General Gaming Article |
- Mechanical Keyboard Guide
- Maximum PC Goes to Video Games Live
- Microsoft Tries Gaming on Three 4K Displays in Eyefinity, Pushes 1.5 Billion Pixels Per Second
- Digital Storm Bolt Titan Review
- Go Small or Go Home: Shipments of 11-inch Notebooks on the Rise as 15-inch Laptops Decline
- Half Life 3 Confirmed! (Well, Sort of, Maybe, Probably Not)
- Avira Antivirus Sends Linux a Breakup Letter, Will Stay Friends Until June 30, 2016
- Newegg Daily Deals: WD Black 500GB Hard Drive, Corsair CX600 PSU, and More!
| Posted: 26 Jul 2013 02:24 PM PDT Mechanical, membrane, and all the Cherry switches explainedSo you want to buy a mechanical keyboard, eh? Why is that? Perhaps you've heard that they're the growing rage among gamers and PC enthusiasts – assuming that's still a "cool" phrase to use. Maybe you've gotten your hands on one and, while you're not quite 100% sure what exactly makes them different from the keyboards you've been using, you nevertheless have fallen in love with the mechanical experience. Maybe you have no idea what a mechanical keyboard really is or why it rocks, but you're interested to find out. Well, as luck might have it, we're here to tell you. In a nutshell, the keyboard world is divided into two (not quite so) warring factions: synthetic keyboards and mechanical keyboards. Without getting into the super-technical nuances of each just yet, the key difference between the two – pardon the pun – is in how the keystrokes themselves are registered by the devices. Synthetic/Membrane Keyboard Design
The typical design of a synthetic keyboards usually features some kind of membrane or dome switch running overtop a non-conductive gap in a lower layer of circuitry. Depending on the specific design of the keyboard, pressing down on the physical key on your keyboard mashes the layer (or layers) of membrane down, where the lowest layer – a conductive material – completes the circuit below it. A dome switch can achieve a similar effect, only instead of pushing down on layers of membrane, you're pushing down on a small cylindrical-like object that has a connective material on the bottom. Once the bottom of the dome bridges the gap between the circuitry underneath, your system registers your action as a keystroke. Examining a synthetic keyboard's membrane layers (image from Wikipedia) Got it? Synthetic keyboards, while practical, still retain a "squishier" feel versus their mechanical counterparts. It's one of the more obvious distinctions to anyone who has ever run their fingers across each kind of keyboard, but the differences aren't restricted to mere tactile sensations. We hate to generalize too much, but synthetic keyboards also tend to have a lower N-Key Rollover (the ability for a keyboard to handle several simultaneous keystrokes accurately) than their mechanical counterparts – or at least, you'll likely have a tougher time finding a membrane keyboard with a high N-Key Rollover when compared to a mechanical keyboard. N-Key Rollover What's an N-Key Rollover? In short, it represents the number of keys that your keyboard can simultaneously register. Mash your left hand on the home keys on a keyboard with a 3-key Rollover and your system will only be able to register three of those key presses – the "A," "S," and "D," for example. Any other keys will be ignored. If you'll allow this writer to get personal for a moment, I can hold down six keys on my six-key rollover synthetic keyboard and all will appear depressed within Microsoft's official "Keyboard Ghosting Demonstration" app. Hitting a seventh key anywhere on the keyboard while I'm holding down six, however, does absolutely nothing.
