The other segments move up and down and the enthusiast is relatively (he said ‘relatively’) stable.”

Delving a bit deeper into the figures from his latest report, the big hit on GPU sales has been for low performance cards. Discrete desktop graphics (all types) are down by just 500,000, from 16.67m last year to 16.12 for the same period this year, while discrete notebook graphics are down by 300,000 to 19.06m.

All of which is to say that yes, there are profound and fundamental shifts happening in the way we use PCs and computers in general. There’ll be more big names go the way of HP before too long, no doubt.

But as far as high performance gaming set-ups go, in this analysis at least, they’re looking just as popular as ever. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/26/pc-sales-down-but-high-end-graphics-holds-steady/feed/ 25 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/24/whats-razers-big-announcement/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/24/whats-razers-big-announcement/#comments Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:58:20 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=60870 [..]]]> Razer has launched an online viral marketing campaign recently, ahead of a big announcement on Friday. It must be big – it’s been backed up by a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal (Global Edition).

The campaign is based around the concept that “PC gaming is not dead”. Something we could have told them for considerably less than they spent on the agency which designed the website to go along with it.

I know we’re a little late to this story, that’s partly because I was decorating my flat yesterday and missed the press release. But it’s also because the debate about whether or not PC gaming is dead is exceptionally dull and I’m wary about giving it the oxygen of publicity. The argument that PC gaming is dead is, in fact, dead in my eyes.

However, Razer’s microsite, with it’s Fallout style console and voiceover is worth looking at. It’s amusing and cryptic (as these things go) and there’s no clue as to what the upcoming launch is. They did, however, tell us that the Switchblade netbook was probably moving beyond concept stage a couple of weeks ago.

The Switchblade is a good looking machine with a lot of promise. Not only does it look beautiful but the contextual keyboard, where action icons replace letters depending on the game you’re playing, is one we’ve been waiting for since the near mythical Optimus Maximus. But I’m not sure that if PC gaming needs a saviour it’ll come in the form of an Atom-powered device.

We’ll see – there’s always a chance that this isn’t an announcement about the Switchblade, which would be truly interesting. Only a couple of days until we find out.



]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/24/whats-razers-big-announcement/feed/ 38 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/22/get-100-off-a-new-msi-laptop/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/22/get-100-off-a-new-msi-laptop/#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:06:20 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=60809 [..]]]> Fancy getting £100 off a top end gaming laptop? MSI is today launching a cashback scheme offering to return up to one hundred of your finest pounds in a cashback scheme if you buy one of its four of its best performing notebooks. It’s available to UK customers only and with the caveat that the laptop must be bought from a UK store.

We wouldn’t normally report on this sort of promotion, except that it extends to the GX660R range which won the most recent laptop round up in PCG 228.

Full details of the promotion can be found on the MSI microsite. It runs from today until the end of September, and the size of the cashback cheque depends on which model you buy. By filling in a form and sending off a proof of purchase you can get £100 back on a GT680-037 or GX660R-650, and £50 returned on GX660R-646 or GX623-096.

The one to go for, by the way, is the 15inch GX660R-646. It’s a bit of an 80s throwback from the outside, but inside it has a Core i7 quad with 6GB RAM and Radeon HD5870 graphics. It’s currently retailing for around £970 before the rebate (RRP £999) – and at £920 it’s a bargain.

As far as I know, MSI regularly runs rebate schemes in the US on its graphics cards, but this is a more unusual offer, presumably to clear stock after what appears to have been a disastrous quarter across Europe for laptop sales and ready for new launches towards the end of the year. If you’re looking for a laptop, though, it’s definitely worth checking out.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/22/get-100-off-a-new-msi-laptop/feed/ 7 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/18/razer-launches-battlefield-3-range/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/18/razer-launches-battlefield-3-range/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:03:25 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=60727 [..]]]> Gaming peripherals manufacturer Razer has unveiled a new range of kit branded with logos and artwork from EA’s forthcoming Battlefield 3.

I say new, but the ‘Collector’s Edition Peripherals’ are actually the existing BlackWidow keyboard, Imperator mouse, Onza controller and Scarab mousemat with new paint jobs themed around the shooter. Specs and performance will be the same as the (impressive) kit that’s already out there.

