General Gaming Article |
- Get Ready for Razer's 50 Percent Off Fan Appreciation Sale
- BitFenix Boasts Merits of New Spectre Xtreme Cooling Fans
- Seagate Reaches for the Cloud with 10TB Helium Filled Hard Drive
- Lian Li PC-Q04: Lots of Vents
- Seagate Adds 8TB Model to NAS HDD Line
- No BS Podcast 242: Is 2016 the Year of VR?
- Star Wars: Battlefront Optimization Guide
| Get Ready for Razer's 50 Percent Off Fan Appreciation Sale Posted: 14 Jan 2016 11:52 AM PST Half off sale lasts 24 hours (while supplies last) Looking for a new gaming mouse? What about a headset to replace the one that's falling apart? With a little preparation, the right timing, and perhaps a bit of luck, you can save 50 percent on such items on an accessory upgrade courtesy of Razer's 2016 CES Fan Appreciate Sale. It's a 24-hour event, though it's not as easy as filling your shopping cart with peripherals and making off like a bandit. There are some things you need to know before the sale kicks off. First, the deep discount is limited to a single item per customer and shipping destination. Second, the purchase has to be made at Razer's online store. Third, the sale runs 24 hours, though if the item you want is out of stock, you're out of luck. It's also limited to peripherals and accessories, so wipe those dreams of effectively stealing a Razer Blade laptop for half off, it's not happening. Finally, there's some preparation you need to take care of beforehand. That's because the sale requires a Razer ID and accompanying discount code. Since there's a good chance Razer's servers are going to get hammered and the more desirable items will sell out fast, you'll want to take care of this bit of housekeeping ahead of the sale. You can do that by going here and following the instructions. That's both our advice and that of Razer's. "To ensure as many fans get in on the sale, each will only be allowed one item – so you may wish to plan ahead as the codes will not work until the time of the sale," Razer says. "Stocks are finite and are expected to go fast. Do also note that your order will only be confirmed when you have completed your purchase and have received a RazerStore Order Confirmation notification." The sale kicks off this evening at 6 PM PST in the United States and Canada, January 15th at 10 AM SGT in Asia Pacific, and January 15th at 10 AM CET in Europe. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| BitFenix Boasts Merits of New Spectre Xtreme Cooling Fans Posted: 14 Jan 2016 11:17 AM PST Don't lose your cool BitFenix is best known for its line of cases, though it also offers a variety of accessories, including fans, the newest of which it says are ideal for liquid cooling setups. Yes, even most liquid cooling configurations need fans -- at minimum, they're needed for the radiator. BitFenix says its new Spectre Xtreme fans offer high airflow and are optimized for static pressure. "The newly designed blades of the Spectre Xtreme not only look good but also improve the airflow of the fan to 66CFM while maintaining optimum static pressure. This makes the Spectre Xtreme fans an ideal choice for liquid cooling solutions," BitFenix says. Available with or without LEDs, the Spectre Xtreme line uses fluid dynamic bearings and have been designed to keep noise levels at a minimum, in part due to the TPU construction of the frame. They can operate at different fan speeds from 950 RPM to 2,000 RPM. A closer look at the specs:
As for aesthetics, the fans sport an aggressive design and multiple color options. If you opt for LEDs, BitFenix says it took special care to ensure that the green LED matchis the light emitted from Nvidia's GeForce GTX stock coolers. No word yet on price or availability. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Seagate Reaches for the Cloud with 10TB Helium Filled Hard Drive Posted: 14 Jan 2016 09:55 AM PST High on helium Seagate has a new hard drive capacity option, 10 terabytes, to help enterprises stock cloud-based data centers. The new drive is Seagate's first foray into 10TB territory, and like HGST's 10TB option, it's filled with helium. The 3.5-inch drive features seven platters and 14 read/write heads. Helium is sealed inside to create a quiet and turbulence-free environment, one that both reduces friction and resistance on all those platters and delivers a lower power-per-TB ratio and weight specifications for a 10TB model. Seagate says its new drive helps improve performance by incorporating advanced caching algorithms specifically intended to help cloud data center managers manage large buckets of data more quickly. It also features technologies designed to minimize costs associated with power and cooling costs during idle time. "At-scale data centers are faced with the challenge of efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital data," said John Rydning, IDC's research vice president for hard disk drives. "Seagate's new 10TB HDD for enterprise data centers is its first product to employ helium technology and will help data center customers to expand storage capacity economically." The 10TB drive is available with choice of 6Gbps SATA and 12Gbps SAS interfaces. Both boast a MTBF (mean time before failure) rating of 2.5 million hours. Performance specs haven't been disclosed. Seagate also didn't say how much the new drive costs, though it's already lining customers. Huawei and Alibaba will be among the first to deploy the 10TB drives. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 14 Jan 2016 08:40 AM PST Looking to build a Mini-ITX system? Lian Li may have the building block you'll need with the launch of the PC-Q04, a chassis that promises enough breathing room for your hardware while keeping a compact form factor. The company admits that the PC-Q04 isn't the smallest case it offers, measuring 194(W)x294(H)x210(D)-mm. But that's OK, it's still small enough to tuck away in your office or living room. According to the company, the chassis does not ship with fans. Instead, it relies on a number of vents to cool the components, helping to create a silent PC build. You can mount a system fan (120mm or 140mm) on the bottom, or use that space to mount a 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch HDD or SSD instead. There's also space provided at the top for mounting two 2.5-inch drives, or a 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drive side by side. The specs show that the case can handle an ATX power supply unit of up to 160mm, a VGA card of up to 190mm long, and a CPU cooler of up to 70mm in height. There are also two expansion slots that can handle thick cards, tall rubber stands mounted on the bottom, two USB ports on the front, as well as HD audio jacks and the power button. The case is made entirely out of aluminum and comes in either black or silver. Lian Li indicates that the big selling point is in the "enhanced" vents. There's a large vent on the side so that the power supply can draw in and vent out its own air. There are also vents on the bottom right and left as well as a huge vent on the bottom of the case so that the GPU can draw in air when needed. The back of the case is also one big vent so that the warm air can be ejected away from the hardware naturally. "The PSU cycles its own airflow without affecting other components," Lian Li explains. "The GPU similarly can pull air directly from the bottom and side intakes and vent directly from its fan. The CPU is more sheltered and requires a smaller cooler. It vents through the oversized back panel as air will naturally flow that way." The company says these vents are designed to help reduce vibration and noise that can come from installed fans. Naturally, system builders will want to choose components that emit very little noise to make an awesome little Mini-ITX powerhouse. However, the drawback to having no intake fans is that you won't have any filters, so expect the system to get a little dirty. Lian Li's PC-Q04 is available for $60 at participating online and offline retailers. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Seagate Adds 8TB Model to NAS HDD Line Posted: 14 Jan 2016 08:27 AM PST Seagate has expanded its line of NAS-focused hard drives with the addition of an 8TB model. That's the largest NAS drive capacity to date, built for NAS enclosures of up to eight bays. The series actually launched back in June 2013, promising high performance and reliability along with support from top NAS solutions suppliers. The 8TB model complements the 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB models Seagate already offers. The specifications show that the new NAS drive has a beefy 256MB cache, a maximum sustainable transfer rate of 216MB/s, and a SATA 3 (6Gb/s) interface. The drive also has an average operating power of 9W, an idle average of 7.2W, and standby and sleep modes that consume a mere 0.6W. The drive is rather quiet, measuring 2.6bels during operation. The company says the NAS HDD line is ideal for NAS-based scenarios such as virtualization, file sharing, multimedia storage, archiving, and more. It's custom-built for "always on" applications and good for storing large files like AutoCAD drawings, databases, large HD content, and medical images. Seagate's NAS HDD line includes the company's NASWorks technology, which "supports error correction via customized error recovery controls, power management, and vibration tolerance for optimal performance and reliability." There's also improved vibration tolerance that consists of a "unique" weighted motor design supported by a dual-plane balance, the specs show. Because the new 8TB model supports NAS devices of up to eight drive bays, that means offices and consumers alike can reach an overall capacity of 64TB. The drive also comes packed with a 180TB/year workload rate limit, a MTBF of 1M hours, and a three-year limited warranty. There's also an optional three-year rescue data recovery service. Seagate says that the NAS HDD line, including the new 8TB model, is qualified for a number of products provided by ASUSTOR, QNAP, Synology and Thecus. As for pricing, the company doesn't provide any information, but the drive is expected to become available by the end of Q1 2016. As a point of reference on pricing, the Seagate 4TB NAS HDD is on sale at Amazon for $136.16 whereas the 3TB model is on sale for $104.33 and the 2TB model sells for $83.63. You can find these drives here. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| No BS Podcast 242: Is 2016 the Year of VR? Posted: 14 Jan 2016 12:00 AM PST | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Star Wars: Battlefront Optimization Guide Posted: 14 Jan 2016 12:00 AM PST The best mix of quality and speed for BattlefrontIf there was one big theme of the 2015 holiday season, it was John Williams' Star Wars overture. Star Wars: Battlefront was released to the masses just a few weeks before the opening weekend of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, and quickly snapped up reviews praising its score, sound effects, and graphics. More: PC Gamer's Review of Star Wars: BattlefrontDespite the great graphics and sound, Battlefront is still plagued by poor multiplayer matchmaking and a severe limitation in multiplayer maps (not to mention the lack of a single-player campaign). The game comes with four worlds: Tattooine, Endor, Sullust and Hoth. The fifth world, Jakku, is available as free DLC. Each of these environments are exceptionally well detailed. To get the most out of your Star Wars experience, it pays to fine-tune your graphics settings. In this guide, we'll show you what we did to get an average of at least 60 frames per second while playing Battlefront on each of our Blueprints Builds for Fall 2015. The settings One nice thing about Battlefront is the number of graphics settings available. The game offers 21 graphics settings, not counting brightness and its four colorblindness profiles (which, by the way, is a nice touch). While many of the settings only have a moderate to low effect on frame rate, others may have very big impacts. Here's what Battlefront gives us to play with. Fullscreen MonitorThis setting selects which monitor is fullscreen, if you're using a multi-monitor setup. If you've only got one monitor, this option will be grayed out and set to 1. Fullscreen ResolutionThis one's pretty obvious, as it sets the resolution of the monitor you're going to use. Resolution has the biggest effect on your frame rate of any of the settings, since the video card has to figure out what color every pixel has to be. The more pixels, the more work. To put this in perspective, a 1440p (2560x1440 pixel) monitor has about 78 percent more pixels than a full HD monitor (1920x1080 pixels). That's a lot of additional work. On the flip side, the more pixels that are on screen, the better the image will look. If you've got a 1440p monitor, the game will look much better if you can play at 1440p than 1080p, as long as you can eke out a high enough frame rate. Fullscreen ModeThis pretty much sets whether you play in fullscreen mode, windowed mode, or in a borderless window. Most people will want to play in fullscreen mode. Fullscreen Refresh RateThis setting allows you to set the refresh rate for your monitor. The options available will change based on the monitor you use. Vertical SyncVertical sync (vsync) will attempt to lock your frame rate to the refresh rate of your monitor, so long as you're achieving frame rates higher than your monitor refresh rate. This can help prevent tearing, which can look nasty and is really noticeable in first-person shooters like Battlefront. This is not the same thing as G-Sync (Nvidia) or FreeSync (AMD). If you have a video card and monitor combination that can use FreeSync or G-Sync, those features will drop your monitor's refresh rate to match your frame rate on the fly if the frame rate falls below the maximum monitor refresh rate. G-Sync and FreeSync options are controlled by using the appropriate control panel application on the desktop. Since we look for raw frame rates during testing, we usually keep vertical sync turned off. If you're playing for fun, however, we recommend turning it on to keep tearing in check. Field of ViewThe field of view affects the, well, field of view of the screen. This option has a range of 44 to 109 degrees and defaults to 55. Unless you're using an ultrawide monitor, we generally recommend leaving this alone. However, some players prefer wider fields of view, allowing them to see more of the battlefield. Using a wider field of view will make the player models for the hands and weapons appear skinnier, however. Motion BlurMotion blur causes moving objects to blur, giving them a better sense of motion or speed. The amount of motion blur defaults to 50 percent, and we think it's just fine there. Resolution ScaleThe resolution scale is an interesting setting, and controls supersampling/upscaling. By default, it's set at 100 percent, meaning that your GPU will render the image exactly at the resolution you've set (like, say, 1920x1080). If you decrease the resolution scale to 90 percent, the game will tell the GPU that it only needs an image that's 90 percent of the actual output image. If you're gaming at 1920x1080, you're trying to push 2,073,600 pixels through the GPU. By scaling back to 90 percent, you'll only be pushing 1,866,240 pixels. That takes some of the load off of you GPU, but also reduces quality as you're basically achieving the same effect as scaling up a lower resolution to fit the screen. On the flip side, by increasing the resolution scale, you achieve what's called "supersampling." Supersampling is the opposite of upscaling. The GPU actually calculates more pixels, but scales them down to a lower resolution to fit. This is a lot like scaling down a higher resolution photo to a smaller size. You'll lose some information, but the scaling filter can provide some extra detail on objects, effectively giving you a form of anti-aliasing. Graphics QualityThe graphics quality setting in Battlefront is essentially a preset selector that affects all of the settings below. This setting can be set to Low, Medium, High, Ultra, or Custom. You can only alter the following settings when this Graphics Quality is set to Custom. However, it can be handy to set this to Ultra or High and adjust from there. Texture Quality Texture quality basically sets the resolution of textures that are used on models and terrain. The higher the setting, the more memory each texture will require. The lower the setting, the