General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

AMD Piledriver CPU Pre-Order Pricing Leaks Out

Posted: 23 Sep 2012 02:14 PM PDT

AMD Piledriver CPUAMD processor fans unite. Piledriver CPU's will not only be launching soon, but we finally have some rumored price points for the new parts. According to the ever reliable ShopBLT.com, 4 new SKU's will hit the market in October, with prices ranging from $131.62 to $253.06. Piledriver, for those who haven't followed its progress, is the codename for a new "Enhanced-Bulldozer" CPU, and will be manufactured on a 32 nm SOI process. 

Piledriver promises better performance by way of an updated microarchitecture, and slightly higher clock speeds. The quad-core FX-4300 will round out the new low end offerings, with the eight-core FX-8530 being touted as the next big thing to hit the CPU market. Clock speeds range from 3.5 GHz  to 4 GHz, but can hit upwards of 4.2GHz using the built in turbo functions. The low end also sports a lowly 4 MB of L3 cache with a 95 watt TDP, while the high end has 8MB of L3 with a TDP of 125 watts. 

We will give you our full review when parts start to hit store shelves, but until then we can only speculate on the value of AMD's new architecture. 

Model Box OPN Cores Frequency Turbo Frequency L3 cache TDP Pre-order
price
FX-4300 FD4300WMHKBOX 4 3.8 GHz 4 GHz 4 MB 95 Watt $131.62
FX-6300 FD6300WMHKBOX 6 3.5 GHz 4.1 GHz 8 MB 95 Watt $175.77
FX-8320 FD8320FRHKBOX 8 3.5 GHz 4 GHz 8 MB 125 Watt $242.05
FX-8350 FD8350FRHKBOX 8 4 GHz 4.2 GHz 8 MB 125 Watt $253.06

(Table Source = CPU-World.com)

Follow Justin on Twitter

Seagate Forecasting Slight Contraction in the Hard Drive Market

Posted: 23 Sep 2012 12:06 PM PDT

Seagate Hard DriveWestern Digital and Seagate command over 90 percent of the traditional hard drive market, so when one of these companies pipes up with concerns, everyone stops and takes note. According to Seagate, first-quarter revenues are likely to be 5 to 7 percent lower than its previous forecast of $4 billion, and it makes us wonder if it's the start of a new trend.

Recent price cuts which have brought consumer costs closer to pre-flood levels than ever before certainly can't be helping the bean counters, however they also mentioned that demand for hard drives was "muted". The company expects to maintain its 40 percent market share with around 140 million units sold, however nobody in the spinning disk industry wants to hear growth has stalled.

Low cost mechanical drives will have a place in data centers for years if not decades to come, but could consumers be accounting for the discrepancy? Tablets and Ultrabooks rarely ship with traditional hard disk drives, and seem to be all the rage these days. It's also possible capacities have reached a point where the average consumer simply can't fill a 2TB drive, and thus rarely need more.

Anyone else care to theorize?

Follow Justin on Twitter

Dell Releases New S Series Monitors With Edge-To-Edge Glass for Eyefinity and Surround Setups

Posted: 23 Sep 2012 11:12 AM PDT

Dell S SeriesDell has always been among the best when it comes to quality monitors at a reasonable price, and it appears as though they are looking to carry on the tradition with five brand new S Series models. The new display's range from 27-inches with edge-to-edge glass, all the way down 21.5-inch panels for those on the hunt for the best price. Each one is capable of 1080p, but as one would expect, connectivity and quality varies considerably based on the price.

The two highest end display's are the 27-inch S2740L for $399, and the 24-inch S2440L for a more reasonable $299. Both display's feature adjustable bases, and that amazing edge-to-edge glass we mentioned in the title that is a must have feature for anyone thinking of an Eyefinity or Nvidia surround setup for gaming. Both pannel's sport HDMI and VGA ports, however oddly, only the 27-inch monitor adds DVI. HDMI to DVI adapters are inexpensive enough, but it's still an odd choice.

The three lower end models range from 23-inch to 21.5-inch, and while the bezels are smaller, they simply don't compare to the edge-to-edge glass featured on the higher end models. Starting at just $199 however, its still amazing how much LCD one can get for so little cash these days.

Surround Setup

Follow Justin on Twitter

Microsoft Releases a Brace of Out-of-Band Patches for Internet Explorer

Posted: 23 Sep 2012 07:41 AM PDT

Friday saw the release of a critical out-of-band patch for Internet Explorer from Microsoft. The security update (MS12-063) addresses as many as five vulnerabilities, but none more important than the critical zero-day bug (CVE-2012-4969) that was made public by French researchers earlier this week, and one which even prompted Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) to issue an advisory requesting German citizens to stay away from IE. The Redmond-based company has also released a security update for Adobe Flash IE 10.

Rated "critical" for IE6, IE7, IE8, and IE9 on Windows and "moderate" for IE6, IE7, IE78, and IE9 on Windows servers, the said security update not only patches the much talked about execCommand Use After Free (CVE-2012-4969) vulnerability, but also the cloneNod Use after Free flaw (CVE-2012-2557), the LayOut Use After Free bug (CVE-2012-2548), the Event Listener Use After Free bug (CVE-2012-2546), and the OnMove Use After Free flaw (CVE-2012-1529).

"Today we released Security Update MS12-063 to address limited attacks against a small number of computers through a vulnerability in Internet Explorer versions 9 and earlier," the company said in a blog post on the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) blog. "In addition to addressing the issue described in Security Advisory 2757760, MS12-063 also resolves four privately disclosed vulnerabilities that are currently not being exploited."

With Adobe Flash being built into Internet Explorer 10, the responsibility of keeping the Flash Player updated on Windows 8 is now Microsoft's. To this end, Microsoft on Friday released Security Advisory 2755801 that addresses a bunch of flaws in Flash in IE10 on Windows 8. The original plan was to patch these vulnerabilities after the release of Windows 8, but the company changed its mind earlier this mind, saying "our goal is to make sure the Flash Player in Window 8 is always secure and up-to-date, and to align our release schedule as closely to Adobe's as possible."
Posted by Shri Krishna

Total Pageviews

statcounter

View My Stats