General Gaming Article |
- First Impressions: Diablo III's Hits, Misses, and Head-Scratchers
- Cooler Master Adds Fans To Hyper 412 Slim CPU Cooler, Intros Three New Thermal Pastes
- Samsung Researchers Design A Better Graphene Transistor
- Researchers Use Calculation Errors To Greatly Improve Processor Speed And Power Efficiency
- This week's hottest reviews on TechRadar
- OCZ Outs Low Profile Vertex 3 Solid State Drives
- BitFenix Rolls Out a Pair of Fan Controllers
- HP Reportedly Mulling Huge Job Cuts
- Acer's New TravelMate P243 Heads to the U.K., Packs Ivy Bridge
- Amazon Flirts with 10.1-inch Kindle Fire, Eyes Third Quarter Launch
| First Impressions: Diablo III's Hits, Misses, and Head-Scratchers Posted: 18 May 2012 12:03 PM PDT How do you possibly condense twelve years' worth of anticipation into a single game? Such is the question that plagues Blizzard's Diablo III – if you can get in to play, that is. I was one of the (likely) hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people slamming the servers on launch day, 12:01 a.m., with reckless abandon. What did it get me? Not very many "first impressions" write about.
By the time two a.m. or so rolled around (Pacific time), my group of more than ten Redditors (and friends of Redditors) had just barely gotten into their games. While starting a big gaming marathon with two hours of Diablo III excitement could have probably kept me going until the sun came up, having to delay any and all fun until the servers let us all in got pretty tiring pretty quickly. It's since been a bit of an up and down with Blizzard, but I've somehow managed to find enough windows of time between my personal life and the life of Blizzard's servers (currently on fire) to beat the game on normal difficulty. In addition to some fun screenshots below, here are a few quick impressions from someone who's been punching Prime Evils in the face since 1997. It's hard.Playing Diablo III makes me nostalgic for Diablo II. You know what I'm talking about. You'd save all of your skill points for the first 15 levels of your character's existence, and then start dumping them into two or three skills and synergies to create The Unstoppable Character. Save for the random, annoying immunities you'd find in Hell difficulty, steam-rolling Diablo's minions (Baal's too) was more a question of how fast you could click your mouse than how tough these foes really were. Diablo III – not so much. If you're not paying attention, conventional packs of mobs have the capacity to put a good bit of hurt on your bottom. This isn't the kind of game where you can just walk right behind a Frozen Orb while watching YouTube videos on the side. Should you find yourself in a four-player slugfest, well, don't expect to just leave your party members behind while you head on out solo. Yeowch. It's easy.Remember what I just said? Okay, now ignore it for a number of boss fights within the game, because Diablo III has this odd tendency to waver between frustratingly difficult and absurdly easy. Your first trip to Belial will be unpleasant for you. Other bosses in the game are tank-and-spanks, up to and including some baddies you find in Act IV itself. In other words, Diablo III doesn't scale all that well. Heaven help the hardcore player who started out on his or her quest to glory immediately after hitting level 10 with an normal character – you're setting yourself up for a bit of sadness. It's fast.For whatever reason, Diablo III just feels like a flurry of activity compared to Diablo II. Maybe there's something about the way Blizzard now handles random mobs and elite monsters; maybe it's a result of the ease at which players can warp in and out of levels to meet up with their friends; maybe it's because of all the in-game cutscenes that become an exercise in spacebar mechanics for those more eager to kill than learn. It could also be the story itself. I won't spoil the goods for those of you who are still chugging through, but the significant plot elements that happen in each act – including the big "sigh, really?" moment toward the late-game – seem hurried. So quickly do we meet new people, learn the barest amount about them, learn a little bit more about the act boss, before blammo – next act. Blizzard's through-line is a river rapid, not a lazy inner tube ride. And I confess, I don't feel like I really understand who some characters are, why they act the way they do, or how in the heck we got to where we are. And I like the Diablo universe. It's missing.Diablo III has a lot going on. You have the game itself, your characters, your friends, the auction house… I don't want to spoil a review and say that Blizzard, perhaps, bit off more than it could chew on this one – on an 11-year development cycle, no less. For example: It would have been nice to be able to sit in a queue for the game on launch day instead of dealing with all the server meltdowns (a minor gripe for an occurrence that Blizzard really should have foreseen). Moving on, why is there no option to queue for public games of specific sizes? While I appreciate the ability to quickly jump into someone else's game and help them out, these frequently become pairings. I want to play with the full, four-person experience, and I want to join or queue for a game that allows this to happen intentionally, not just by chance. For that matter, why can I add Battle.net friends via Facebook within Starcraft II… but not Diablo III? Nothing says "ball of fun" like having to write your friends' Battletags down in a notebook so you can input them into the game later. And, in the largest, lazy sin to date, why is Blizzard showing me a cutscene to end a major act that they already released as a trailer for the game. First off, spoilers: Much of what was predicted by Diablo fans based upon the peculiarities of that trailer happens. Second: It's a bit of a letdown to find out that we've all already watched one of the game's few extended, fully-rendered cinematics. With but a handful of these beautiful mini-movies to view in the game, it's a real bummer to find out that the total amount of new CG content drops by one when chugging through the acts. Nitpicky? Yes. When a company has spent 11 years working on a single title, I think nitpicking is completely fair game. It's fun.Criticisms aside, Diablo III remains a fun stompy-stomp through all things evil. You'll enjoy your (rushed) time throughout the four acts… the real question is whether Blizzard's built enough to keep players jamming on new characters and new difficulties over the long-term. And why, oh why, won't they find competent writers for the plot and in-game dialogue. I officially volunteer.
