General Gaming Article

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• Nvidia Shield Tablet Review
• Nvidia GeForce 340.52 WHQL Sit Just a Few Clicks Away
• Microsoft's Sharks Cove Mini PC Now Available to Pre-Order
• Acer Owns the U.S. Retail Monitor Market
• Intel Lifts the Lid Off Upcoming Core i7 5960X Haswell-E Processor
• Thermaltake Launches High End Water 3.0 Ultimate All-in-One Liquid Cooling System
• Newegg Daily Deals: Microsoft Windows 8 Professional 64-Bit (Full Version), PNY XLR8 240GB SSD, and More!

Nvidia Shield Tablet Review Posted: 29 Jul 2014 12:36 PM PDT The best gaming tablet in town Despite its problems, we actually liked Nvidia's original Shield Android gaming handheld. Our biggest issue with it was that it was bulky and heavy. With rumors swirling around about a Shield 2, we were hoping to see a slimmer, lighter design. So consider us initially disappointed when we learned that the next iteration of Shield would just be yet another Android tablet. Yawn, right? The fact of the matter is that the Shield Tablet may be playing in an oversaturated market, but it's still great at what it sets out to be. The new wireless controller uses Wi-Fi Direct instead of Bluetooth for lower latency. At eight inches, the Shield Tablet features a gorgeous 1,900x1,200 display, which shares the same resolution as Google's flagship Nexus 7 tablet. At 13.1 ounces, the Shield Tablet is about three ounces heavier than the Nexus 7 but still a lot lighter than the original's 1 lb. 4.7 ounces.  Part of the weight increase with the Shield Tablet over the Nexus 7 is due to the extra inch that you're getting from the screen, but also because the Shield Tablet is passively cooled and has an extra thermal shield built inside to dissipate heat. It's a little heavier than we like, but isn't likely to cause any wrist problems. On the back of the Shield is an anti-slip surface and a 5MP camera, and on the front of the tablet we have a front-facing 5MP camera and two front-facing speakers. While the speakers are not going to blow away dedicated Bluetooth speakers, they sound excellent for a tablet. In addition to the speakers, the Shield Tablet has a 3.5mm headphone jack up at the top. Other ports include Micro USB, Mini HDMI out, and a MicroSD card slot capable of taking up to 128GB cards. Buttons on the Shield include a volume rocker and a power button which we found to be a little small and shallow for our liking. The guts of the Nvidia Shield Tablet All of this is running on the latest version of Android KitKat version 4.4. Nvidia says that it will update the tablet to Android L within a few weeks of Google's official release. If Nvidia's original Shield is any indication of how well the company keeps up with OS updates, you should be able to expect to get the latest version of Android but after a couple of weeks if not a months after release. Regardless, the Shield Tablet is running a pretty stock version of Android to begin with the main difference being that Nvidia has pre-loaded the tablet with its Shield Hub, which is a 10-foot UI for you to purchase, download, and launch your games. Arguably the real star of the tablet is Nvidia's new Tegra K1 mobile superchip. The 2.2GHz quad-core A15 SOC features Nvidia's Kepler GPU architecture and 192 CUDA cores along with 2GB of low power DDR3. K1 supports many of the graphical features commonplace in GeForce graphics card including tesselation, HDR lighting, Global illumination, subsurface scattering, and more. In our performance benchmarks, the K1 killed it. Up until now, the original Shield's actively-cooled Tegra 4 is arguably one of the most if not the most powerful Android SOC on the market, but the K1 slaughters it across the board. In Antutu and GeekBench benchmark, we saw modest gains of 12 percent to 23 percent in Shield vs. Shield Tablet action. But in Passmark and GFX Bench's Trex test, we saw nearly a 50 percent spread, and in 3DMark's mobile Icestorm Unlimited test, we saw an astounding 90 percent advantage for the Shield Tablet. This is incredible when you consider that the tablet has no fans and a two-watt TDP. Compared to the second-gen Nexus 7 , the Shield Tablet benchmarks anywhere from 77 percent to 250 percent faster. This SOC is smoking fast. In terms of battery life, Nvidia is claiming you'll get 10 hours watching/surfing the web and about five hours from gaming with its 19.75 Wh battery. This is up 3.75 Wh up from Google's Nexus 7 equivalent and from our experiential tests, we found those figures to be fairly accurate if not a best case scenario. It will pretty much last you all day, but you'll still want to let it sip juice every night. Of course if you're going to game with it, you're going to need Nvidia's new wireless Shield Controller. Sold separately for $60, the 