In terms of prices, the keyboard will RRP for $139.99/€139.99, the mouse will be $79.99/€79.99, the mousemat $39.99/€39.99 and the Onza controller £59.99/€59.99. Not cheap, but only around $10/€10 more expensive than the stock black versions.

While there’s a temptation to sneer at a ten euro decal, someone must be buying these game branded peripherals. This is the seventh licensing deal Razer’s done, with StarCraft II, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Transformers 2 already under its belt.

Personally, my favourite is the branded laptop bag which is also part of the range. But I’m a sucker for a good shoulder slung holdall, even if it is $79.99/€79.99.

In other news, I’ve just reviewed a keyboard which is very similar to the Razer BlackWidow Ultimate, which has the same Cherry black mechanical switches and backlit keys. It’s called the Mionix Zibal 60 and comes in around $40/€40 cheaper. The review will be in issue 232, but it’s quite possibly the best keyboard I’ve ever used – although I still consider it too expensive.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/18/razer-launches-battlefield-3-range/feed/ 42 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/16/intel-launches-more-scratchcard-cpu-upgrades/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/16/intel-launches-more-scratchcard-cpu-upgrades/#comments Tue, 16 Aug 2011 09:04:05 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=60564 [..]]]> Want to overclock your CPU? Why bother with all those tedious BIOS tweaks when Intel can effortlessly turbo charge your chip on your behalf? The company has updated its Intel Upgrade Service to cover three chips from the new Sandy Bridge family, allowing owners of the low end Core i3-2312M, Core i3-2102 or Pentium G622 to transmogrify them into something else. Something a little more powerful.

The way it works is simple, if you have a system with one of these processors in and live in the US or Canada, you will be able to buy a scratchcard with a reference number on it. Reveal the code, install a small Windows application from Intel, type number into application then reboot your PC. Magically, your low end CPU will have transformed into, well, a slightly less low end CPU.

The 2312M becomes a 2393M, the 2102 becomes a 2153 and G622 becomes a G693. Benefits in each case are between 10-20% depending on the program and chip used.

Prices haven’t been confirmed, but when Intel first launched remote upgrades last year they were $50 a pop. That seems like quite a lot considering the low price of processors these days, and it’s much better value for money to buy a better CPU in the first place. Where it’s intriguing is in the case of the laptop processor. If the program extends up to more powerful CPUs at a later date, it could be a worthwhile upgrade to make for a decent games machine.

On the other hand, it might just make you feel like you’ve paid for the same chip twice.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/16/intel-launches-more-scratchcard-cpu-upgrades/feed/ 28 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/10/uk-broadband-worse-than-we-thought/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/10/uk-broadband-worse-than-we-thought/#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:50:16 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=60236 [..]]]> UK broadband speeds are under a lot of scrutiny at the moment. First there was Ofcom’s study of fixed line broadband which we reported on here, and now download delivery outfit Pando Networks has released a similar map of download speeds for the country.

It reveals an even larger disparity between advertised connection speeds and actual broadband performance than the Ofcom survey.

Pando may not be a name that you’re immediately familiar with, but you may be using its software. It builds the download and install clients for games like Lord of the Rings Online, League of Legends and Maple Story, as well as back end services for music and video streaming sites like Blip.tv.

The survey data is built up from 400,000 Pando users from around the country. Which makes it interesting, methodologically speaking, to compare to the Ofcom data. That was measured at the other end of the pipe – how fast the exchange is sending bits out – and the Ofcom report explicitly warned that it might be overestimating connection speeds as a result.

That certainly seems to be borne out by the Pando map (below).

Average sync speeds in London, for example, are 8.8Mb/s according to the Ofcom study. Actual download speeds recorded by Pando users in the capital are closer to 4.5Mb/s. The best places to live, according to Pando, are Brighton (8Mb/s) and Ware (7.3Mb/s). The worst are Swithland (1.5Mb/s) and Stanford on Avon (1Mb/s).

Swithland is, for all intents and purposes, a part of Loughborough. Therefore older readers will understand that we already knew it was nearly the worst place in the world to be a PC gamer. (Disclosure – I grew up in Loughborough, and am therefore allowed to say this).

