General Gaming Article |
- Build It: The Midsize Menace
- Microsoft Kept Surface Tablet A Secret By Securing The Team In An Underground Bunker
- Digital Diablo III Downloaders Restricted From Features, Gameplay For Up To Three Days
- SSD Prices Went Down, Down, Down 46 Percent On Average Over The Past Year
- Google Spills the Jelly Bean on Android 4.1, Tips Galaxy Nexus as First Phone
- Steam for Schools Beta Barges into Classrooms Carrying Portal 2 Lesson Plans
- AMD Lays Claim to "Graphics Crown" with Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition
- Nintendo Reveals 3DS XL Console with Extra Large Display
- Microsoft Bids Adieu to Office Starter 2010
| Posted: 22 Jun 2012 01:17 PM PDT Pound for pound, you know the sound: Here's a Kepler-powered microATX gaming rig that won't break the bank—or your back Note: This feature originally ran in the June issue of Maximum PC--some pricing may have changed since then. The MissionOh, microATX. You're the awkward middle child of motherboard form factors: neither as fully powered as a regular ATX board nor as compact as Mini-ITX. On the other hand, it's possible to build a hell of a rig with microATX in a relatively small footprint without compromising power, and I've been intending to do so for a while. I took a shine to the X79-powered microATX mobo Gordon Mah Ung reviewed in the April 2012 issue, and when the sky angels slipped a Kepler GPU into my rucksack, I knew what I had to do. It's not going to be easy fitting all these high-powered parts into a minuscule chassis, but if you want easy, build a full-size machine. When I'm done, I'll have a box just 14.5 inches tall, 15.2 inches deep, and 8.25 inches wide—one that kicks a disproportionate amount of ass, no matter how tricky we have to get with the zip ties.
CHOOSING THE HARDWAREI've had my eye on Silverstone's TJ08-E microATX case since we reviewed it in March 2012. It's a bit cramped, but it has good airflow and a sleek aesthetic—as well as an unusual motherboard orientation—and it has plenty of room for long videocards and a few drives. Now, most microATX motherboards suffer from budget-itis: They're cheap and underpowered compared to full ATX boards. The Asus Rampage IV Gene? Not so much. It has LGA2011 support, quad-channel memory (though only four DIMM slots), 6Gb/s SATA ports, three 16x PCIe slots, great onboard audio, and ground-effect LEDs. Just for fun. Intel's Core i7-3820 is a great processor, and an obvious choice for an LGA2011 CPU under $300. It's a quad-core part at 3.6GHz stock and includes HyperThreading. Plus, if you want to upgrade to a six-core CPU later, LGA2011 is the only way to fly. The Rampage IV's RAM slots are close to the CPU socket, so I can't use an enormous CPU cooler. NZXT's Havik 120 features dual fans and excellent performance, but I'm still using RAM with low-profile heat spreaders to avoid bumping up against the fans. For storage, I'm sticking with my personal price/performance sweet spot: a 120GB 6Gb/s SATA SSD and a 3TB storage drive. There's not much room in the TJ08-E for excess cabling or lengthy PSUs, so I'm using the Silverstone Strider Plus 750W, which is fully modular and only 6.3 inches deep. This should help me keep my wiring tidy. Oh, and I'll be using Nvidia's brand-new GeForce GTX 680, which is faster than the GeForce GTX 580 and competitive with the Radeon HD 7970 but uses just two 6-pin power cables (see Loyd Case's detailed Kepler breakdown on page 42). At $500, this card is a hell of a deal, sips power (for a high-end GPU), and fires a pretty big shot directly across AMD's bow. INGREDIENTS
UNDER THE MAGNIFYING GLASSThe TJ08-E's cramped quarters and unusual layout mean I can't follow a typical build order. Instead, the steps are optimized for cable management as well as, well, component management. Here are the highlights. 1. First, Add PowerRemove the TJ08-E's side panels, then remove the six screws securing the top panel and take that off, too. Make sure the following cables are attached to the PSU: 24-pin and 8-pin ATX, two 6-pin PCIe power, and two SATA power cable strands. Remove the rest of the modular cables and slide the PSU into the top of the case, fan side up. Secure it with four screws (I used the PSU's included thumbscrews) and pull the cables through the opening that leads behind the motherboard tray.
2. What Drives YouNext, we'll install the drives. Lay the case on its side and remove the four screws securing the drive cages to the bottom of the case. Remove the trays and secure the SSD directly to the bottom of the case.
3. Word to Your MotherboardMount the RAM and CPU into the motherboard, install the I/O shield into the case, then mount the motherboard into the chassis. Bring your 8- and 24-pin motherboard power connections behind the motherboard tray toward their respective connectors and plug them in. Now is also a good time to start connecting front-panel connectors, like USB 3.0, audio, power and reset switches, and LEDs.
