General Gaming Article |
- Star Wars Battlefront Beta Will Be Open To All
- Newegg Daily Deals: Gobs of Gigabyte Motherboards!
- Win Your Dream Setup in the UltraWide Festival!
- MSI Raids Skylake with B150M Night Elf and Z170I Gaming Pro Motherboards
- Microsoft Updates Xbox App for Windows 10, Announces Beta Program
- Fast Forward: Watts Up With Processor Power?
| Star Wars Battlefront Beta Will Be Open To All Posted: 18 Sep 2015 02:51 PM PDT Star Wars Battlefront community manager Mathew Everett posted an update on the game's website, reporting that the upcoming beta will be made available to everyone owning a PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC (via Origin). The beta will consist of two multiplayer modes and a single mission that will be playable in co-op mode. "Get ready hit the battlefront on Hoth via Walker Assault and check out our newly revealed mode, Drop Zone on Sullust," Everett says. "Now, I have to state my excitement here as this is by far my favorite mode and I can't wait for you to check it out for yourself. Is online Multiplayer with more than two players just not your thing? We have you covered." Earlier this month, Electronic Arts said that the Drop Zone mode is similar to King of the Hill. Drop pods will be dumped on the planet surface, and two teams of eight each will fight to control or capture these pods. To win, the team must capture all five pods. However, if the teams can't manage to capture all the pods within the 10-minute limit, the team who controls the majority of them will win the match. Everett goes on to describe the beta's mission, stating that gamers can play solo, with an online friend, or locally with a friend sitting on the same couch. This mission, based on Tatooine, will introduce players to the beta Survival Mission mode. Everett also points out that for the beta, this mission will require an Internet connection. Once the full game is released, missions will be playable offline. The news update also mentions the Deluxe version of the upcoming game. In addition to the base game, players will receive an Ion Grenade, an Ion Torpedo, and a DL-44 blaster pistol. Players will also receive Ion Shock and Victory emotes. Unsurprisingly, this bundle will be served up to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 owners only. In addition to the news, Everett answered a few questions submitted by the community. One question focused on upgrading vehicles, which will not be possible, as they need to stay authentic within the Star Wars universe. Bots will also be provided in the game, but only within the Fighter Squadron mode, which will include ten AI units on each side. "Our team is working hard to continue to gather the proper details around features, modes, weapons, vehicles, and more," Everett says. "We know a lot of the community is eager to get every specific detail around the game, and our team is looking forward to revealing it." Star Wars Battlefront is slated to arrive on November 17, 2015. |
| Newegg Daily Deals: Gobs of Gigabyte Motherboards! Posted: 18 Sep 2015 11:01 AM PDT Top Deal: As you know, Skylake is here, and that means there are a lot of anxious builders ready to take the plunge. However, a case could be made for building a last generation system, especially now that prices on previous high-end parts have fallen. Case in point, today's top deal is for a Gigabyte GA-X99-UD3P Motherboard for $153 with $4 shipping (normally $180 - use coupon code: [EMCAXKW28]). This is a socket LGA 2011-v3 for Haswell-E. It has plenty of bells and whistles, like dual M.2 slots, SATA Express, four-way graphics support, and so forth, but it's priced like a mid-range part. Not sold? See if any the other mobo deals suit your fancy. Other Deals: Gigabyte GA-X99-SLI LGA 2011-v3 Intel X99 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard for $212.50 with $4 shipping (normally $250 - use coupon code: [EMCAXKW28]) Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard for $85 with free shipping (normally $100 - use coupon code: [EMCAXKW28]) Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 R5AM3+ AMD 990FX 6 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors ATX AMD Motherboard for $127.50 with free shipping (normally $150 - use coupon code: [EMCAXKW28]) Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 5 (rev. 1.0) LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard for $113.05 with free shipping (normally $133 - use coupon code: [EMCAXKW28]) |
| Win Your Dream Setup in the UltraWide Festival! Posted: 18 Sep 2015 10:28 AM PDT What's Your Dream Setup? More inches. More speed. More eardrum-blasting bass. We're talking, of course, about the things we want in our dream PC setup—the ultimate combo of monitors, headphones, hardware, and all those brilliant tech goodies that we want on our desk 24/7. The UltraWide Festival is hosting an awesome competition right now, to let you build your own dream setup with their money ($10k to each winner!), and keep it forever and ever. Even if you don't win of the 3 Finalist prizes, they're also giving out 30 of LG's incredible new Curved UltraWide monitors, guaranteed to make even the most tech-casual noob drool instantly. All you have to do to enter the competition is make a video showing your current PC setup, explain how you would upgrade it if you won the $10 thousand dollars, and fill out a super fast form over on their website. It's fast, it's easy, and it gives you a chance to show off your awesome video-making skills. (Pro tip: make it funny!) When we heard about this competition, we started thinking... what sorts of things would we want our dream setup to do if someone else was paying for it and we had no budget limit? Hopefully our ideas help spark some of your own that you can use in your video for the UltraWide Festival Dream Setup competition. The Hardware Any respectable gamer starts in the guts of the PC when dreaming big. It doesn't matter how pretty