Pando also revealed details on the best ISPs for download speed. Be Broadband topped the chart with an average of 4.8Mb/s, while BT dragged up the rear with a 3.2Mbp/s average.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/10/uk-broadband-worse-than-we-thought/feed/ 61 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/05/new-stock-for-amd-radeon-hd6970-soon/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/05/new-stock-for-amd-radeon-hd6970-soon/#comments Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:10:33 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=60082 [..]]]> If you’ve been trying to buy a high end graphics card lately, you might have noticed that there are very few examples of AMD’s flagship Radeon HD6970 around at the moment. A trawl through the usual line up of online retailers found just one card in stock at newegg.com, and none in the UK whatsoever.

Vendors are well aware of this problem. Sapphire is promoting its latest take on the Radeon HD6950 – a Toxic edition clocked at 880MHz – as an alternative for people who can’t wait to get their hands on the faster cards.

Shortages could be due to high demand still. The HD6970 has no doubt been a success for AMD since it launched late last year. Sales figures are, as ever, very hard to come by but there’s no real competition for the card from NVIDIA in the same price bracket. The GeForce GTX 570 is closer to the HD6950 in performance and price, while the monstrous GTX 580 is much more expensive. One retailer told us that when the HD6970 was in stock earlier in the year, it was outselling the cheaper HD6950 for a while – even though the latter card is plenty powerful enough for most games at 1920×1080 resolutions.

So popularity could be a reason that everywhere is sold out, but that hasn’t stopped many people from speculating that shortages are due to AMD winding down manufacture of the cards. That would make sense, because according to its traditional release schedule the new HD7000 series, based on the completely reworked Graphics Core Next, should be coming out soon. Some sources believe that HD7000s will launch as soon as September.

When contacted by PC Gamer, however, AMD told us that new supplies of the HD6970 have just been shipped out from the factories and should be in stores soon. So if you’re after one, you hopefully won’t have too long to wait.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/05/new-stock-for-amd-radeon-hd6970-soon/feed/ 30 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/03/snag-the-new-gamer-power-bts11-on-the-cheap/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/03/snag-the-new-gamer-power-bts11-on-the-cheap/#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2011 17:48:38 +0000 Lucas Sullivan http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=60018 [..]]]> We understand the plight of the college PC gamer: you need a new computer that can run your favorite games with ease, but everything’s too expensive from your parents’ point of view. But worry no more—iBUYPOWER’s got your back with the deal for their new Gamer Power BTS11, a desktop computer that’ll serve as your throne of gaming power when it’s not processing those terrifying term papers. You can grab the Gamer BTS11 from TigerDirect.com or iBUYPOWER.com for a mere $999 if you order it before September 30th; sounds like a pretty sweet deal to us. Check out the specs of this beaut’, then get ready to tell your parents that this costs less than most laptops.

With the default specs, here’s everything you’re getting for your ten Benjamins:

• NZXT Phantom tower
• Asetek SI 240mm liquid cooling
• Intel Core i5 2500k processor
• 8GB DDR3 memory
• NVIDIA GTX 550Ti 1GB graphics card
• 750GB hard drive
• 64MB solid-state drive
• 700 Watt power supply
]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/03/snag-the-new-gamer-power-bts11-on-the-cheap/feed/ 67 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/03/viewsonics-new-27inch-led-screen/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/03/viewsonics-new-27inch-led-screen/#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2011 16:04:37 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=60007 [..]]]> Viewsonic’s VP2365wb was my favourite screen of last year. In fact, I liked it so much that – as those old enough to remember a certain advert would say – I went out and bought one.

So I’m actually a little sad that its successor, Viewsonic’s VP2765-LED, just arrived in the office in time to be reviewed next issue.

Because while my screen at home is a stunning 23inch eIPS affair, the VP2765-LED is a massive 27inches in diagonal. It comes mounted on a similarly professional stand which swings through all directions, goes up and down and can flip the screen itself into portrait mode.

What’s more, it’s also got an LED backlight. Which means it’s currently chugging through Shogun 2 benchmarks while drawing just 16W of power. The older VP2635wb has a traditional CCFL backlight which requires considerably more than that, and it’s too late for me to return it under a no quibble guarantee. Bah.

Unlike the older screen, though, the 27incher makes use of a mere AMVA panel, which may or may not be as high a quality as the eIPS screen the VP2635wb boasts (I’ll be looking at that closely in the review). There is, however, another newcomer to the Viewsonic range – the VP2635-LED, which combines IPS tech and LED backlight for monitor nirvana, albeit in a 23inch package.

