General Gaming Article

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• EVGA GeForce GTX Titan Review
• Zombie Games Roundup
• Enermax Posts List of PSUs Compatible with Haswell Processors
• Column: The Dangers of Deep Packet Inspection
• Intel's Iris Technology Will Get You Excited About Integrated Graphics
• Internet Explorer is Killing Chrome in Browser Wars, But Also Losing - Huh?
• YouTube Now Serving Up 6 Billion Hours of Video Each Month
• Newegg Daily Deals: WD My Passport Edge 500GB, Rosewill Stallion 700W PSU, and More

EVGA GeForce GTX Titan Review Posted: 02 May 2013 05:15 PM PDT EVGA GeForce GTX Titan Review Fastest single-GPU card? Yep. Fastest GPU? Nope If aliens ever land and say, "Take us to your single-GPU leader," you'll have to find a GTX Titan that's available for a viewing. The Titan is without a doubt the fastest single-GPU card available today, but it's not the fastest single video card, as that distinction still belongs to dual-GPU behemoths such as the Asus Ares II and the Nvidia GTX 690. A lot of people don't enjoy messing with SLI and CrossFireX, though, and for them the Titan offers the highest level of performance possible at this time without any dual-card shenanigans. It also brings some new technology to the table, has a smaller form factor and lower TDP than the GTX 690, and includes heavily revamped tuning software designed for quiet operation, making it one of the most well-rounded and impressive GPU packages we've encountered in recent memory.  As with the GTX 690, both EVGA and Asus offer Titans that are 100 percent Nvidia's design inside and out. The Titan has existed for more than a year in the supercomputer world in the form of the Telsa K20X, which costs around $5,000. It's Nvidia's Big Kepler GPU, meaning it's the most powerful implementation of the company's current architecture, and for context it's almost double everything compared to a GTX 680 GPU. It has twice the transistors, almost double the CUDA cores, triple the frame buffer, a wider memory bus, better double-precision performance for compute, and totally revamped tuning software. Given its massive parallelism and size the card runs at a much slower clock speed than a GTX 680, however, moving along at 836MHz compared to the 680's 1,006MHz clock speed. It's a half-inch longer than the GTX 680, but is a worthy successor to the flagship cards we tested last year, as it offers a sizable performance increase over all of them, dual-GPU cards excluded, of course.  In terms of new technology, its tuning software now lets you dictate a maximum temperature for the card, which helps keep it totally silent at all times. Out of the box it's set to 80 C but you can nudge it up to 95 C if you're feeling saucy; the card can handle it. You can also over-volt the Titan, which is a first for a "stock" card from Nvidia. The GeForce GTX logo is now controlled by software, too, so you can make it breathe and tweak its brightness level. It will supposedly also let you "overclock" your display's refresh rate, allowing you to bypass VSync to achieve higher frame rates.  In testing, we saw the Titan reign supreme over its single-GPU competitors, but it could not topple the Ares II, Radeon 7990 Devil 13, or GTX 690 cards. It's also not as fast as dual-card SLI and CrossFireX configurations, which isn't surprising, but the Titan is close to them despite using only one GPU, which is quite impressive. It also requires exactly half the power requirements, needing just one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCIe connector. Overall it's a good 10-15 percent faster than the GTX 680, which is great and all, but not for double the price. In the end, the main goal of the Titan is twofold: to provide a kick-ass GPU to fit inside the increasingly popular SFF rigs, and to convincingly take the single-GPU crown back from AMD's HD 7970 GHz edition. On both of these fronts it's definitely Mission Accomplished, which can mean only one thing: It's your move, AMD! Price $1019, www.evga.com

Zombie Games Roundup Posted: 02 May 2013 03:05 PM PDT In the zombie apocalypse, your worst enemies might actually be humans. The rules used to be simple: Don't get bitten; destroy the brain. Zombie games like Left 4 Dead, Killing Floor, and Resident Evil shared a vaguely similar approach, even as they offered terrific takes on one of horror's most ubiquitous subgenres. But zombie games have matured. They've mutated beyond simply being zombie-themed shooters, and redefined what we know as the zombie FPS into more of a genuine survival game. You still have to get headshots and avoid getting gnawed, but there are new threats to manage. Thirst. Hunger. Darkness. Scarce resources. Untrustworthy strangers. Who knew trying to survive the zombie apocalypse could