Big Changes at Microsoft, AMD unleashes Mantle, and more.
On this episode of the No BS Podcast #218, the staff spends a lot of time discussing Microsoft because we just can't quit them. First up we discuss its new CEO, Satya Nadella before moving on to upcoming changes to Windows 8.1, and finally the recent news of the company asking advanced users to help their friends get off Windows XP. Next we chat about AMD's Mantle API before closing by answering listener questions and delivering our picks of the week. Gordon then brings the podcast to a thundering conclusion with one of his signature rants.
EVGA has unveiled its GeForce GTX 780 as well as a new GPU cooling design dubbed ACX that it plans to stick on all its high-end GPUs for the foreseeable future. The cooler's acronym stands for Active Cooling Extreme since it uses active cooling and it's more extreme than getting a Red Bull enema.
Honestly, it's high time EVGA came out with this, as it's been using a slightly modified version of the Nvidia reference "blower" design for way too long, so it'll now be able to compete with Asus's DirectCU II, MSI's Twin Frozr, and Gigabyte's Windforce designs. EVGA says the new cooler offers a 40 percent increase in heatsink volume, which translates to 15 percent lower temps and totally silent operation. The biggest thing it's promoting is that the fans use ball bearings instead of the sleeved variety, allowing for longer life and quieter operation. The new heatsink covers the entire card—all 10.5 inches of it—so the VRMs and RAM are also covered by the cooling apparatus. EVGA offers six variants of this particular card, and this is its flagship air-cooled model, the SuperClocked ACX board.
Compared to the stock design, which has a Titan cooler by the way, this silver siren features a 104MHz overclock to the base clock, 118MHz overclock to the boost clock, and the aforementioned extreme cooler. It retains the stock card's 3GB of memory and 6GHz memory clock. That huge-ass fancy cooler only adds $10 to the price of the stock card, too, which is surprising. Sure, we're used to seeing aftermarket coolers go for $10 or $20 more over stock, but this cooler looks so premium we were we expected it to be more expensive, especially since the card is also overclocked. We should point out that the card's hardware "bundle" is, well, crappy and small, but we are coming to terms with the state of video card bundles now—which is to say they're all like this.
In testing, we saw the ACX-cooled GTX 780 run neck-and-neck with the more expensive GTX Titan, effectively closing the gap between the two cards in a way that just isn't possible on the GTX 780 reference board, at least not in our testing. This is the first card we've ever seen get this close to a Titan, and in the tests where it didn't graze it, the ACX card matched the Titan, which is damn impressive. It was able to match the Titan in Heaven 4.0, Far Cry 3, Tomb Raider, and Battlefield 3.
More good news: We were able to overclock the ACX board a fair bit, eventually getting it up to 1,149MHz boost by nudging the power target slider to 106 percent in the superb PrecisionX software, and GPU offset was set to +59MHz. Under full load, overclocked, the ACX cooler kept the card at a steady 75 C, which is about 10 C cooler than stock.
Let's recap then: sexy good looks and blistering benchmarks, cool and quiet performance, overclockable, as fast as a Titan, the best overclocking software around, and only $10 more than a stock board. Sounds like what is basically a perfect video card to us.
A number of websites such as Reddit and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have put up banners urging Internet users to join one another in an effort to fight back against mass surveillance. The anti-spying initiative has been dubbed 'The Day We Fight Back' by a broad collection of activist groups, companies, and online platforms that are also seeking to honor and celebrate the late Aaron Swartz, an activist and technologist who helped spur a victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act two years ago.
Facing legal action and a potentially lengthy prison sentence for allegedly breaking into a computer network and downloading millions of academic journals, Swartz took his own life on January 11, 2013.
"Aaron had a brilliant, inquisitive mind that he employed towards the ends of technology, writing, research, art, and so much more. Near the end of his life, his focus was political activism, in support of civil liberties, democracy, and economic justice," TheDayWeFightBack.org stated in a press release last month. "Aaron sparked and helped guide the movement that would eventually defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act in January 2012. That bill would have destroyed the Internet as we know it, by blocking access to sites that allowed for user-generated content -- the very thing that makes the Internet so dynamic."