it all looks if it doesn't run like a jackrabbit on ritalin. But let's not get bogged down in the details here and end up bickering about AMD vs. Nvidia for the next 10 pages. We're dreaming—so let's just focus on what we want it to do. We want double video cards working hand-in... umm, robo-hand with each other to show us aliens, nazis, and zombies on our screens for us to shoot. Powering alongside those duel gods of pixel magic, we want a futuristic CPU with more cores than an apple tree, RAM for every slot, and nothing less than a pile of the finest multi TB SSDs. Someone else is paying for your dream setup if you win the competition, so I'm dreaming big! I guess we also better toss in a rock-solid PSU, a water cooling system with the coolest neon lights you've ever seen, and a motherboard that fits all that stuff into just the right places that makes it easy to work with. Oh, a case that looks like a freakin' mechwarrior. With real rocket launchers and a flamethrower that'll toast our grilled cheese. Let us dream! The Monitor I thought I was actually pretty happy with my monitor before I saw the website for this competition. They're giving away a bunch of the LG Curved UltraWide monitors, and they look incredible. I mean, that one in the image above has so much screen real estate on its 34-freakin-inch display that the dude is doing like ten things at once. And here I was, like a chump, being happy that I could just play Hearthstone and watch Netflix at the same time on my current screen. Nope. Monitor envy is a real thing, folks. And I now have it. Thanks, LG. Now every time I boot up Hearthstone, I'll be reminded that I don't have a curved monitor with bleeding edge specs that's editing some cool space battle footage from a game I probably can't even afford. Oh, man, reality is too painful. Let's go back to dreaming about our dream setup! We want that tiny PC-deity box we described on the previous page to feed into the fattest monitors that have ever existed. Wait—cancel that. We want that feeding into THREE of the fattest monitors that have ever existed, just like Lewis of Unbox Therapy was showing off in his video about this competition. Audio/Video You better believe that if we won this UltraWide Festival competition and got to build our dream PC setup, we'd be livestreaming 24/7 to show it off to the world. Even though the LG UltraWide monitor has great speakers built-in, we'd still want some slick 7.1 surround sound headsets that make us look like esports pros on stream. Bonus points if that headset has an unobtrusive mic attached, so we can personally thank everyone that donates $100 or more in our Twitch chat—which totally happens every five minutes in my dream. But sometimes we don't want to use the headset, so we'll need a crazy surround sound setup with speakers and a comfy subwoofer we can rest our feet on when it's not busy shaking the house's walls around us. And I guess we need a webcam so the world can see our glorious faces on the stream. Everything Else Phew, all this dreaming is tiring. But we're not done yet! True geeks need all sorts of cool stuff on their desk. Of course, the gaming mouse with like 20 buttons on it and a wired cable. Of course, the gaming keyboard with mechanical keys and glowing back-lit letters. Of course, the three core gamepad controllers so we can be snobby about which gamepad works best for each individual game we play. But we also need an amazing chair that magically fixes our posture, a USB flash drive that can store our entire Steam library on it, a real Pip-Boy, a wearable mouse, a thumbs up bottle opener, a USB PICKLE LIGHT! Uh... okay. I think we've finally dreamed too big. We should've stopped at the Pip-Boy. But I think we're finally ready for the competition. Win Your Own Dream Setup Don't let our way-too-big-and-very-fun-until-it-got-a-little-bit-weird-at-the-end-there-with-the-pickle dream overshadow your own dreams, though! Head on over to the UltraWide Festival Dream Setup website and share your own story. All you have to do to enter the competition is make a short video showing off your current PC setup and talking about how you want to make it better. You have until September 25 (next Friday) to enter the competition, so take your time and dream big! The 3 Finalists will get $10,000 to upgrade their current rigs to their dream setup, and 30 Semi-Finalists will get the beautiful Curved UltraWide monitor (34UC87C). It's incredible for gaming, but we won't judge if you want to also use it to edit videos, make art, or any of that other awesome creative stuff. Just make sure to frag sometimes too. Good luck, and dream big! |
| MSI Raids Skylake with B150M Night Elf and Z170I Gaming Pro Motherboards Posted: 18 Sep 2015 09:48 AM PDT Two small form factor motherboard options We're seeing more and more small form factor case options for tiny builds, and of course there's AMD's Radeon R9 Nano, a six-inch graphics card that packs a much bigger punch than its size suggests. Building a potent SFF PC is certainly possible. It all starts with the motherboard, and MSI has two new options specific to the SFF category. The first is the B150M Night Elf. We'll go ahead an award MSI 500 geek points right off the bat for giving its board a name that's more memorable than a string of numbers and letters (we're looking at you, Gigabyte). MSI's B150M Night Elf is a micro ATX (mATX) motherboard aimed at gamers. In case there's any doubt as to the target audience, MSI imprinted "NO. 1 IN GAMING" along the side of the board and lit it up with a red LED. As its name suggests, the board is based on Intel's B150 chipset for Skylake (LGA1151). It has four DDR4 DIMM slots supporting up to 64GB of DDR4-2133 memory, two PCI-E x16 3.0 slots, two PCI-E x1 3.0 slots, a GbE LAN port, USB 3.1 and 2.0 connectivity, half a dozen SATA 6Gbps ports, SATA Express, onboard audio with dual headphone amplifiers, and various other amenities. If you're looking to go even small, MSI's other SFF board is the Z170I Gaming Pro AC. It's a mini ITX motherboard based on Intel's Z170 chipset. The board only has two DDR4 DIMM slots, though it can handle frequencies up to 3200MHz. Other features include a single PCI-E x16 3.0 slot, four SATA 6Gbps ports, M.2 port, SATA Express, USB 3.1 and 2.0 connectivity, and onboard 802.11ac Wi-Fi. MSI didn't say how much the boards will cost or when they'll be available. |
