General Gaming Article |
- Maingear's 17-inch Nomad 17 Gaming Notebook Comes with Free Custom Paint Job
- Is Intel Killing The Motherboard Market?
- Razer Blade Gaming Laptop Hands-On (Video)
- Google Takeout Lets You Download Original Copies of All Your YouTube Videos
- AMD Partners With BlueStacks to Bring Android Apps To Windows 7 & 8
| Maingear's 17-inch Nomad 17 Gaming Notebook Comes with Free Custom Paint Job Posted: 30 Sep 2012 07:12 PM PDT
Starting at $1,599, the Nomad 17 is said to be the "only gaming laptop in the industry to have hand-painted premium automotive paint jobs"; in all, there are six different color options to choose from. As for the innards, this 17-incher from Maingear supports up to an Intel i7-3840QM (8MB Cache, up to 3.8GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0). The complete specs are as follows:
"The NOMAD 17 is a thing of beauty," said Wallace Santos, CEO and founder of MAINGEAR. "With a custom automotive paint job and performance parts, this roadster of a machine is quite a work of art, technologically and aesthetically. Quite simply, it is the finest gaming laptop we have ever offered." Image Credit:Maingear |
| Is Intel Killing The Motherboard Market? Posted: 30 Sep 2012 05:17 PM PDT
DigiTimes points out what now seems almost completely obvious to industry observers; Intel wants to integrate everything motherboard vendors were once doing short of physical connectors onto the CPU. The push to consolidate North and South Bridge chips directly onto the CPU die are forging ahead with next year's release of Haswell, and will only accelerate as we go forward. This trend has left DigiTimes to speculate on the shaky future of some smaller motherboard manufacturers going forward. Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock make up the top three, and will likely all find a niche for the next few generations, but then what? If the desktop continues to lose traction to mobile devices going forward, we could well see even the established players begin to struggle. If motherboards become little more than a socket with a few extra USB and thunderbolt chips it could become increasingly difficult to sell premium products, even to power users. Could Intel conceivably kill off the motherboard market within the next 3-5 years? It's starting to look at least somewhat possible. Follow Justin on Twitter |
| Razer Blade Gaming Laptop Hands-On (Video) Posted: 30 Sep 2012 05:08 PM PDT Is the $2,500 Razer Blade gaming laptop worth it?The saying, "You get what you pay for" gets tossed around a lot, but sometimes this proverb doesn't always ring true. At $2,500, the new 17.3" Razer Blade gaming laptop certainly is expensive, but is it worth it?
Specs The Razer Blade features Intel's newly revealed Intel Core i7 3632QM Quad Core CPU, which features a base block of 2.2GHz and overclocks up to 3.2Ghz with turbo boost. In terms of discrete graphics, the gaming laptop features Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660m GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 video memory. Tying the CPU and GPU together is Optimus Technology, which allows the laptop to switch between NVIDIA's discrete graphics and Intel's integrated graphics on the fly. For memory, the Razer Blade features 8GB of 1,600 MHz DDR3 RAM.
Storage side, the laptop comes with a 64GB SSD along with a 500GB 7,200 RPM mechanical hard drive. This combination gave us impressive boot times, allowing the Blade to boot to Windows within 25 seconds. In terms of laptop features, the Blade supports up to three 3.0 USB ports, an HDMI port, and comes with a built-in HD webcam. Design Aesthetically, the Razer Blade looks a lot like a large, black MacBook. Adding some edge to the layout are green-back lit LED keys which complement the simple and elegant design well.
The chassis features a matte aluminum body that looks sleek. One problem we did encounter, however, was that the surface was a sucker for finger prints. This is a shame considering we really like placing our hands on the quiet and responsive keyboard. For the screen, the Blade features an LED-backlit 1080p monitor. Though the monitor looks great head-on, there is a bit of that TN-monitor shimmer when you view it at off angles Because the 17.3 inch monitor is so massive, the laptop can be cumbersome to use in areas where table space is limited, but at only .88 inches, the Razer Blade is impressively thin. Weighing in around 6lbs 11oz, the laptop is by no means light, but it is lighter than similar competitors. The big feature Razer is touting with the Blade is the multi-touch LCD pad with 10 programmable keys. This will allow you to bind custom gaming commands and to open up programs with a single keystroke. In addition, Razer says it will allow owners to download pre-made settings whenever new, popular games come out. While most laptop touchpads are situated below the keyboard, Razer has opted to place it on the right to act as a gaming mouse replacement. Even though gaming with the touchpad worked better than we expected (about on par with an Xbox 360 controller for shooters), most gamers will want to plug in a USB mouse which would neglect Razer's efforts here. Furthermore, considering we have been conditioned to using touchpads below the keyboard for so long, forcing ourselves to keep our hands to the right felt extremely counterintuitive and downright frustrating at points. Performance Gameplay performance for the Blade was very solid. Playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with all settings maxed out, FRAPs recorded average framerates around the 60 frames per second mark.
On the audio front, the Blade was plenty loud at full volume with no unwanted distortion. While the sound quality was adequate, audiophiles aren't going to be blown away by these fairly run-of-the-mill laptop speakers. In terms of battery life, The Razer Blade features a 60-watt hour battery. What this translates to is about 2 hours and 45 minutes of non-stop video footage. While this should get you through the majority of movies, it's nothing spectacular. Luckily, Razer has created a small and light battery charger that easily allows you to use the device as a portable gaming desktop. While the laptop can get warm under load, we haven't encountered any temps that would melt the denim off our jeans. Conclusion We are impressed with the look, performance, and build quality of the Razer Blade, but its expensive price point makes it difficult to fully recommend. For the money, gamers can build a much stronger desktop PC AND purchase a decent gaming laptop.
For the final verdict along with more performance, benchmark comparisons, stay tuned for the full-written review. |
| Google Takeout Lets You Download Original Copies of All Your YouTube Videos Posted: 30 Sep 2012 11:54 AM PDT
This officially makes YouTube one of the most affordable ways to archive large video clips, with absolutely no danger of lock in. Wondering how it works? Well, according to the Data Liberation Blog: "With Google Takeout, you can download all of the original videos that you have uploaded in a few simple clicks. No transcoding or transformation -- you'll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded. Your videos in. Your videos out." Just visit the YouTube site as usual, click your name / "Video Manager", then click "Download MP4" using the drop down arrow next to the edit button for each video. If you have hundreds of uploads this might take some time, however it's still an amazingly selfless service for the company to offer considering they have nothing to gain. Follow Justin on Twitter |
| AMD Partners With BlueStacks to Bring Android Apps To Windows 7 & 8 Posted: 30 Sep 2012 10:36 AM PDT
Desktop users might not find much use for the feature, but where this would really make sense is on Windows 8 tablets. The new Microsoft Windows 8 store currently only offers around 2,000 apps, and it has some pretty glaring omissions when compared to iOS and Android. The emulator would distinguish AMD powered tablets in the market place, and give them an interesting advantage over Intel. According to BlueStacks: "We've worked closely together to optimize the performance of the apps for AMD's unique 'graphics and computing on one chip' setup. The result is awesome - mobile apps run beautifully on their machines." This doesn't mean the emulator will never make its way to Intel chipsets, but my magic eight ball says the outlook is not so good as long as the payments from AMD keep rolling in. Both Intel & AMD users can download the beta version of the BlueStacks App Player from their website, however it will no doubt be locked to AMD hardware in the near future. Follow Justin on Twitter |
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