The coalition hopes that another mass awareness campaign can have a similar effect on NSA spying. As it stands now, the effort mostly revolves around getting the word out by encouraging people to visit the organization's website, signing up to receive updates, installing widgets on on websites, using social media tools to announce participation, and anything else that draw attention to the cause, such as creating memes.
For those who want to take a more active role, TheDayWeFightBack.org offers to connect you with legislators with a script you can read, as well as filled out email forms.
A couple of last minute additions to Patch Tuesday address security holes in Windows XP
Today is the second Tuesday of the month, which means it's time to download a collection of security fixes from Microsoft. Otherwise known as Patch Tuesday, today's collection includes seven security bulletins, including two late additions that fill up patch remote code execution holes in Windows XP. These are some of the last updates Windows XP will ever receive, as Microsoft plans to stop supporting the legacy OS on April 8, 2014.
Five of the seven bulletins pertain to Windows 8.1, the latest version of Microsoft's consumer OS. Three of them are rated Critical and also deal with Remote Code Execution, while the other two are rated Important, one of which fixes a vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services and the other a security flaw in IPv6 that could allow a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
Windows RT is the recipient of three Critical and three Important updates, while Windows RT 8.1 gets three Critical and two Important updates.
Gigabyte will try to surpass Asus as the No. 1 motherboard player (in terms of shipments)
Top tier motherboard makers Asus and Gigabyte continue to dominate the mobo market just as they did in 2013, but only one can take the top spot. It was a close race between the two last year, and it could be another photo finish this year, with Gigabyte expecting to ship over 5 million motherboards in the first quarter. If so, that could give Gigabyte an early lead over rival Asus.
Just as before, these aren't official figures from either firm, and instead represent estimates by players within the upstream supply chain, Digitimes reports. Those sources say Gigabyte shipped 20 million motherboards last year, 40 percent of which ended up in China.
Citing comments made by Gigabyte president Alexander Ma, Digitime says Gigabyte's strategy for this year is to aggressively focus on the mid-range and high-end markets in order to boost its average selling price (ASP), gross margins, and profits. Part of the challenge will be outpacing an overall motherboard industry that's expected to decline 5 percent this year -- Ma hopes Gigabyte can stay flat or even increase its shipments by a small amount.
Meanwhile, second-tier vendors ASRock, MSI, ECS, and Biostar are expecting a 10-15 percent drop in sequential shipments, Digitimes says.
The Gigabyte Z87X-UD5H offers a lot of features for the price.
The world's economy may be on the mend but a lot of people still want to justify every cubit spent on technology. For some people, spending $280 for the Asus Z87-Deluxe or even $260 for the Intel DZ87KLT-75K may seem exorbitant. Fortunately for you, budget-minded power user, Gigabyte has its GA-Z87X-UD5H board. OK, we'll admit, $210 isn't really budget, but you'll see that it's a pretty modest price given the board's features.
The Z87X-UD5H gives you SLI and CrossFireX support, 10 SATA 6Gb/s ports, dual USB 3.0 headers, dual NICs, a POST LED, surface-mounted power and reset buttons, Creative Labs X-Fi MB drivers, and Gigabyte's trademark dual-BIOS setup. We've had the unfortunate need to resort to the dual-BIOS in the past and it's been an automatic affair. The UD5H offers and automatic and manual mode, which we got to use when we bricked the primary BIOS. No problem, flip a switch and you're back up and running on the backup BIOS. From there, you simply flip the switch back to the primary and reflash the BIOS again. It's pretty damned robust.
The last time we reviewed a Gigabyte board we complained hardily about the goofy UEFI (hey, that rhymes), with its faux "3D" mode. Gigabyte has since redone its BIOS with a vastly improved interface. Unfortunately, it's still not in the class of Asus's and now Intel's excellent UEFI. In fact, we went back to "classic" BIOS mode because the sheer amount of information on the UEFI screen is overwhelming.
