General Gaming Article |
- Newegg Daily Deals: Samsung P3 1TB Portable HDD, LG 24-Inch Monitor, and More!
- Microsoft Now Lets You Disable Automatic App Updates in Windows 10
- White House May Hit China with Sanctions for Cyber Hacking
- New Mirrativ App Streams Your Phone's Screen
- Nvidia GeForce WHQL 355.82 Drivers Now Available to Download
- Dream Machine 2015
| Newegg Daily Deals: Samsung P3 1TB Portable HDD, LG 24-Inch Monitor, and More! Posted: 31 Aug 2015 10:27 AM PDT Top Deal: It never hurts to have backups of your data in multiple places. The cloud is one option, and so is a secondary drive and/or NAS box. But why stop there? A portable drive offers yet another layer of protection against the unforeseen, plus it's a convenient way to transfer large amounts of files from one system to another. Don't want to spend a fortune on one? Then check out today's top deal for a Samsung P3 1TB USB Portable External Hard Drive for $50 with free shipping (normally $55 - use coupon code: [EMCAWPK32]). This 2.5-inch drive sports a USB 3.0 interface, SafetyKey protection, and a 3-year warranty. Other Deals: LG 24M47VQ Black 24-inch 2ms HDMI Widescreen LED Backlight LCD Monitor for $130 with free shipping (normally $140 - use coupon code: [EMCAWPK27]) Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2x8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 2400 (PC3 19200) Desktop Memory for $80 with free shipping (normally $85 - use coupon code: [EMCAWPK24]) G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2x8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory for $75 with free shipping (normally $83 - use coupon code: [EMCAWPK23]) Lenovo Laptop ThinkPad E550 Intel Core i7 8GB Memory 500GB HDD 15.6-inch Windows 8.1 for $675 with free shipping (normally $680 - use coupon code: [EMCAWPK35]) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Microsoft Now Lets You Disable Automatic App Updates in Windows 10 Posted: 31 Aug 2015 10:17 AM PDT Say goodbye to mandatory app updates (if you want to) Microsoft's been catching some heat over its forced update policy in Windows 10, though it's hoping to douse some of the flames by now allowing users to disable automatic app updates through the Windows Store. There's no official blog post from Microsoft announcing the new capability, though after you install the recently released Windows 10 Cumulative Update 5 and reboot your Windows 10 PC, you'll find that the option to disable app updates is no longer grayed out. To access it, go the Windows Store, click on your profile image, and select Settings. Assuming you're rocking the latest Windows 10 updates, you should now be able to flip the switch under "Update apps automatically" from On to Off, should you want to. Don't confuse this newfound capability with Microsoft's mandatory Windows OS updates. Windows 10 Home users are still forced to install security updates, and as we saw recently when a bad update resulted in some users being stuck in an endless reboot loop, the policy can have unintended negative consequences. Windows 10 Pro users can delay security updates for up to eight months. Might that option one day be available to Home users? The answer probably depends on how well automatic updates work in the future and how much pressure Microsoft receives from the public. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| White House May Hit China with Sanctions for Cyber Hacking Posted: 31 Aug 2015 09:38 AM PDT Tough decision U.S. officials are debating whether or not to issue economic sanctions against China for its alleged involvement in various cyber crimes. According to a report in The Washington Post, the Obama Administration is fed up with China's cyber shenanigans and has drafted a set of "unprecedented" sanctions in retaliation for Chinese companies and individuals benefiting from cybertheft of U.S. trade secrets. The U.S. has never issued economic sanctions against overseas entities and individuals on the basis of cyber espionage, and it still might not happen. While a draft of the proposed sanctions exist, it's not yet been decided whether to issue them. A final decision could come by the second week of September. Hackers in China are believed to be responsible for several separate cyber attacks against the U.S. with various information having been stolen, including nuclear power plant designs and search engine source code, to name just two examples. While some in the White House are eager to push ahead with sanctions against China, others fear that they will do little to curb China's behavior. Some also warn that China may retaliate by freezing U.S. companies out of contracts or markets, though other officials argue that's already the case. President Xi Jinping of China is scheduled to make his first visit to Washington next month where there will be a 21-gun salute on the South Lawn. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| New Mirrativ App Streams Your Phone's Screen Posted: 31 Aug 2015 08:35 AM PDT There's no question that streaming has become the "next big thing" on the Internet, with surfers making video calls to friends and family, Xbox One gamers streaming their favorite titles to Twitch and Windows 10, and so on. It's taken quite a while for technology to offer this type of real-time coverage, and now that the tech is finally here, we seem to be streaming everything that has a screen attached to it. What about smartphones? There's an app for that and it's called Mirrativ. The app is made by DeNA Co, which is the same company that struck a deal with Nintendo to create apps and games on smartphones (finally!) based on Nintendo's popular IPs. DeNA Co is also behind a number of mobile apps such as Marvel: War of Heroes, Star Wars: Galactic Defense, Transformers: Age of Extinction, and more. "I think this is the first app that allows users to broadcast everything happening on their smartphone device through the Internet," Mirrativ creator Junichi Akagawa told the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, Mirrativ will supposedly stream whatever is on the screen, whether the user is playing a mobile game, a movie or just browsing on the Web. The app can also take control of the microphone and front-mounted camera so that the streamer can add audio and video commentary in a small picture-in-picture box on-screen. The Wall Street Journal points out that Periscope and Meerkat are similar apps, allowing users to stream video from their phone to social networks. What makes Mirrativ different is that it provides a "more personal" setting because the streams stay within the app and don't show up on the likes of Twitter and Facebook. So if Mirrativ captures everything on the smartphone's screen, what happens when the user is watching a movie? Akagawa didn't say how the company will deal with copyrighted media, but he did say that DeNA will have a customer support team of 400 employees that will keep an eye on the app and handle any problems that may arise. Mirrativ is currently in beta on Android and in development for Apple's iOS devices. Users can begin livestreaming with their phone with just a couple of taps. They can even interact with their audience, which will leave comments and send stickers to the broadcaster. Users can also launch a private broadcast that can be accessed only by using a specific URL. Oh boy. This should get interesting. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Nvidia GeForce WHQL 355.82 Drivers Now Available to Download Posted: 31 Aug 2015 08:28 AM PDT Ready, set, download! Nvidia is kicking off the work week with a new GeForce Game Ready Driver, release 355.82 in WHQL form. According to Nvidia, these latest drivers provide the best possible gaming experience for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Mad Max. The newest driver release from Nvidia also fixes several issues in Windows 10. They include the following:
The first two issues and the P2P bug were also fixed in Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista with the new driver. No 3D Vision profiles were added this time around, though Nvidia did add or update several SLI profiles for eight titles, including Batman: Arkham Knight, Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition, FIFA 16, Gu Jian Qi Tan Online, Mad Max, Maple Store y, Rocket League, and World of Tanks. You can download the new driver here and read the release notes here (PDF). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 31 Aug 2015 12:00 AM PDT To boldly go where no Dream Machine has gone before Last year, we said we would need to build this year's Dream Machine in space to beat our 2014 über-desk PC. That's why this year's Dream Machine is upping the ante by going out-of-this-world with a NASA motif. Specifically, we're modeling our Dream Machine after NASA's iconic 1960s Titan II Gemini Launch Vehicle, which was powered by Titan II missiles. Dream Machine 2015, coincidentally, is powered by Titan rockets of its own; specifically, four supercharged Titan X GPUs. We mainly went with this theme, though, because we think NASA and its space programs are cool. Really, who doesn't? Historically, NASA has been known for giving mankind a cutting-edge glimpse of the future of technology and innovation—topics that Dream Machine tries to evoke each and every year. The space program also embodies the spirit of what it means to dream big. It's the perfect theme for this year's Dream Machine. Unlike the computers that powered the Titan II GLV, however, our Dream Machine is orders of magnitudes more powerful than all the command centers on Earth back in the '60s, as you will no doubt discover in the following pages. So, strap yourself in and prepare to be jettisoned into the final frontier of computing! Stellar componentsIf money were no object, what would the best PC look like? That's a question that Dream Machine has always tried to answer, and this year's build is no different. We've filled every PCI-e, RAM, and SATA slot we could with the highest-grade components that we could find. Make no mistake, this PC has enough horsepower to reach relativistic speeds. 