be so fun? A gun can't solve every problem you have in DayZ, The War Z, and No More Room In Hell, in other words. These zombie games demand different skills: communication, leadership, a knack for navigation over open terrain, nerves of steel, and even a little deception will help you survive. In short, they're the zombie games we've dreamed of: demanding and realistic survival simulations that ask a lot of you, but reward players with unforgettable, self-authored stories of sacrifice, horror, and survival. If you're unfamiliar with any of these games, make sure to read on to prepare yourself for the horro that's in store. DAYZ Everything you learned about surviving the zombiepocalypse was wrong In April 2012, an unfinished mod developed by a former New Zealand military officer quietly released. The add-on was designed for Arma 2, a niche military simulation game from Czech studio Bohemia Interactive, known most as the creators of Operation Flashpoint. Initially, DayZ arrived with little fanfare. "I developed it, essentially, in secret and that removes a lot of ego, it removes a lot of promises," creator Dean Hall told PC Gamer last year. But DayZ would catch PC gaming by complete surprise. In just four months, it had drawn 1 million unique players. Hundreds of 50-player custom servers hosting the still-incomplete, alpha version of the mod sprung up in a matter of weeks. Almost 200,000 people were playing every day at the peak of the mod's popularity in August 2012. The zombie game that gamers had openly fantasized about on message boards - an open-world, do-anything, go-anywhere survival game—had appeared out of thin air, albeit in a rough and half-realized form. Even with placeholder animations, annoying bugs, and incomplete features, DayZ had a death-grip on gamers' attention. Relative to the zombie games that preceded it, it offered unprecedented freedom and made other facets of the apocalypse—including fellow survivors—as much of a threat as the undead. Its style of realistic zombie arose partly from the inspiration of its creator. Hall had originally pitched the mod as a zombie-less training simulator, having endured survival training himself during an exchange program with the Singaporean military. A lot of DayZ's appeal is owed to Arma 2, whose Real Virtuality engine forms a foundation for its authenticity. Arma 2's creators went to great lengths to create high-fidelity game technology, and DayZ benefits from sharing systems that model for vehicle fuel consumption and modular vehicle damage, a real-time night/day cycle, a working compass and detailed topographical map, voice chat that's affected by proximity, and an engine that can render objects over long distances. Loot is everything in DayZ. Your carrying capacity depends on the size of your backpack—a rare ruck can become a literal target on your back. DayZ's rigid and unintuitive inventory interface, unfortunately, is a well-documented shortcoming. A particular asset is Arma 2's ballistics modeling, which distinguishes it from every shooter in gaming. Bullets travel parabolically in Arma 2 and DayZ based on their caliber, so the behavior of a hunting rifle, revolver, and M4A1 assault rifle, for example, is all significantly different. Getting a knack for your weapon is as important as just finding one—someone that knows the nuances of a low-end gun like a Lee Enfield (a bolt-action WWI rifle) is arguably more dangerous than someone holding an AS50 anti-material sniper rifle but doesn't know how to dial-in its scope. Guns emit different amounts of noise, too—snipers usually find it safest to operate in teams for protection, as a single shot can ring a dinner bell for zombies two or three hundred meters away. For this reason, silenced sidearms and rifles are some of the most prized items in the game. Chernogorsk (aka "Cherno") is DayZ's largest death trap. Erm, city. To get your hands on high-end equipment, you need to scour the game world. You don't complete quests or levels or experience points in DayZ, so typically you're just worried about gathering useful gear—tools, food, and weapons—within the game's enormous sandbox. One of DayZ's masterstrokes is that the drive for gear always feels self-motivated; your needs and emotions naturally drive your goals. When you enter DayZ for the first time, you're unarmed. You instinctively want to find a gun, but to do it you need to put yourself in danger: weapons and items only spawn inside structures, and zombies lurk where structures dwell. Other survival mechanics operate as motivators too. You need to eat. You need to drink, but true to Arma's fidelity, you can't fill your canteen in the ocean. I've been in situations where I would've traded grenades for a can of pasta, or nightvision goggles for a soda. If you're