General Gaming Article

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• Sharkoon Skiller Review
• Acer Aspire 5600U Review
• How to Build: An Nvidia Titan into an ITX Case
• SteamOS is the First of Valve's Three Big Reveals
• LinkedIn Addresses Lawsuit Alleging Email Hacking
• LG Most Likely Candidate to Build Google's Nexus 5 Smartphone
• Newegg Daily Deals: Lian Li PC-7B Plus II Case, NZXT Hale82 850W PSU, and More!

Sharkoon Skiller Review Posted: 23 Sep 2013 01:03 PM PDT Killer price meets not-so-killer performance Sharkoon has stepped into the gaming-keyboard ring with its new budget plank called the Sharkoon Skiller, which is loaded with hotkeys and a macro-recording software suite. Those of you not familiar with Sharkoon should know that the company started out making cold-cathode PC lighting a decade ago, and has since expanded its offering with keyboards, mice, and other PC peripherals. The Sharkoon's Skiller keyboard comes with almost every hotkey imaginable. Sharkoon's newest keyboard manages to include some high-end features but ultimately has too many flaws—most notably a less-than-optimum typing experience—for us to recommend it. On the plus side, Sharkoon includes rubberized WASD and cursor keys on the Skiller out of the box, making it easy to locate these gaming keys without taking your eyes off the screen. Rubberized WASD keys aren't a new thing, of course, but they're generally found on far pricier planks, such as Corsair's K60. For folks who don't care for the rubberized surface, Sharkoon includes a set of standard keys, as well as a tool for replacing them. The right side of the Skiller has volume and mute keys, above which are the media controls, including pause, play, and stop. Sadly, the keys only work with Windows Media Player—we had no joy trying map to them to work with Pandora, VLC, or iTunes. At the top of the keyboard there are wake, sleep, and power keys—the Skiller actually lets you power off your PC, put it to sleep, and wake it up using the last three buttons located in the top right-hand corner of the keyboard. Unfortunately, the power and sleep buttons cannot be disabled, which means an accidental tap of those keys during gameplay will put your machine to sleep or shut it down. We recommend changing these functions in the power options of your OS before you put the board into action. The top left of the keyboard is rounded out with shortcuts to My Computer, Email, Windows Search, Windows Calculator, and Windows Media player. While useful to some, these dedicated keys seem out of place on a gaming keyboard. Most budget keyboards don't include macro-recording software, but the Skiller does, which is a plus for folks on a tight budget who want big-dollar functionality. Sharkoon's software makes it quick and easy to create macro sets and it also makes the Skiller MMO- and RTS-friendly. When you take into account the Sharkoon Skiller's $30 price, the inclusion of rubberized and textured WASD keys and macro software might make it seem like a steal, but the one deal-breaker to us is the keyboard's mushy feel. It's just not that pleasant to type on. Yes, we'll acknowledge that you won't get a more satisfying mechanical plank in this price range, but Sharkoon's Skiller is notably mushy by even mushy-membrane-key standards. $30, www.sharkoon.com

Acer Aspire 5600U Review Posted: 23 Sep 2013 01:03 PM PDT Trades thin figure for performance The Acer Aspire 5600U is a slim and somewhat-sexy all-in-one. It features a 1.3-inch-thin chassis and a 23-inch display atop a clear-plastic base, giving the illusion that it's floating in air. Once you get past the aesthetics, however, you'll find that the 5600U is lacking where it counts. The 5600U's keyboard and mouse match the AiO's slick, glassy aesthetic. Keeping the AiO upright is an adjustable kickstand that allows it to tilt 30 to 80 degrees, which is limber enough to use sitting or standing. Alternately, a slide-in VESA mount makes it possible to attach the 5600U to an arm or wall. While it doesn't feature a keyboard docking area like our Asus ET2300 zero-point, you can tuck the peripherals behind the display, in between its frame and the AiO's stand. All in all, the 5600U doesn't take up much space, with a desktop footprint of just 8x22.5 inches. Another nice feature of the AiO is its 1920x1080-resolution monitor. While it's a TN panel, it offers much better viewing angles than the HP Envy 23 we reviewed last month, though it has a similarly glossy screen that's far too reflective for our tastes; the panel supports 10-point touch. While attractive, the thin profile doesn't do wonders for audio, as the top-mounted speakers themselves sounded thin and project the audio toward the ceiling as opposed to at us. In terms of ports, the left side of the AiO features two USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, and a mic/speaker-in. The right side