4. Drives Part DEUXWith the motherboard in place, it's time to add the storage drive. Take the lower hard drive cage (the one-bay one) and mount the hard drive into it with four screws in the mounting holes marked HDD. Reattach the hard drive cage to the bottom of the case. You can either remove the empty top three-drive cage for a less cluttered case or leave it in, to channel air from the intake fan toward the CPU fans. It also includes a pad to support the GPU, if you're into that. Run a three-port SATA power cable from the PSU to the drives. Plug the last power adapter on the string into the hard drive, then tuck the cable under the drive and plug the second plug into the SSD. Attach SATA data cables to both drives and plug them into the middle red ports on the motherboard. Those are the native Intel 6Gb/s SATA ports. Install the optical drive in the top 5.25-inch bay and secure it with four screws, then connect SATA power and data.
5. Cool (And The Gang)Now that all the fiddly bits are ready, it's time to install the CPU cooler. Install the four double-sided mounting thumbscrews, add the mounting bars, secure them with nuts, and apply a small dot of thermal paste to the CPU. Mount the heatsink with the crossbar and tighten the screws evenly, alternating every few turns until the CPU is secure. Secure the fans onto the heatsink, making sure they are drawing air from the front of the chassis and exhausting it toward the rear. Plug both fans into the included Y-connector and attach them to the CPU_FAN header on your board.
6. Game OnLast, you'll install your GPU. Remove the metal cover that blocks access to the expansion slots, then remove the lower two expansion slot covers (what would be the top two, if the case's motherboard orientation weren't upside down.) Install the GPU into the PCIe slot closest to the CPU cooler. If you left the top drive cage in, the end of the GPU should rest atop the cage. Secure the card into the expansion slots and plug in the two 6-pin power cables. Double-check your power and data connections, replace the metal cover, and turn the case upright. Reattach the top and side panels, and power on!
1. The TJ08-E's front fan, an 18cm Air Penetrator, is powerful enough to cool everything in the rig, thanks to the case's simplified airflow 2. I left the empty drive cage in place to help channel air to the CPU cooler, but you can remove it if you prefer a less cluttered interior 3. The last-minute addition of an Nvidia GTX 680 gives my rig more oomph but ruins the nice black-and-red color scheme I was going for. Punching Above its Weight ClassThe Midsize Menace is small, yet mighty. It's functionally equivalent to our Tax Refund PC from last month, but in a smaller package. It uses the same CPU and amount of RAM, as well as a similar GPU. The SSD in the Midsize Menace is a little faster, and the storage drive is larger and faster, but the Tax Refund PC has a Blu-ray drive and a higher-wattage PSU. So how much smaller is the Midsize Menace than the Tax Refund PC, which we housed in an NZXT Phantom 410 midtower chassis? The Midsize Menace, in a Silverstone TJ08-E, is just under six inches shorter than the TRPC, five inches shallower, and about a quarter-inch narrower. That makes for a lot less bulk on your desk. Using the Rampage IV's Gamer OC BIOS setting, it took about two seconds to get a stable 4.4GHz overclock on the 3820, and Gordon Mah Ung's experience last month shows that the 3820 can be easily overclocked to 4.7GHz on air. At 4.4GHz, though, it's within spitting distance of last month's Tax Refund machine, and the differences are attributable to the clock speed. More time with the Midsize Menace, and it'd be just as fast as last month's high-end box. If you don't mind a cramped build process and the loss of some elbow room (as well as expandability down the line), you can get a machine that's just as fast as the Tax Refund PC but more compact, for the same amount of money—or even a little less. Benchmarks
Our current desktop test bed consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.5GHz, 6GB of Corsair DDR3/1333 overclocked to 1,750MHz, on a Gigabyte X58 motherboard. We are running an ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card, a 160GB Intel X25-M SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Microsoft Kept Surface Tablet A Secret By Securing The Team In An Underground Bunker Posted: 22 Jun 2012 11:09 AM PDT
Microsoft hardware guru Stevie Bathiche told TechRadar, our FutureUS sister site, that the small team worked in "an underground bunker with no windows." Once things started picking up, Microsoft brought the team above ground, but the new digs sported armed guards, biometric verification and double airlock-type doors to ensure that nobody was able to sneak their way in; one door had to close completely before the other one would start to open. The Surface tablet's team spilled several more beans about the blood, sweat and anal-retentive tears that went into designing Microsoft's first self-branded tablet. They also confirmed you won't see a Windows RT tablet sporting a Kindle Fire-low price tag. Head on over to TechRadar to read the whole shebang. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Digital Diablo III Downloaders Restricted From Features, Gameplay For Up To Three Days Posted: 22 Jun 2012 10:38 AM PDT
The Starter Edition restricts progression to a level 13 cap and only lets players hack-n-slash up to Act I's Skeleton King. Blizzard reached out to Kotaku to let them know that this is a bug and will be remedied ASAP -- though to be fair, the company only said that after teh Interwebz raised a ruckus A handful of other limitations, however, were fully intended and designed to cut back on credit card fraud from would-be farmers and exploiters, Blizzard said. These restrictions are:
The moves make sense -- if you consider the real money auction house to be absolutely essential to what is, for a large part, a single player-oriented game. How many of you actually use the RMAH? Admittedly, the RMAH only opened its doors a week ago, but do its benefits outweigh the ongoing DRM hassles? Let us know what you think in the comments. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SSD Prices Went Down, Down, Down 46 Percent On Average Over The Past Year Posted: 22 Jun 2012 10:02 AM PDT If you watched HDD prices soar after the Thailand floods and found yourself grumbling that SSDs should be cheaper, good news! Your wish has come true, at least to some degree. The hardworking souls over at The Tech Report and Camelegg have analyzed scads and scads of SSD price points over the past year and found that prices are down nearly 50 percent in that time frame, with several models now dropping below the vaunted $1/GB price point.