Maximum PC's resident Diablo nut and former editor, David Murphy, looks forward to getting pummeled left and right on Inferno difficulty. |
| Cooler Master Adds Fans To Hyper 412 Slim CPU Cooler, Intros Three New Thermal Pastes Posted: 18 May 2012 11:39 AM PDT
The Hyper 412 Slim redesign introduces a pair of appropriately slim fans on either side of the heatsink. Why slim fans, you ask? Cooler Master says the new look will increase cooling performance while still allowing you to plop memory down around the cooler. The Hyper 412 Slim works best with LGA 2011 sockets and should be available next month for around $50. Check out more about the Hyper 412 Slim on the Cooler Master website. Of course, you need thermal paste to install a CPU cooler, so Cooler Master announced three new compounds to go with the redesigned Hyper 412 Slim: the gold-colored, IC Essential E1, the grey-colored IC Essential E2, and the white-colored IC Value V1, which offer varying levels of conductivity. All three will join the new-look Hyper 412 Slim on store shelves in June. |
| Samsung Researchers Design A Better Graphene Transistor Posted: 18 May 2012 11:12 AM PDT
That last part is key: most of the previous solutions to graphene's electric current woes involved transforming the material into a semi-conductor, but doing so reduced its electron mobility -- thereby eliminating much of its performance gain over silicon. Samsung Electronics' R&D arm, the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, created a special three-terminal Schottky barrier (dubbed the "Barristor" by Samsung) that can be raised or lowered in order to allow or impede the flow of electrical. The three-terminal device is basically a gate. So how does Barristor stop current without mucking up electron mobility? From the abstract: The key is an atomically sharp interface between graphene and hydrogenated silicon. Large modulation on the device current (on/off ratio of 10^5) is achieved by adjusting the gate voltage to control the graphene-silicon Schottky barrier. Subscribers to the Science journal can check out the full text for an even more in-depth and jargon-filled explanation. It was published on the website yesterday. |
| Researchers Use Calculation Errors To Greatly Improve Processor Speed And Power Efficiency Posted: 18 May 2012 10:22 AM PDT
The researchers -- from Rice University, Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, Switzerland's Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, and the University of California, Berkeley -- use probability to account for the number of errors created by the inexact chip and place limitations on exactly which chip calculations can produce errors, to avoid mistakes during critical processes. Since an inexact chip isn't constantly triple-checking its work for pinpoint accuracy, it also receives a significant processing speed increase compared to traditional processors. A couple of innovations help inexact chips consume less power than traditional chips. The variance allows the team to "prune" infrequently used sections of the chips to make the hardware smaller, while a technique called "confined voltage scaling" taps into the processing speed increase to reduce power consumption when it isn't needed. "In the latest tests, we showed that pruning could cut energy demands 3.5 times with chips that deviated from the correct value by an average of 0.25 percent," study co-author Avinash Lingamneni said in a Rice University press release. "When we factored in size and speed gains, these chips were 7.5 times more efficient than regular chips. Chips that got wrong answers with a larger deviation of about 8 percent were up to 15 times more efficient." But what good is a chip that screws up all the time? Plenty of good, as it turns out. While you obviously wouldn't want an inexact chip running, say, critical banking or security systems, the researchers say it could provide significant gains in areas that can have more tolerance for slight errors. Since the human body is hard-wired for basic error correction, the release says that initial markets may include hearing aids and devices that generate pictures. "We used inexact adders to process images and found that relative errors up to 0.54 percent were almost indiscernible," project co-investigator Christian Enz reports. "Relative errors as high as 7.5 percent still produced discernible images." Hey, does that mean Photoshop might get cheaper in the future? In any case, the team hopes to have the first inexact chip-powered prototype hearing aids and educational tablets available sometime in 2013. |