has the power button, DVD drive, and monitor controls. On the back of the AiO there are three USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, S/PDIF port, and two HDMI ports for in/out options. The transparent aesthetic of the included wireless mouse and keyboard is cool-looking and matches the 5600U, but in use we were unimpressed with the peripherals' plasticky feel. This is especially true of the mouse, which is made of a low-quality, toy-like plastic. The compact keyboard feels slightly better, but oddly omits lights of any kind, such as a Caps Lock indicator. While the AiO makes a nice first impression, once you get past its looks, you become aware of its deficiencies under the hood, even at the relatively affordable price of $1,000. It comes with a dual-core 3.2GHz Core i5-3230M that can Turbo up to 3.2GHz, 6GB of DDR3/1333, and—while large—a 1TB drive that spins at 5,400rpm. We wish it came with an SSD or at least a caching drive, but its biggest omission is a discrete video card. It's no surprise, given its specs, that it got creamed in our benchmarks. The Acer's best showing was a 15 percent lag behind our zero-point's quad-core 3GHz Core i5-3330M in ProShow Producer. You can thank the 5600U's Hyper-Threading for that close showing. In the multithreaded TechARP x264 HD test, however, it got bullied by 40 percent. The integrated graphics got stomped by 45 percent in Metro 2033. Our zero-point's GPU is but a GeForce 630M, too, so integrated graphics still have a long way to go in competing with even the humblest video cards. Firing up the less stressful Portal 2, the 5600U was capable of just 15fps at 1080p on max settings. We were able to hit the 60fps range by disabling AA and setting everything to medium, so it's playable if you don't mind image quality taking a hit. In terms of boot times, the 5600U started up in 24 seconds, which is typical given its specs. The Aspire 5600U is low-cost, but in more ways than one. While it might work as a decent touchscreen AiO for your parents, it most certainly doesn't have the chops for a power user. If you're looking for something that lives up to the "all-in-one" moniker, we recommend spending $300 more for the Asus ET2300, which features much better specs all around. $1,000, www.acer.com

How to Build: An Nvidia Titan into an ITX Case Posted: 23 Sep 2013 01:03 PM PDT Nvidia's newest GPU was built to provide maximum horsepower to small gaming PCs, so we built a Mini-ITX system to see if the card would fit, and if it could keep cool and quiet under pressure Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan video card has a serious cool factor. It's the fastest single-GPU card on the market, for one thing. And it beats the competition without sounding like a fighter jet or getting hot enough to trigger a meltdown. Finally, at 10.5 inches, it's shorter than the reigning single-card champ, the GTX 690, by half an inch, making the Titan suitable for deployment in small gaming PCs. In fact, when Nvidia launched this card, it specifically pointed out that it was designed for use in small form factor PCs, so we just had to see how things would play out in a Mini-ITX environment. And why stop with the card? We figured we might as well throw in a nice CPU, motherboard, a fast SSD, and some extra cooling so we could dabble in overclocking. Even though we started off with the innocent goal of gauging the experience of building a Titan-based SFF rig, in the end we decided to see just how far we could push this tiny system, and came away surprised by how much performance can be had in a rig with such a small footprint. A Plethora of Options With our GPU already decided, we had to figure out which platform to build around, and going Mini-ITX narrowed our choices considerably. First off, there are no LGA2011 motherboards in that form factor, and second, Intel's new socket 1150 Haswell microarchitecture isn't available as of press time, leaving just AMD or Intel's venerable Socket 1155. Because this is a maximum-performance machine, we went with Intel, especially since we wanted to overclock and we know from experience that we can push a Socket 1155 CPU to 4.4GHz. That push necessitated a large CPU cooler and an overclockable motherboard. To hold it all, we chose Silverstone's Sugo SG08 case. It's small and tastefully appointed, yet large enough for both our Titan GPU and an aftermarket CPU cooler since its PSU is mounted in the front of the box instead of the rear. There are larger SFF cases that offer more room for fans and wiring, but we wanted to see the Titan sweat a bit, so we went with the Sugo. We also like the fact that it includes a 600W power supply that's customized for the chassis; a very nice touch that we'll discuss later on in more detail. Wrapping it up we chose an OCZ SSD for our OS drive and a WD hard drive for media storage. We went with a slot-fed optical drive