injured, depending on your ailment, you'll need to find morphine, painkillers, or antibiotics. Surveillance is one of the pleasures of DayZ. It's a game that makes looking and listening a genuine skill. Scouting an area for dangerous players (which you'll need binoculars or a rangefinder for) is a good habit. This isn't a game where your health regenerates automatically, in other words. Actually, the quickest way to restoring your life in DayZ isn't even something that can be done by yourself. Eating food slowly restores any blood you've lost from injury, but in order to use a blood transfusion bag, you need another player—meaning friendship (or temporarily trusting another player, at least) is roadblock to healing yourself. And interacting with strangers in DayZ—other players that, like you, want to find better gear—is inherently dangerous. These intricate mechanics play out in one of gaming's most detailed worlds. DayZ borrows Arma 2's map, Chernarus, a 225km² country that's actually a satellite-modeled slice of the Czech Republic (see comparison photos and maps here). Basing Chernarus on real topographic data grants it a feeling of authenticity that isn't present in other virtual environments. Hills roll into unexpected ponds and forest valleys. Road signs are printed in Cyrillic. Powerlines run perpendicular to ruined castles. Villages and dense cities cling to the coast. The only downside is that Chernarus' realistic scale? To get where you want to go, you might have to run three or four kilometers in real time. DayZ's Chernarus map is actually one of several playable worlds available for DayZ. Modders have ported other player-made Arma 2 maps into the mod, including the tundra of Namalsk, the jungle of Lingor Island, and a dense urban desert called Fallujah. It's worth noting that modders—the ever-busy carpenter gnomes of PC gaming—have ported several Arma 2 custom maps into the game. A popular one is Namalsk, a connected by a half-kilometer railway bridge. You can spy it and the other four currently-available landscapes here.  DayZ's biggest innovation is the trust it places in players to find their own fun. Compared to conventional shooters, it's barren of any cinematic content. But DayZ leverages complex systems and difficulty in a way that produces incredible stories and interactions that don't exist in other games. Banal tasks like watching another survivor through binoculars and trying to determine where they're going or if they're friendly are meaningful safety measures. YouTube is full of funny, scary, and fascinating interactions between strangers and survivor groups, bandits and self-described axe murderers, do-gooders and kidnappers. For the patient player, the search for water in DayZ can be just as heart-pumping as a shootout. It's the first zombie game to emphasize stories over shooting, and the first that makes human nature an implicit part of everything you do. Click the next page to read about The War Z THE WAR Z A sincere form of flattery In July 2012, faster than you could horde canned goods, a DayZ imitator emerged. Within a month of DayZ's flash of popularity, a new studio told the gaming world that it was hard at work on its own player-versus-player and player-versus-zombie, open-world survival sandbox.  The announcement of The War Z was met with skepticism and cynicism flecked with curiosity. Its features were uncomfortably familiar: a huge, verdant open world dotted with mundane and military loot, a first-person and third-person camera, and dedicated servers, all laid out to support unscripted, persistent gameplay between zombies and other players. Even the look of its characters--baseball cap-wearing, backpacked survivors--resembled DayZ's. The War Z wasn't being subtle about its inspiration. Using separate real-money and in-game currencies, The War Z allows players to purchase some basic items—like melee weapons and food—before they spawn into the game. If you die, anything you're carrying is dropped. But if this blatant borrowing of ideas resulted in a good game, would it matter? More details snuck out as gaming press got early access. The War Z would include a player-written questing system, appearance customization, the ability to place bounties on other players' heads, an RPG-style skill system, and a microtransaction store for items. Perhaps most interesting was The War Z's promise to offer something called Strongholds—small, private instances like a cabin in the woods, a farm, a small town on a cliffside, or a trainyard that clans or individual players can rent for money. Even if these features don't appeal to you personally, they painted a picture of a game that was less of a clone than originally thought. "In fact, we're fans of the mod," The War Z Executive Producer Sergey