Viewsonic isn’t the first to put LED and IPS together. ASUS did so for their almost beautiful Designo ML range earlier in the year, but the fixed stand for those screens is a bit of a problem. Meanwhile LG has a similarly specced out screen – the IPS231P-BN – which I’m still waiting to try out, especially as it’s available for around £150 ($246).

Otherwise, combinations of IPS panels and LED backlights have been limited to the rather more expensive likes of Apple and high end workstation monitors.

This pair of Viewsonics will go on sale with RRPs of £239 ($392) for the 23inch version and £349 ($573) for the 27incher. Actual on sale prices should be lower.

Full review as soon as…

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/03/viewsonics-new-27inch-led-screen/feed/ 19 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/03/two-more-space-saving-ssd-tips/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/03/two-more-space-saving-ssd-tips/#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:44:42 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59895 [..]]]> Struggling to stay on top of the tiny amount of space you have on your SSD drive? Fear not, as promised in our first guide on how to save save space on your SSD we have a few more tips on creating room for games on your new flash drive.

Turn off Hibernate

First up is to disable the Hibernate feature of Windows 7. Hibernate is a halfway house between standby and shutdown when you come to close down your PC for the night. It copies the entire contents of your system RAM over to the hard drive before turning everything off, so the PC is in a state that uses less power than standby, but can bounce back to exactly the state that you left it in.

The thing is, Hibernate also requires a file to be created on your boot drive that’s 75% the size of your system RAM. Which if you’ve got 8GB of RAM or more is a considerable chunk of an SSD. To make things worse, you can’t move this file with symlinking either, it is where it is and there it will stay.

Fortunately, with your SSD accelerating your boot times anyway, there’s little reason to use Hibernate on a desktop PC. Certainly the benefits don’t really outweigh the space cost.

To see the size of your Hibernate file, go to C:\ in Windows Explorer and look for hiberfil.sys. You may need to turn on ‘Show hidden files’ in Folder Options>View.

To disable Hibernate, open up the Start menu, go to Accessories and right click on Command Prompt. Open this as an Administrator and type the following: powercfg -h off.

That should delete hiberfil.sys automatically too – if it doesn’t, just delete it.

Sort out your storage

The second tip is to move your common file libraries to a storage drive.

This is very straightforward – just open up Windows Explorer, and right click on the Documents link under Libraries in the left hand pane. Here you’ll get a load of options for folder locations. Set up a Documents folder on your storage drive and then click ‘Include a folder…’ in this window.

Select the folder, then choose it from the list and click ‘Set Save Location’ – anything that automatically saves to Documents will now go in here. You can copy over the contents of the original Documents folder to the new one if you like, and remove that link from the Library list altogether.

Now do the same for Music, Pictures and Video.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/03/two-more-space-saving-ssd-tips/feed/ 18 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/30/razer-pulls-out-a-switchblade/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/30/razer-pulls-out-a-switchblade/#comments Sat, 30 Jul 2011 15:00:48 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59676 [..]]]> You may have noticed these new fangled tablet things that appear to be quite popular in some circles. Mouse and keyboard makers Razer has been experimenting with the miniature charms of these ultraportables for some time now, first unveiling its concept gaming tablet, the Switchblade, back at CES in January.

The Switchblade is a clamshell design with a seven inch screen at the top and a tactile keyboard that adapts to whatever game you’re playing with icons replacing the key symbols. Inside, there’s WiFi and 3G connectivity, a discrete graphics card and an Intel Atom processor.

The company has put out a press release today claiming that the Switchblade is the first device to use Intel’s Atom Z690 CPU running at 1.7GHz. Razer reckons this is good enough for gaming, although to be honest I’m not convinced – an Atom is an Atom is an Atom and all that. Not that it matters hugely, the Switchblade is still only a concept device with no firms plans by Razer to bring it to market – although giving out details of the chip inside does make it more likely that it will eventually appear.

Also, it’s beautiful and rightly won lots of awards at CES. And this is as good an excuse as any to show off pictures of what a handheld PC gaming tablet might look like, if we were very lucky.



]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/30/razer-pulls-out-a-switchblade/feed/ 54 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/26/amds-10-core-piledriver-chips-revealed/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/26/amds-10-core-piledriver-chips-revealed/#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:32:44 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59666 [..]]]> The net is alive today with news that AMD is planning a 10 core CPU sometime next year, based on a revision to their Bulldozer design codenamed Piledriver.