1) GPUs: We grabbed the single fastest graphics card on Earth, Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan X, and then we grabbed three more and put them into SLI. Oh, did we mention that they are all liquid cooled and heavily overclocked? 2) Water cooling: Allowing our rockets to run at full capacity is our liquid-fueled custom dual-loop system from EKWB. This will ensure that our engine and rockets don't overheat when we break the sound barrier. 3) Storage: You want hard drives? We've got four 6TBs of them mounted on the other side of the case. There's enough storage here to last us years in outer space. They are perhaps only eclipsed by our four 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs that we've put in hyper drive RAID 0. 4) Case: CaseLab's Magnum SMA8 is an astronomical chassis that is equipped to carry all the cargo we need to send our Dream Machine into outer orbit and back. It's also got a super sexy paint job from Smooth Creations. 5) CPU: The central processing unit behind our rocket is Intel's Core i7-5960X, which is the most advanced CPU money can buy as of this writing. It's got eight core engines, which we've boosted to Mach 4.5GHz speeds. Ingredients
Click the next page to read about the individual components. CPU: Intel Core i7 5960XThe brains behind the operation Engineered by Intel, the central processing unit inside our rocket is the high-end eight-core i7-5960X. Based on the 22nm process and clocked at 3GHz, the CPU turbos up to 3.5GHz. For DM2015, we can use all the power we can muster, so we boosted our engines up to mach 4.5GHz speeds. The CPU also has 16 threads, a 140-watt TDP, and 20MB of L3 Cache. For all-around computing and gaming needs, there is no better CPU out there at the moment. The 5960X is almost tailor-made to allow us to break the benchmark (and sound) barrier. Mobo: Asus Rampage V ExtremeThe mothership Asus has always been a staple in the community for cutting-edge features and high quality manufacturing. So it was a no-brainer when we picked the company's new highest-end Rampage V Extreme motherboard for our mothership. The Rampage V Extreme comes packed with all the features you'd expect from a flagship mobo: enough PCIe slots for a ridiculous 4-way SLI setup, eight RAM slots, and overclocking features up the wazoo. Taking a page from its previous X79 flagship, the Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition, the new V comes with Asus's external overclocking and monitoring module. The Rampage V Extreme also comes with an obscene amount of overclocking options, which may be too overwhelming for most, but gives us enough headroom to go intergalactic. GPU: 4x EVGA GeForce GTX Titan Hydro Copper in SLITurbo-injected rockets One Titan X will run you about 1,000 bucks. One water-cooled Hydro Copper Titan X from EVGA will cost you $1,300. Because this is Dream Machine, we, of course, set our sights on four of the Hydro Copper editions and put them in SLI. Normal Titan Xs carry GPU base clocks of 1,000MHz and boost clocks of 1,075MHz, but these Hydro Copper editions carry a base overclock of 1,152MHz and boost clocks of 1,241Mhz. We overclocked them some more, leaving us with final clocks of 1,207MHz base and 7.7GHz on the GDDR5. When you also factor in the 12GB of VRAM and 3072 CUDA cores, you'll see that we've got enough turbo-injected rocket power here to take us to the moon and back. A few times. Monitor: Dell UP2715K 27-Inch 5KWe've got visuals With all that rocket fuel, you can pretty much go anywhere you want. So we decided to shoot for the stars and go with a 5K monitor. Yep, that's right, because 4K is so 2014. With Dell's 27-inch UP2715K, we're rockin' a 5120x2880 Ultra HD resolution. That means we're pushing over 14 million pixels here, folks. In case you were wondering, that's roughly as sharp as seven 1080p panels; that's a lot of polygons we're pushing! It might even be sharp enough to cut our retinas, if we weren't wearing our space helmets. If you're thinking this is a TN panel, think again. Dell employs an IPS display here and it is glorious. Seriously, the viewing angles and color reproduction are just stellar. RAM: 64GB Corsair Dominator PlatinumRamming speed Ensuring that we're all packed up for the long haul, we used every RAM slot that we could. This meant plugging in all eight of our DIMM slots for a total of 64GBs of RAM. And the Dream Machine doesn't pack any old cheap-o RAM, mind you. No. We've outfitted our rocket ship with 64GB of premium-grade Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 RAM clocked at 2,800MHz. This ensures that way have enough high-speed memory to engage ramming speed! The RAM also features Corsair's DHX cooling system, to help our system stay cool when it blasts out of orbit. Cooling: EKWB Dual-Loop CoolingRocket fuel The thing about rockets is that they get hot. Really hot. For a rocket as stellar as ours, we needed an ultra-dependable cooling solution, so we went with EKWB. EKWB makes what we think are the best custom liquid-cooling solutions on the market, and