Titov said to VG247 in October last year when asked about DayZ. "Ultimately, we hope gamers end up playing both The War Z and the DayZ standalone. It's difficult to compare at the moment, but although there are similarities, we tried creating a game that was a little bit easier to access and play, and that would allow players to be creative and create their own scenarios." There's some consensus that this isn't a "there's only room for one of us in this town" situation, but a sign that this sub-genre is simply in the process of losing that prefix. Competition between companies usually benefits consumers, and The War Z has a lot to live up to. Being built atop a military simulator, DayZ carries a lot of inherent traits that lend itself to survival simulation, and not all of them are easily reproducible. But the other side of that coin is that The War Z isn't burdened by some of DayZ's inherent quirks, and seems to benefit from being coded from scratch. It's offers a few simple antidotes to some of DayZ's issues, like confusing inventory management, inaccessible weapon handling, and rigid animations. It's also favoring accessibility more than DayZ. The War Z does have permadeath--if you die, you lose that character and their items forever--but only if you're playing with a Hardcore mode character. Normal mode simply temporarily locks your ability to play that character for 24 hours and removes any items they were carrying. Likewise, you can get a leg up on a new character by spending in-game currency that persists across all characters, so it's easier to recover from a death. A stamina mechanic is one of the small-but-significant differences separating The War Z from DayZ. You can't run forever, but the undead can—sprinting into a town while out of breath might be all it takes to doom you. The focus on accessibility extends to gameplay itself, where weapon behavior is more akin to games like Battlefield 3. An assault rifle or a pistol handles with the lightness and responsiveness you'd expect in an ordinary multiplayer FPS. You'll still have to keep noise in mind when firing—letting loose with a sniper rifle will make you awfully popular in your part of the map. There are also small but significant difference between DayZ and The War Z in player movement. You can crouch and go prone in both games, but The War Z has a jump button. But more realistically, you can't sprint infinitely in The War Z—running depletes a stamina meter that recharges over time, so you'll want to conserve your sprinting until you really need it. The War Z also features a few imaginative zombie types. "Sleeper" zombies deceptively lie dormant on the ground, but rise if they notice you nearby. The developers have also promised a rare "stem cell-carrying" zombie that only appears at night. "Visually they'll look very different from other infected, they're much more aggressive, fast and agile. They're rare, they hunt only at night, so the best place to find them will be larger cities at night time," says Titov. Killing one of these superzombies will yield stem cells, which are kind of a special currency within The War Z that can also be used to create a vaccine. Hammerpoint hopes that the relative difficulty of bagging one of these zombies will inspire some creative teamwork and competition among players. Nighttime in The War Z is inherently dangerous. Flares, chemlights, and flashlights will help you find your way around, but any light sources will inevitably draw attention from other players. These corpses lurk in a world about 160km² in size—about 70 percent the size of Chernarus in DayZ. Encouragingly, Hammerpoint has said that anyone who buys The War Z will receive additional maps that are released. The game's stock map is inspired by Colorado, a rocky wilderness pocked with outposts, lakes, and small towns. Click the next page to read about "No More Room in Hell" NO MORE ROOM IN HELL Expect at least half of your team to die. Unlike The War Z and DayZ, No More Room In Hell doesn't fit into the newly-born "outdoor survival game" category. It's fairer to call it an advanced, hardcore take on conventional cooperative zombie games like Left 4 Dead. In development for a decade before releasing over a year ago, the Source engine mod was selected through Steam Greenlight to release as a full, free game on Steam, but you can play it now by downloading it from www.nomoreroominhell.com. What NMRiH shares in common with DayZ (other than an awkward name) is the unapologetic way that it throws you into a brutal post-apocalyptic scenario with almost no instruction. You're fragile. Bullets are scarce. And zombies will infinitely spawn until you complete the map's tough (and partially randomized) objectives, like switching on generators or finding the keycode that