| Microsoft Updates Xbox App for Windows 10, Announces Beta Program Posted: 18 Sep 2015 09:01 AM PDT Preview program coming soon Microsoft has begun rolling out the next wave of updates for the Xbox app on Windows 10. One of those updates includes a real-time Friends list presence -- your Friends list will automatically refresh when your gaming buddies are online or offline, along with the apps and games they're using. It will also tell you whether you're able to join whatever game they're playing by way of multiplayer or party. Also on the real-time front are updates to the Activity Feed. It's no longer necessary to mash refresh to see new Activity Feed items. As long as the Xbox app is open, your Activity Feed will let know when there are new things to view, comment on, etc. The two other updates include a Compare feature in the Achievements section that lets you see "how you stack up against your friends on specific game progress," and console text entry, which Microsoft says is one of the most requested features. You can now use the Xbox app and other inputs compatible with Windows devices to enter text in search boxes and other places on the Xbox One. In addition to the above, Microsoft is throwing fans another bone by introducing the Xbox Beta app. Similar to the Xbox One Preview program, people who join the Xbox Beta app program will gain access to features and enhancements before the general public and be able offer feedback. The Xbox Beta app will be available later this month in the Windows Store. |
| Fast Forward: Watts Up With Processor Power? Posted: 18 Sep 2015 12:00 AM PDT This article was published in the September 2015 issue of Maximum PC. For more trusted reviews and feature stories, subscribe here. Demystifying Processor Power ConsumptionMy recent column on AMD's advanced voltage/frequency scaling confused some readers. It's worth tackling this subject again, because power consumption is the most challenging problem for chip designers. It's also a challenge for users who struggle with thermal requirements when building custom systems. The root problem is that each new generation of chip-fabrication technology enables smaller transistors, so designers cram more of them on each chip. It's great for processor performance, because we get more powerful CPU cores, more cores per chip, and more cache. That's the bright side of Moore's Law. The dark side is power consumption. Although today's transistors are extremely power efficient, their wattage adds up when a chip has billions of them. Most home users could afford to pay the slightly higher electric bills if their PCs consumed twice as much power. For data centers with thousands of rack servers, the higher bills would be more deadly. But heat dissipation—the corollary of power consumption—is the real killer. Smaller transistors can lead to impressive designs, but power draw is important as well. In the early 2000s, chip designers hit the "power wall." No longer could they gain performance simply by cranking up the clock speed. Chips were getting so hot that they stopped working. So, designers found alternatives, such as spreading the software workload across multiple CPU cores. Other powersaving techniques are dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS) and advanced voltage/frequency scaling (AVFS). Both work on the principle of reducing the processor's supply voltage and clock frequency when full speed isn't needed. But the commonly used power equation I quoted (P=fV2) confused some folks. It says that power varies linearly with clock frequency and quadratically with voltage. For example, reducing the frequency by 50 percent also reduces power by half, but reducing the voltage by 50 percent reduces power by 75 percent. Voltage matters more than frequency because it's a squared factor. You can't use this equation to calculate actual processor power, however. (For one thing, I deliberately omitted a capacitance factor to more clearly show the voltage/frequency relationship.) So, if your 1.2V processor runs at 3GHz, you can't multiply 1.2 x 3.0 to find the wattage. The simplified equation merely expresses the relative voltage/frequency relationship. Also, the frequency factor doesn't apply to other things. One reader joked that his desk lamp would burn 864,000 watts because it uses 60-cycle alternating current at 120 volts. Luckily, AC frequency isn't the same as processor clock frequency, or we'd still be burning candles. DVFS is getting more complicated as designers divide their chips into more power, voltage, and frequency domains. Instead of varying the entire chip's voltage and frequency, individual sections are controllable. Some domains can vary their voltage; some can vary their frequency; some can vary both; and some can shut off their power altogether. One company (Sonics) recently announced a power-management subsystem that can do all this stuff for dozens or even hundreds of domains. The trick is to vary these factors on the fly without noticeably hurting performance. "Dark silicon" is a popular industry buzz term. It means that more circuits in your processor will power down when they're unneeded, spring to life when duty calls, and then go "dark" again to save power. It's like switching off the lights in your home's unoccupied rooms, except it happens automatically, many times per second—and if it's done right, you won't notice a thing. Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report. |
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