11.2-ounce Shield Controller maintains the same button layout as the original Shield controller, but feels a lot like a lighter and more comfortable to hold. While most Android game controllers operate over Bluetooth, Nvidia opted to go with Wi-Fi Direct stating that it offers 2x faster response time and more bandwidth. The extra bandwidth allows you to plug in a 3.5mm headphone into the controller and also allows you to link up to four controllers to the device, which is an appreciated feature when you hook up the tablet to your HDTV via the Shield Tablet's Console Mode. Other unique features of the controller include capacitive touch buttons for Android's home, back, and play buttons. There's also a big green Nvidia button that launches Shield Hub. The controller also has a small triangle shaped clickable touch pad which allows you to navigate your tablet from afar. A quibble we had with it is that we wish the trackpad was more square, to at least mimic the dimensions of the tablet as the triangle shape was a little awkward to interface with. Another problem that we initially had with the controller was that the + volume button stopped working after a while. We contacted Nvidia about this and the company sent us a new unit which did remedy the issue, however. One noticeable missing feature from the controller is rumble support. Nvidia said this was omitted on the original Shield to keep the weight down, however its omission is a little more glaring this time around since there is no screen attached to the device. The controller isn't the only accessory that you'll need to purchase separately if you want to tap into the full Shield Tablet experience, however. To effectively game with the tablet, you'll need the Shield Tablet cover which also acts as a stand. Like most tablets, a magnet in the cover shuts off the Shield Tablet when closed but setting up the cover and getting it to standup is initially pretty confusing. The cover currently only comes in black and while we're generally not big on marketing aesthetics, it would be nice to have an Nvidia green option to give the whole look a little more pop. We actually think the cover should just be thrown in too, especially considering that the cheapest 16GB model costs $300. On the upside though, you do get Nvidia's new passive DirectStylus 2 that stows away nicely in the body of the Shield Tablet. Nvidia has pre-installed note writing software and its own Nvidia Dabbler painting program. The nice thing about Dabbler is that it leverages K1's GPU acceleration so that you can virtually paint and blend colors in real time. There's also a realistic mode where the "paint" slowly drips down the virtual canvas like it would in real life.  The Shield Controller is a lot lighter and less blocky than the original Shield Portable. But that's probably not why you're interested in the Shield Tablet. This device first and foremost is a gaming tablet and even comes with a free Android copy of Trine 2. Trine 2 was originally a PC game and it's made a great transition to the Shield Tablet. While the game was never known to be a polygon pusher, it looks just as good as it ever did on its x86 debut.  With gaming as the primary driver for Shield Tablet customers you may wonder why Nvidia didn't bundle its new controller. The company likely learned from Microsoft's mistake with Kinect and the Xbox One: Gamers don't like to spend money and getting the price as low as was likely on Nvidia's mind. Of course, not everyone may even want a controller with the general lack of support for it in games. Nvidia says there are now around 400 Android titles that support its controller, but that's only a small percentage of Android games and the straight truth is that the overwhelming majority of these games are garbage.  Nvidia is making a push for Android gaming, however. The company worked with Valve to port over Half Life 2 and Portal to the Shield and they look surprisingly fantastic and are easily the two prettiest games on Android at the moment. Whether Android will ever become a legitimate platform for hardcore gaming is as good as anyone's guess, but at least the Shield Tablet will net you a great front seat if the time ever arises. Luckily you won't have to rely solely on the Google Play store to get your gaming fix. Emulators run just as well here as they did on the original Shield and this iteration of Shield is also compatible with Gamestream, which is Nvidia's streaming technology that allows you to stream games from your PC to your Shield. Gamestream, in theory, lets you play your controller-enabled PC games on a Shield.   