unlocks a door. NMRiH's unforgiving approach to zombie co-op practically guarantees that a few of your teammates will need to die as you trudge from your spawn area to the end of the level. Your eight-person survivor group is twice the size of Left 4 Dead's, and a given round typically sees your team whittled down as players inevitably get separated, surrounded, and eaten. Though it resembles Left 4 Dead, what No More Room In Hell shares in common with DayZ and The War Z is that it often makes fleeing from and avoiding the undead preferable to fighting them. Most of NMRiH's zombies are of the slow, vintage variety. They're easy to evade, but much more durable in combat, so the danger arises from their numbers and players' modest agility. You can only sprint for a brief period of time, so wandering into a cluttered garage with a single exit, for example, is sometimes all it takes to doom you. A handful of speedier zombies jog after survivors (some of which—harrowingly—are children), but NMRiH otherwise lacks any undead with special abilities like leaping, acid-spitting, or tongue-lassoing. This gives the game a more grounded feeling; the molasses-speed creep of the horde gives you room to react, but the absence of a revival mechanic and the relative weakness of weapons has a way of turning small mistakes into permanent death. Also refreshing is NMRiH's emphasis on immersion. Like DayZ, the volume of voice communication is based on distance, meaning a far-off teammates' cries for help may go completely unnoticed. The game also doesn't place any interface, crosshairs, or HUD on the screen by default, and all of its maps are pocked with corners that are absolutely saturated with opaque, impermeable darkness. A small antidote to this is the flashlight. It mercifully doesn't require fresh batteries, but just as you'd expect in real life, you can't hold it and swing a sledgehammer or operate an M16 simultaneously. This design makes the seemingly banal role of "flashlight holder" a vital role for guiding teams through unlit corridors—being the guy responsible for shining the light on enemies while your teammates whack away with shovels or chainsaws is genuinely helpful. The melee weapons themselves take a lot of finesse to operate. Most of them swing slowly (and with a wind-up animation much lengthier than Left 4 Dead's), meaning they're nowhere near the weedwackers you wield in Valve's co-op zombie game. And despite their decomposing state, the undead are durable, taking multiple hits to bring down unless you skillfully connect with their skull. A typical hand-to-hand fight is a tense tango of bobbing and weaving, angling to position yourself to just the right distance where your axe or machete can clobber a zombie but the zombie can't hit you. This limited room for error makes individual zombie kills feel like a heroic effort. Zombies spawn endlessly in No More Room In Hell; this isn't a game that's afraid to overwhelm you with enemies. Some maps stack dozens of zombies directly outside the spawn room, only giving you a handful of bullets and melee weapons to deal with them. Firearms are also handled with a modicum more realism than Left 4 Dead. They're scarce, and pistols don't have infinite ammo—when you pick one up, it might have a meager six or seven shots waiting for you in the magazine. More, they're tough to aim: shots that look like a sure thing through ironsights won't always produce a kill. And like DayZ, most guns have a discrete ammunition type —you might find handgun ammo, but if it's .45 ACP and the only pistol you have is the 9mm Beretta M9, it's not going to help you. Appropriately enough, a lot of NMRiH's scares arise from the lack of room in its levels. Structurally, they resemble Left 4 Dead's meandering, point-to-point sprints, but because aggressive collision detection between zombies and even other teammates means that it only takes a few zombies to block a doorway. About a half-dozen maps, with the community and the development team filling in more. "Behind you!" The snail-speed crawl of zombies in NMRiH makes room for communication and decision-making in a way that isn't present in most zombie-themed shooters. My favorite, called Cabin, begins with a leap of faith. You spawn in a secure attic, and begin by combing dark corners for melee weapons, flashlights, and whatever you can find. But to start the level, you have to drop straight through a hole in the ceiling—a one-way trip that usually makes the first survivor in instantly popular . My usual tactic is to have this leading player lure zombies away from the entrance so the rest of the team can safely descend. They usually get beat up in the process, but it's preferable to throwing everyone into a crowded, panicked melee. A final twist on all this layered