General Gaming Article |
- Valve Says Caching Issue Caused Steam SNAFU, Not Hackers
- Intel Skips Integrated Graphics on Two New Skylake Processors
- Apple Wants Samsung to Pay Additional $180 Million in Patent Damages
- SteelSeries Rival 100 Gaming Mouse Review
- Crucial BX200 480GB SSD Review
| Valve Says Caching Issue Caused Steam SNAFU, Not Hackers Posted: 28 Dec 2015 10:27 AM PST All is well againSteam gave its users an unexpected and unwanted surprise over the holiday. It came in the form of a glitch that resulted in users seeing private account information belong to other users when logging in. There were multiple reports of Steam users seeing other people's partial credit card information, email addresses, purchase histories, and more. Adding to the confusion, Steam also had a tendency to load in different languages. This wasn't a hacking incident. Instead, Valve blamed the screw up on a "caching issue" that appeared after making a configuration change. "Steam is back up and running without any known issues. As a result of a configuration change earlier today, a caching issue allowed some users to randomly see pages generated for other users for a period of less than an hour," Steam said in a statement. "This issue has since been resolved. We believe no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information and no additional action is required by users." The timing is unfortunate, as it coincided with Steam's Winter Sale. It also came on the heels of hacking group SkidNP threatening to hack Steam over the holidays. When Steam's servers first went down to address the caching issue, some assumed SkidNP had made good on its promise. Luckily that wasn't the case, as the damage could have been much worse if there was malicious intent involved. Valve didn't say how many people were affected by the issue. In any event, it's been fixed and everything appears to be working normally now. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Intel Skips Integrated Graphics on Two New Skylake Processors Posted: 28 Dec 2015 09:47 AM PST Skylake sans graphics Maybe someday Intel and AMD will build integrated graphics into their processors that will rival discrete solutions in terms of performance. Until then, integrated graphics will continue to go largely unused by power users, assuming they're even present. While most of today's chips do sport integrated graphics, there are two new desktop Skylake CPUs that don't. They're two of eight new Broadwell and Skylake processors Intel added to its price list over the weekend, according to CPU World. They include the Core i3-6098P and Core i5-6420P. If you recall, Intel used the "P" suffix in older generation processors to denote CPUs that lack an integrated GPU as well. The Core i3-6098P is a dual-core chip clocked at 3.6GHz. It supports Hyper Threading, has 3MB of cache, and is priced at $117. As for the core i5-6420P, it's a quad-core part that does not support Hyper Threading, is clocked at 2.8GHz, has 6MB of cache, and is priced at $182. The rest of the lineup consist of ULV and mobile chips. Here's a look:
It's not yet known what feature Intel is associating with the "D" suffix. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Apple Wants Samsung to Pay Additional $180 Million in Patent Damages Posted: 28 Dec 2015 09:27 AM PST Because $548 million wasn't enough After much legal kicking and screaming, Apple scored a $548 million payday from Samsung as part of a partial judgement that was decided by an appeals court earlier this year. Though not an insignificant sum, Apple wants more -- $180 million more. According to Reuters, Apple filed papers with a U.S. court last Wednesday asking for $180 million in supplemental damages and interest. Like the $548 million Samsung already paid, the damages relates to a handful of Samsung devices that were found to infringe on Apple's patents. This is just the latest saga in a suit that was initially filed four years ago. Apple had asked the court to award it $2.75 billion in damages but was instead awarded a little over $1 billion. An appeals court reduced that sum to $930 million, which was then later cut down to $548 million. After four long years of litigation, Apple and Samsung issued a joint statement earlier this month saying that Samsung had agreed to pay the $548 million sum within 10 days of receiving an invoice from Apple, though with an interesting caveat. "Apple notes that Samsung purports to reserve rights to obtain partial reimbursement in the future of judgement amounts it has paid. Apple disputes Samsung's asserted rights to reimbursement," the court document states. That tidbit insinuated the fight wasn't over, and indeed there's yet another trial scheduled for March of next year to determine any remaining damages. On top of that, Samsung has appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SteelSeries Rival 100 Gaming Mouse Review Posted: 28 Dec 2015 01:00 AM PST A gaming mouse for those of us on a budgetAT a GlanceKeeps It 100: Great sensor; solid build; budget price, big mouse feet. 99 Problems: Flimsy scroll wheel. As much as we love exorbitantly expensive products that make our eyes bleed from sheer awesomeness, sometimes the best things lie at the opposite end of the price spectrum. This couldn't be more true for the gaming peripherals scene. As companies compete to deliver the best value to buyers, there's an increase in people's accessibility to gaming, and that helps diversify the audience. As one of