General Gaming Article

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• Digital Storm Now Offers Titan X in Aventum, Bolt, and Velox Systems
• Nvidia Titan X Review
• Newegg Daily Deals: Linksys EA9200-4A AC3200 Router, Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD, and More!
• Here's How Microsoft Is Shrinking Windows 10's Footprint
• Velocity Micro Edge Z55 Review
• OpenSSL Readies Series of Updates to Patch Mystery Security Holes
• Nvidia GTC 2015 Live Blog
• Tesoro's Lobera Spectrum Mechanical Keyboard Heads to North America

Digital Storm Now Offers Titan X in Aventum, Bolt, and Velox Systems Posted: 17 Mar 2015 08:16 PM PDT Tackling a Titan X Nvidia finally made official a new flagship graphics card today, the mighty GeForce Titan X, and right on cue are the barrage of announcements from system builders flaunting the availability of the successor to Titan Z. That includes boutique builder Digital Storm, which is now (or soon) offering the Titan X in various configurations inside its Aventum, Bolt, and Velox desktop product lines. The Bolt is Digital Storm's version of a Steam Machine and is a logical fit for the Titan X if you're already rocking or planning to upgrade to a 4K Ultra HD television. For even more power, there's the Velox, which is Digital Storm's standard desktop for enthusiasts, and the Aventum, the boutique builder's top shelf gaming system with room for up to four graphics cards. As we learned the today, the Titan X features 3,072 Maxwell cores, 192 TMUs, 96 ROPs, 24 SMs, and 12GB of GDDR5 on a 384-bit bus. The memory at reference is clocked at 7,010MHz and the GPU at 1,000MHz/1,075MHz (Core/Boost). "The GTX Titan X is the most advanced piece of hardware we've seen here at Digital Storm and we are all very excited to see what people can do with these cards in our machines," said Harjit Chana, Chief Brand Officer. "This card has the potential to be a game-changer and it deserves a machine that can keep up with it." At the time of this writing, Digital Storm still hadn't updated its website to reflect the availability of the new cards, though they should be available any time now. In the meantime, you can check out some 4K benchmarks Digital Storm ran of a three-way SLI Titan X setup here. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Nvidia Titan X Review Posted: 17 Mar 2015 12:00 PM PDT A new hero descends from the heights of Mount GeForce In ancient Greek mythology, the Titans are the immediate descendants of the primordial gods. So it is with the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan, descended from the company's top-shelf professional workstation GPUs. First debuting in March 2013, the original Titan was nearly the most powerful video card that the company could offer. They sealed off a couple items that would be of little interest to gamers, which also prevented professionals from using these much less expensive gamer variants for workstation duties. In the two years since, the company has iterated on this design, adding more shader processors (or "CUDA cores," as Nvidia likes to call them), and even adding a second GPU core on the same card. Now the time has come for it to deliver the Maxwell generation of super-premium GPUs, this time dubbed the GTX Titan X. And it's a beast. Despite being stuck on the 28nm process node for several years now, the company continues to extract more and more performance from its silicon. Interestingly, the card goes up for sale today, but only at Nvidia's own online storefront. There is currently a limit of two per order. The company tells us that you'll be able to buy it from other stores and in pre-built systems "over the next few weeks." First-world problems, right? These days, you can use the number of shader cores as a rough estimate of performance. We say "rough" because the Maxwell cores in this Titan X are, according to Nvidia, 40 percent faster than the Kepler cores in the earlier Titans. So when you see that the Titan X has "only" 3072 of them, this is actually a huge boost. It's about 30 percent more than the GTX 980, which is already a barnstormer. For reference, the difference in shader count between the GTX 780 and the original Titan was about 16 percent. The Titan X also has an almost ridiculous 12GB of GDDR5 VRAM. We say "almost" because Nvidia has some ambitious goals for the resolution that it expects you to be able to play at with this card. At the Game Developers Conference two weeks ago, its reps pitched the Titan X to us as the first GPU that could handle 4K gaming solo, at high settings. They demoed Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, which wasn't a solid 60fps, as they readily acknowledged. But we did see all the graphics settings cranked up, and gameplay was smooth at about 45fps when paired with a G-Sync monitor. As its name implies, G-sync synchronizes your monitor's refresh rate to the frame rate being delivered to your video card, which vastly reduces tearing. They also enabled motion blur, which can help mask frame rate drops. For our review, we used seven high-end cards that have come out in the same two-year time frame as the original Titan. Some of these are no longer sold in stores, but they still provide an important frame of reference, and their owners may want to know if upgrading is going to be worth it. Note that the clock speeds in the charts on the next page are not all for the reference versions. These are for the particular models that we used for this review. The GTX 980 is the MSI Gaming 4G model; the GTX 970 is the Asus GTX970-DCMOC-4GD5; the GTX 780 is the Asus STRIX-GTX780-OC-6GD5 (and the reference model also has 3GB of VRAM instead of 6GB); and the Radeon R9 290X is the MSI Lightning edition. We used the prices for the reference versions, however. Click here to turn to page 2 for the specs! Let's take a look at their specs: Titan X Titan  GTX 980 GTX 970 GTX 780 Ti GTX 780 R9 290X Generation  GM200  GK110  GM204  GM204   GK110   GK104 Hawaii Core Clock (MHz)  1,000  837  1,216  1,088  876  889 "up to" 1GHz Boost Clock (MHz)  1,075  876  1,317  1,228  928  941 N/A VRAM Clock (MHz)  7,010  6,000  7,000  7,000  7,000  6,000 5,000 VRAM Amount  12GB  6GB  4GB  4GB  3GB  6GB 4GB Bus  384-bit  384-bit  256-bit  256-bit  384-bit  384-bit 512-bit ROPs  96  48  64  56  48  48 64 TMUs  192  224  128  104  240  192 176 