brutality is NMRiH's infection mechanic. Zombies will occasionally grapple you, and if you or a teammate is unable to shake them loose, you'll get bitten. You know what happens next: within minutes, you'll drop dead, and rise again as an AI-controlled zombie. It's surprising that the mod is the only zombie game we know of to model this classic horror trope. NMRiH is a stand-out take on zombie survival, and the scariest multiplayer game I've ever played. Unlike Left 4 Dead, trying to kill every zombie you meet is the surest way to have your human card revoked. Click the next page to read about the five most important zombie games. THE FIVE MOST IMPORTANT ZOMBIE GAMES OVER THREE DECADES, THESE TITLES HAVE SHAPED (OR WILL SHAPE) THE ZOMBIE GENRE AS WE KNOW IT Zombie Zombie 1984 (on ZX Spectrum), Spaceman Ltd. One of the first games to feature zombies as its subject. Zombie Zombie had a very indirect way of dealing with the undead: You had to lure zombies up to tall buildings and then trick them into falling off to their doom. Coincidentally, it was one of the first games to use two-channel sound. Resident Evil 4 2007 (on PC), Capcom The RE4 PC port was particularly bad, but the game still stands as the best "actionization" of the zombie genre. Japanese difficulty, boss design, and pacing tempered by Western playability and an over-the-shoulder camera spawned hordes of imitators. Weapon customization lent meaningful progression to the dozens of brushes with undead creatures. Left 4 Dead 2008, Valve The reigning champ in zombie co-op, L4D's mildly forking level design and "zombie director AI" combined to create movie-like campaigns that wickedly and dynamically threw threats at your survivor group as you progressed through each chapter. Another L4D innovation, asymmetrical multiplayer, has been copied in games such as Dead Space 2. The Walking Dead 2012, Telltale Games Telltale's adventure spin-off of the Robert Kirkman comic book series has taken a novellike, "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" approach to the genre. Though it's modest on interaction, choices you make—from whom to rescue to which friend should get a candy bar—affect the content of future episodes. The five-episode series has already been renewed for a sequel. Dead State 2013, DoubleBear Productions Zombie shooters have been done to death; Dead State is a turn-based RPG. Described as Fallout-meets-The Walking Dead, it's being helmed by Vampire: The Masquerade writer/ designer Brian Mitsoda. You play as the leader of a group of survivors that've holed up in a Texas elementary school. The game earned $332,635 on Kickstarter in July 2012. Click the next page to read about the five most incredible custom Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns. FIVE INCREDIBLE LEFT 4 DEAD 2 CUSTOM CAMPAIGNS L4D2 MAY LACK REALISM, BUT IT'S STILL THE BEST ZOMBIE-THEMED ACTION GAME AVAILABLE. THE MODDING COMMUNITY HAS CREATED HUNDREDS OF FANTASTIC CUSTOM CAMPAIGNS THAT ARE A CINCH TO INSTALL Questionable Ethics Fight your way through a white-walled, underground, secret research facility filled with traps (like a ceiling that drops cars on you) and endless tricks. Almost Portal-like in its devious cleverness, Questionable Ethics is the work of a Korean modder. Play the sequel after you're done.  Helm's Deep Reborn   The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers' iconic castle siege is reproduced here with almost 1:1 authenticity, with the exception of L4D's menagerie of uglies swapped in for Uruk-hai. This multistage survival map has you meat-grinding through hundreds of zombies, climaxing in a defense of—and then escape from—the throne room. Nonstop violence and calamity. GoldenEye 4 Dead An amalgamation of settings drawn from the 1995 Bond film, including a dam, runway, and a hidden space base in Aztec ruins. G4D is more than a pile of references: It's a genuinely taxing and creatively designed campaign, and one that takes clever liberties with its source material. Be on the lookout for Easter eggs. Let's Build A Rocket Instead of a sprawling campaign that has you racing to the safe room as a finish line, Let's Build A Rocket gathers the survivors around a small launch pad and hangar. Using a computer panel, you research new technology to unlock L4D2's weapons as zombies harass, juggling these tasks as you and teammates slowly construct a rocket to escape Earth. Suicide Blitz 2 A great example of the indulgent set pieces , Suicide Blitz 2 pushes the survivors through a bowling alley, maximum security prison, and finally to the 50-yard line of a football stadium for a titular stand-off against hulking zombie Tanks in football jerseys. Zombie games have come along way and are continuing to evolve. What's your favorite Zombie game?

