General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Pictures and Impressions: Steam Controller and Steam Machine

Posted: 10 Mar 2015 01:59 PM PDT

A steaming pile of awesome

With all of the talk about VR, and with the Valve/HTC Vive system in particular taking the spotlight at GDC, it was easy to miss the several big Steam Machine reveals that Valve made at the show. 

The company invited us into its booth to take a look at the Steam Machines that would be available at launch. In addition, we got up close and personal with its final controller. We also got to see Steam Link, which is a $50 box that will allow you to stream games from your desktop PC to the living room over Wi-Fi.

All of this is coming in November. In the meantime, check out our pictures, notes, and impressions from our GDC appointment below!

Newegg Daily Deals: Solid State Drive Storage Overload!

Posted: 10 Mar 2015 11:06 AM PDT

 

Samsung 850 Evo SSD

Newegg

Top Deal:

Storage has always been one of the major bottlenecks of system performance. But then came 7,200 RPM hard drives with large cache buffers, and then Western Digital's Raptor, which kicked things up to 10,000 RPM! They served their purpose, but if you still using a mechanical hard drive, do yourself a favor and check out today's top deal for a Samsung 850 Evo 250GB SSD for $100 with free shipping (normally $125 - coupon code: [EMCAPKA23]). Using 3D Vertical NAND flash memory and Samsung's MGX controller, the Evo 850 is rated at up to 540MB/s read and 520MB/s write transfers, and it's only a Benny!

Other Deals:

Samsung 850 Pro Series 2.5-inch 256GB SATA III Solid State Drive (SSD) for $144 with $3 shipping (normally $160 - use coupon code: [EMCAPKA22])

OCZ ARC 100 2.5-inch 120GB Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) for $60 with free shipping (normally $70 - use coupon code: [EMCAPKA24]; additional $10 Mail-in rebate)

2x Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 2.5-inch 240GB Solid State Drive (SSD Combo) for $168 with free shipping (normally $200)

AMD Radeon SSD 2.5-inch 240GB SATA Solid State Drive (SSD) for $120 with free shipping (normally $135; additional $15 Mail-in rebate)

Nvidia's Giving Away Witcher 3 Codes with Select GeForce GTX 900 Series Graphics Cards

Posted: 10 Mar 2015 08:57 AM PDT

The Witcher 3: Wild HuntA little gaming bribery never hurt anyone

After the fiasco with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 970 graphics card and the way it handles the last .5GB of its onboard 4GB of memory, Nvidia could use a bit of positive press. One of the best ways to do that is to dangle something shiney in front of the public, like an anticipated game. So, available now for a limited time, customers who buy a select GeForce GTX 980, 970, and 960 graphics card, or a GTX 970M or above notebook, will receive a code for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Nvidia announced today.

"Over my 10-plus years at Nvidia, I've seen, worked with, and played countless games. Few stand out to me as deserving of the term epic. The Witcher: Wild Hunt is one of those titles," Nvidia's Leslie Pirritano stated in a blog post. "Developer CD Projekt Red has provided gamers with an epic story, an epic adventure, and epic graphics. The untamed world of this action-adventure game is a graphics showcase, with stunning vistas and detailed characters. So, it's exciting to me that we're offering it to GeForce gamers as part of our new 'Undeniably Epic' bundle."

Nvidia was also quick to point out that the upcoming title supports technologies like Nvidia HairWorks and PhysX, the first of which will add a level realism to the fur and hair of more than 50 monsters and characters in the game.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is currently scheduled to release May 19, 2015. To grab a qualifying card, be sure to start you search here, which has links to participating vendors.

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Biostar Rolls Out TA970 Plus AMD Motherboard for Budget Buyers

Posted: 10 Mar 2015 08:31 AM PDT

Biostar TA970 PlusLow cost board for overclockers

Biostar this week released its TA970 Plus motherboard, its latest AMD socket AM3+ offering with AMD OverDrive and a feature called ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration), which is supposed to help with overclocking efforts. Built around AMD's 970 chipset, the board supports AMD six-core and eight-core socket AM3 processors, including the AMD FX, Phenom II, and Athlon II lines.