it shows. For Dream Machine, we decided to separate cooling into two discrete systems: one for the 5960X central processing unit and one for the four liquid-cooled Hydro Copper Titan Xs. Because our Titan X rockets will run the hottest, we equipped dual reservoirs to provide ample coolant circulation and paired the loop with a double-thick radiator in a push-pull configuration. Both loops have their own radiators and pumps, but we didn't stop there. The entire cooling system is powered by a separate power supply that ensures our rocket has enough energy in case we ever get lost in space. SSDs: 4x Samsung 850 Pro 1TBWarp drives While M.2 PCIe SSDs are faster than standard SATA drives, one issue that prevented us from going the NVMe route was our four graphics cards. With four graphics cards, PCIe lanes come at a premium. Regardless, we were able to greatly mitigate this issue by going with four of Samsung's 1TB 850 Pro SSDs, some of the fastest SATA SSDs around. We call these bad boys warp drives. We also combined them into a super fast RAID0 set—think of it as having four main thrusters instead of just one. With over 2GB/s peak transfer rates and 4TB storage, there's plenty of room for the OS, applications, your entire Steam library, and a healthy chunk of videos and images that will keep us occupied as we drift our way through the solar system. We're beaming ourselves into a time when SSDs finally surpass HDDs in capacities as well as performance. HDDs: 4x WD Black 6TBCargo bays If the SSDs are the main thrusters of our rocket, the hard drives are the cargo bays. In terms of bang for the buck, HDDs still reign when it comes to price-per-GB. Where the 1TB Samsung SSDs cost over $600 each, Western Digital's 6TB Black drives only cost $300—half the price! The drives are again using RAID0, providing a massive 24TB of storage, which can be divvied up into multiple smaller partitions or a single 24TB GPT block. It's enough space for 1,200 hours of 48Mbps Blu-ray content, or about 7,000 hours of good-quality 8Mbps video. Think of it: using H.265, we could easily set up a full year of non-repeat 4K video! This is enough storage to get you to infinity and beyond! Click on to the next page to read more about the case and peripherals. Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster X7 Limited EditionSound control to Major Tom On any mission, making sure you can hear what's going on, loudly and clearly, is essential. This triangular block with Battlestar-Galactica-like corners fits the bill and offers lots of options. This external sound card features a maximum output of 100W (50W + 50W) and headphone amp impedance of 1 ohm. Despite the X7's impressive power output, we went with powered speakers. There's also a built-in mic, so you don't need a gaming headset to talk to Houston. Speakers: Adam Audio ARTist Series 5.1 Speaker SystemPardon our noise; it's the sound of awesome Nothing blows your hair back like the divine roar of rocket engines during a launch, or the soaring vocals of Diva Plavalaguna. We got four supersonic models for our mission from Adam Audio. The big boys in the set—the ARTist 5's—have a range of 50Hz to 50KHz. The ARTist Sub fills in the bass, reaching from 150Hz down to 32Hz to let you feel the earth rumble as the main engines ignite. We used ARTist 3s as satellites and an ARTist 6H for the center, with ranges of 60Hz to 50KHz and 55Hz to 50KHz, respectively. The speakers all feature carbon fiber cones, Kevlar tweeters, more inputs than you can shake a space pen at, and individual crossover controls. If our rockets don't blow you away, these speakers will. Headset: Kingston HyperX Cloud IIBeaming your ears to cloud nine Considering we gave Kingston's HyperX Cloud II a 9 Kick Ass back in June, we didn't have to look far for a headset that would allow us to play our favorite Nep-tunes. This headset has aluminum construction with a stitched vinyl-covered memory foam headband, and detachable mic. It also comes with both vinyl- and fabric-covered ear cups, making them comfy enough for crew and mission controllers to wear for hours on end. They offer fantastic sound isolation, so you can focus on the mission at hand. When you're not in space, these cans also make good street headphones if you disconnect the mic and 3.5mm jack from the USB connector. Virtual 7.1 mode kept us ducking in our dogfights, and had us spacewalking when we made a stereo connection to the mothership. Case: Magnum SMA8A hull lot of love All the most expensive plutonium and premium liquid-fueled rockets mean nothing to a space ship if it doesn't have a premium-grade hull to protect it. A cheap chassis may suffer from hull degradation upon lift off, or... you know, when you bang it against a table. That's why we went to the brilliant engineers at CaseLabs. Interesting bit of trivia, CaseLabs founder Robert Keating was a chief weld engineer and helped create and develop rockets for NASA in the '60s. He actually played an integral part in the Apollo missions, including Apollo 11, which famously took us to the moon. So, when it came time to choose a chassis for our Dream Machine, we went with the obvious choice. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that rocket scientists do good work. While CaseLabs still does sheet metal fabrication for a variety of jobs, it has evolved with the personal computing era and, as a result, is known today for its extremely modular and premium PC chassis. With the company's cosmically large Magnum SMA8 case, which measures 11.2x26x25.7 inches, we had enough room and flexibility to build the rocket of our dreams. We could fit in four full-sized GPUs, custom liquid cooling, two massive radiators, and eight storage drives with ease. The all-aluminum construction also has sturdy blast shields, but the hull is also light enough so that our rocket can easily make lift off. Finally, not only can we open up the pod bay doors without the help of HAL 9000, but the side doors can easily come straight off the case, which is great for routine maintenance checks. Arguably, the real supergiant star of the show is the amazing paintjob by Smooth Creations. We've used the company before to decorate our Dream Machines, but the paintjob this time is smoother than the Milky Way. It's black, white, and silver pattern perfectly encapsulates the look of the Titan II GLV and it has a super killer, pristine finish. The NASA etching on the window is also out of this world. PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 1600 T2Rocket power Ensuring that our rocket has enough power to go supernova is EVGA's aptly named SuperNOVA power supply. It's a 1,600-watt modular PSU that is composed of 100 percent high-quality grade Japanese Nippon Chemi-con solid state capacitors, which ensure this rocket will have ample power and be able to withstand the harshest conditions. We needed all the energy we could muster, too, and pushed our system to over 1,500 watts! Talk about a lifesaver! In keeping with the Titan theme, the SuperNOVA PSU also carries an 80 PLUS Titanium power efficiency rating, which is the highest standard there is. Because Platinum-rated PSUs are for the Soviets. Keyboard: Razer BlackWidow ChromaMission Control gets fabulous When you're entering commands before, during, and after launch, you want to make sure that they're quick and accurate whether you're in a capsule in Cape Canaveral or sitting behind a console in Houston. For this, we turned to Razer and the BlackWidow Chroma keyboard. Besides just having lots of shiny customizable lights to signal aliens with, this keyboard has a simple and uncluttered layout. There's no elaborate specialized function keys, and only five macro keys that sit to the left of the main key bank. The keys themselves feature Razer's green switches, which have slightly less actuation distance–1.9mm as opposed to a more typical 2.2mm. That may not matter much, but when you need faster response, that little bit of distance can mean the difference between burning up or bouncing off the atmosphere like a rock skipping across a pond. Mouse: Logitech G303 Daedalus ApexOrbital control in the palm of your hand This spacey mouse is simple, as gaming mice go, and we think that's a good thing. You won't find crazy button layouts here. This lightweight, compact mouse has a simple and accessible layout, perfect for crewmembers who need precise response without complexity. Visually, the G303 keeps it elegant and simple, with RGB lighting that is projected through gratings on either side of the mouse, producing ovals on your desk. The mouse sports up to 12,000dpi for players who prefer twitchy movements of the hand and wrist. Finally, the G303's design makes it usable (even if not ideal) for lefties. The two thumb buttons are accessible with the ring finger, and there's no thumb molding to make the mouse awkward. Click the next page for a brief NASA history lesson and the conclusion. Propelled by TitansWhat the Gemini program meant for NASA and space computing When people think of the American space program, most think about manned spaceflight programs. More specifically, they think about the Apollo moon missions or the Space Transportation System (space shuttle) program. But what happened before Apollo? The Gemini II computer is currently housed at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Germany. (Image courtesy of Jan Braun/Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum). The Gemini program is where astronauts like Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins cut their teeth in the art of flying spaceships. Gemini saw the beginnings of advanced guidance computing in manned spaceflight. We were interested in learning more about the program, so we reached out to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. We got in contact with National Air and Space Museum public affairs specialist Alison Mitchell, who connected us with two curators, Paul Ceruzzi and Michael Neufield. Neufield told us the Gemini Launch Vehicle was the Martin Aircraft Titan II, a converted US Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile from the 1950s. "Gemini's purpose was to test critical operations and technology needed for Apollo," Neufield said. Gemini had three major objectives; first was to perfect the docking maneuvers that would later be necessary for mating a command module with a lunar excursion module (LEM), or moon lander. Gemini was also used to see if humans could survive two weeks in space, and to help train astronauts for extra-vehicular activity (also known as an EVA or spacewalk). The Gemini program also "demonstrated US space capability in the Cold War," Neufield said. In the end, it helped the United States catch up with and ultimately pass the Soviet Union in the Space Race. Besides the social and vehicular impacts of Gemini, the program also marked the first time Americans had used digital computers in space. "The Gemini computer was the first digital computer in an orbiting, manned spacecraft," said Ceruzzi. "It was built by IBM Federal Systems in Owego, New York, using discrete components. It did not use integrated circuits, although the transistors were made of silicon not germanium, which was an innovation at the time." Remember, this was 1965, when computers would take up entire rooms. In comparison, the Gemini computer was compact and light. "It was in a box approx.19x15x13 inches, and weighed 59 pounds," Ceruzzi told us. "One addition time took 140 milliseconds. It used ferrite core memory, containing 4,096, 39-bit words (equivalent to about 20K, although the comparison is not a good one as it had a complicated word structure). Gemini VIII and later missions also had a magnetic tape auxiliary memory, of about 150K." The Gemini computer was used for guidance and docking, Ceruzzi said. Before Gemini, ground radar and radio stations would track and beam up commands to the vehicle, but proved too slow and imprecise for docking. Instead, NASA put a computer onboard to do the arithmetic needed for successful docking applications. The onboard computer was also capable of taking over control of the Titan II launch vehicle if needed. And by the way, the black-and-white paint schemes for the Gemini and Apollo rockets and vehicles had a real-world purpose: cooling. This means the Gemini project was cooler in more ways than one. Faster Than LightAll systems go When it came time for Dream Machine 2015 to perform, our rocket was able to make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. With all eight of our CPU engines blasting at 4.5GHz, it outperformed our desktop zero-point by 11–32 percent, which is crazy considering that our ZP also uses a 5960X. You can attribute these gains to our amazing custom-cooling system from EK, which not only performed stellarly, but stayed stealthily quiet under load as well. Perhaps the real neutron star of our Dream Machine, however, were our four water-cooled Titan X GPUs. With our spacious case, robust cooling setup, and airtight Titanium-rated 1600-watt PSU, we were able to crank the power target on these GPUs to 110%, boost the voltage by 112mV, overdrive each core clock by 205MHz and dial up the memory clock 734MHz. This allowed us to shatter speed records. Kidding aside, at the time of this writing, if you don't count liquid nitrogen setups that traverse the galaxy through unsustainable black holes, Dream Machine 2015 is among the top five fastest PCs in both the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra and 3DMark 11 Extreme benchmarks. How's that for an astronomical accomplishment? We're pretty sure we've inadvertently set off the beacon indicating to higher life forms that our technology has evolved enough now to be accepted within their advanced inner circle. Seriously, though, this year's Dream Machine blasted our desktop zero-point system out of the sky by 53–117 percent in our graphics benchmarks, which is beyond impressive considering that our ZP is also heavily armed with three GeForce GTX 980 missiles of its own. In real-world terms, Dream Machine was able to play GTAV, a super graphically demanding game, maxed out on Dell's incredibly sharp 5K-resolution monitor with average framerates between 70–90fps. Sure, those figures are with anti-aliasing disabled, but at 5120x2880 resolution, you'd need to bust out a telescope to spot any jaggies. Even in the storage department, our Samsung 850 Pro warp drives in RAID 0 were able to hit light speed, with sequential reads and writes measuring 1,654MB/s and 1,290MB/s, respectively. That's among the fastest read and write speeds we've ever seen in our Labs. Dream Machine 2015 is not only the fastest computer we've ever built, but it's the fastest computer we've ever tested. Ladies and gentlemen, we have done it, we have won the space race! Benchmarks
Our desktop zero-point PC uses a 5960X CPU, three GTX 980s, and 16GB of RAM. Arkham City tested at 2560x1440 max settings with PhysX off, Tomb Raider at Ultimate settings, and Shadow of Mordor at Max settings. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Maximum PC latest stories To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