since that is the only type this case accepts and we didn't want the bay to sit empty. Finally, we used a low-profile Silverstone Nitrogon NT06-Pro CPU cooler and Windows 7 Pro. INGREDIENTS PART URL Price Case Silverstone Sugo SG08 www.silverstonetek.com $200 PSU 600W SST-ST60F-SG   (bundled) Mobo P8Z77-i Deluxe www.asus.com $200 CPU Core i7-3770K www.intel.com $325 Cooler Nitrogon NT06-Pro www.silverstonetek.com $60 GPU GeForce GTX Titan www.nvidia.com $1000 RAM 2x 8GB Vengeance www.corsair.com $100 SSD 256GB OCZ Vector www.ocz.com $250 Hard Drive 2TB WD Caviar Black www.wdc.com $150 OS Windows 7 Professional 64-bit www.microsoft.com $100 Optical Drive Samsung SN-208DB/BEBE www.samsung.com $22 Total     $1,983 Click the next page to see the building process.  1. ITX-cellent An Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe is an expensive board, but you are reading Maximum PC, after all. The mobo is loaded with beefy overclocking options, built-in Wi-Fi, USB 3.0 front-panel connectors, and eSATA; it's just as full-featured as mobos twice its size. Asus manages this feat partly because it added an extension called a "riser," which holds extra capacitors and other circuitry, effectively extending the board's size vertically (image A). We installed the CPU cooler's backplate before installing the motherboard, as the case has no opening behind the motherboard. The heatsink on the north bridge also has a plastic fastener that we needed to push up a little, to make the CPU backplate fit securely against the motherboard. The board's riser card also has two screws that need to be removed, then re-installed after the motherboard is inside. 2. Cool Customers CPU coolers like Silverstone's NT06-Pro are designed for use in chassis like this, where the power supply is not installed over the motherboard, leaving a bit of room over the CPU for some additional cooling power. This heatsink is oriented parallel to the CPU instead of sticking up like a tower cooler, so it fits into tight spots where tower coolers won't. To make the NT06-Pro fit, we initially pointed the tips of its heat pipes towards the PCIe slot, but they were actually blocking it slightly, so we adjusted them to face the rear of the case (image B). The CPU fan went on top, blowing air down through the heatsink and complementing the positive pressure airflow from the 18cm case fan right above it. Installation was simple and took only 10 minutes, which included adjusting the orientation of the heatsink. We could have flipped the case fan and used it as an exhaust instead (ideally flipping the CPU fan as well), but this creates "negative" pressure (a slight vacuum), which usually leads to higher temps. 3. Godlike Processing Unit Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan is basically the star of the show here. The SG08 case can technically fit a GeForce GTX 690, which costs the same as the Titan while outperforming it by as much as 20 percent. But dual GPUs means SLI, and that can be glitchy, which is why people prefer single-GPU gaming. The 690 is also noticeably louder under load than the Titan, and it produces substantially more heat.  To install the video card, we could have gone in from the top or the side. But we chose to go in from the side, at an angle, in order to make sure no cables got trapped below the card. And because the Titan is just 10.5 inches long in a case that can handle 12.2 inches, there was space between the end of the card and the front of the case to hide the power supply cables (image C). 4. Drive Me Crazy The 256GB OCZ Vector is our SSD of choice this time. You could save money with a Corsair Neutron GTX, but the price difference is tiny against the system's overall price tag. In our tests, the Samsung 840 Pro is a smidgen faster than the Vector, but it's close enough that the subjective difference between the two is nonexistent. The SG08's drive cage leaves just enough room to slip two SSDs under the hard drive (image D), though we felt compelled to put the Vector in upside-down to orient its SATA cable more comfortably. A 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black was also installed to give us much-needed capacity. The drive cage is not toolless however, so a screwdriver is required for installation. Also, the Silverstone SG08 can only fit a "slim" optical drive (normally seen in laptops), but the Samsung was only $22. It needs a special combined power and data connector cable, which Newegg had for a few bucks. Click the next page to see how we finished the build.   