| This week's hottest reviews on TechRadar Posted: 18 May 2012 08:32 AM PDT This is the best LCD TV we've ever tested. Sony has had a tough ride in the last few years but after a catalogue of mistakes, it's finally come good in the most spectacular of ways. The KDL-46HX853 takes LCD picture quality to a whole new level, particularly where contrast and motion handling are concerned. The set looks gorgeous too, and features what's for our money the best - or at least the most sensibly focussed - online service around. This all adds up to an achievement made all the more remarkable when you consider that this outstanding TV is being delivered at a more aggressive price than the usually ultra-competitive Korean brands are offering on their range equivalents. To sum all this up, with the KDL-46HX853 Sony isn't just back, it's back with a vengeance. The way the Toshiba BDX3300 doesn't bother to disguise its BBC iPlayer, Acetrax, YouTube and Picasa services as apps is somewhat refreshing, since the functionality is identical to much more expensive - and certainly more polished, usability-wise - smart TVs and Blu-ray players. When it comes to pure Full HD picture quality, the Toshiba BDX3300 delivers, and we also like the fact that it can support an awful lot of digital files via USB and over a network. It may lack finesse and at times appears a tad archaic, but we can't find it within us to criticise anything on a super-slim Blu-ray player that combines the best of the smart TV landscape with a price that hovers under £80/£120. For a simple 2D Blu-ray upgrade with some YouTube goodness, we can't recommend the Toshiba BDX3300 highly enough. Asus Transformer Pad 300 review You can't release a £399, 10.1-inch tablet and not expect comparisons with the iPad, so we'll cut to the chase. The Asus Transformer Pad TF300 is currently one of the best 10-inch Android tablets you can buy, and represents better value with equivalent performance than the Asus Transformer Prime. The top-notch benchmark scores, wonderful use of the keyboard docking station, excellent battery life and superb usability make it a top recommendation in our eyes. If you're platform agnostic and are tossing up between this and the iPad, things get trickier. The Transformer is better value, has double the storage, a fantastic keyboard dock which makes it much more versatile, and Ice Cream Sandwich closes the gap hugely. Individual needs and budget will determine if the Asus Transformer Pad TF300 is right for you, but we applaud Asus for marrying value and performance, and the TF300 comes highly recommended. The TX-L42DT50B is a relatively high-end TV - that much is obvious from its slim depth and metallic bezel, the latter of which is some achievement considering Panasonic's rather lacklustre history in this department. Feature-packed inside, we're able to detect that this isn't the brand's flagship set, but there's really no major flaws aside from a stubborn refusal to include 3D specs. It's a decision which rather underlines why most brands - including Panasonic, to some extent - is quickly turning to passive 3D system with its 99p 3D glasses. Toshiba's 55ZL2 is designed to get any tech obsessive's pulse racing. After all, it breaks new ground in not one but two huge areas. First it can genuinely produce a watchable 3D picture without you having to wear glasses. And second, to help it achieve its first innovation, it employs a native 4K or Quad HD pixel resolution for the first time on a domestic TV. Amplifiers Blu-ray players Cameras Hands on: Leica M Monochrom review Desktops CyberPower Infinity Achilles review Gaming accessories Graphics cards Sapphire HD 7870 OC Edition review Gigabyte HD 7850 Overclock review Headphones Incase Sonic Over Ear Headphones review Plantronics BackBeat Go review Laptops Toshiba Satellite Pro C660-2F7 review Hands on: Sony Vaio T13 review Mobile phones Printers Processors Routers |
| OCZ Outs Low Profile Vertex 3 Solid State Drives Posted: 18 May 2012 06:06 AM PDT
The Vertex 3 LP line features a 7mm high form factor that "easily integrates into the latest mobile computing platforms." Best of all, the shrinkage in physical size doesn't come at the expense of performance or storage space. These are SATA III SSDs available in 60GB, 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. Depending on the model, they offer maximum read/write speeds of up to 550MB/520MB per second, and up to 85,000 IOPS of random 4K write performance. No word on when these will be available or how much they'll run. Image Credit: OCZ |
| BitFenix Rolls Out a Pair of Fan Controllers Posted: 18 May 2012 05:50 AM PDT
Probably of more interest to most folks is the Recon, an Internet-connected fan controller that also boasts five channels, but offers fan monitoring and control via mobile devices. The mobile interface is browser-based, so you can control it with just about any operating system, including iOS, Android, and Windows. "Users have been clamoring for these two devices for a while now, and I'm proud to report that the wait is finally over," says BitFenix Product Manager David Jarlestedt. "With Recon and Hydra Pro, BitFenix once again takes our disruptive ideas and brings them into a new design space – fan controllers. Offering never-before-seen functionality at competitive price points, Recon and Hydra Pro are set to become the go-to thermal control devices for enthusiasts the world over." The BitFenix Recon carries an MSRP of $39 in the U.S. and will be available next week, while the Hydra Pro will run $34.90 when it ships in June. Image Credit: BitFenix |
| HP Reportedly Mulling Huge Job Cuts Posted: 18 May 2012 05:33 AM PDT
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| Acer's New TravelMate P243 Heads to the U.K., Packs Ivy Bridge Posted: 18 May 2012 05:33 AM PDT