Shaders  3,072  2,688  2,048  1,664  2,880  2,304 2,816 SMs  24  15  16  13  15  12 N/A TDP (watts)  250  250  165  145  250  250 290 Launch Date March 2015 March 2013 Sept 2014 Sept 2014 Nov 2013 May 2013 Oct 2013 Launch Price  $999  $999  $549  $329  $649  $699 $549 You probably noticed that the Titan X has a whopping 96 ROPs. These render output units are responsible for the quality and performance of your anti-aliasing (AA), among other things. AA at 4K resolutions can kill your framerate, so when Nvidia pitches the Titan X as a 4K card, the number of ROPs here is one of the reasons why. They've also made a return to a high number of texture mapping units. TMUs take a 3D object and apply a texture to it, after calculating angles and perspectives. The higher your resolution, the more pixels you're dealing with, so this is another change that serves 4K performance well. "SM" stands for "streaming multi-processor." Stream processing allows a GPU to divide its workload to be processed on multiple chips at the same time. In Nvidia's architecture, each one of these SMs contains a set of CUDA cores and a small amount of dedicated cache memory (apart from the gigabytes of VRAM listed on the box). Having 50 percent more SMs than your next-fastest card should give you an impressive jump in performance. The result won't be linear, though, becuase the Titan X has lower clock speeds—those extra one billion transistors on the Titan X generate additional heat, so lowering clocks is the main way of dealing with that. Its siblings the GTX 980 and 970 have "only" 5.2 billion transistors each, so they can set their clocks much higher. Despite all the silicon crammed into the Titan X, it still uses Nvidia's reference dimensions; it's only about 10.5 inches long, and it's not taller or wider than the slot bracket. If not for its darker coloring, you could easily confuse it for any baseline Nvidia card released in the past couple years. Its fan is noticeably quieter than the Titans that have come before, but it won't disappear into the background like we've seen (heard) when Nvidia's partners install their own cooling systems. If you want reliable quietude, you'll have to wait for EVGA's Hydro Copper version, which attaches to a custom water-cooling loop, or try your hand at something like Arctic Cooling's Accelero Hybrid. One card arguably missing from our lineup is the Titan Black. However, the GTX 780 Ti is basically the same thing, but with a 3GB frame buffer instead of a 6GB frame buffer, and slightly lower clock speeds. The Radeon R9 290X is the fastest GPU that AMD currently has available, so we thought it would make for a good comparison, despite being about a year and a half old; and the MSI Lightning edition is arguably the beefiest version of it. Before we show you the benchmarks, here's the system that we used to test these cards: Part Component CPU Intel Core i7-3960X (at stock clock speeds; 3.3GHz base, 3.9GHz turbo) CPU Cooler Corsair Hydro Series H100 Mobo Asus Rampage IV Extreme RAM 4x 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws X, 2133MHz CL9 Power Supply Corsair AX1200 SSD 1TB Crucial M550 OS Windows 8.1 64-bit Case NZXT Phantom 530  Our Sandy Bridge-E system is getting a little long in the tooth, but the Intel Core i7-3960X is still quite a beefy chip and fine for benchmarking video cards. We'll probably be moving to the Haswell-E platform soon. We test with every game set to its highest graphical preset and 4x multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). Sometimes individual settings can be increased even further, but we leave these alone for more normalized results. That's because these settings are usually optimized for a specific brand of cards, which can end up skewing results. For example, we leave PhysX disabled. We did make one exception, to show you how much of an impact certain niche settings can have: At 3840x2160, we tested Tomb Raider with TressFX on, and TressFX off. Since this hair-rendering tech is an open spec, both Nvidia and AMD can optimize for it. MSAA is not an available setting in Tomb Raider, so we use 2x super-sample antialiasing (SSAA) instead. This form of AA generates a higher resolution frame than what the monitor is set at, and squishes the frame down to fit. All Nvidia cards in this roundup were tested with the 347.84 drivers, which were given to us ahead of release and are scheduled to be available for everyone to download on March 17th. The Titan X is also scheduled to hit retail on this day. We tested the R9 290X with AMD's Omega drivers released in December. Click here to see the benchmarks and analysis! We test with a mix of AMD-friendly and Nvidia-friendly titles (it seems like you're either one or the other, these days); Metro: Last Light, Hitman: Absolution, and Tomb Raider usually favor AMD; Batman: Arkham Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and Unigine Heaven favor Nvidia. In all cases, we use their built-in bechmarks to minimize variance. 1920x1080 Bechmark Results, Average Frames Per Second   Metro: Last Light Arkham Origins Hitman: Absolution Shadow of Mordor Tomb Raider Unigine Heaven Titan X  93  127  84  106  205  97 Titan  63  80  63  67  129  57 980  86  99  70  93  164  79 970  71  81  59  72  132  61 780 Ti  72  84  70  77  142  69 780  67  77  65  71  122  62 290X  82  111  64  84  143  65 You probably noticed that the GTX 780 trades blows with the original GTX Titan, despite the Titan having better specs. The 780 benefits from a higher clock speed and an enhanced cooler designed by Asus. Historically, Nvidia has not allowed its partners to use vendor-specific coolers on the Titan cards, so the other cards with slightly lower specs and better cooling could catch up with some overclocking. However, Nvidia says that the Titan X was highly overclockable despite using a reference cooler, so we'll be exploring that soon. The 780 Ti handily beats the original Titan despite also using reference clock speeds, because the Ti variant is basically a Titan Black, which is the sequel to the original Titan and came out about a year later. (And the Titan X is a physically black card, while the Titan Black is not. It can get a little confusing.) Meanwhile, the R9 290X beats all the Kepler generation cards, except in Hitman: Absolution, which is usually a bastion for AMD's GPUs. It looks like Nvidia has figured out some driver optimizations here. In general, the Titan X says to the other cards, "Get on my level." It's clearly operating on a different tier of performance. The GTX 980 also stays generally ahead of the 290X by a comfortable margin. 