General Gaming Article

Skyrim is the Fastest-Selling Steam Game Ever
Western Digital Cuts Hard Drive Warranties – Seagate Follows Suit
AMD Radeon HD 7970 Reference Board Design, Specifications, & Benchmarks Leak
Intel Prepares To Launch Core i5-2550k Quad Core for LGA1155

Skyrim is the Fastest-Selling Steam Game Ever

Posted: 18 Dec 2011 10:13 AM PST

skyrim Skyrim is a technical and artistic masterpiece, but you don't need us to tell you that. The title is expected to pick up just about every game of the year award up for grabs in the next few months, but more importantly for Bethesda, the game also appears to have been a huge financial success as well. According to Valve's Jason Holtman, Skyrim is the "fastest selling title in Steam's history". And just to be clear, Steam has quite a bit of history having launched officially all the way back in 2003.

In addition to the millions of digital sales, Bethesda also claims to have shipped (not sold) 10 million retails copies of the game. Given the success of the series I think it's safe to say at this point we can expect another Elder Scrolls game in a few years. 2013 can't come soon enough.

Western Digital Cuts Hard Drive Warranties – Seagate Follows Suit

Posted: 18 Dec 2011 09:39 AM PST

seagate Western Digital and Seagate are leaders in mechanical hard drives to be sure, but I think we can all agree this time they are leading the industry in a very negative direction. Back in 2008 Seagate lowered the standard HDD warranty from 5 years to 3, and as expected, just about everyone followed suit shortly after. Now they are dropping the coverage period on some products to as little as one year depending on the model.

Here is what we've hammered down so far:

Western Digital

Caviar Blue, Green, and Scorpio Blue – Drops to 2 years.

Caviar Black, Scorpio Black, and external drives – Stay at 3 years.

Seagate

Constellation 2, Barracuda XT, and ES.2 – Stays at 3 years.

Barracuda, Barracuda Green, and Momentus – Drops to 1 year.

In addition to the consumer backlash retailers are also now put in the awkward position of, at least in the short term, stocking the same drives with two different warranties depending on serial number until old disks sell through.

Interestingly enough however Western Digital claims they will be offering an extended warranty program which will allow customers to buy back into the old three year warranty, but no pricing has yet been announced.

Below is a copy of the letter received by channel partners from Western Digital on the issue:

This new warranty policy will be effective for drives shipped from January 2nd, 2012. It is important that you take a moment to update your website(s) and collateral to reflect this change for effected drives shipped after January 1st, 2012.

All drives shipped to distributors prior to Jan. 2nd 2012 will retain the current warranty terms. Because of existing inventory in the distribution channel there will be a short period of time when some drives with a 3-year warranty will be sold at the same time as drives with a 2-year warranty.

If you have any doubt about the warranty of a drive you purchased, you can go to support.wdc.com, select Warranty and RMA Services and proceed to the Warranty Check page.

With sky high pricing due to the flooding in Thailand, and now warranty cuts, these guys are doing a great job pushing users over to SSD's these days.

AMD Radeon HD 7970 Reference Board Design, Specifications, & Benchmarks Leak

Posted: 18 Dec 2011 09:05 AM PST

With a rumored December 22nd launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 just around the corner, details as expected are starting to leak out. A series of slides obtained during a press briefing have confirmed a few additional specifications in addition to what we already knew, and even a few internal benchmarks.

Perhaps the most immediately apparent change in terms of the cards appearance is that AMD is finally going to be capable of offering up a high performance single-slot card for those willing to go with water cooling. Previous generation parts from the HD5000 and HD 6000 series had issues with the dual DVI connectors spilling over into a second expansion slot, making four-GPU configurations rather difficult in all but the most mammoth of cases. A second slot is still consumed by the 6th generation vapour chamber if you stick with the stock configuration, however the extra space to dissipate the air should also make the 7970 much quieter than we've seen in previous high end parts. The design of the vapor-chamber looks promising, however with a 4.3 billion transistor Tahiti GPU and 12 GDDR5 memory chips pumping out heat like a furnace, it remains to be seen if it's any quieter in reality.

Of course if board design isn't of much interest to you, perhaps the above slide on overclocking headroom will get your attention. The leaked specifications already confirmed a 925 MHz core clockspeed, however AMD now appears to be openly advertising that the Radeon 7970 will have lots of extra headroom, allowing users to push it to 1 GHz and beyond with the reference air-cooler.

Lastly, a final slide shows a few internal benchmarks which I caution you, most certainly can't be verified at this point. While it doesn't really tell us much in comparison to the competition, it does claim an average improvement of around 50% when it comes to tessellation performance vs. the Radeon 6970. Since DX11 performance against NVidia has always been an issue, it's great to see performance levels in this area finally starting to catch up. We will have to wait and see when it comes to DX9 performance, as well as how the 7970 will stack up against NVidia part's following release.

So is this the next generation GPU you've been waiting for? Let us know in the comments below.

Intel Prepares To Launch Core i5-2550k Quad Core for LGA1155

Posted: 18 Dec 2011 07:55 AM PST

Core i5 The Intel Core i5-2500k and i7-2600k processors were revolutionary when they launched. Offering amazing value for both mid-range and high end PC's, these parts overclocked so easily on air you'd be crazy not to. Recently Sandy Bridge-E has moved in to draw away the attention of the high end enthusiasts, while those on a budget of $300 or less for a CPU have been more or less stuck with the 2500k. Never wanting to miss an opportunity to upsell you to the latest and greatest, Intel is preparing to launch the Core i5-2550k for those who want something slightly better than the 2500k, but can't quite scrape together enough coin for the 2600k/2700k.

If we've managed to peek your interest keep an eye on the retail channel number BX80623I52550K, or for the OEM variation CM806230121300. The exact specifications of the chip haven't yet been published, but if the 2600k/2700k can be used as an example, then a 100Mhz bump to 3.40 GHz sounds likely. It is also expected the chip will feature 256 KB L2 cache per core, 6 MB shared L3 cache, and a TDP of 95W. If you're still saving up for the 2500k on the other hand don't fret. The i5-2550k will likely sit at a price point just above it somewhere below $250.

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