The new processor was revealed in a deck of presentation slides leaked by the Chinese news site Zol.com.nc, and shows that these new processors won’t have on board graphics and will require a new motherboard socket, called FM2, which supercedes the current AM3+ board. Just behind these ‘up to 10 core’ CPUs is confirmation of the Trinity CPU/GPU hybrid that was announced at Computex, which will also use the Piledriver architecture and FM2 socket.

While we’re still waiting to see samples of the delayed Bulldozer CPUs – which will have up to eight cores and be known as the AMD FX when they launch – this isn’t surprising news. AMD had already said that they plan to launch 10 core server chips codenamed Sepang next year, so it makes sense that the desktop line will follow suit.

Not surprising, but still quite exciting. A decacore processor gives games developers an interesting target to work towards for elements of the game engine that can be heavily multithreaded.

(via The Inquirer)

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/26/amds-10-core-piledriver-chips-revealed/feed/ 55 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/25/save-space-on-your-ssd/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/25/save-space-on-your-ssd/#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:15:53 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59644 [..]]]> SSDs are great. Not make the world a better place and sort out your work/life balance great, but having one in your PC will almost certainly make it a slightly better machine. The problem is, of course, that they’re quite small.

The standard advice for making the most of SSD space is to install Windows and a few key games onto your SSD and put everything else, like videos and music, onto a larger, slower hard drive. If only it were that easy.

Lots of programs, from iTunes to Google’s Picasa to most games, save large files like thumbnail caches or save data in the Users folder on the C:\ drive. That’s regardless of where you install the application itself to. They offer you no control at all, and in the case of iTunes and Picasa especially can quickly use up many gigs of precious space.

Fortunately, you can wrest control of your machine back even from these insidious interlopers, using the power of the symbolic link, or symlink.

A symlink looks like a shortcut in Windows explorer, but it’s slightly more embedded in that applications see it as the folder they’re looking for. So if a program looks for a file called ‘Save.gme’ in a directory called C:\Games and it finds a symlink pointing it to D:\Games, it will load up the file from D:\Games\Save.gme.

You can use symlinks, then, to move these large data folders over to your harddrive without the program that needs them knowing. It’s outrageously easy, but first you need to find them.



1 – Open the Start menu and type ‘Folder Options’. This will fire up the control panel that lets you see hidden files in Windows Explorer. With the disclaimer that any thing you do after this point is at your own risk and I’m not responsible for breaking your PC, click the ‘View’ tab and check the radio box for ‘Show hidden files, folders and drives’.

2 – Now you need to find those large files. Download and install WinDirStat. This displays the contents of your hard drive as coloured rectangles. The really big ones are the large files you want to move.



3 – If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod backed up onto your PC via iTunes, you’ll notice one of the large blobs will be for some Apple related files. This will usually be in C:\Users\your name\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer, and you can find the exact location by right-clicking a blob. Another place files often get stored is C:\Users\your name\AppData\Local.

4 – Create a duplicate folder on your storage drive, for example D:\Apple Computer. Copy the contents of the original folder over to the new one, and rename the original folder something like ‘Apple Computer Bak’. Don’t delete it yet, just in case.

5 – To make symlink, you’ll need to use the command ‘mklink’ from the open up the Start menu, click All Programs>Accessores and then right click Command Prompt and ‘Open as an administrator’.



6 – There’s information about the syntax of the mklink command on its Wikipedia page. To move our iTunes back-up folder, we’ll need to enter this into the command prompt: mklink /d “C:\Users\your name\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer” “D:\Apple Computer”.

7 – You should see the symlink appear as a semi transparent icon in the original Roaming folder. Click it to make sure it works, then run the program – in this case iTunes – to double check nothing has been lost.

8 – If all is fine, you can delete the original folder on the C: drive completely, and reclaim several gigabytes of room.

If this has been at all useful, stay tuned. We have more tips for on how to save space on your SSD here.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/25/save-space-on-your-ssd/feed/ 30 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/25/asus-launches-noise-cancelling-gaming-headset/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/25/asus-launches-noise-cancelling-gaming-headset/#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:51:34 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59527 [..]]]> Not only is it a tedious bore, the real world can be such an unnecessary distraction when trying to listen for footsteps coming around the corner or place that last block on a Minecraft masterpiece. Which is obviously why ASUS is launching a noise cancelling headset just for the likes of us.