That's been sparked by competitive pricing wars between Crucial, OCZ, Corsair and Samsung, with a lot of the cuts coming from SSDs based around SandForce's super-popular controllers. The one stodgy holdout price-wise is Intel; various versions of its 520 series and 320 series SSDs cost more dollar-for-data -wise than any other SSDs on the market, with the 40GB 320 series SSD going for a whopping $2.31 per GB. Even still, The Tech Report's researchers found that the average drop in price for SSDs over the past year was a similarly staggering 46 percent. Mechanical HDDs still provide more space for less money, but if SSD costs keep plummeting like this, even mainstream computing could be in for a speedy solid-state future. The full Tech Report report is full of all kinds of useful information, broken down by vendor and model and visualized in handy-dandy graph form, including the picture above. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Google Spills the Jelly Bean on Android 4.1, Tips Galaxy Nexus as First Phone Posted: 22 Jun 2012 07:05 AM PDT
The folks over at Droid-Life, who first reported the listing (as discovered by a user on XDA Developers forum), had the foresight to snag a screenshot before Google had a chance to cover its tracks, and once the Jelly Bean's out of the bag, there's no putting it back in. If you pay attention to the wording, you'll notice Google says the Galaxy Nexus is the "first phone" to rock Jelly Bean, not necessarily the first device. As CNet notes, that leaves the door wide open for the Nexus 7-inch tablet, co-developed between Google and Asus, to swoop in as the very first gadget running Android 4.1. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
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| Steam for Schools Beta Barges into Classrooms Carrying Portal 2 Lesson Plans Posted: 22 Jun 2012 06:37 AM PDT
Valve is currently accepting applications from educators into its Steam for Schools beta, which is "the educational version of Steam, specially designed for use by teachers and students in a classroom setting either in a school or an afterschool or summer program setting." Teachers needn't fret that students will wage bloody warfare with each other as soon as their backs are turned, as any part of Steam that isn't "core to the education experience" is disabled. The only game available at this time is Portal 2 (and the Portal 2 Puzzle Maker). What's the appeal for teachers? "In the Portal world, students interact with physically simulated objects (cubes, catapults, lasers, etc.). The interaction tends to be free-form and experimental and as students encounter new tools and challenges they may develop an intuitive understanding of physical principles such as mass and weight, acceleration, momentum, gravity, and energy," Valve explains in an FAQ. "The games also put a premium on critical thinking, spatial reasoning, problem solving, iteration and collaboration skills, and encourage overall inquiry into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) learning." Sounds a heck of a lot more useful than being able to shoot a bison from 100 yards, doesn't it? If you're an educator who agrees, you can find more information on Valve's Teach with Portals website. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
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| AMD Lays Claim to "Graphics Crown" with Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Posted: 22 Jun 2012 06:12 AM PDT
Clocks are faster all around on the GHz Edition card version compared to the "vanilla" Radeon HD 7970, if we can call it vanilla. The GPU cruises along at 1GHz, obviously (and up to 1.05GHz with boost), but the memory's also been goosed to 1500MHz. Clockspeeds on the original card are up to 925MHz (GPU) and 1375MHz (memory). The result of these higher clockspeeds is improved performance across the board. AMD's Radeon 7970 GHz Edition card boasts 288GB/s of memory bandwidth, 4.3 TFLOPS single precision compute power, and 1.01 TFLOPS double precision computer power. All three are increased over the non-GHz Edition counterpart, which features 264GB/s memory bandwidth, and 3.79 TFLOPS and 947 GFLOPS of single and double precision computer power, respectively. Look for the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition graphics card to be available next week for $500. Image Credit: AMD Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
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| Nintendo Reveals 3DS XL Console with Extra Large Display Posted: 22 Jun 2012 05:51 AM PDT
It will also wield an improved batteyr that, despite the 90 percent larger screen, outperforms that of the original 3DS, Nintendo claims. The 3DS XL will come bundled with a 4GB SD card to store music, photos, and downloadable games and videos from the Nintendo eShop. "No other hand-held entertainment experience compares to the fun of Nintendo 3DS," said Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime. "With the launch of Nintendo 3DS XL on August 19, consumers will be able to enjoy the great lineup of current and upcoming games on an even grander scale. Plus, Nintendo 3DS XL gives owners even more real estate on their screens to enjoy entertainment applications like Nintendo Video and Netflix." Also scheduled to launch on August 19 is New Super Mario Bros. 2. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Microsoft Bids Adieu to Office Starter 2010 Posted: 22 Jun 2012 05:12 AM PDT