One area where Gigabyte has really improved is in its OS utilities. We haven't been happy with the gear-shifter style interface and confusing options for some time and usually just avoided them. With the UD5H, the utilities have gotten a complete makeover that actually makes them competitive with Asus's excellent utilities. Gigabyte, for example, now has its own equivalent of Asus's Fan Xpert2 that's pretty good. It's not as granular or nerdtastic in settings but it's a step in the right direction. And Gigabyte even aces Asus is the update utility, which can find and fetch mobo drivers and utilities for you. This isn't a breakthrough feature, as MSI used to do this (although not very reliably), but it's a welcome feature that we'd love to see other board vendors also implement. The upshot is that the utilities are something to actually be used, not just installed once and ignored.
In performance, the Z87X-UD5H holds its own. Both the Intel and Gigabyte boards showed default multipliers of 8-39 on our Core i7-4770K, while the Asus had a default multiplier of 8-43. This gave the Z87-Deluxe a decided advantage in several benchmarks—but the Z87X-UD5H got pretty close. It also managed to smoke the Intel by a good margin.
In the audio department, the board uses the same ALC898 as the Intel board, but Gigabyte licenses Creative's software algorithms, including its Crystallizer and voice changing-features, among others. We're fans of the Crystalizer, which is a nice upgrade over the stock Realtek audio applets we usually see. We also did some close listening tests using a set of gaming headsets while hammering the USB 3.0 port with gigabytes of data and couldn't discern any snap, crackle, or pop.
Our overall view of the GA-Z87X-UD5H is that it's probably the sweet spot for most enthusiasts who could put the money saved by forgoing Thunderbolt or Wi-Fi into the CPU, GPU, or SSD instead.
New chip from ARM takes aim at smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and more
ARM on Tuesday added to its mobile arsenal by announcing its Cortex-A17 processor, a mid-range part the company hopes will find its way into a number of different devices. According to ARM, the Cortex-A17 boasts a 60 percent performance uplift over Cortex-A9 processors, making it the fastest mid-range solution available. ARM also claims that it offers superior efficiency.
"We expect to see a rich set of innovation in the mid-range mobile phone segment which is forecast to become a half a billion unit market annually from 2015 and the Cortex-A17 processor will be a key component in that growth," said Ian Ferguson, vice president of segment marketing, ARM. "To date, the ARM Partnership has shipped more than 50 billion ARM-based chips and the continued broadening of our processor family will enable our partners to further optimize their offerings in existing and new product categories."
The 28nm Cortex-A17 is based on the ARMv7-A architecture with support for over 1 million apps. It's scalable up to four cores, each of which offers a full out-of-order 11+ stage pipeline. It also has a fully integrated, low-latency L2 cache controller. ARM says it expects frequencies to run north of 2GHz.
ARM sees the Cortex-A17 being paired with its high-efficiency Cortex-A7 as part of its big.LITTLE platform, which consists of higher-end processors for CPU intensive tasks and power efficient processors for longer battery life.
Ivytown will slip into Intel's Xeon E7 chip family
Intel's codenames for processors sound like directions someone might give you if you get lost in the country. Take a wrong turn off of I64 in West Virginia, for example, and you might be told that Ivytown is on the other side of Ivy Bridge, not to be confused with Sandy Bridge. In reality, Ivytown is Intel's codename for an upcoming 15-core Xeon processor based on Ivy Bridge and designed for high-end servers.
Intel shared a few more details about Ivytown at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco this week. The Santa Clara chip maker said Ivytown will be part of its Xeon E7 lineup, which it's likely to formally introduce next week, PCWorld reports.
The Ivytown part is packing 4.31 billion transistors and has the most cores of any Intel x86 server CPU. Intel says it will likely be its fastest performing CPU for servers with frequencies ranging from 1.4GHz to 3.8GHz, drawing anywhere from 40W to 150W of power. Each of the 15 cores supports multithreading so that each Ivytown chip can run 30 threads at the same time.