2560x1440 Bechmark Results, Average Frames Per Second   Metro: Last Light Arkham Origins Hitman: Absolution Shadow of Mordor Tomb Raider Unigine Heaven Titan X  64  90  60  77  129  61 Titan  44  58  43  49  77  38 980  59  71  46  67  105  48 970  47  59  39  51  81  36 780 Ti  51  62  48  56  86  42 780  47  59  44  52  80  40 290X  54  83  54  63  91  40 As we ratchet up the resolution (while keeping all other graphical settings the same) we see the performance separation begin. While everyone comfortably sustained 60-plus fps at 1080p, older GPUs struggle to maintain that threshold at 2560x1440, as does the GTX 970. We're pushing 77 percent more pixels onto the screen, and the original Titan's relatively low number of ROPs, low clock speeds, and Kepler-generation CUDA cores combine to make an obstacle that the other cards don't have to deal with. The new Titan X is producing well over 50 percent more frames in some of these tests, despite generating less noise, about the same amount of heat, and costing about the same. Wringing these kind of gains from the same 28nm process node is pretty impressive. It comfortably beats AMD's best card in every test. Tomb Raider and Batman: Arkham Origins distinguish themselves as two particularly well-optimized games.  The R9 290X remains ahead of Nvidia's Kepler cards and pulls away in Hitman. AMD's 512-bit bus provides a wide pipe for memory bandwidth, and that advantage emerges once you move past 1080p. It's not until we encounter newer premium cards like the GTX 980 and Titan X that we find a competitive alternative from Nvidia. And when the Titan X arrives, it makes a statement, decisively maintaining 60-plus fps no matter what we threw at it. We'd want nothing less from a card that costs nearly three times as much as the 290X. The GTX 980 gets more mixed results here, but it still looks like a great card for playing at this resolution. 3840x2160 Bechmark Results, Average Frames Per Second   Metro: Last Light Arkham Origins Hitman: Absolution Shadow of Mordor Tomb Raider* Unigine Heaven Titan X  35  53  33  44  44/60  26 Titan  24  34  22  25  26/37  18 980  32  41  24  37  36/48  20 970  24  32  19  28  27/37  15 780 Ti  27  38  23  32  29/40  19 780  26  35  23  30  27/38  18 290X  28  41  29  37  31/43  17 *TressFX on/TressFX off When you look at these results, it's important to keep in mind that our review process does not aim for playable framerates. We want to see how these cards perform when pushed to the limit. Despite this demanding environment, the Titan X remains a viable solo card to have at 4K, though it's still not ideal (putting aside for the moment the technical resolution difference between DCI 4K and Ultra HD 4K). The good news is that 4xMSAA is arguably not needed at a resolution this high, unless you're gaming on a big 4K HDTV that's less than a couple of feet from your eyes. Those with screens that are 32 inches or smaller will probably be fine with 2xMSAA, or some version of SMAA (Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing), which is known to be quite efficient while producing minimal blurriness and shimmering. Nvidia's TXAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) can be a good option when you have one of the company's cards and are playing a game that supports the feature. And with the Maxwell generation of cards (the Titan X, GTX 980, and GTX 970), you also have MFAA, or Multi-Frame Sample Anti-Aliasing. The company claims that this gets you 4xMSAA visual quality at the performance cost of 2xMSAA. The GTX 780 nearly catches up with the 780 Ti at this resolution, again demonstrating the importance of clock speeds, although the difference is pretty modest in this scenario. At 4K, this GTX 780's additional 3GB of VRAM also comes into play. The 6GB card spends less processing power on memory management. However, the 780 does not support 4-way SLI, if that's your thing. It's limited to 3-way SLI. The GTX 970 and 980 have the same difference with their SLI support. The GTX 960 is limited to only 2-way SLI. This is one of the methods that Nvidia uses to encouraging the purchase of their more expensive cards. All Titans support 4-way SLI. The R9 290X maintains its lead over Kepler, though it shrinks inside the margin of error at times. It's weakest in Unigine Heaven, because this benchmark makes heavy use of tessellation (dynamically increasing surface complexity by subdividing triangles in real time), and that's something that Kepler and Maxwell do much better. In general, it's a very respectable performer, especially for the price, which has fallen to roughly that of a GTX 970. Since the 290X is meaningfully faster in every single benchmark that we used, and it bumps up against the GTX 980 when we get to 4K, it makes for a pretty good spoiler until the Titan X arrives and leapfrogs everyone in the contest. Conclusion Overall, things are looking pretty rosy for the Titan X. Since it's packed with a huge amount of ROPs, SMs, shader processors, and VRAM, it's able to overcome the limitation of the aging 28nm process. The Maxwell-generation CUDA cores are also about 40 percent faster than the older Kepler version (by Nvidia's estimation, at least), and the company improved color compression for additional performance gains. It's not the Chosen One if you want to game with a single GPU at 4K, but you can get pretty close if you're willing to tweak a few graphical settings. Also keep in mind that it was about one year ago when Nvidia debuted the GTX Titan Z, which has two Titan Black GPUs on a single card. So they may plan to drop a dual Titan X sometime soon, as well. And there's room in the lineup for a "980 Ti," since there's quite a spec gap (and price gap) right now between the GTX 980 and the GTX Titan X. If that's not enough, rumors around AMD's next generation of video cards are reaching a boiling point. There's always something new around the corner, isn't there? But if you're comfortable with this price tag, and you don't care about what AMD's got cooking, the Titan X is the fastest thing you'll find for gaming beyond 1080p.