The TravelMate P243 sports a 14-inch display with a 1366x768 screen resolution. Specs will vary by model, though all will come with a USB 3.0 port for high-speed data transfers (provided you're rocking a USB 3.0-friendly storage device), HD webcam, up to 8GB of system memory, at least 750GB of storage space, stereo speakers, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, GbE LAN, Bluetooth 4.0, and various security features, including Acer's ProShield Security lineup, which is a suite of security and manageability tools integrated in a unified user interface (file shredder, pre-boot authentication, and other odds and ends). Pricing starts at £339 when it launches in the U.K. Acer didn't say when that will be, nor did the company mention whether or not its latest TravelMate will make a trip to U.S. shores any time soon. Image Credit: Acer |
| Amazon Flirts with 10.1-inch Kindle Fire, Eyes Third Quarter Launch Posted: 18 May 2012 05:17 AM PDT
According to DigiTimes, Amazon is "likely" to launch a full-sized Kindle Fire tablet device in the third quarter of this year, and is so serious about the move, it's suspending the launch of the 8.9-inch version that was rumored to exist. The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire was supposed to compete with Samsung's Galaxy Note tablets, or at least that's what DigiTimes' sources are saying. But with the decision to launch a 10.1-inch Kindle Fire, Amazon scrapped its 8.9-inch plans in order to simplify its lineup while going for the iPad's jugular. Image Credit: Amazon |
Cooler Master has spread its wings into a lot of different product lines, but it's still best known for its namesake: stuff that keeps your PC running cool. To that effect, today the company announced an update to the design of its Hyper 412 Slim CPU cooler as well as three new thermal pastes. 
Intel's doing a bang-up job and shrinking transistors and packing them in tighter than ever before, but let's face it: it's going to be hard to scale silicon down much further. That eventual wall is why engineers are pumped about the potential of graphene, a substance with more than 200 times the electron mobility of silicon. (Read: better potential performance.) Coaxing graphene transistors into switching off current to create the 1 and 0 signals we know and love has been tricky, however. Now Samsung says it's developed a solution that does just that, without limiting graphene's electron mobility.
A team of researchers from prominent institutions around the world claim that they've figured out how to make computer processors smaller, faster and more power efficient than ever before: by letting chips mess up once in a while. No, seriously. By allowing "inexact" chips to make a pre-calculated amount of errors rather than striving for absolute perfection, the researchers claim that drastic power reductions can be made -- and they already have a working prototype.
Thin is in, as it pertains to the tech world, and the current trend is towards increasingly skinny devices. Just take one look at the Ultrabook frenzy, including similar devices that don't carry Intel's official Ultrabook label, but are just as flat and portable nonetheless. Catering to this crowd of thin and light machine owners is OCZ, which is rolling out a line of low profile Vertex 3 solid state drives.
The world's population of fan controllers grew by two this week, courtesy of BitFenix, including one model the company claims is the world's first Internet-connected fan controller (Recon) and another that sports low profile sliders (Hydra Pro) for compatibility with just about any case, even ones with doors. The Hydra Pro features 30W per channel performance (with five channels), offers push-button LED on/off functionality when combined with BitFenix's Spectre and Spectre Pro LED fans, and boasts BitFenix's SofTouch surface treatment similar to what you find on many rubberized smartphones.
Last year, Hewlett-Packard briefly toyed with the idea of quitting the PC business. While that didn't pan out as the powers that be at the company eventually decided against it, HP did launch a major restructuring effort by announcing the merger of its printing and PC divisions in March, 2012. According to recent reports, that restructuring effort also includes job cuts. Hit the jump for more. 
Acer this week rolled out its TravelMate P243 laptop, a notebook designed to meet the needs of SMB and SOHO with a "pleasant yet practical design." On the practicality side, the TravelMate P243 wields third generation Intel Core processor options with Turbo Boost and, according to model, discrete level Nvidia GeForce GT 630M graphics to tear through those multimedia chores (or some gaming in between hammering out TPS reports).
One of the complaints some people have with Amazon's Kindle Fire device is that it's only 7 inches. Sure, it's relatively affordable in the land of tablets (or glorified eBook readers, if you prefer to call it that), but certainly a larger screen size would put additional competitive heat on Apple's iPad, the only tablet line that sells better than the Fire. Well, it looks as though a 10.1-inch Kindle Fire is nearing release.| You are subscribed to email updates from Maximum PC - All Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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