Intel came to the odd core count by arranging the cores across three columns. It also has 40 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes.
Does ARMA 3 bring your system to its knees? What about Cryss, Tomb Raider, or any of the other titles featured in our list of the most demanding games? That's the great thing about PCs -- you can upgrade whenever the need arises. When it comes to gaming, the GPU is the most important component. That said, check out today's top deal for an Asus GeForce GTX 780 3GB Graphics Card for $489 with free shipping (normally $520 -- use coupon code: [EMCPHPC88]; Free Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag with purchase). This card is equipped with Asus's DirectCU II cooler with a rather large 10mm heatpipe instead of a conventional 8mm heatpipe. It also has a backplate and high end components for stability.
I'm having a great time in Guild Wars 2's new Edge of the Mists map. It's rekindled my love of World vs. World. I've spent so much time there that I've gotten pretty good at not accidentally running off ledges (although I've probably just jinxed myself), and my collections of empyreal fragments and badges of honor are steadily growing.
Against all odds, I also managed to tear myself away long enough to write this column, which is good because there's a lot to talk about this week: What's so great about this cluster of floating rocks? How is Braham handling his new caretaking responsibilities? Why do people keep referencing the Zerg from Starcraft when they talk about GW2?
If you prefer to play female avatars in game, Black Gold Online has a new class just for you. Snail Games unveiled the new Occultist class, a female-only support healer and ranged DPS that sports leather armor. With a low resistance to damage, Occultists rely on sapping and stunning their enemies while replenishing the stamina of her group and providing heals. The Occultist joins Black Gold's line up alongside the recently revealed Spellsword class, the Pyromancer, the Assassin, and more. For a chance to check out this class when beta starts, sign up on the official site.
So who's at fault for the 38 Studios debacle? It's a question that's been thrown around a lot with no clear answers. But John Smedley of Sony Online Entertainment thinks that it's a pretty clear case of Rhode Island getting involved in something it shouldn't have and then backing out at the worst possible time. He stated on Twitter that having seen the game himself, it had potential and it could have been something if it had actually made it to release.
Smedley agrees with Governor Lincoln Chaffee that the funding deal was a bad idea and should never have taken place, but once it had taken place, it was in the state's best interest to aid the studio rather than letting it fail. Chaffee's comments and naysaying for the project doomed the chances of the game getting any additional funding, ultimately shuttering the studio altogether. Despite that, Smedley also notes that in the long run it was a bad idea that should never have taken place, and that SOE was approached for funding on the game and declined, which should have been indication enough for Rhode Island not to make the deal.
Disclaimer: Massively Speaking is both a news show and an opinion show. Objectivity has nothing to do with our viewpoints, snarky remarks, and keen insight into the workings of MMOs. We will demonstrate this as we talk about certain games under NDAs, new studios taking over old franchises, and what 200,000 subscribers means, more or less, in the large scheme of things.
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Flappy's time has come! The Secret World fans can now exact some long-overdue payback on the filth-flinging winged nemesis that has been tormenting players throughout The Whispering Tide event. The final phase of the event -- a 40-man raid against Flappy himself -- has now started, and players of all strengths and skill levels can take part in taking this black behemoth down. The instanced raid will open every three hours for 30 minutes, and offers the chance to collect epic raid loot. Once the filth is completely eradicated from Agartha, the portal to Tokyo will open and usher in the long-awaited Issue #9.
It's fortunate for adventurers on Nexus that they won't be alone. And that's not just a matter of their faction; no, they'll have a little help from the Caretaker, a sentient AI left behind by the Eldan. Yes, he may have been waiting just a little while to deal with another sentient life form, but he's certainly not bitter about untold centuries of complete neglect without any word or even so much as a steady stream of information. So when you meet him in WildStar, why not let him take you on an adventure?
