General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Intel's Braswell NUC Breaks Cover

Posted: 25 May 2015 08:27 AM PDT

Braswell crashes the mini PC party

Intel NUC

Intel continues to release new NUC models, the latest of which feature 6-watt processors based on the company's Braswell architecture inside. Fanless Tech discovered two new additions on Intel's website, the NUC5CPYH with a Celeron N3050 and the NUC5PPYH with a Pentium N3700.

Braswell is the 14nm successor to Intel's 22nm Bay Trail-D line and is intended for tablet PCs and low-end desktops. Processors based on Braswell don't consume much power and are cheaper than Intel's Core M Broadwell CPUs, which makes them attractive for systems like the NUC.

The Celeron N3050 found in the NUC5CPYH is a 64-bit dual-core chip clocked at 1.6GHz with a burst speed of up to 2.16GHz and 1MB of L2 cache. It supports up to 8GB of DDR3L-1600 memory and is armed with Intel HD Graphics clocked at 320MHz, with a burst frequency of 600MHz.

Other features of the NUC5CPYH include four USB 3.0 ports (one is a charging port), SDXC memory card reader, HDMI output, GbE LAN port, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and a TOSLINK optical digital audio output. Pricing for a barebones model starts at $140.

The Pentium N3700 found in the NUC5PPYH is a 64-bit quad-core chip clocked at 1.6GHz with a burst frequency of 2.4GHz, 2MB of L2 cache, and support for 8GB of DDR3L-1600 memory. It has the same graphics as the Celeron N3050.

A barebones NUC5PPYH starts at around $180. It shares the same features as the aforementioned model, both of which support a single SO-DIMM memory module and a 2.5-inch SSD or HDD, according to Intel (PDF).

Legal Rift: Oculus Founder Sued by Hawaii-based VR Firm He Once Worked With

Posted: 25 May 2015 07:17 AM PDT

This is the second lawsuit alleging use of stolen tech in the Oculus Rift

Palmer Luckey 001

Facebook-owned Oculus VR finds itself at the heart of another legal battle. Total Recall Technologies (TRT) is suing both Oculus and its founder Palmer Luckey for "breach of contract and wrongful exploitation" of its virtual reality-related intellectual property.

The Hawaii-based company alleges that it enlisted Luckey's help to build a VR headset prototype in 2011 and that the ensuing collaboration lasted until 2012, when he brought it to an abrupt end without consulting them. Luckey, the company further alleges, subsequently began passing off as his own the prototype he had built using materials, design features and confidential info supplied to him by the company. The rest, as they say, is history. Luckey's Oculus Rift headset became a crowdfunding darling later that year and got acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.

TRT filed its complaint (PDF) with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Thursday, May 20, 2015, almost a year to the day ZeniMax Media brought a somewhat similar lawsuit against Oculus. In its complaint, TRT states that Luckey was contractually obligated not to share the info and materials provided to him with any third party, let alone use it for his own benefit, but he flouted those obligations.

"As a result of Luckey's breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, TRT has been injured in an amount to be determined," reads the complaint. "The conduct by Defendants was fraudulent, oppressive, and malicious, and as such constitutes the basis for the award of punitive damages pursuant to California Civil Code 3294."

First Image of AMD's Next-Gen Flagship Graphics Card Hits the Web

Posted: 25 May 2015 02:26 AM PDT

A formal announcement is likely next month

Radeon R9 390x Fiji Hbm

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has promised to officially unveil its newest Radeon flagship graphics card before the ongoing quarter is out. The announcement is most likely to take place at either Computex in early June or a little later at E3's maiden PC Gaming Show, and the company and its partners have already begun teasing the product.

EA technical director Johan Andersson, one of the principal architects of the much-acclaimed Frostbite engine, took to Twitter a couple of days back to share an image of an upcoming AMD graphics card many believe is the much-anticipated R9 390X (not the official name). Coming from a man who is known to have worked closely with AMD in the past—Frostbite was the first major engine to support AMD's Mantle low-level graphics API—there's really no reason for us to doubt its authenticity.

"This new island is one seriously impressive and sweet GPU," Andersson wrote with regards to the upcoming card on Twitter Friday, promising AMD that it would be "put to good use." Well, he definitely seems mighty excited about the product.

Going by some reports, we're probably looking at a water-cooled graphics card featuring four 1GB HBM (high-bandwidth memory) stacks on the same interposer as the GPU. HBM has a couple of key advantages over GDDR5 memory in that it delivers greater bandwidth while taking up lesser space. That's probably why the above card looks smaller than current offerings. You can read more about AMD's HBM implementation here.

Zotac Announces Mini PCs with RAID Support

Posted: 25 May 2015 02:00 AM PDT

R Series PCs will let you combine two disks into a RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration

Mini PC RAID

Zotac is a seasoned campaigner when it comes to the mini-PC market, where it has been a key player for many years now. It's once again trying to make its presence felt with the new R Series ZBOX mini-PC line.

Aesthetically, the RI531 and RI323 aren't dissimilar to the company's other ZBOX devices. Deep down, however, there is something that will force those currently on the market for a mini PC to sit up and take notice: They both allow for two 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs to be organized into a RAID 0 or RAID 1 setup. The former drive configuration, for those who don't know, improves performance and delivers double the capacity of the smallest drive, whereas the latter is purely about redundancy.

The two mini PCs are identical in terms of specs, save for a couple of things. The RI531 will come with a 2.1GHz Intel Core i3-5010u dual-core processor, whereas the the RI323 will ship with a 1.1GHz Intel 2961Y dual-core chip. Further, with the former you will also get an mSATA SSD slot in addition to the two 2.5-inch SATA slots mentioned above. Specs common to both include up to 16GB of RAM (not included), HDMI port, DisplayPort 1.2, four USB 3.0 ports, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and three-in-one card reader.

According to Fudzilla, the RI531 and RI323 will be available soon, priced at €349 (roughly $384) and €199 (around $218), respectively. While these are both barebone models with no built-in storage or RAM, there will also be a €459 ($504) RI531 Plus model with 4GB of RAM and 64GB solid-state storage.

Intel Lukewarm on Windows 10, Says OS Won't Boost PC Sales in Long Run

Posted: 25 May 2015 01:31 AM PDT

Windows 10

The chip maker is looking to data centers for growth

The PC market fared rather poorly in terms of sales in the first quarter of 2015, recording a pretty significant decline compared to the same period last year. Attributing this decline to a slowdown in the Windows XP replacement trend, however, leading analysts forecast better things for the months and years ahead. While they may expect Windows 10 to have a positive impact on PC sales — especially in the long run — Intel isn't convinced.

"We continue to see growth from [the replacement of Windows XP PCs]," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said at the company's annual shareholder meeting Thursday. "As we entered this year, we are going through another transition, Windows 10 upgrades. And we are seeing some quarter-to-quarter pushing, but we continue to take a view of our long-term forecast. A long-term forecast is the PC market should be flat to slightly down mid-single digits over the long-term."

The company is banking on other sectors to offset any future losses or stagnation in its consumer PC business. Krzanich, for instance, named data centers as a key area of focus going forward. That's hardly surprising as the company's data center business grew by as much as 17 percent in 2014.
Posted by Shri Krishna

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