5. Down to the Wiring The SG08's bundled 600-watt power supply has shortened cables that are specifically designed for the case (image E), so that made our job a little easier. It also has just one Molex cable, and one SATA power cable with three connectors on it, so you can only connect up to four devices. The Titan was a bit of a tight fit, but it was OK, and we had enough space to tuck the power cables away. Still, it's difficult to picture an 11-inch video card fitting inside this case, let alone a 12-incher. While the motherboard power cables are braided, the 24-pin cable is still thick and therefore stiff. It and the 8-pin power cable ended up getting looped a couple of times within the spare real estate we had left. The GPU power cables were unavoidably snug against the top of the SG08 when the case cover went on, though; flat cables would be ideal. If anything, the biggest wiring problem we faced was with the three SATA cables we used, since they were all standard length. If we had planned better, we would have ordered some shorter cables to help reduce the clutter. 6. Miscellany Assembling this build in the order dictated by the layering of components was a challenge. The GPU definitely had to go in last, because the motherboard's riser card obstructs access from the other side of the case. So, once the GPU is in it blocks access to the rest of the motherboard. If we had forgotten to plug in a cable somewhere, we would have had to pull out the GPU to solve the mystery, so it was important to be methodical. We had to get a little creative with the cabling to get everything to fit. For example, the SSD and its right-angle SATA connector ended up going in upside-down because we were running out of room to thread the cable around the power supply. We went over the PSU instead, as there were several millimeters of space between it and the optical drive tray above. The optical drive also uses very tiny screws (image F), about the size that you'd see on a pair of eyeglasses. The SG08 comes with them, thankfully, but they took a while to insert because the drive tray is recessed (though it uses precut holes for you to align the screwdriver with the screw holes).   The Little Overachiever in Action With our mini-rig assembled, cooled, and ready to rumble, we were primed to see how hard we could push these components. After all, the SG08 sports a large grill on the side, offering our GPU the chance to pull in cool air, so the Titan has some room to breathe. The case's unusually large 18cm "penetrator" fan blows directly down on the core of the system at up to 1,200rpm, and the CPU has a big heatsink with a 12cm fan that can go up to about 2,200rpm, so we figured cooling wouldn't be an issue. To our delight, the GPU handled a core overclock of 150MHz and a memory OC of 400MHz without complaints. The Titan did get up to 81 degrees C in our temperature-controlled Lab, which hovers around 20 C (or about 70 F), but Nvidia has told us the Titan is fine up to temps below 95 C. The Titan stayed fairly quiet and pushed almost all of its heat out of the system, too, which was excellent. So as far as the question of a Titan being able to survive in a SFF chassis goes, we'd say it works like a charm, and we can't see it causing any issues at all in other small cases. You're probably surprised to see that this system's 3DM11 score of 5,571 was within 5 percent of our zero-point system, which boasts a hexa-core i7-3930K overclocked to 4.2GHz and a GTX 690. However, the 690 was not overclocked, and keep in mind the zero-point's GPU scores were achieved with the drivers that were out when it was built in March 2012, so much of the surprisingly small gap is probably thanks to Nvidia's constant software optimizations made since then. The CPU was a trickier affair. Once you get beyond about 4.4GHz, Ivy Bridge CPUs start heating up dramatically. Taking it to 4.6GHz or even 4.5GHz gave us temperatures we didn't think would be sustainable outside of our air-conditioned testing environment. The NT06's bundled fan is also not particularly quiet once it revs up to about 2,200rpm, and the case fan adds noticeable noise when switched to "high." Even though we thought this little rig might be able to sit in our living room and stay quiet while gaming, we're left to conclude this particular setup would not be the best choice. So, the overall system performance was excellent, the build quality of the case was great (though the bundled PSU could use shorter motherboard power cables), the motherboard handled our CPU overclock quite well, and we didn't have to do anything questionable or dangerous to fit everything into the SG08. Overall, we'd say the mission was accomplished. Now, to build a Titan SLI SFF rig. Benchmarks   Zero-point Premiere Pro CS6 (sec) 2,000 2,700 (-26%) Stitch.Efx 2.0 (sec) 831 768 3DMark11 Extreme 5,847 5,571 (-4.8%) x264 HD 5.0 (fps) 21.1 16.95 (-19.7%)   ProShow Producer 5.0 (sec) 1,446 1,336  Batman: Arkam City (fps) 76 80 Our current desktop test bed consists of a hexa-core 3.2GHz Core i7-3930K @ 3.8GHz, 8GB of Corsair DDR3/1600, on an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard. We are running a GeForce GTX 690, an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.