Newegg Daily Deals: Linksys EA9200-4A AC3200 Router, Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD, and More! Posted: 17 Mar 2015 11:59 AM PDT   Top Deal: So you've finally went through and upgraded your PC, your significant other's machine, and the PC the kids use for school and games. Great! You're all set, except for one little thing -- home networking. Don't panic, there's good news. Now that 802.11ac has been out for quite some time, high-end devices are coming down in price. Just look at today's top deal for a Linksys EA9200-4A Wireless AC3200 Tri-Band Smart Wi-Fi Router for $200 with free shipping (normally $290 - use coupon code: [EMCAPKV22]). This router rocks six active antennas (three on the inside, three on the outside), supports beamforming technology, and is aided bya 1GHz dual-core CPU for more simultaneous connections. Other Deals: Samsung 850 Pro 2.5-inch 512GB SATA III Solid State Drive (SSD) for $265 with free shipping (normally $292 - use coupon code: [EMCAPKV23]) Dell E2414Hr Black 24-inch 5ms LED LCD Monitor for $130 with free shipping (normally $160; additional $10 Mail-in rebate; Free game Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with purchase, limited offer) MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GD5T OC 4GB Video Card for $320 with free shipping (normally $340) Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1866 Memory for $120 with free shipping (normally $125 - use coupon code: [EMCAPKV24])