Enermax Posts List of PSUs Compatible with Haswell Processors Posted: 02 May 2013 11:42 AM PDT Not all power supplies will support Haswell's zero load design, Enermax says. Intel's Haswell refresh is coming, and when it does, it will deliver better performance, much improved integrated graphics, and superior power efficiency that, according to Enermax, only a handful of power supplies are able to take advantage of. Enermax is referring to the new C6 and C7 states that are able to reduce CPU power consumption to a mere 0.05A. Some Ivy Bridge chips draw up to ten times more in a minimum power state. According to Enermax, only power supplies that support ultra low loads will do that feature any good. "The positive progress of the CPU technology is subject to certain restrictions, because only few power supplies will be able to deliver stable voltages at such low loads," Enermax says. "End users are therefore groping in the dark with no clues if their own power supply will be compatible with the new energy functions of Intel Haswell CPUs. PSU manufacturers usually do not state the possible minimum load of their products." Let's be clear, this doesn't mean your current power supply won't work with a Haswell processor, Enermax is just saying that certain models may or may not be able to utilize the so-called zero load design. If a PSU isn't able to supply 0.05A on the +12V rail, then entering a C6 or C7 state could trigger Under Voltage Protection (UVP), in which case you'd probably need to jump in the BIOS and disable the C6/C7 function. Enermax claims you won't have to worry about that on all of its PSUs dating back to the Revolution85+ Series released in 2008, which "deliver rock-stable voltages even at 0W load," and are therefore able to fully take advantage of Haswell. For a list of specific models, both old and new, just take a peek on Enermax's website. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Column: The Dangers of Deep Packet Inspection Posted: 02 May 2013 10:51 AM PDT A case of Big Brother watching? Over the years, there's been talk on and off about a technology called Deep Packet Inspection, but apart from sounding like the title of sysadmin-themed porn, why should you care? Technically, DPI is what happens when an ISP looks past the headers, or metadata, of the packets that carry information all around the Internet and into the content. On its own, looking doesn't hamper the Internet, but only that packet header is required by the machines that need to pump the cats through the series of tubes. Could Internet service providers be watching you? Like all technologies, DPI isn't inherently good or bad, but potentially either. Good uses include cleaning up spam and viruses, and useful traffic shaping. Bad uses include dystopian control of digital expression and perfect totalitarian surveillance. But let's break that down a bit. Because DPI looks into each packet, it can be used, as in the case of the National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless wiretaps, to copy every packet. In the case of Comcast, it was used to identify Bit-Torrent traffic and disrupt it. In America, it's been used to very specifically target advertising. In other countries known to use DPI, like China and Bahrain, it could be (and likely is) used for specifically targeting political activists. DPI is the technology that allows violation of net neutrality, lets ISPs throttle competing services, and rights-holders to comb the net looking for content. But despite the dark side, given how easy and useful for companies it is, it's inevitable. Without rigorous legal protection, you'll never know if it's used on you. The only thing that slows down DPI at all is encryption, coded messages ISPs can look at but never make sense of. Fortunately, encryption tools are becoming available to everyone. DPI is the future of the net—and so is you encrypting your way back to free speech and privacy.

