Displaying items by tag: Performance

We stopped by the CyberpowerPC suite at the Palazzo yesterday and were shown some interesting products. When we walked into the suite the first thing that caught our eyes was a very unusual looking PC. This was set up like a three armed star with a power button in the center. In talking with Eddie Vong we were told that the Trinity Fang is fully customizable so you can get the components you want… within certain limits. You have to use a Mini-ITX board simply because of the space available to you.

Just when you thought it could not get any worse for Ubisoft it turns out that the patch they designed to fix all of the broken stuff is also sort of broken. According to a post on the Assassin’s Creed Unity site some Xbox owners were seeing a 40GB download when they were trying to grab patch 4 for the game. It seems that the patch was attempting to re-download the entire game and simply overwrite all of the game files instead of just trying to replace the messed up ones.

With the launch of Windows 8 the gaming world was a tad shaken up. It seems that Microsoft was abandoning the PC gamer in favor of their own console. Everything about Windows 8 seemed designed to push the Xbox as the center of the gaming world. It was a decision that made many development houses more than a little angry. It was bad enough that Valve made the choice to begin working on their own Linux based OS to support games. The gaming community responded favorably to this change which we are sure made Microsoft more than a little nervous. To add insult to injury the Xbox One did not do as well as expected at launch and in the first months of its life.

Ubisoft is at it again with an announcement that they will delay review copies of the game The Crew until launch day. Their justification for this is that there is no way to properly test the game with such a small group of people. On their blog they claim “it’s only possible to assess our game in its entirety with other real players in the world. And by other, we mean thousands and thousands and thousands of players – something that can’t be simulated with a handful of devs playing alongside the press.”

The PC Gaming market has not short supply of great gaming mice. There are so many these days that someone could get lost looking through them all. You can even go so far as to choose a mouse that works for the particular game type that you like. The problem is that once you get this great mouse home you might have to run it across a surface that is… less that optimal. Here in the mouse pad vertical there are a number of products, but not all are suited to gaming and not all fill fit every gaming style. Today we are looking at a pair of mouse pads that can offer you either precision or speed.  These are part of Kingston’s new dive into the peripheral market and are call HyperX Skyn. Let’s see what they have for us.

The world of storage is evolving very quickly as the way PCs are built change. We have watched as the traditional single dive systems have given way to hybrid drives, multiple disk systems and even systems with additional cache in them. All of these measures are designed to give you more options for your system, but there is (at times) a limit to what can be done. This is typically the size of the drive. For years the typical disk was 3.5 inches and about ½ of what the common bay height was. With the original SSDs this dropped significantly and has been followed on by mSATA, mini-mSATA and now M.2. These offer high density storage in a very small package. Today we are checking out ADATA’s SP900NS38 256GB M.2 SATA SSD. Let’s see what kind of performance it offers shall we?

Anyone who’s been involved with PC building and modding for any length of time has seen their share of oddities when it comes to PC cases.  These are the first thing people see after all, and as such they were some of the fist things to start taking different forms as the industry evolved.  It was and still is a dynamic market, and as the designers and PR people put out products that they think we the consumer will appreciate and spend our money on, there inevitably come along some examples that are… out of the ordinary.

One of the biggest issues with wireless is that you never really get the speeds you are promised. Right now the maximum theoretical speed you can get in consumer wireless is about 1.3Gbps. This is assuming you are running the right router and wireless adapter which means that both have to support three antenna as well as the full 802.11ac spec. To be perfectly honest with you that is not likely to happen in the real world as most wireless adapters do not support AC1300 (full 1.3Gbps). Instead you end up getting AC800-900 with the rare AC1200 popping up now and then. Even if you have both ends at AC1300 you are still not likely to see the nirvana of 1.3Gbps wireless.

It is the dream of many computer enthusiasts to have a mobile system that is at least as powerful (if not as flexible) as their desktops. I know that I personally have spent a small fortune on finding mobile devices that can run all of the rendering and editing software I have without tearing my shoulders off my body. For their part both Intel and AMD have cut the gap between desktop and mobile performance in the CPU world, but mobile GPUs have traditionally lagged way behind their desktop counterparts.

EVGA has been taking flak from consumers over an unusual design for the cooler on their GTX 970 ACZ graphics card. The problem arose when someone pointed out that the GPU does not make contact with all three heatpipes. According to EVGA this is the way the card was designed so everyone should calm down and get back to gaming.