Here's How Microsoft Is Shrinking Windows 10's Footprint Posted: 17 Mar 2015 11:35 AM PDT A leaner OS When Windows 10 launches in its final form to the public later this year, it will come with a smaller footprint than what you might be used to. That's because Microsoft is making a concerted effort to reduce the storage space necessary for a Windows 10 device, and there are two ways the Redmond is going about it -- compression and recovery enhancements. Microsoft explains both in a blog post. Using what Microsoft says is an efficient algorithm, Windows is better able to compress system files in current builds. This method alone gives back around 1.5GB of storage for 32-bit and 2.6GB for 64-bit Windows installs. In addition, Phones running Windows 10 will also make use of the same efficient compression algorithm, though Microsoft didn't say what the net savings would be. The second way Microsoft is cutting back on storage use is by redesigning Windows' Refresh and Reset functions so that a separate recovery image -- the kind that's often installed by OEMs -- is no longer needed to restore Windows to a squeaky clean state. According to Microsoft, this can save anywhere from 4GB to 12GB, depending on the make and model. There's a caveat to the compression scheme. Microsoft says it will only be done if the hit on resources and subsequent performance impact won't be noticeable by humans. "One important factor is the amount of memory (RAM) a device has. The amount of RAM a device has determines how often it retrieves system files from storage. Another important factor is how quickly a device's CPUs can run the decompression algorithm when retrieving system files. By considering these and other important factors, Windows is able to assess if a device can use compression without reducing human-perceivable responsiveness," Microsoft says. Why bother? The main reason for all this is to ensure that Windows can fit on low storage devices, and fit while still giving the user some storage space of his or her own to play with. You can read more about Microsoft's methods here. Image Credit: Flickr (Yutaka Tsutano) Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Velocity Micro Edge Z55 Review Posted: 17 Mar 2015 11:20 AM PDT Compact but fast It's never good to whip out a new PC, plug it in, and click the power button, only to have absolutely nothing happen. Nada. Zilch. Zippo. The issue is only compounded when the problem box is a small MicroATX system packed with so much hardware that you can't even get your hand inside. That's the problem we faced with the Velocity Micro Edge Z55. Like most review systems we get, it was expedited in shipping, which is a free license for the shipping firm's employees to dribble it down the tarmac like Shaq going for a slam dunk. Fortunately, that's when we ran across one of the niftier features of the new MX3 case (a customized Lian Li case) that Velocity Micro uses: A swing-out tray for the liquid cooler. Remove two thumb screws and you can easily swing the Corsair 240mm radiator out of the way. Once we did that we did a quick re-seat of the machine's power connectors and we were up and running with no issues. It was almost so conveniently fixed that we wondered—with eyes squinting like Philip J. Fry—if Velocity Micro hadn't intentionally set it up that way just to show off how cool the case is. On the inside, we found Intel's Core i7-4790K "Devil's Canyon" overclocked to 4.7GHz in a Gigabyte GA-Z97MX board with 16GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR3/1866. Storage duties go to a pair of 250GB Samsung Evo SSDs and a Tosh mechanical drive. A pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti cards in SLI handle graphics. The cards use the standard reference Nvidia coolers, which is one of our issues with the Edge Z55. The CPU is liquid-cooled by the Corsair closed-loop cooler, and even though heavily overclocked at 4.7GHz, the acoustics are extremely unobtrusive under a compute load. But crank up a gaming load for long enough, and the fan whir from the pair of 780 Ti cards lets you know this is no silent runner. What's odd is we've long thought Nvidia's reference design to be very decent considering the performance provided, but here it rains on the quiet performance of the PC under CPU loads. It's not horribly loud, but we've come to expect anything larger than a small form factor box to be extremely quiet. The BMW of Desktops? The Maingear Epic Force, for example, which we reviewed in our October issue, packed four GeForce 780 Ti's in Quad SLI, but was silent thanks to its custom-liquid loop. That same machine, we should point out, cost nearly $13,000, making the Edge Z55's price tag of $4,300 seem damn near a bargain. It isn't, but at least the performance is good. Our zero-point PC uses a six-core Core i7-3930K overclocked to 3.8GHz with a GeForce GTX 690 inside. The Edge Z55 surpasses it by more than 20 percent in our benchmarks that aren't thread-heavy. In Premiere Pro and x264 HD 5.0—both very multi-thread-heavy workloads—the Edge Z55 was slower by only about 3 to 5 percent. That's pretty good when you remember we're talking four cores versus six cores. In gaming, however, a pair of 780 Ti cards easily roughs up a GeForce GTX 690. We're talking about a 100 percent performance advantage in Batman: Arkham City and 69 percent in 3DMark 11 on the extreme setting. But what about something more modern? The pricey Maingear Epic Force, with its CPU at basically the same clock, is just about even with the Edge, so score one for the system that's a hell of a lot cheaper. In gaming though, the Epic Force's four cards throat-punches the Edge's mere pair. We're really looking at two kinds of computers, however, and two kinds of companies. Maingear is firmly in the boutique sector of PC building. It's the kind of company that, if you're a billionaire and want a gaming PC for your kid, you call up and drop $13,000 into a box like most of us put quarters in a parking meter. Velocity, meanwhile, sticks to its mantra that if companies such as Maingear or Falcon make Ferraris and Lamborghinis, VM makes BMWs. That kind of fits here. The Edge Z55 is a nicely adorned, pleasant-looking box, but it won't get you the same "oohs" and "aahs" as an exotic PC. It will, however, save you a serious chunk of change. We'd prefer it if Velocity could tamp down the GPU noise, and even though it's a steal compared to a boutique box, it's still on the pricey side. Otherwise, it's a solid all-round effort.

