If every PC gamer had $550+ to spend on a graphics card, AMD's Radeon HD 7970 would be the hottest selling GPU around. Not everyone does, however, and for some people, AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7950 presents a compelling compromise between owning a card based on Santa Clara's next-generation GPU architecture and pocketing a few extra bucks in the process. Your time is coming[......]
In some ways the Internet is like the digital equivalent of truth serum. It forces people to fess up and spill the beans on their shenanigans, because in some cases, their tricks are caught on video and uploaded to the Web for all the world to see. This happened to Intel at CES when Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel's PC client group, was caught faking a DirectX 11 graphics demo on an Ivy Bridge Ultrabook[......]
It’s CES time! You know what that means: a ton of new, awesome looking tech is going to be unveiled this week, some of which will never actually see the light of day, and the things that actually end up launching won’t hit the streets for a while yet. Before we dive too deeply into the future, let’s take a look at something that’s actually in the here and now[......]
Is anyone still playing Rage anymore? It's a fun game overall, albeit a short excursion into a bug-ridden landscape that desperately needs to be fleshed out. It's also been eclipsed by newer titles, like Skyrim, Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Batman: Arkham City, and other recent titles. [......]
While most of us were sitting around watching football and ringing in the New Year over the holiday weekend, our friends over at VR-Zone were getting their geek on by modding and benchmarking AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards. They started with a single HD 7970 board, of which they quickly modded with a special BIOS that allowed them to bump up the core voltage from 1.15V to 1.25V[......]
Did you read our write-up of the spiffy new AMD Radeon 7970 earlier this week and find yourself getting all hot and bothered at the thought of kick-ass custom rigs built around the beast? Well, one company can help you cool down[......]
With a minimum of fuss and fanfare, AMD and Nvidia have made some changes to their mobile lineup over the past few days. [......]
When we reviewed the NZXT Phantom case way back in the beginning of the year, one of the few drawbacks we noted was that despite rocking mid-size measurements, NZXT considered it a full-size tower. Now, the company is releasing the NZXT Phantom 410, a smaller version of the Phantom with a “crafted mid tower chassis.” Does that mean it’s really a small form factor case? [......]
Fancy yourself an adventurous gamer? [......]
Even though the spec is apparently dead , some of us may still want to tag numeric values to our gadgetry. The folks over at Futuremark seem to agree, and want to take their benchmark testing into new territory. [......]
Looking for a single slot, low profile Radeon HD 6670 graphics card? Up until now, your search would have been fruitless – there wasn’t one. [......]
I don’t usually link to huge collections of images focused on one theme unless I’m sending examples of potential frost maiden outfits to my LARP clan. However, this is too good to pass up: this is a set of 30 vintage PC ads featuring some of the iconic images of my childhood, the equivalent of faded old Playboy page (it was an interview with Norman Mailer) you tore out and hid in a copy of Hoyle’s Rules Of Games and suddenly rediscovered years later while you’re at home cleaning out your old closet (true story). It produces, in short, an admixture of frisson and nostalgia that geeks love[......]
We had to check the date just to make sure the past two decades weren't just one very long dream, one in which we've seen the accelerated graphics port (AGP) supplant PCI as the port of choice for graphics cards, which itself ended up being replaced by PCI Express. Unless this is the most elaborate hoax in the world, the year really is 2012, a fact that Zotac blatantly ignores with the release of a GeForce GT 520 videocard in PCI and PCI-E x1 form factors. What's the point? [......]
Acer isn't pitching its new TravelMate Timeline 8481T as an Ultrabook, but maybe that's because Intel is still finalizing its list of qualifications. As it stands, the 8481T is a 14-inch ultraportable that weighs just 3.7 pounds and struts around with a 0.87-inch profile, and that's with the 8-cell battery Acer says will provide up to 13 hours of run time[......]
AMD decided to shake things up a bit with its last major driver release of the summer, Catalyst 11.8. The new driver package integrates the chip maker's CPU Overdrive utility into the AMD Vision Control Center, putting CPU and GPU overclocking controls at your fingertips from a central location (note that the software only supports CPU overclocking of Black Edition chips). When you're finished overclocking and ready to get down to the business of playing games, Catalyst 11.8 promises to deliver up to 20 percent better performance in Call of Duty Black Operations for both single- and multi-GPU setups running Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series graphics cards, up to 30 percent when AMD's Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) is enabled through the Control Center, up to 10 percent in Crysis 2 (DirectX 11 version), and up to 8 percent in F.E.A.R. [......]