SteamOS is the First of Valve's Three Big Reveals Posted: 23 Sep 2013 10:27 AM PDT Valve takes another step away from Windows Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has been very outspoken in his criticism of Windows 8. He viewed the OS as the beginning of the end of PC gaming, in particular because he feared Microsoft's walled garden approach could eventually be used to shut out the competition. It's not really surprising, then, that the first of Steam's big three announcements this week is the introduction of a Linux-based SteamOS. "As we've been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we've come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself," Valve explains. "SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines." Valve claims to have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and is now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the OS level. According to Valve, game developers are already on board and are working on new releases for SteamOS. SteamOS introduces four new features to Valve's living room strategy, including in-home streaming (play Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine); music, TV, and movies (Valve is working with "media services you know," which we take to mean Netflix and Hulu, or so we hope); family sharing; and family options (profiles, basically). SteamOS will be available soon as a free download, but we also can't help but think this is part of something bigger, perhaps much bigger. There are two announcements left to go, and if one of them is a Steam Box, you can bet it will be running SteamOS. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

LinkedIn Addresses Lawsuit Alleging Email Hacking Posted: 23 Sep 2013 09:09 AM PDT "Quite simply, this is not true" Professional networking site LinkedIn recently found itself the recipient of a class action lawsuit alleging that the company has been hacking into its users' email accounts and downloading their contacts, which it would then use to send out marketing materials. Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that LinkedIn essentially impersonates its users. Blake Lawit, Senior Director of Litigation at LinkedIn, denied the accusations in a blog post. "As you may have read recently, a class action lawsuit was filed against LinkedIn last week. The lawsuit alleges that we 'break into' the email accounts of our members who choose to upload their email address books to LinkedIn. Quite simply, this is not true, and with so much misinformation out there, we wanted to clear up a few things for our members," Lawit posted. He went on to address three specific points, the first of which are claims that the site hacks into its members' accounts. That's false, Lawit says, adding that LinkedIn doesn't access email accounts without permission. Second, Lawit said LinkedIn never deceives its users by pretending to be them in order to access their email account. Finally, Lawit says the site never sends messages or invitations to join LinkIn on behalf of its users unless it has been given permission to do so. "We do give you the choice to share your email contacts, so you can connect on LinkedIn with other professionals that you know and trust," Lawit added. "We'll continue to do everything we can to make our communications about how to do this as clear as possible. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

LG Most Likely Candidate to Build Google's Nexus 5 Smartphone Posted: 23 Sep 2013 08:14 AM PDT Why break up a good thing? All things considered, Google's Nexus 4 turned out to be a winning product for the Mountainview company. There were hiccups along the along way, many of them associated with LG's inability to manufacture Nexus 4 devices at a fast enough clip to satisfy demand, and during the time, both companies were pointing the finger at one another. Nevertheless, it worked out in the end, and it appears LG will be the one building the Nexus 5. LG had previously said it doesn't plan on building any more phones for Google, but that was several months ago. With Samsung dominating the Android market, LG might as well continue to ride the Nexus train as far as it can go. At least for one more generation of Nexus phones, that's exactly what LG plans to do, according to a Digitimes report. It's believed the Nexus 5 will be similar to LG's own G2 smartphone, which ships with a 5-inch Full HD 1080p display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, and 4G LTE. Other rumored features include a 13MP rear-facing camera, 3GB of RAM, and of course the latest version of Android, which at the time of its debut (speculated for October) will be Android 4.4 KitKat. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Newegg Daily Deals: Lian Li PC-7B Plus II Case, NZXT Hale82 850W PSU, and More! Posted: 23 Sep 2013 06:08 AM PDT Top Deal: Former Maximum PC editor David Murphy proved it's possible to build a functioning PC inside a cardboard box. That's still one way to cheap out on a home brewed system. Another, more sturdy way to house your components without breaking the bank is by taking advantage of today's top deal for a Lian Li PC-7B Plus II Black Aluminum Case for $72 with free shipping (normally $90 - use coupon code LLC20DSEPT13). This mid-tower chassis features four external 5.25-inch drive bays, five 3.5-inch bays (two external and three internal), and two 120mm fans. Other Deals: Seagate Expansion 3TB USB 3.0 Black Desktop Hard Drive for $100 with free shipping (normally $120 - use coupon code: [GAMING9200]) NZXT Hale82 850W 80 Plus Bronze Modular PFC Power Supply for $100 with free shipping (normally $125 - use coupon code: [IVYEPSU20]) Asus VN247H-P Black 23.6" 1ms LCD Monitor w/ Built-in Speakers for $160 with free shipping (normally $180 - use coupon code: [EMCXLWN24]) Team C123 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive for $12 with free shipping (normally $15 - use coupon code: [EMCXLWN72])

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