OpenSSL Readies Series of Updates to Patch Mystery Security Holes Posted: 17 Mar 2015 09:19 AM PDT Vague security bulletin is vague Imagine being told that you're in danger for the next couple of days and that there's nothing you can do about it but sit tight and wait it out. Talk about suckage. Well, that's essentially what the OpenSSL Project just did, though there's a reason behind it. The OpenSSL Project announced plans to plug up several security holes, including one that's classified as "high severity," in a series of updates scheduled for March 19. Those security updates will be included in several new versions of OpenSSL -- 1.0.2a, 1.0.1m, 1.0.0r, and 0.9.8zf. They'll address a "number of security defects," though if you're wondering what they are, the OpenSSL Project isn't saying. We assume that's to keep black hat hackers in the dark while the group patches whichever vulnerabilities it found. Nevertheless, it's a bit unnerving to know there's a high severity OpenSSL security hole that will exist for the next couple of days, especially after incidents like Heartbleed caught the Internet at large with its pants around its ankles, and more recently FREAK (Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys). To say it's been a rough year for OpenSSL is an understatement. The good news here is that OpenSSL's security should significantly improve over time. Companies like Cisco and IBM, to name just two of several, are funding the Core Infrastructure Initiative, a $2 million per year project dedicated to supporting and auditing open-source projects like OpenSSL. Image Credit: Flickr (Brian Rinker) Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Nvidia GTC 2015 Live Blog Posted: 17 Mar 2015 09:07 AM PDT Titan X announced to be $999 Nvidia's GPU technology conference is starting shortly and we're on location in San Jose prepping to do a live blog on the event. Refresh your browser for updates as the conference progresses. 9:11am PST: Video introduction begins: Shows footage of sci-fi movie clips (2001: A Space Odyssey), videos that highlight medical research.  Video showcase robots and vehicles that drive humans. The video ends with "the future is here" and Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang walks out. 9:15: Jen-Hsun Huang says four things will be talked about: a new GPU and deep learning, a "very fast box" and deep learning, roadmap reveal and deep learning, and self-driving cars and deep learning. Deep learning appears to be a theme here... 9:17: Jen-Hsun Huang recaps the last year in visual computing. Says gaming is big. Brings up Nvidia Shield console announcement from GDC.  9:18: The days of dials, knobs and buttons are gone for cars, says Jen-Hsun Huang. It will all be digital, he says. Cars will be smart, he suggests. 9:22: Huang says since 2008, there has been a 10X growth in GPU computing. 9:27: Huang formally announces Titan X GPU. Video plays introducing us to the chassis of the card. Specs: 8 billion transistors, 3072 CUDA cores, 7 TFLOPS SP/.2 TFLOPS DP, 12GB Memory. 9:31: Huang showcases what Titan X can do by showing Epic's new Unreal demo which is a forest area that has been rendered out 100 square miles (larger than Silicon Valley, Huang says). We've seen this video at GDC before, but it never fails to impress. A boy and his kite fly through a gorgeous virtual world. It looks like a CGI film (except its supposedly being rendered real time on a Titan X).  9:36: Huang talks about Titan X for deep learning. Says its faster than a 16 core Xeon CPU, which took nearly 43 days) under the training AlexNet benchmark. Titan X, on the other hand, took only 2.5 days with a middleware called cuDNN. 9:40: Huang announces Titan X will cost $999 9:46: Huang talks about how machine learning has been used in the late 90s to allow machines to detect human writing, which we still use in banks and the like today.  9:47: Huang recaps that on February 6th, 2015, Microsoft used a computer that could recognize images better than a human. 10:06: Huang puts on a slide showcasing dozens of tech companies using GPU accelerated deep learning. These companies include Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and more. 10:07: Huang explains that deep learning is being used in medical research. A couple of examples include: predicting the toxicity of new drugs and understanding gene mutation to prevent disease. 10:10: Huang says we're just at the beginning of deep learning. Showcases research done at Stanford university which is able to use a computer to create a sentence which descibes an image. The sentence reads, "a bird perched on a branch of a tree," as we see an image of a bird perched on a branch of a tree. That's pretty impressive.  10:17: Huang announces Digits Devbox. It has "the world's fastest GPU." (it looks like it has four Titan Xs) Made for develoopers/researchers who want to do deep learning work, not a general purpose computer. Comes with Linux. (No instruction manuals!).  Will be priced for $15,00 10:27: Nvidia reveals road map. Beyond Maxwell, Pascal will be coming roughly in 2016. It will have "mixed precision, 3d memory, NVlink." 10:34: Huang moves on to talk about self driving cars. Huang wants to augment ADAS (advanced driving assistance systems -- that do auto breaking) with its deep neural network system via Nvidia's Drive PX self-driving car computer.  10:41: Project Dave - Darpa Autonomous Vehicle is featured on the slide.  Nvidia shows Dave (a little toy car) driving over rough terrain. It knows what it can and can't drive over. All of this was done on one CPU. It used 225,000 images as training data. We get to see a video glimpse of what Dave was like when it had less images to use as training data and it would bump into objects and get stuck. 10:46: Huang then shows off Drive PX system, and says its 3,000x faster than Dave (more neural capacity). Huang reveals that Drive PX will be available in May 2015 as a developer kit for $10,000. 10:51: Elon Musk comes in stage to talk more about the future of cars. Elon says getting self driving cars to be safer than human drivers is going to be easier than most people think. He gives the example of old elevators, which used to have elevator operators, but now we can use elevators by themselves. He says cars will be like that. It will be "magnitudes safer" than human drivers. He envisions a future in which human drivers will be outlawed because they would be less safe compared to self driving cars. Musk says he can envision a distance future in which even air bags will be removed, though he admits that it will take a long time and that it will be a gradual roll out with self driving cars. Same goes with the electrification of cars. Musk says current cars will need more, better sensors and more sophisticated computers and admires the direction that Nvidia is going in with its Tegra GPUs. 11:00: Eventually "We'll take autonomous cars for granted," says Musk. Musk believes it will take about 2-3 years after we prove that self driving cars are safer than humans for the policy to change and approve them.

