General Gaming Article

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• Charter Buys Time Warner Cable
• Newegg Daily Deals: Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD, Asus 23.8-inch Monitor, and More!
• SanDisk Dangles Z400s Solid State Drive in Front of OEMs
• Will Your CPU Bottleneck Your Graphics Card?
• Red Hat Takes Fedora 22 Out of Beta, Now Available to All
• Microsoft's Cortana Voice Assistant Heads to Android and iOS

Charter Buys Time Warner Cable Posted: 26 May 2015 08:31 PM PDT Charter announced today that it's buying Time Warner Cable, with the intent to bolster its number of subscribers across the States. With the purchase of Time Warner Cable, Charter also announced that it would acquire Bright House Networks for $10.4 billion. The three companies will form a new company under the name New Charter, and have a total customer base of roughly 23.9 million, which would place the company in second place behind Comcast's 27 million strong customer base. The statement from Charter: "The combination of Charter, Time Warner Cable and Bright House will create a leading broadband services and technology company serving 23.9 million customers in 41 states. The announced transactions will drive investment into the combined entity's advanced broadband network, allow for wider deployment of new competitive facilities based WiFi networks in public places, and the footprint expansion of optical networks to serve the large marketplace of small and medium sized businesses. This will result in faster broadband speeds, better video products, including more high definition channels, more affordable phone service and more competition, for consumers and businesses." The New Charter deal still needs to go through regulatory approval by the FCC. The most recent Time Warner Cable attempt by Comcast went through a barrage of hurdles and was ultimately canned at the regulatory stages. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, indicated that while the Charter and Time Warner Cable deal would go through the same scrutiny, he wasn't totally against such mergers as long as the results would be good for consumers. According to  a statement by Tom Wheeler: "The FCC reviews every merger on its merits and determines whether it would be in the public interest. In applying the public interest test, an absence of harm is not sufficient. The Commission will look to see how American consumers would benefit if the deal were to be approved." This is the fourth time that Charter has tried to court Time Warner Cable.

Newegg Daily Deals: Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD, Asus 23.8-inch Monitor, and More! Posted: 26 May 2015 12:28 PM PDT Top Deal: Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber had it all wrong, the most annoying sound in the world isn't him screeching. What's even worse is that dreadful clicking and grinding sound your hard drive makes when it's on its last legs. And of course it always during that brief period where you've neglected to back up your data. It stinks, but if you want turn a sour situation into something sweet, then replace that dying HDD with today's top deal -- Samsung 850 Pro 2.5-inch 512GB SSD for $260 with free shipping (normally $300; free G.Skill 8GB desktop memory w/ purchase, limited offer). It's fast, capacious, and comes with free memory! Other Deals: Asus VN248H-P Slim Bezel Black 23.8-inch 5ms LED LCD Monitor w/ Built-in Speakers for $150 with free shipping (normally $170 - use coupon code: [EMCASNT23]; additional $20 Mail-in rebate) Acer G6 Series G276HLGbd 27-inch 6ms Monitor for $170 with free shipping (normally $200 - use coupon code: [EMCASNT22]) Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1866 Desktop Memory for $105 with free shipping (normally $110 - use coupon code: [EMCASNT42]) Corsair CX750M 750W Modular Power Supply for $72 with free shipping (normally $80 - use coupon code: [0526USDMA20]; additional $20 Mail-in rebate)

SanDisk Dangles Z400s Solid State Drive in Front of OEMs Posted: 26 May 2015 11:18 AM PDT SSDs at HDD prices Have you ever shopped a promising looking laptop only to be turned off by the fact that it's running a mechanical hard drive instead of a solid state drive? SanDisk feels your pain, and to alleviate the problem, the company came up with the Z400s line, purportedly a cost effective solution intended to convince PC OEMs and embedded application designers to roll with an SSD. SanDisk isn't short on claims, such as saying these new drives are "designed to deliver a delightful user experience" while maintaining reliability and affordable price points. And really, aren't "delightful user experiences" what we're all after? More specifically, the Z440s line is supposed to outperform HDDs by 20x, while providing 5x more reliability and consumer 20x less power, all at price points that are on par with HDDs. That translates into sequential read and write speeds of up to 549MB/s and 330MB/s, respectively -- not too shabby. "With a single architecture, SanDisk is able to provide OEMs with an affordable solution for displacing HDDs in today's cutting edge consumer devices, and help embedded application designers avoid overpaying for un-needed space—all while delivering the peak performance and high-reliability that only SSDs can supply," said Rizwan Ahmed, senior director of product marketing, client platform solutions, SanDisk. The Z400s line comes in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities. SanDisk said it's begun sampling the drives in mSATA, 2.5-inch, and M.2 form factors. Unfortunately, the company didn't mention any MSRPs, so we'll have to trust its claim that they're inexpensive.