the biggest peripheral makers, SteelSeries is looking to impress said audience with its Rival 100 gaming mouse. The Rival 100 comes in a fairly compact form factor. Measuring 4.75 inches tall and 2.65 inches wide, it fits in the palm easily, yet still leaves enough room for you to completely lift your fingers off the mousepad. For this reason, it caters to all three grip styles (palm, claw, and fingertip) very well. Featuring an ambidextrous design, the Rival 100 does not discriminate between hand preferences. As mentioned above, the Rival 100 offers plenty of resting space for your palm. Combined with the rounded spine, it's a very comfortable mouse. Its grippy soft touch finish combats sweaty palms while you battle your enemies, and the pair of textured plastic grips on its sides keeps the mouse firmly in your hands when snapping from side to side. To complement its compact form, the Rival 100 is a featherweight by gaming mouse standards at just over four ounces. Its lightness helps making quick movements easier and puts less strain on your wrist. The trade-off is that heavier mice provide more stability, so this mouse is for those with disciplined wrist control. SteelSeries Engine is a favorite of ours in driver software suites. Its clean, intuitive interface and powerful set of features separates it from the competition. It also contains drivers for all of SteelSeries's products to ensure new products work the first time you plug in after your initial installation. A few customization options are available for the Rival 100 through SteelSeries Engine. For starters, all the buttons are programmable. Another neat feature is the option to set customized macros. And finally, there are the options to adjust CPI settings, lighting, angle snapping, and acceleration settings. Although it has an ambidextrous shape, the Rival 100 only has side buttons installed on the left, meaning that lefties will probably find them hard to access. They're positioned slightly above the side grips to prevent your fingers from hitting them accidentally. The buttons have a solid feel and give a satisfying click. The original Rival has SteelSeries's proprietary switches that need way too much weight to actuate, making them more difficult to spam. We're glad to see that the Rival 100 uses more traditional, lighter switches. Our only gripe is that the scroll wheel feels a little flimsy, but that's a trade-off we're willing to live with, considering the budget price point. Lighting has become an expected feature for today's gaming mice. The SteelSeries Rival 100 comes with customizable lighting under its scroll wheel and rear logo.The SteelSeries Engine software lets you choose from a theoretical 16.8 million colors, though admittedly the granularity is hard to see. While they do nothing to help your game, they do add some style points to your desktop. Despite being a budget mouse, the SteelSeries Rival 100 feels exceptionally sturdy. You won't find any squeaky plastic or rough edges on this little rodent. One thing many companies do to reduce cost is to skimp on the mouse feet; this is not the case with the Rival 100. The three Teflon feet are fairly wide and smooth. With the exception of the scroll wheel, the entire unit is well-polished and definitely looks and feels like more than entry-level gaming gear. That said, please refrain from dealing it repeated, heavy blows. Mice have feelings, too. In addition to comfort and durability, the final determining factor in purchasing a gaming mouse lies in the performance of the sensor. In this department, the Rival 100 carries SteelSeries's own SDNS-3059-SS optical sensor—and, wow, does it perform great. Although it's capped at 2,000 CPI, you can crank it up to 4,000 by using the digitally simulated CPI through SteelSeries Engine. We don't recommend this, however, as it introduces noticeable jitter. But when it's within its limits, the sensor is rock solid. And let's be honest here: Most gamers can live without an 8,000 CPI sensor. So, should you sink a bit of cash into this mouse and add it to your gaming gear? The SteelSeries Rival 100 can be had for just $40. For the price, you get a solid sensor and great build quality all packed into a compact, comfortable package. If you blew your money in Vegas and are looking to vent that sadness in PC gaming, then the SteelSeries Rival 100 is an excellent companion for your hand. Hell, it's an attractive option even if you are rolling in the dough. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Crucial BX200 480GB SSD Review Posted: 28 Dec 2015 12:00 AM PST At a Glance(+) Bargain Hunting: Low price per GB; much faster than HDD for random IO. (-) Dumpster Diving: Slower than most other SSDs; short warranty; TLC endurance. TLC != Tender Loving CareSometimes a product comes along that blows your socks off and leaves you breathless. This unfortunately is not that product, at least when we're talking pure performance. Crucial has been a player in the SSD market for some time now, and they've been one of the driving forces in lowering SSD prices. Their MX100 line for example was the first time we saw anyone offer a 1TB class SSD for under $600, thanks to their early deployment of 16nm NAND, and the drive was extremely successful. Their BX100 targeted even lower price points, while MX200 improved on the performance of MX100 without increasing the price much. Now we have a new value option from the company that has been pushing for ever-lower SSD prices, the BX200.