Released this week, the Office 2010 Transition OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK) is meant to replace all prior versions of the Office 2010 OPK and Microsoft recommends OEMs use it for Office preinstallation on all new Windows 7 PCs. "The Office 2010 Transition OPK does not contain Office Starter 2010," states the page dedicated to the Office OPK tool. "The Office 2010 Transition OPK will be required on all Microsoft Windows 8 PC builds. OPK versions prior to the Office 2010 Transition OPK installed on Windows 8 PCs may create a bad user experience for Office Starter 2010." Does this signal the end of the road for Office Starter edition or will it make a comeback with the next version of the Office suite codenamed Office 15? Well, this is what Microsoft told ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley: "We will begin to phase out the shipment of PCs with Office Starter 2010. After Windows 8 becomes available, most new PCs shipped will not have Office Starter. People who use Office Starter 2010 today will continue to be able to use the product for the life of their PC. For Windows7/Office Starter 2010 users who want to upgrade their PC to Windows 8 and continue using Office Starter 2010, they will have to install an update to Microsoft Office 2010 which is available today." |
How does Microsoft, one of the highest-profile technology companies in the world, create a new, similarly high-profile piece of hardware like the Surface Tablet without anybody in the industry getting a whiff of it? Simple: you lock the designers working on the project into secretive underground facilities with security measures similar to what you'd find at a bank or sensitive data centers. 
Blizzard's decision to add a real-money auction house to Diablo III prompted the developer to force users to have an active Internet connection in order to play, to cut back on possible fraud. This has caused much consternation amongst gamers. Another fraud-protection scheme has generated a new wave of anger as digital Diablo downloaders have found their games nerfed until Blizzard verifies the payment, which takes anywhere from one to three days. To make matters worse, a bug in a recent update dumps downloaders into the "Starter Edition" of the game until verification.
In all likelihood, Google's unlocked Galaxy Nexus will be the first smartphone to come with Android 4.1 (otherwise known as "Jelly Bean") pre-installed. We believe this to be true because Google inadvertently tipped its hand in a Google Play listing for the Galaxy Nexus in which a product description touted it as the first "first phone with Android 4.1," a description that has since been removed.
I can't tell you the number of times I came down with dysentery, one of the many diseases that stopped me dead in my tracks on the Oregon Trail. But I plodded on, a banker from Boston who developed a skill for shooting bison and fast moving critters. And then it would be time for recess. Today's generation may never known of the awesomeness that was playing Oregon Trail on an Apple computer, but thanks to Valve, a good many will experience Portal 2 in the classroom as part of a "Steams for School" initiative.
If you've been following the PC scene for awhile, you may recall Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) beating Intel to the punch (if only by a hair) in getting a 1GHz CPU (an Athlon "Thunderbird") into the hands of consumers back in 2000. Here we are more than a decade later and AMD's still talking up its 1GHz achievements, only this time those bragging rights are related ot its GPUs, the newest one being the 
The Wii U isn't the only big console news coming from Nintendo's camp. On the mobile gaming front, Nintendo today revealed plans to launch an XL version of its 3DS console with a screen that's almost twice as large (90 percent bigger) than the original version. It will ship in North America on August 19, 2012 for $200, packing a new form factor and either red or blue digs.
When it released Office 2010 a couple of years back, Microsoft also introduced an ad-supported, no-frills Starter edition for bundling with OEM machines in the hope that a significant number of Starter edition users would eventually opt for a paid version. But the Redmond-based company, which owes a sizable chunk of its revenue to the hugely popular productivity suite, does not seem too pleased with the results so far, as it has left out Office Starter 2010 from the latest Office 2010 OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK).| 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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