The latest WildStar teaser is just past the break, and it hints at how adventures will work -- players will be put into a virtual construct wherein they can choose how to proceed, with consequences depending on which choices are made. They're also replayable, allowing groups to go back through and try different choices on the second time around. Click on past the break to let the Caretaker explain it in his own words... but you might want to sit a little further back from your monitor. He's a bit on edge.
For over 250 years, the city of Lion's Arch has been a place for players of Guild Wars 2 and its predecessor to call home. It's iconic enough that the ruins of the original city can still be explored beneath Sanctum Harbor. Unfortunately, one of Scarlet Briar's mysterious probes has been discovered within those ruins -- and if she gets her way, the people of Tyria may not have to wait very long at all to pick through the ruins of the city's current incarnation.
On February 18th, Scarlet will bring her armies and all of their horrible weaponry to the city in the Escape from Lion's Arch release. Players will join forces with the Orders of Tyria, the allies they've gained through the living world story, and each other to help innocent citizens evacuate and try to mount a counterattack. ArenaNet'sColin Johanson, Steve Hwang and Steven Waller sat down with Massively to deliver both a new teaser trailer and a grim warning: Nothing lasts forever.
There are people who will cry that a game is "just a beta" right up until the day before a launch. There are also people who will proclaim that a game should have been ready for prime time as soon as players were let loose in the playground, even if release is a day away. There appear to be no methods to counteract these two stances. But there is a happy medium somewhere, isn't there? Final Fantasy XIV launched largely clear of bugs despite its brief beta; Cataclysm had a normal beta but still arguably launched in a mid-beta state.
Realistically, if a game is suffering from glaring performance issues or enormous bugs when it's a month from launch, these things will not be fixed in time for launch. The few games that have tried to do launch-day patches (such as Champions Online) rarely go over well. But it's hard to know how much work fixing something will take. So when does a game lose the defense of "it's just a beta"? When release is announced? When there's one month remaining? Two? Does it depend on the size of the bug or the issue?
Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Elite: Dangerous released the second phase of its alpha testing this week, giving early adopters the chance to smash each other to bits or play co-operative horde-style missions. Star Citizen hit the $38 million crowdfunding mark to unlock a solar system with an interesting oceanic planet where terraforming is banned, and it showcased the talents of its modders in episode 1.2 of The Next Great Starship.
Turn-based MOBA Arena of Heroes asked for votes on its Greenlight campaign to help the game secure a free-to-play release on Steam. SMITE revealed the deadly and barely-dressed Greek goddess Nemesis in a new god reveal video. League of Legends made a change its ladder system that allows highly skilled players to actually skip the promotion series matches, and week four of the Legends Championship Series ended with further upsets for European team Fnatic.
Blizzard revealed that Diablo III's sales have topped 15 million worldwide on all platforms, putting console sale figures at somewhere below three million units. We also discovered that items dropped before Reaper of Souls will not be enchantable when the expansion hits, and several legendary and set items will be exclusive to Torment mode. And Path of Exile announced that its first mini-expansion will land in March and has promised teasers with more info all this month.
Guild Wars 2 takes a slightly different approach to questing than other MMOs, letting you adventure through the game's open world deciding what tasks need doing as they come up. Instead of demanding you talk to an NPC who will then politely ask you to kill 10 rats, Guild Wars 2'sdynamic quest system may alert you to a nearby bandit invasion or to a giant spider that could really use some killing. Tonight, Massively's Mike Foster is prepared to wander the mid-level zones of Guild Wars 2 looking for things that need doing and NPCs that need rescuing.
Tune in at 7:00 p.m. EST for the action, and hop over to the Blackgate server if you'd like to play along.
Game:Guild Wars 2 Host: Mike Foster Date: Monday, February 10th, 2014 Time: 7:00 p.m. EST
Along with the names Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, Ed Greenwood is a keystone figure in the Dungeons & Dragons franchise. It was from his mind that the Forgotten Realms and Elminster sprang, and it's to his mind that Turbine has turned to make DDO's next update something truly memorable. So to celebrate D&D's 40th anniversary, Turbine and Greenwood have collaborated to bring the players an online version of the classic Haunted Halls of Eveningstar module.