They’re called the Republic of Gamers Vulcan ANC Pro. The acronym stands for ‘active noise cancelling’ – although they have been launched so close to Nelson Mandela’s 93rd birthday that I can’t help feel they’re missing a trick for South African sales of the bright red set of cans.

Apparently the noise  cancelling circuit which is good for damping out 85% of low frequency sounds. As they’re a closed back cuffs, the large plastic baffles you have strapped to your ears should do for the rest.

I think this might be a bit of overkill – closed back headphones block out most distractions anyway, and since all we have at the moment are press shots it’s not entirely clear how the noise cancelling is powered.

Still, with 40mm drivers and a detachable mic boom the specs do look promising. Although not as promising as the “soft memory foam encased in Japanese protein leather” padding for the top of your head. I have no idea what “Japanese protein leather” is, but since I have slightly less hair than this cat, these things interest me more than most.

No word on pricing or availability yet. Surely can’t be worse than the CoD:MW3 set over here.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/25/asus-launches-noise-cancelling-gaming-headset/feed/ 13 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/23/rid-yourself-of-troublesome-catalyst-drivers/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/23/rid-yourself-of-troublesome-catalyst-drivers/#comments Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:00:59 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=58240 [..]]]> If you’ve recently bought yourself a new AMD Radeon graphics card, or updated the drivers for an existing one, you might be familiar with this problem: when you try to install a new version of the Catalyst driver suite, the progress bar hangs about a quarter of the way through for anything up to 15 minutes or so and then presents you with an error stating that the installation has failed.

I’ve had this problem present itself itself on several different systems in recent months – I thought it was as a result of doing lots of driver upgrades/card swaps for various features, but it turns out to be pretty common. Especially with any of the drivers from the 11 series.

Normally, best advice would be to uninstall drivers before upgrading them or changing a card, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference here. The control panel may vanish, but getting rid of the drivers themselves is pretty tough.

In older versions of Windows, the cure would be to boot into Safe Mode and remove the drivers – except that Windows 7 doesn’t allow you to run an installer package in Safe Mode any more. At least, not without hacking the registry – and there are instructions for how to do that here.

A quick Google of the problem shows that a lot of people have resorted to nuking Windows completely and reinstalling everything from scratch to get around this Catalyst installer problem.

There is, fortunately, a simpler solution which has worked every time I’ve run into it so far.

When you boot your PC, give it a couple of seconds to clear the POST part of its boot process and hit F8 to enter the Windows boot menu. You might need to tap F8 repeatedly to get it to register. Now choose the option for ‘Enable low resolution video (640×480)’. Oddly, even though this still boots the video driver, it should now allow you to upgrade Catalyst suite problem free.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/23/rid-yourself-of-troublesome-catalyst-drivers/feed/ 66 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/21/european-pc-sales-down-nearly-a-third/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/21/european-pc-sales-down-nearly-a-third/#comments Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:26:05 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59556 [..]]]> Market analysts at IDC released its quarterly report on the state of PC sales in Europe last night, and the results make bleak reading for manufacturers. Total shipments of PCs across the Europe, the Middle East and Africa were down by 8.9% compared to last year.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, that figure was held high by lots of PCs sold in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. In Western Europe shipments were down by more than a fifth overall, and by 32.2% in the consumer sector.

IDC highlighted the rather booming trade in smartphones and tablets as the cause of the decline, along with the ongoing debt crisis in Southern Europe and ‘high inventory’ at the start of the quarter.

In other words, there were lots of unsold PCs in shop warehouses three months ago, and there aren’t so many now – so actual sales figures might not be as bleak as these headlines suggest. But people are buying a lot of phones and tablets.

It’s especially bad news for Acer, who sold 40.3% less PCs than they did last year. Not so much for Apple, which – as they told investors last night – are selling Macs like the proverbial warm cakes. Up 28% globally on this time last year in fact.

What does it mean for gaming? For what’s it’s worth, my opinion is not a lot. As far as games machines go, my feeling is that these figures just represent what we already knew – you don’t need to buy a new PC that often any more. A decent first generation quad core processor will still perform perfectly well in games, so why upgrade.