Try out your keyboard on Microsoft's Keyboard Ghosting Demo Of course, there's also a general six-key limit (regular keys, not modifiers like CTRL, or Shift, et cetera) for keyboards connected via USB, but keyboard manufacturers tend to come up with creative workarounds for that issue. Mechanical Keyboards Back to definitions! A mechanical keyboard, in contrast, throws out the concept of membranes and replaces those squishy bits of rubber with raw, physical switches underneath each key. But not each switch is the same – different mechanical keyboards use different switches, which can change up the raw tactile sensation you feel when pressing the key, the physical noise made when you mash the key, and the sheer amount you have to push down before your system registers your input as a keystroke. As you might have guessed, mechanical keyboards – by their construction – tend to be a wee bit more durable than their synthetic counterparts. At least, it's a bit more difficult to break a physical switch than it is to kill a membrane, and mechanical keyboards are typically rated for many, many more keystrokes – up to 50 million, claims popular manufacturer Das Keyboard, versus the ten million or so keystrokes that synthetic keyboards can typically handle sans failure. The Gigabyte Osmium Aivia uses Cherry MX Red switches which are quieter than their Blue and Brown counterparts. A manufacturer named ZF Electronics tends to make a significant chunk of the various switches found underneath the keys of today's mechanical keyboards, marketed under the "Cherry" line. Thankfully, for those interested in knowing a bit more about the keys in their mechanical keyboard, the various Cherry MX switches are color-coded to match particular parameters, which we'll briefly explain below as we go over some of the switch characteristics. Spoiler: There aren't many. One way to separate out the different the Cherry MX switches in a mechanical keyboard is to do so by the tactile sensation they offer – which is to say, the little bit of a bump you feel as the keystroke registers. Linear switches, or switches that offer a smoother press and release (non-tactile), can be found on MX Cherry Red and Cherry Black switches (which, as mentioned, are conveniently color-coded to fit their names).
Cherry Red switches come with a lower actuation force requirement than Cherry Black (Gifs via Daskeyboard) The key difference between the Red and Black switches is the force required to depress the key in order to register a keystroke: Cherry Red switches come with a lower actuation force requirement than Cherry Black switches, to the tune of 45 cN to 65 cN (centinewtons). There's no general school of thought as to which switch is better for gaming per se – that's a matter of personal preference. However, these switches might be a little tougher for typing due to the lesser feedback present when pressing; in general, they feel less responsive than their tactile-heavy, clicking counterparts. The brown, blue and clear switches all offer a bit of a bump when you press them, with the blue being the loudest The other four Cherry switches – Brown, Blue, Clear, and White – might offer a bit of a bump to register when a key has been pressed, but only two make an audible clicking noise when the key reaches this point (followed by a "clack" as the key ultimately bottoms out). Like before, the noisier Cherry Blue switch comes with a bit less of an actuation force requirement – the amount you need to press down before a keystroke happens – than its Cherry White counterpart. Also, Cherry Blue switches are far, far more commonly used than Cherry White switches, though you can likely still order the latter from individual component retailers. That leaves us with two switches to compare: Cherry Brown and Cherry Clear. They offer the tactile bump when the keypress is registered, just not the (occasionally annoying) clicking noise. Cherry Brown switches require slightly less force for a keystroke to register than Cherry Clear switches and, as before, are much more commonly found in keyboards than their colorless counterparts. Do you want or have a mechanical keyboard yourself? Let us know in the comments below. |
| Maximum PC Goes to Video Games Live Posted: 26 Jul 2013 01:40 PM PDT
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| Microsoft Tries Gaming on Three 4K Displays in Eyefinity, Pushes 1.5 Billion Pixels Per Second Posted: 26 Jul 2013 10:11 AM PDT
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| Digital Storm Bolt Titan Review Posted: 26 Jul 2013 10:11 AM PDT Dual-card-like without two cardsWe know console fanboys have already started calling the PS4 a "truly next-gen" product while saying the PC isn't one, so we thought we'd rub this in their faces: the Digital Storm Bolt Titan.