What sets the BX200 apart from the earlier Crucial offerings is that this is their first ever SSD with TLC-based NAND. We've discussed this before, but to quickly recap, NAND comes in a variety of options. The simplest (and most expensive) is SLC NAND, where each cell represents a single bit, using two stored voltage states. MLC doubles the bits per cell to two, using four stored voltage states, and as you might guess TLC increases the bits yet again to three, this time with eight voltage states to track. And there's the rub: more in this case isn't better, as NAND gates eventually wear out with use, so SLC lasts the longest (all other factors being equal) while TLC has the lowest durability. There are other concerns with TLC, like the need for more complicated firmware to handle reading and writing, wear leveling, etc. However, if you can overcome all of these difficulties, the potential payoff comes in dollars. Where a 256GB SLC drive would need 256GB of raw NAND capacity, a 256GB MLC drive could get by with half the raw NAND capacity, and a 256GB TLC version could use one-third the raw NAND. Combined with 16nm 128Gb raw NAND die, that could mean very competitive price points. That's not the whole story, however. As with all SSDs, Crucial has some spare NAND set aside to improve performance and longevity. Second, Crucial specifies 6GB of NAND as an SLC buffer. The idea is that for many workloads, the drive will write to the SLC buffer very quickly, and when the drive is idle it can flush the buffer to the TLC NAND. For the 480GB model, Crucial sets aside 6GB of NAND as SLC, while the 240GB and 960GB models allocate 3GB and 12GB of SLC NAND, respectively. The drive itself has eight packages on the 480GB model, each with 64GiB of raw capacity, with 512MB of RAM cache supporting the Silicon Motion SM2256 controller, running custom Crucial firmware. We don't know the internal configuration of the NAND packages, but most likely each has part configured as SLC with the remainder running as TLC. Crucial doesn't disclose the exact amount of overprovisioning, but there's more spare NAND than in other modern SSDs. It's likely needed, since TLC can't handle as many Program/Erase (P/E) cycles as MLC NAND. All of the above is basically secondary to the real question: How does the drive perform, and is it worth the asking price? Here's where things get a bit complex. At the original MSRP ($150 for the 480GB BX200), the price would have the BX200 competing with the Samsung 850 Evo 500GB. Considering you get 20GB more capacity, we would want similar performance. Street prices on the BX200 however are quite a bit lower, currently $130 for the 480GB model. That makes this the least expensive modern SSD, at least on the midsize model, and it's one of the few SSDs selling below $0.30 per GB. That brings us to the performance. A Three-Legged HorseOur standard SSD test bed uses a Skylake i7-6700K with an Asus Z170-A motherboard. You can read more about our testing methodology, and the full specifications of our test bad are in the table below. For our performance comparisons, we've highlighted the Samsung 850 Evo 2TB drive alongside the BX200, as the 500GB and 1TB 850 Evo perform at nearly the same level as the 2TB model. The other TLC-based SSDs in our benchmarks include the Corsair Neutron GX and the OCZ Trion 100, both using the Phison S10 controller but with different NAND/firmware, so keep an eye on those. And just for comparison, we're tossing in a 3TB Seagate HDD—you'll find out why in a moment.