What will be interesting is whether or not graphics cards and other upgrades are selling well. They were predicted to, and we’re expecting to see those numbers soon.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/21/european-pc-sales-down-nearly-a-third/feed/ 53 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/20/ssd-drives-to-replace-ram/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/20/ssd-drives-to-replace-ram/#comments Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:40:00 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59463 [..]]]> Solid state storage drives based on NAND flash memory provide more performance per pound than DRAM, and will eventually become the “memory of choice” in a new PC. So says a report by Objective Analysis cited on Computer World today.

Researchers at Objective ran 300 benchmarks comparing aspects of system performance. They tested various combinations of DRAM, SSD drives and traditional hard drives for system storage. While they don’t conclude that DRAM will vanish any time soon, they do reckon that dollar for dollar, buying an SSD is a much better upgrade for a current PC. That will improve further in SSD’s favour as prices drop and drive technology gets faster.

DRAM will still be necessary for the foreseeable future, and the best PCs will use a blend of all three memory types (as they do today). But the amount of DRAM required for top performance is likely to peak and then fall.

That makes sense: many manufacturers are already looking at embedding NAND flash on their motherboards to take advantage of technologies like Intel’s Smart Response Technology and boost the speed of traditional hard drives.

It’s a pertinently timed report for PC Gamer: I’m in the middle of benchmarking a batch of new SSD drives for the next issue. Fun time with read speed benchmarks ahead!

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/20/ssd-drives-to-replace-ram/feed/ 51 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/17/turn-your-hard-drive-into-a-hybrid/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/17/turn-your-hard-drive-into-a-hybrid/#comments Sun, 17 Jul 2011 15:00:57 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59060 [..]]]> Fancy SSD performance with the kind of storage capacity more commonly associated with a traditional hard drive? You’ve got two choices: either sell your first born to buy a large SSD drive, or take a look at Icy Dock’s new SSD Xpander.

The SSD Xpander is a 3.5inch hard disk caddy designed to hold a standard 2.5inch laptop SSD drive. Around the back, though, there’s an extra SATA port for daisy chaining a normal 3.5inch hard drive to the Xpander. Once you’ve connected both SSD and HDD, a second partition is created on the latter and connected to the SSD via an internal RAID interface. The SSD now appears to Windows (or any other OS, since this is a hardware implementation) as double its actual size. Caching technology moves data between the HDD and the SSD to try and ensure that the bits and bytes you need are kept in the faster SSD half of the virtual drive.

It’s a little like Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT) which premièred on recent Z68 motherboards, which can also join an SSD and a hard drive in an unholy union of speed. Only the Xpander theoretically works with any motherboard and system.

The obvious drawback is the same one as is associated with any RAID striping set-up – if one drive fails, you lose data from both. Also, if the caching technology moves data around too much it could end up wearing out the SSD or overloading its garbage collection capabilties. It’s also potentially cheaper to look at a native hybrid drive like the Seagate Momentous XT than buying two separate drives for a new build.

Still, the idea of having a large virtual drive capable of SSD speeds is hugely appealing, and gets around the current house keeping problems of what should and shouldn’t be installed directly to the SSD when a small capacity one is included in a system. Plus, the Icy Dock SSD Xpander is only £30/$48. Since our review sample of has just turned up in the labs, I’ll be able to tell you whether it’s any good or not in the next few days.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/17/turn-your-hard-drive-into-a-hybrid/feed/ 30 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/15/coming-right-out-of-the-screen-lgs-glasses-free-3d-monitor/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/15/coming-right-out-of-the-screen-lgs-glasses-free-3d-monitor/#comments Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:00:28 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59306 [..]]]> We’ve seen a couple of announcements about glasses free 3D laptops from ASUS and Toshiba, but LG has gone one better and produced a lenticular display for the desktop.

The D2000 is a 20inch screen with uses a similar technology to Toshiba’s Qosmio F750 3D. There’s a built in web came which tracks the position of your eyes, and adjusts the stereoscopic screen filter to the best position for a clear image. The result should be better than wearing passive 3D glasses, with less blurring around the edge of objects, but possibly not as good as using an active shutter system.

There is one massive downside. The D2000 will be launching in Korea with a price equivalent to $1,200, or £750. That’s a lot of money for only one extra dimension – you can almost buy a TARDIS for that.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/15/coming-right-out-of-the-screen-lgs-glasses-free-3d-monitor/feed/ 26 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/15/badoing-razer-resurrects-rubber-ropes-for-mice/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/15/badoing-razer-resurrects-rubber-ropes-for-mice/#comments Fri, 15 Jul 2011 19:00:54 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59134 [..]]]> Razer, the peripherals company with a slight track record when it comes to mice, has hired the inventor of the ‘mouse bungee’ to its innovation team. With the result that it’s next gaming accessory will be, um, the mouse bungee.