Will Your CPU Bottleneck Your Graphics Card? Posted: 26 May 2015 11:00 AM PDT How to figure out whether your system is going to put a damper on your video card upgrade plans Tax refund, graduation gift, bonus from work... you've got some long green burning a hole in your pocket and you want to use it for a sweet video card upgrade. There's just one hiccup: Your rig isn't exactly up to date with the most whizz-bang hardware. You might wonder how to determine if your video card upgrade will be held back by your CPU. In order to answer that question, it's important to know what a bottleneck is, what happens when a bottleneck occurs, and some examples so that you're aware of it when it occurs. What Is a Bottleneck?  A bottleneck is when a PC is performing a very demanding application and it appears that some aspect of the application can (or should) be performing better. In games, a telltale sign of a bottleneck is that the video card achieves much lower benchmark scores and performance than what most people with the same setup experience. As the performance of the CPU and the video card are largely responsible for how well the game runs, the blame is put on the CPU for causing the performance bottleneck, hence "CPU bottleneck." Fortunately, there's one easy test to figure out whether you'll have a CPU bottleneck: Monitor the CPU and GPU loads while playing a game. If the CPU load is very high (about 70 percent or more) and significantly higher than the video card's load, then the CPU is causing a bottleneck. What's going on in a Bottleneck Condition?  Using video games as an example, a typical application cycle could look like this: A simplified flowchart of how a video game runs. When the CPU is under heavy load, it has trouble running through this loop in a timely manner. For example, in order to meet a buttery-smooth 60fps, the CPU has to reach the "Render Graphics" step in 1/60 of a second, or less. If the CPU can't, then it's going to perform that step less often. If the video card is more than capable of rendering the game at a frame rate faster than 60fps, then it will sit idly until the CPU gives it render commands. This issue is similar on old eight-bit consoles, when there was too much going on at once. The game's logic would try to be done in 1/60 of a second. If it couldn't complete all of the processing in that time, another 1/60 of a second would be used, which would result in a slow-down effect. How To Monitor Your System In order to monitor your rig's CPU and video card load, you'll need to set up a couple of programs that will capture data over time. For monitoring the CPU, Windows has a built-in tool called Performance Monitor. To monitor the video card, the GPU profiling tool GPU-Z ( https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz) comes with a logger that captures data. To start Performance Monitor: 1. Go to Control Panel > System and Security > Administrative Tools, right-click Performance Monitor, and select "Run as administrator." 2. Select "Data Collector Sets" from the left pane, then right-click "User Defined" in the right pane, and select New > Data Collector Set. This will open a wizard. 3. Name the Data Collector Set and choose "Create manually (Advanced)," then click "Next."  4. In "What type of data do you want to include?," select "Create data logs," and check only "Performance counter." Then click "Next." Picture 5. In "Which performance counter would you like to log?," click the "Add..." button. Look for the "Processor" category and expand it. Select "% Processor Time," and in the "Instances of selected object" below, add "<All Instances>," then press "OK." Set the "Sample Interval" to one second.  6. Choose a location to save the data capture. Every time you run the capture, it will create a new folder in that location. You can click "Finish" at this point. When you want to begin capturing CPU load data, select the Data Collector that was created and press the green arrow button on the top toolbar. To stop, press the black square next to it.  7. To open the captured data, locate the folder where you saved it and find the file named DataCollector01.blg. Opening that file will present a graph of the data capture. 8. To start a video card data capture in GPU-Z, go to the "Sensors" tab and tick the "Log to file" checkbox at the bottom. It will ask you where to store the log file. To stop logging, tick it again.  If you have Microsoft Excel or a similar program, you can change the extension of the GPU-Z log file to ".csv" and it will format it to be spreadsheet-friendly. Examples of the CPU Bottleneck in Action The Test Setup Here's the hardware we're using for this demonstration:  To simulate different levels of processing power, the CPU will be tuned to four different settings at the BIOS level. Using PassMark's PerformanceTest software, scores can be used to roughly compare what the CPU achieves versus other CPUs.  The Games These games will be used to determine whether a CPU bottleneck occurs. They were chosen as a mix of older and newer games of varying genres. Unless noted otherwise, all games were tested at 1080p using the highest quality preset or options and no anti-aliasing, unless it was part of the preset. If a game did not have a benchmarking utility, FRAPS was used to capture a minute of data and the game was run under a repeatable test.  Test Results With this as the baseline, the GTX 460 SE is certainly under almost full load for most of the games, but the CPU is under a high load of above 70 percent as well. This configuration will definitely bottleneck a video card upgrade. The question is, how much?  While there is improvement across most games with a better video card, the system show signs of CPU bottlenecking, as expected. The GTX 980 should perform much faster, rather than up to double the performance improvement over the old GTX 460 SE.  Adding 50 percent more clock speed to the CPU shows a similar increase in performance across all games. In an interesting case, Unreal Tournament 3 was able to really stress the CPU to the point of bottlenecking, despite being a game from 2008. To explain the lower GPU loads in some games despite having higher frame rates, the video card was running at full speed throughout this test. In the previous test, the video card didn't consider itself busy enough to run at full speed.  Another increase in speed gives the video card more render commands and the frame rate goes up accordingly. Still, with the average CPU load above 70 percent in most of these games, it may bottleneck future upgrades.  At its fullest potential (at stock speeds), the CPU is able to keep the video card busy most of the time. A future video card upgrade wouldn't be bottlenecked, assuming CPU requirements for games don't increase dramatically.  Will Your CPU Bottleneck that Video Card? In short, depending on the game, if the CPU's load is consistently very high already, the CPU will very likely hold back the performance of video card upgrades. By profiling the CPU and GPU load of games you normally play, you can make better decisions for your upgrade path. Based on the results from this test: * If the CPU load is maxed out at 100 percent across the board, the CPU needs to be upgraded first. * If the CPU load is hovering between 70 percent and 100 percent, a video card upgrade will still offer an improvement, but the upgrade path is limited. Unless you plan on upgrading the CPU in the near future, avoid high-end video cards. A GeForce GTX 960 or Radeon R9 280 is about the most powerful card that should be considered. * If the CPU load is below 70 percent most of the time, any video card upgrade will likely not be bottlenecked. However, with lower overhead APIs such as Mantle, DirectX 12, and Vulkan, one can expect a bit more life out of old CPUs in the future.