Tesoro's Lobera Spectrum Mechanical Keyboard Heads to North America Posted: 17 Mar 2015 08:41 AM PDT Per-key RGB backlighting meets Kaihli key switches Remember when mechanical keyboards were few and far between? That all changed in the last several years and what was once a niche market is quickly becoming a crowded field. Go ahead and add one more model to the growing list of options as Tesoro brings its Lobera Spectrum mechanical keyboard featuring RGB per-key illumination and a few other notable bullet points to North America. Per-key RGB illumination means gamers can customize the backlighting for each individual key with around 16.8 million color options. So if you wanted to, you could light up just the WASD keys, and have each one glow a different color. You also get nine different LED effects to play with, including dimming, full zone, trigger, ripple, firework, radiation, rainbow wave, and per key customized mode, plus five levels of brightness and five profiles to store them. If you really want a light show, you can put the keyboard in Audio Mode and watch as LEDs dance to the beats and bass of your playlist. When you're done playing with lights, you can move over to macro recording. Unfortunately there are no dedicated macro keys, though each key is programmable, including the media keys, which are all accessible with one hand, Tesoro says. The Lobera Spectrum supports N-Key Rollover (NKRO) and USB 6 Key Rollover, has a 1,000Hz polling rate, and offers USB and audio jack pass-through (there's a combo audio/mic jack and two USB 2.0 ports, plus a DC-in jack to charge smartphones and tablets through the keyboard). Tesoro opted for Kailh switches available in Blue, Brown, Black, and Red. The general consensus around the web is that Kailh switches are somewhat inferior versions of Cherry MX switches, as they're cheaper to produce and require varying (inconsistent) force. My experience with Kailh switches is limited to the Blue version on a Tt eSports Poseidon ZX. It wasn't hard to tell the difference between typing on Kailhs versus Cherry MXs, as the former didn't offer as much tactile feedback. Still, they're serviceable, especially if you're not already used to Cherry MX switches. The Tesoro Lebora Specturm is available now for about $160 street, a little more than the suggested retal price of $149. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