According to the press release, Ed Larkin invented a simple system for holding mouse cables out of the way while playing first person shooters back in the mid-1990s. I have to confess to possibly never having used one of his devices knowingly – although the very similar ones that were branded with Gamespy logos many years ago were possibly his, and Roccat recently released one which it called an Apuri desktop management system. Ed joined Razer at the end of last year, when a disturbingly similar press release was put out.

The real news is that the Razer Mouse Bungee is now available for 19.99 Euros or a similar number of dollars. It has three non-slip feet and lots of bungee.

Incidentally, I’ll be meeting up with Razer next week to try out a load of their latest gear and pick up a Mouse Bungee and a Hydra motion sensor too. If you have any questions you’d like me to pose on your behalf, note them down below.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/15/badoing-razer-resurrects-rubber-ropes-for-mice/feed/ 32 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/12/amd-launches-hd6990m-notebook-graphics/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/12/amd-launches-hd6990m-notebook-graphics/#comments Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:02:27 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=59107 [..]]]> AMD has taken the wraps off of its latest graphics chip for notebooks, the Radeon HD6990M. The Barts-based GPU is its most powerful mobile graphics processor currently available from AMD’s line, and will be available in the Alienware M18x and other manufacturers from today.

The AMD announcement comes not long after NVIDIA’s launch of the GeForce GTX 580M a couple of weeks ago, and while we haven’t seen samples of either in the office yet, it should be a close run battle as to which is better.

As with most laptop GPUs, the Radeon HD6990M bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the dual-chip desktop monster that is the Radeon HD6990. This is a single chip, for a start, and it’s built around an older version of the Radeon architecture than the newer Cayman-based HD6xxx series on desktop.

That said, these high end laptop chips are catching up. The HD6990M comes with 1120 stream processors on board, as well as 56 texture units and 32 ROPS – it’s almost identical to a desktop HD6870, in other words, save for a slightly lower clockspeed. It also has 2GB of GDDR5 RAM, which should help it with effects like anti-aliasing at high resolutions.

Certainly it’s enough power for a 1080p laptop screen, and with the right CPU, could even be enough for 3D effects at a reasonable framerate – although that’s an area where NVIDIA continues to lead just in terms of hardware support (I’ve still never seen an AMD compatible 3D monitor, for example).

There’s no word yet as on the cost of laptops fitted out with either the GeForce GTX 580M or the HD6990M, but I’m hoping to put them head to head some time in the next couple of weeks.

]]> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/12/amd-launches-hd6990m-notebook-graphics/feed/ 18 http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/09/ambx-back-in-the-limelight-and-the-red-light-blue-light-yellow-light-etc/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/09/ambx-back-in-the-limelight-and-the-red-light-blue-light-yellow-light-etc/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 18:00:52 +0000 Adam Oxford http://www.pcgamer.com/?p=58869 [..]]]> Remember amBX? That was the Philips subsidiary that wanted to take PC games beyond the computer screen with flashing lights, rumbling wrist rests and even a pair of small fans to simulate the thrill of being in the open air without leaving your desktop? Well, it’s back with a new set of experience enhancing peripherals, the Cyborg amBX Gaming Lights.

A lot has changed for amBX since it launched its first – very expensive – kit in 2008. It’s been spun off as a separate company and quietly working away to develop its ideas into something a little more, um, cost effective for the average gamer. The first fruits of this work are now available via a partnership with Mad Catz under the Cyborg brand.

Each pair of lights connects via USB, can display millions of colours and uses the same amBX scripting language as the original kits. Games devs can code their own effects, or the amBX drivers can do a best guess at the light most suitable for filling your peripheral vision. Ambient lighting effects can also be added to movies and music.

Games which are fully scripted for amBX include Age of Conan and Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway.

At nearly £90 a pair, though, the Cyborg amBX kit isn’t exactly cheap, but I’m not passing judgement yet. Review samples are apparently heading labwards next week – co-incidentally, they’ll be up against Antec’s single colour Halo 6 lights, which turned up on my desk the other day (and I haven’t had chance to try out yet).

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