Next-gen this, console fanboys! Yeah, fanboys, eat the hot pixels being thrown your way by the world's fastest single-GPU video card! It's not just any video card, either. As the DStorm's name suggests, this PC is running Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan. For petite systems like these, the magic of Titan isn't just its straight-line speed—it's that, as powerful as it is, the card has a relatively small footprint. That translates into a mini-tower machine that, for the first time, doesn't give up much quarter to the dual-card setups. It's not quite the equal of a full-tilt GeForce GTX 690 card or the more exotic dual–Radeon HD 7990s, but it's a lot better behaved. New to Titan is the ability to tune the GPU by setting thermal and performance goals. If you're running the card in your ginormous case with more fans than a Ridley Scott movie, then go to town on performance. But if you're in the Bolt Titan and gaming on your HDTV, you can tune the card until its sound is barely noticeable. The Bolt Titan favors being quiet. The box certainly isn't as quiet as Alienware's X51, with its ability to run integrated graphics via Nvidia's Optimus, nor the Falcon Northwest Tiki, with its liquid-cooled CPU, but it's fairly quiet during gaming bouts, especially when you consider its graphics performance. We should note that Falcon now also offers the Tiki with the Titan option. Elsewhere in the box, there are no major differences from the GeForce GTX 680–based Bolt that we reviewed earlier this year. In fact, the original Bolt, with its Core i7-3770K clocked up at 4.4GHz, is the perfect foil for this machine. In the performance benchmarks that are mostly limited by the CPU, the 100Hz clock advantage of the Bolt Titan doesn't move the needle much, with performance roughly 2 to 3 percent faster. However, in gaming, the Bolt Titan easily knees its 680-based sibs in the nads. In Batman: Arkham City, the Bolt Titan was 62 percent faster and in 3DMark 11 we saw a 37 percent difference. Up against our Core i7-3930K–based zero-point with its GeForce GTX 690, the Bolt Titan didn't win in games, but it held its own, considering the 690 is just about the equivalent of a pair of GeForce GTX 680s in SLI. The Bolt Titan was just 4 percent slower in Batman, which is pretty much a tie, and but 16 percent off in 3DMark11. That, folks, is impressive as frak when you look at how diminutive the Bolt Titan is. We know, we know, some will say this harkens the end of the big, bad full-tower PC but, no, it doesn't. As freaking fast as the Bolt Titan is, it's not the same as running an overclocked and liquid-cooled, hexa-core chip at speed. For example, the Geekbox Ego Maniacal that we reviewed in January, with its Core i7-3970X tuned up to 4.8GHz, hammers the quad-core chips in multithreaded CPU tests by more than 30 percent. And its quad-SLI configuration? Yeah, as fast as Titan is, a single Titan isn't going to even get within striking distance of two liquid-cooled GeForce GTX 690s. So, haters need to step off. Still, let's not forget to pay proper homage to what Digital Storm has achieved with the Bolt Titan. It's the fastest mini-tower we've tested yet, and whether working as your HTPC gaming box or simply saving space in your office, it's hard to find much fault with this sweet little rig. $2,500, www.digitalstormonline.com |
| Go Small or Go Home: Shipments of 11-inch Notebooks on the Rise as 15-inch Laptops Decline Posted: 26 Jul 2013 09:34 AM PDT
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| Half Life 3 Confirmed! (Well, Sort of, Maybe, Probably Not) Posted: 26 Jul 2013 08:29 AM PDT
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| Avira Antivirus Sends Linux a Breakup Letter, Will Stay Friends Until June 30, 2016 Posted: 26 Jul 2013 07:53 AM PDT
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| Newegg Daily Deals: WD Black 500GB Hard Drive, Corsair CX600 PSU, and More! Posted: 26 Jul 2013 07:31 AM PDT
Top Deal: Hear that clicking noise? It's your hard drive about to give up the ghost. Back up your data, and when you're finished, take a look at today's top deal for a Western Digital Black 500GB hard drive for $65 with free shipping (normally $75 - use coupon code EMCXNVR35). This is a high performance HDD with a 7200 RPM spindle speed, 64MB of cache, and SATA 6Gbps interface. Other Deals: Corsair Builder Series CX600 600W 80 Plus Bronze Certified Active PFC Power Supply for $58 with free shipping (normally $70 - use coupon code: [EMCXNVR44]) G.Skill Ripjaws Series 4GB (2x2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory for $39 with free shipping (normally $43 - use coupon code: [EMCXNVR43]) Corsair Hydro Series H80i Water Cooler for $75 with free shipping (normally $87 - use coupon code: [EMCXNVR74]) Asus VE278Q Black 27" 1080p 2ms HDMI LED Backlight LCD Monitor w/Speakers ASCR 10,000,000:1 for $250 with free shipping (normally $270 - use coupon code: [EMCXNVR235]) |
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