Samsung initially impressed the world with their 840 Evo line's TLC performance, though the problems with drives becoming slower over time soured the deal. The heart of the issue with 840 Evo is that accessing "old" (nine weeks or older) data becomes slow due to voltage drift. In short, there's a drop in voltage where the stored charge in the NAND cells degrades over time. This happens on all NAND to varying degrees, but it was worse on the 840 Evo. The fix involves reading and refreshing cells with old data periodically, which is done in the background while the drive is idle. It looks like the use of 19nm TLC planar NAND made this a bigger problem than on other NAND (e.g. 19nm MLC), and the better solution comes via the upgraded 850 Evo line. By using V-NAND and stacking 32 NAND layers using an older process node (40nm), the size of the NAND cells can be much larger and voltage drift is far less of an issue. There's just one problem: V-NAND is currently a Samsung-only solution. Where does that leave other TLC drives? Back at the difficult task of dealing with voltage drift on smaller process NAND. So while Samsung's 850 Evo screams along at performance levels very close to that of their 850 Pro (see our 2TB 850 Evo and 2TB 850 Pro reviews), we haven't seen TLC solutions from other manufacturers come anywhere near the performance of the 850 Evo—and that includes the Crucial BX200, which sadly ends up being slower than virtually every other SSD we've tested. We had high hopes for the BX200, considering the BX100, MX100, and MX200 have all performed reasonably well. Unfortunately, the change to TLC results in pretty severe drops in performance. One thing you can't really see with the charts is that the performance is initially quite a bit better, which means on less demanding workloads where the SLC can service all requests, the BX200 does pretty well. Heavier workloads on the other hand exhaust the SLC buffer and write directly to the TLC NAND, and in some cases performance can approach that of a conventional hard drive (e.g., large sequential writes). You can see this happen in the following image, showing throughput of a Windows copy operation; the BX200 starts at over 300MB/s, but after the SLC buffer is exhausted, write speeds drop to around 75MB/s. Looking at the competition, the BX200 primarily goes up against the Trion 100, and it wins some tests and loses in others. Overall, the BX200 ranks behind the OCZ Trion 100, and both of them trail well behind faster SATA SSDs like the OCZ Vector 180 and Samsung 850 Evo. Initially, the Trion 100 targeted the same price points as the 850 Evo, but street prices have come down since launch. The Crucial BX200 480GB has a $130 street price, matching the Trion 100 480GB, and depending on your workload the BX200 may prove more effective. We'd still much rather spend the extra $27 to get the 500GB 850 Evo, but at least there are some savings to be had. Looking at the bigger picture, it's great to see 500GB-class SSDs now selling below $0.30 per GB. For users that don't need a ton of storage, we're at the point now where laptop makers can legitimately look at using a 500GB SSD for roughly twice times the cost of a 1TB 7200RPM HDD. Considering all the benefits of solid-state storage, we see little reason to ever go with conventional storage for your OS drive on any decent PC. This is particularly true of laptops, where the ubiquitous 5400RPM hard drives are even slower, leading to long-term problems and increased failure rates in our experience. What remains to be seen is whether or not Crucial is able to improve the performance of the BX200 with firmware updates. We're looking at the initial release, and given other TLC SSDs perform better without an SLC cache, it's possible Crucial can further optimize things. We can't recommend a product based on what may or may not happen, however, which leaves us with an inexpensive SSD that is merely okay. If you're building a PC for your parents or grandparents and you know they're not going to do any strenuous workloads, there's little difference between the experience of using the BX200 and using a faster SSD, but there's still a big jump relative to hard drives. That's the market Crucial targets, and they're a good fit for undemanding users; enthusiasts on the other hand will be better served by a faster SSD. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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