Even if you've played Haunted Halls as a pen-and-paper adventurer, you'll be in for a new treat this time around. Turbine's created two versions of the dungeon, one that mimics the original module and an extended version that uses Greenwood's unpublished notes. Plus, for the first time in DDO, Greenwood himself will provide the narration and optional commentary as the module's DM.
We sat down with Turbine to take a look at how Update 21: The Legendary Halls is shaping up and what players will be in for when the past of pen-and-paper meets the present of online gaming.
Inferno Legend is a new title from ChangYou, the former publisher of Zentia and many other current games. Will this game have the same magic that Zentia did? Beau's about to find out. Join him in the chat room to ask about the game!
Game: Inferno Legend Host: Beau Hindman Date: Monday, February 10th, 2014 Time: 4:00 p.m. EST
Although neither the most recent recent patch notes nor the January Game Director letter mentions it, something happened in The Secret World recently that might, if you believe the cries of some, portend the beginning of the end for the horror-filled game. What powerful behemoth will be responsible for slaying TSW and grinding it into the ground? No, not the Økokrim; this time, it's the mighty Mystery box.
Players logging in since January 30th have been met with a launchpad announcement heralding the introduction of the new Mystery Box to the item store. And while some players are up in arms about the significance of this addition, I'm going to tell you why it's no big deal.
Mysterious, diminutive creatures that love magic are standard fare for fantasy MMOs, and Brad McQuaid'sPantheon: Rise of the Fallen is no exception. Visionary Realms, which is attempting to raise $800,000 via Kickstarter to develop Pantheon, has posted an update diving deeper into the game's race of tiny "secretive sorcerers."
Originating from the world of Aruska, gnomes are creatures whose mastery of magic has made them "one of the more proficient crafters of magical items and allowed them to unlock the arcane potential of even the most mundane of items." According to the lore, Pantheon's gnomes are slightly antisocial creatures with a penchant for hoarding who destroyed their magical troves after a conflict with a tribe of humans. The locations of the new troves are unknown, even to the gnomes left behind.
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has raised $360,000 of its $800,000 funding goal with 12 days remaining. Gnomes (and halflings) will only be added if Pantheon reaches $2,000,000 in funding, which at this point is starting to look like a serious long shot.
If you're looking forward to playing The Elder Scrolls Online but want to really feel that you're in the game, your options are a bit limited. Odds are you don't want someone standing by to hack at your torso with an edged weapon during on-screen combat, for instance. But if you've got an Oculus Rift and want the full VR experience, that might be a bit more doable after all; a fan has hammered together unofficial support for the headset.
The video contained past the break shows about five minutes of footage -- nothing novel, but more than enough to get a sense of the game running on the Rift's paired screens. The fan in question is aware that this is breaking the terms of his testing agreement; however, he hopes that this will convince ZeniMax Online to add in native Oculus support before the game goes live. If you want a peek at what it looks like, feel free to check out the video past the break.
EverQuest Next Landmark is all about building things right now. There's going to be more to do in the future, but right now it's all about making your own stuff. So it's helpful to know what you can use to make those things. The latest trailer, past the break, shows off another set of building blocks for the game in the form of desert-based plants, landscapes, and textures.
Just like real deserts, it's not just an unbroken sea of sand and rocks -- there are cacti, withered trees, sparse grass, bluffs, valleys, and the like. All the things you could need if you want your own little slice of the game to be a dusty place full of blowing tumbleweeds, in other words. Take a look at the video past the break, and keep your eyes peeled for similar videos in the future.
As good as it gets
An online attempt to end NSA spying
A couple of last minute additions to Patch Tuesday address security holes in Windows XP
Gigabyte will try to surpass Asus as the No. 1 motherboard player (in terms of shipments)
The Gigabyte Z87X-UD5H offers a lot of features for the price.
New chip from ARM takes aim at smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and more
Ivytown will slip into Intel's Xeon E7 chip family
Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's 