Intel's Iris Technology Will Get You Excited About Integrated Graphics Posted: 02 May 2013 09:50 AM PDT Select Haswell parts will feature Intel's supercharged Iris graphics. Nobody brags about integrated graphics, and that's because there's not much there worthy of boast. That's fine, but if manufactures insist on pushing thin and light platforms on the masses and shrinking the desktop, then is it too much to ask for an integrated graphics solution that either (A) doesn't suck, or (B) is better than just serviceable? Intel doesn't think so, and its Iris graphics might be just what the market needs. Intel Iris graphics will be available on select SKUs of the chip maker's 4th Generation Core processor line (Haswell) and will offer up to 2X the 3D performance of today's fastest mobile Intel HD Graphics solutions, the company claims. If you frequently visit Maximum PC, you may have caught a glimpse of Iris before. It's the official name for GT3/GT3e, which we previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year, and when we asked readers to guess which of the two side-by-side systems was running Iris and which was running a GeForce GT 650M, the responses were fairly split. Performance aside, Iris supports three-screen collage display, enhanced 4K x 2K resolution, OpenCL 1.2, and a few other goodies. It also delivers faster video and photo editing, and offers support for Intel's Quick Sync Video technology. Let's not kid though, it IS the performance we're most interested in, and according to Intel, Iris will have advanced integrated 3D performance in 3DMark06 by 75X since 2006. Pretty incredible. Furthermore, Intel says if consumers were to upgrade a four-year old notebook with a Core 2 Duo processor to a new Ultrabook with Iris inside (Core i5 4200U), they would experience a 25X faster graphics performance in games and 17X faster video conversions. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Internet Explorer is Killing Chrome in Browser Wars, But Also Losing - Huh? Posted: 02 May 2013 09:14 AM PDT Conflicting data makes it difficult to gauge the browser landscape. Depending on which data collection service you trust the most, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is either wiping the floor with Google's Chrome browser, or getting spanked by the relative newcomer. Starting with the former, NetMarketShare has IE way out in the lead with a 55.81 percent share of the desktop browser market, virtually unchanged from last month and up a little more than a percentage point from a year ago. In that same time frame, NetMarketShare's data shows Chrome on the decline, going from being the go-to browser 18.85 percent of the time to just 16.35 percent currently. Looking at the data set, you could conclude that Chrome peaked in 2012 and is now settling into a plateau. And forget about catching up to IE, Chrome still trails Firefox, which is in second place with a 20.3 percent share of the browser market. Don't care for the story that's unfolding at NetMarketShare? Head on over to StatCounter and you'll read an entirely different view of the online landscape. StatCounter has Chrome out in the lead with a 41.43 percent share of the browser market, up a little more than 10 percent versus a year ago. IE, on the other hand, continues to slide, goiing from a 34.07 percent share of the browser market a year ago to 27.39 percent currently, which is still ahead of Firefox at 19.73 percent. How can these two firms report such drastically different figures? It has to do with the way each one collects data. NetMarketShare collects data from browsers of site visitors to its on-demand network of HitsLink Analytics and SharePost Clients, giving it a pool of 40,000 websites around the world to work with. StatCounter, on the other hand, uses tracking code installed on more than 3 million sites globally. That's all well and good, but what are YOU using to browse the web these days? Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

YouTube Now Serving Up 6 Billion Hours of Video Each Month Posted: 02 May 2013 08:40 AM PDT It would take many, many lifetimes to watch all of YouTube's content. Three ex-PayPal employees created YouTube just over eight years ago, but do you think any of them could have predicted just how popular the video sharing site would become? Perhaps, though it would have been hard to conceive of a service streaming out 6 billion hours of content each and every month, which is how much YouTube is currently piping through the Internet. YouTube announced the staggering stat in a blog post, adding that it now sees 1 billion unique monthly visitors, connecting 15 percent of the planet to its growing catalog of videos. When you think about it, YouTube may have barely scratched the surface here. The video sharing site is no longer simply a portal for crappy home videos (oh, they still exist), but also a place for major media companies to reach an audience fed up with cable and satellite TV. Underscoring that point, YouTube revealed that DreamWorks Animation has acquired AwesomenessTV, a popular teen network on YouTube with almost half a million subscribers and over 101 million views. Image Credit: Flickr (jm3) Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Newegg Daily Deals: WD My Passport Edge 500GB, Rosewill Stallion 700W PSU, and More Posted: 02 May 2013 08:15 AM PDT   Top Deal: Everybody should own a USB thumb drive, but what about those times when you need to take more data with you than your flash drive allows? One well-timed solution is today's top deal, a WD My Passport Edge 500GB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive for $70 with free shipping (normally $110). It's convenient, fast (courtesy of USB 3.0), and far more capacious than that 32GB flash drive in your pocket. Other Deals: Rosewill Stallion Series 700W Power Supply for $50 with free shipping (normally $80 - use coupon code:[EMCXSTX34]; additional $10 mail-in rebate) Rosewill 3.5mm Gold-Plated Connector Noise Isolating Rosewood Earbuds for $12 with free shipping (normally $20) Accessory Power GOgroove BlueSYNC EDG Portable Bluetooth Wireless Speaker for $30 with free shipping (normally $50) On Light AQ6 High Performance LED Flashlight for $16 with free shipping (normally $50)

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