It's a full-size ATX motherboard with four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 64GB of DDR3-2133 (OC) memory and an mSATA/mini PCI-E combo connector. It also has two PCI-E x16 2.0 slots (x16, x4), two PCI x1 2.0 slots, and two standard PCI slots, as well as five SATA 6Gbps connectors with support for RAID 0/1/1/10.

As for the overclocking features, here's Biostar's marketing pitch:

"To get every power advantage the TA970 Plus features the AMD OverDrive and the ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration) function. This allows power users to overclock their system by precisely calibrating the clock timings between the processor and RAM chips," Biostar says. "These timings are critical in maintaining system stability when overclocking, otherwise you will end up with a system that crashes often. As they say, 'Timing is Everything' and the TA970 Plus allows you to get it right."

Biostar also focused its efforts on onboard audio. According to Biostar, the board sports a noise-blocking multi-layer PCB layout for a cleaner signal to go along with a sampling rate of 192kHz/24-bit.

The company didn't mention a price, though Fudzilla seems to think it will sell for $79.

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Every Asus 9 Series Motherboard Now Supports Broadwell

Posted: 10 Mar 2015 06:00 AM PDT

Asus Z97 ProMay require a BIOS update

Rumor has it Intel will finally release its 14nm Broadwell desktop processors in the middle of next quarter (think somewhere around mid-May), so you still have some time to prepare for an upgrade or overhaul, if going that route. Wondering if your motherboard will support Broadwell? At least one company is making it easy -- Asus on Tuesday announced that all of its 9 Series motherboards support Intel's 5th Generation Core lineup.

That takes the guesswork out of the equation, though you may need to update the BIOS, which you can do a couple of different ways. One is to use Asus' USB BIOS Flashback tool, which downloads the latest BIOS to a USB flash drive.

"The motherboard does not even need to have a CPU or DRAM modules in place; users can simply connect the power supply, plug in their USB drive, press the USB BIOS Flashback or Reset button, and then sit back and wait -- there's nothing else to do," Asus says.

Another way is to use Asus' Windows-based BIOS updated application. It's available to download from Asus, though if you can go the other route, you'll remove a bit of risk from the equation. I've updated BIOSes from within Windows on several occassions, but generally don't advise it in case there's an OS hiccup that interrupts the process and corrupts the BIOS.

In any event, here's the list of Asus 9 Series mobos and the minimum BIOS version you'll need to run Broadwell:

 

Model name

BIOS
version

Z97

Z97-Deluxe(NFC & WLC)

2205

Z97-Deluxe/USB 3.1

0401

Z97-Deluxe

2205

Z97-Pro(Wi-Fi ac)/USB 3.1

2302

Z97-Pro(Wi-Fi ac)

2205

Z97-Pro

2205

Z97-A/USB 3.1

0501

Z97-A

2205

Z97-AR

2205

Sabertooth Z97 Mark 1/USB 3.1

0401

Sabertooth Z97 Mark 1

2205

Sabertooth Z97 Mark 2

2205

Sabertooth Z97 Mark S

2205

Gryphon Z97 Armor Edition

2205

Gryphon Z97

2205

Maximus VII Formula

2304

Maximus VII Hero

2304

Maximus VII Ranger

2304

Maximus VII Gene

2304

Maximus VII Impact

2304

Z97-Pro Gamer

2002

Z97I-PLUS

2502

Z97M-PLUS

2604

Z97-K

2502

Z97-C

2401

Z97-E

0602

Z97-P

2702

Z97-K R2.0

0702

H97

H97-Pro Gamer

2402

H97I-Plus

2502

H97M-Plus

2402

H97-Plus

2402

H97-Pro

2703

H97M-E

2302

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