At this point, Nvidia says Gamestream supports more than 100 games such as Batman: Arkham Origins and Titanfall from EA's Origin and Valve's Steam service. The problem though is there are hundreds more games on Steam and Origin that support controllers but not the Shield Tablet's controller. For example, Final Fantasy VII, a game which we couldn't get working with the original Shield still isn't supported even though it works with an Xbox controller on the PC. When Gamestream does work, however, it's relatively lag-free and kind of wonderful. The one caveat here is that you'll have to get a 5GHz dual-band router to effectively get it working.  Nvidia Shield Video Demo Would we buy the Shield Tablet if we owned the original Shield (now renamed the Shield Portable)? Probably not. If we were looking for a new tablet and top notch gaming performance was on the check list, the Shield Tablet is easily the top contender today. We'd take it over the second-gen Nexus 7 in a heart beat. While we understand why Nvidia decided to separate the cover and controller to keep the prices down and avoid the Kinect factor, we think a bundled package with a small price break as an alternative would have been nice. All things considered though, consider us surprised. The Shield Tablet is pretty dang cool.  $300

Nvidia GeForce 340.52 WHQL Sit Just a Few Clicks Away Posted: 29 Jul 2014 12:01 PM PDT Latest GeForce drivers add a bunch of SLI profiles Attention GeForce graphics card owners -- you can now download new GeForce 340.52 WHQL drivers from Nvidia's website, or update automatically through GeForce Experience. Either way, new drivers are available, and with them, you can take advantage of GameStream technology to stream PC games to the new Shield tablet, which launches today to e-tailers and retailers, Nvidia says. That's really the big reason for the new drivers, though if you're running multiple GPUs in SLI, you'll potentially benefit from a number of SLI profiles that have been added. Specific to the 340.52 release are profiles for Battlefield: Hardline, Dark Souls II, 3DMark SkyDriver Subtest, Divinity: Original Sin, Elder Scrolls Online, GRID Autosport, LuDaShi Benchmark, and WildStar. There are also some new 3D Vision profiles for stereoscopic 3D gamers. They include Banished, BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea, and Krater. You can out more in the Release Notes (PDF) and can download the new drivers here. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Microsoft's Sharks Cove Mini PC Now Available to Pre-Order Posted: 29 Jul 2014 11:12 AM PDT Sharks Cove is ready swim in mini PC waters Watch out Raspberry Pi, you're now swimming in Shark infested waters, or at least you soon will be. For those interested, Microsoft's Sharks Cove development board is now available to pre-order. A U.K. vendor has it listed for £192.99, or just a little shy of $330 in U.S. dollars. That's quite a bit more expensive than Raspberry Pi, though it's also more fully featured, hence the higher price tag. Sharks Cove sports a x86-based Intel Atom Z3735G quad-core processor clocked at 1.33GHz (1.83GHz Burst) with 2MB of L2 cache, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of eMMC flash storage, HDMI connector, and a memory card reader. The actual board measures just 6 inches by 4 inches. Microsoft's banking on the added horsepower being incentive to spend a premium on Sharks Cove versus a much less expensive Raspberry Pi. It also comes with a Windows 8.1 image and the utilities necessary to apply to Sharks Cove. According to Microsoft, Sharks Cove is ultimately intended to facilitate development of software and drivers for mobile devices that run Windows, such as phones, tablets, and similar System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms. "When you additionally consider that the Windows Driver Kit 8.1 can pair with Visual Studio Express and are both free with a valid MSDN account, the initial outlay for Windows driver developers is a lot less cost prohibitive than it once was," Microsoft says. Microsoft said it plans to post articles related to Sharks Cove in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, you can check out SharksCove.org, a site dedicated to the development board. And if you want to pre-order one, just head over to the Mouse Electronics website. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Acer Owns the U.S. Retail Monitor Market Posted: 29 Jul 2014 10:45 AM PDT Nearly half of all touchscreen monitors shipped last year donned an Acer label Time and again, we see examples of where lower priced gadgets rule the day. We saw it when Amazon stormed the Android tablet market with its smaller size, lower cost Kindle Fire (compared to what was available at the time), and we're seeing it again in the monitor market. According to the latest data from NPD Group, Acer is selling more monitors in the U.S. than any other player. Acer's share of the overall monitor market during the first half of this year has bounced between 18 percent to 20 percent, which qualifies the company for pole position. In the touchscreen monitor segment, Acer slammed the competition by remaining the top maker for the entire year (from July 2013 to June 2014), reaching a high in market share of 46.4 percent in May. It will be interesting to see if Acer can hold onto its lead once 4K monitors grow up a little bit and become more affordable. The company's off to a good start, having announced back in May the first 4K monitor to support Nvidia's G-Sync technology, the XB280HK. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Intel Lifts the Lid Off Upcoming Core i7 5960X Haswell-E Processor Posted: 29 Jul 2014 10:21 AM PDT Intel soldered the CPU die to the integrated heat spreader A picture making the rounds on the web shows what Intel's upcoming Core i7 5960X Haswell-E processor will look like if you have the nerve to pry off the integrated heat spreader (IHS). If you look close, you can see that beneath the adhesive layer that secures the IHS to the package is soldering from where Intel soldered the CPU die to the IHS with a strong epoxy. If you're an overclocker or otherwise concerned with temps, this a good sight to see. Soldering the CPU die to the IHS offers better heat conductivity than filling the gap with thermal interface material (TIM), the latter of which is the route Intel took with its Core i7 3770K, 4770K,a nd 4790K processors, according to the folks at OCDrift.com. While not game changing by any means, this is simply another reason to look forward to Haswell-E. Expected to launch this September, Haswell-E will coincide with Intel's X99 Express chipset and offer support DDR4 memory support. As for the stripped down Core i7 5960X on display, earlier rumors suggest it will rock 8 cores, 16 threads, a 3GHz to 3.3GHz (Turbo Boost) clockspeed, 20MB of L3 cache, and a 140W TDP. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Thermaltake Launches High End Water 3.0 Ultimate All-in-One Liquid Cooling System Posted: 29 Jul 2014 09:05 AM PDT All-in-one kit with a 360mm radiator Thermaltake this week added a new self-contained liquid cooling kit to its lineup, the Water 3.0 Ultimate. It sports a large 360mm radiator with three "Triple Curve" 120 PWM fans that spin at 1,000 RPM to 2,000 RPM. If that's not enough for your overclocking efforts, Thermaltake says the large radiator supports three additional fans, bringing the potential total to half a dozen 120mm fans. This is Thermaltake's flagship all-in-one LCS, which stands above the Water 3.0 Extreme, Performance, and Pro kits. To give an example of its performance, Thermaltake compared the temps of its Ultimate kit versus Intel's stock cooler for a Core i7 975 running at 4GHz and 100 percent load. Intel's cooler maintained 94C, while the Ultimate held steady at 69C in Thermaltake's own tests. Unfortunately, Thermaltake only provides a few specifics about the kit -- the water block consists of a copper base plate, while the rubber tubing going to and from it measures 326mm. The pump's motor speed is 3600 RPM, give or take 150 RPM. No word yet on when the Water 3.0 Ultimate will be available or for how much. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

Newegg Daily Deals: Microsoft Windows 8 Professional 64-Bit (Full Version), PNY XLR8 240GB SSD, and More! Posted: 29 Jul 2014 08:02 AM PDT Top Deal: Young or old, there are multiple examples of where going pro works out for the best. Look at LeBron James and Kobe Bryant, both of which decided to go pro right out of high school. And Brett Favre found some measure of success by remaining a pro in his 40s. Have you been thinking about going pro? We can't help on the sports side of the equation, but if it's a new copy of Windows you need, you can go Pro with today's top deal -- Microsoft Windows 8 Professional 64-bit (Full Version) OEM for $100 with free shipping (normally $140 - use coupon code: [EMCPCHE56]). It's eligible for a free update to Windows 8.1 and comes with features like Remote Desktop, Data BitLocker, Network Domain Join, and Client Hyper-V. Other Deals: AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini Quad-Core 2.05GHz Socket AM1 25W Desktop Processor AMD Radeon HD 8400 for $58 with free shipping (normally $65 - use coupon code: [EMCPCHE25]) PNY XLR8 2.5-inch 240GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) for $100 with free shipping (normally $110; additional $10 Mail-in Rebate) G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory for $149 with free shipping (normally $165 - use coupon code: [EMCPCHE34]) Fractal Design Define R4 Blackout Silent ATX Mid Tower Computer Case for $80 with free shipping (normally $95 - use coupon code: [EMCPCHE42])

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