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MMORPG News

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• Hex: First $100k Tournament Announced
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Top 21 Locations in SWTOR
• World of Warships: New Dev Diary Dives Into US Navy History
• Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited Surprise - You Can Log In Now
• Guild Wars 2: Today's Update Includes First Person Camera & More!
• General: RUMOR: Lay Offs Hit Perfect World
• General: Lineage Eternal - GW2 Expansion Figure in NCSoft's Future
• Guild Wars 2: Sylvari: A People Torn
• General: Return to Blackrock
• EverQuest: Original Launch Trailer a Blast From the Past
• Crowfall: Mounts & Caravans Detailed
• General: Top 10 Most Anticipated MMO Releases of 2015

Hex: First $100k Tournament Announced Posted: 17 Mar 2015 07:16 AM PDT Gameforge and HEX Entertainment have announced that a HEX: Shards of Fate tournament will take place later this year to crown a worldwide champion. The tournament will feature a $100,000 prize pool to be shared among participants.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Top 21 Locations in SWTOR Posted: 17 Mar 2015 06:11 AM PDT Not every article has to be an in-depth discussion of gameplay, offering commentary on press releases, or speculating what big reveal BioWare might choose to unleash at Star Wars Celebration next month.

World of Warships: New Dev Diary Dives Into US Navy History Posted: 17 Mar 2015 06:54 AM PDT Wargaming has released a brand new developer diary that gives World of Warships players a look at the history of the US Navy and its place in the game. Check it out!

Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited Surprise - You Can Log In Now Posted: 15 Mar 2015 06:41 PM PDT In a surprise move, Zenimax has announced that Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimted, the 'buy to play' version of the game, is now live nearly a day earlier than anticipated. The word is out that the North American megaserver IS online and players can begin updating their clients in order to log in to check out the big changes that the update brings.

Guild Wars 2: Today's Update Includes First Person Camera & More! Posted: 16 Mar 2015 04:55 PM PDT Today's Guild Wars 2 update notes have been released with the welcomed surprise that the first-person view camera is now part of the game. Also, the WvW map requirement for the World Completion achievement has been removed and a new streaming client notification system has been implemented.

General: RUMOR: Lay Offs Hit Perfect World Posted: 16 Mar 2015 04:39 PM PDT According to a Twitter post sent to us, there are unconfirmed rumors of lay offs affecting employees of Perfect World Entertainment. We do not know if this is internationally-based or US-based yet and we do not yet know which games and teams have been hit. We will keep you posted as the story develops.

General: Lineage Eternal - GW2 Expansion Figure in NCSoft's Future Posted: 16 Mar 2015 01:43 PM PDT Investment firm, Daewoo, has published its buyers' prospectus for NCSoft. In it, several scenarios are presented for potential investors that project data on how NCSoft can remain solvent and avoid any corporate takeover by Nexon. Both Lineage Eternal and the Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns expansion come into play as major components of NCSoft's success or failure this year.

Guild Wars 2: Sylvari: A People Torn Posted: 15 Mar 2015 11:23 AM PDT Back before Guild Wars 2 was released the Sylvari were already captivating the minds of future players. We had the chance to see the Sylvari undergo dramatic changes as more news poured out of the gates of ArenaNet into the internet. When we finally got the chance to be one of these unique people, we found that they weren't only visually stunning, but had an incredible story that will only get more complex with HoT.

General: Return to Blackrock Posted: 15 Mar 2015 11:18 AM PDT At PAX East Blizzard announced details for the next Hearthstone Adventure, Blackrock Mountain. This week we go over all that we currently know about this mini-expansion. But first, BlizzCon!

EverQuest: Original Launch Trailer a Blast From the Past Posted: 16 Mar 2015 10:34 AM PDT Today marks the official sixteenth anniversary of the launch of EverQuest. To celebrate, let's take a look back at the original launch trailer from 1999 (and let's party!) reposted by the EQ team in 2012.

Crowfall: Mounts & Caravans Detailed Posted: 16 Mar 2015 10:16 AM PDT As the Crowfall fundraising initiative approaches the $1.3M goal for adding mounts and caravans to the game, the Artcraft team has released an FAQ to detail how the feature will work in the game.

General: Top 10 Most Anticipated MMO Releases of 2015 Posted: 15 Mar 2015 10:54 AM PDT Right now we are in a bit of a lull in the MMO release schedule. Crowdfunding campaigns like Crowfall keep on trucking and the astronomically high level of hype around Star Citizen continues to escalate, but both of those games are pretty far off from a real release. This list isn't going to mention any current crowdfunding games, nor will it mention stuff that will go into a closed alpha of any kind - only open betas and full releases.

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