Red Hat Takes Fedora 22 Out of Beta, Now Available to All Posted: 26 May 2015 09:30 AM PDT Choose your own adventure -- Fedora 22 Cloud, Server, or Workstation It was barely more than a month ago that Red Hat made Fedora 22 available in beta form. If you've been holding out for a final release, today is your day -- Fedora 22 received its final coat of polish is now available in three different editions. They include Fedora 22 Cloud, Fedora 22 Server, and Fedora 22 Workstation. This is the second version of Fedora to offer multiple targeted options for cloud computing, servers, and desktops and laptops belonging to developers and creators. It also marks a return a to Fedora's six-month cadence, meaning a new version should arrive around Halloween. Fedora 22 builds on its predecessor and is "not radically different" from Fedora 21, though it does have a number of new and improved features. They're mostly specific to the individual releases. For example, Fedora 22 Cloud boasts updated Docker images that you can use as the base of your containerized applications, an official Vagrant box for developers, and several Atomic improvements; Fedora 22 Server features a new Database Server role through Rolekit; and Fedora 22 Workstation gets better notifications, refined themes, and several software improvements. You can grab Fedora 22 here.

Microsoft's Cortana Voice Assistant Heads to Android and iOS Posted: 26 May 2015 09:06 AM PDT New playgrounds for Cortana It's been sort of expected that Microsoft would eventually make its Cortana digital voice assistant available on Android and iOS, especially with its multi-platform push for other software, like Office. And wouldn't you know it, Microsoft today announced plans to make available separate Cortana apps for each platform. Cortana on Android and iOS won't be as fully functional as it is on Windows devices, though it will deliver notifications and be able to "do most of the things" it does on your PC or on a Windows phone, Microsoft says. "You can have Cortana remind you to pick up milk the next time you're at the grocery store, and then your phone will wake up and buzz with the reminder. You'll be able to track a flight using Cortana on both your phone and your PC, and get the updates on the device that you're on so you don't miss anything," Microsoft explained in a blog post. That said, you won't be able to toggle settings or open apps through Cortana on Android or iOS, nor will you be able to say "Hey Cortana" for hands-free operation. These are things that Microsoft says are too deeply integrated to incorporate in alternate OSes. In addition to Cortana's expansion, Microsoft also announced a "Phone Companion" app that will be integrated into Windows 10. The app is intended to connect your Windows 10 PC to whatever device you own, regardless of platform (well, as long as it's Windows, Android, or iOS). The companion app will configure your mobile phone so that you can sync files via OneDrive.

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