more textures you can load without a performance hit, though the textures will be of lower quality (resolution). If you've got a video card with oodles of memory, using higher-quality textures will yield a better experience. That said, we had a very good experience with this setting at High on a GTX 960 at 1080p. Texture FilteringTexture filtering helps a game engine figure out how to scale textures and smooth the transitions between different mapmap levels (e.g., a distant object might have a 64x64 pixel texture, and when it's closer it might switch to a 128x128 pixel texture). This takes some calculation to do without breaking the experience or looking sloppy. There are a few methods to do this, and Battlefront uses ansiotropic filtering. As long as you have a decently powerful or recent GPU, go with the high or ultra setting. You can find performance savings elsewhere if need be. Lighting QualityLighting quality determines how dynamic lighting and light scattering will look in game. The higher the setting, the better and more "realistic" the lighting will seem. Shadow QualityLike lighting quality, shadows are the flip side to the lighting coin. This setting affects shadow quality, quantity, and draw distance. Effects Quality Think of effects quality as the slider that adjusts special effects. Explosions, smoke, and other effects will be affected by this setting. We try to keep this setting as high as we can get away with. Post Process Quality Post processing controls things that appear to happen to the "camera lens" of the player. Motion blur, distortion (like water droplets on the lens), high dynamic range, and depth-of-field are all affected by this setting. The array of "camera lens" effects is one of the highlights of the game, but these effects aren't completely necessary to have a good experience. Post processing is like icing on the cake, and adds a little polish to the other graphics and effects. We like to keep these, but you can turn them down a bit to give your GPU a little breathing room. Mesh QualityMesh quality affects how models look. The higher the mesh quality, the more details (and polygons) models will have. Tessellation, reflections, simulations, and draw distance will all be affected by this setting. The things you'll likely notice most are the tessellations and draw distance. We like to keep this setting cranked up to High or Ultra. Terrain Quality Terrain quality is a lot like the mesh quality setting, but applied to the terrain itself. The environments of Battlefront are one aspect of the game that really shine, so making them look good means you have to spend some power on the terrain models. Like mesh quality, the higher the setting, the higher the polygon count of the terrain, and the farther the draw distance will be for those details. Terrain Groundcover The terrain groundcover is plentiful in Battlefront. Whether its the ferns and rocks on Endor, the snow on Hoth, or the rocks of Tattooine, ground cover adds detail to the terrain that helps with immersion. However, all of the groundcover can cost you a few frames without a beefy GPU. While we really love the ground cover in Battlefront, turning down the setting to High or Medium can yield a few extra frames per second. Anti-aliasingAnti-aliasing can be one of the most expensive (in terms of processing power) things your GPU can do, besides pushing the raw number of pixels. In short, anti-aliasing attempts to smooth the transition between adjacent pixels of different colors. The end result is the reduction of hard edges ("jaggies") and a smoother, better-looking image. The folks over at PC Gamer wrote an explanation of the finer points of anti-aliasing that you might want to take a look at. Our recommendation is to use anti-aliasing for lower resolutions like 1080p, since pixels are often physically larger on 1080p monitors. However, with monitors with higher pixel density, anti-aliasing becomes less necessary. (When we tested GTAV with our Dream Machine on a 5K monitor, we didn't notice a visual difference between having AA on or off, though turning it off yielded a huge jump in performance.) Additionally, the settings in your control panel will often offer better anti-aliasing control and results than in-game settings will. For our testing, we let Battlefront control the settings. If you're really hurting for FPS, turning down anti-aliasing a notch will often give you a noticeable boost in frame rates. Ambient OcclusionAmbient occlusion is a subtle effect that accentuates edges of objects by using shadowing and shading. In short, it helps bring out details of objects in game. The process isn't terribly expensive, so we recommend experimenting at the Ultra setting and turning it down to High if you are near the edge of 60fps. Now that we've gotten familiar with the settings, let's see what we did to optimize the game for each of our Blueprints builds. The BuildsWe put our Blueprints builds from fall 2015 through the ringer to figure out what settings we could get away with on each machine. We know that not everyone's rig will match what we have built, but the builds can serve as a guide to get an idea of what you can do with similar hardware. We played Battlefront on each machine, and used Fraps to calculate our average frame rate.While there will always be some variation based on number of players and effects that are in frame at any given moment, we did our best to get right in the thick of any firefights that were going on (for better or worse). Here's what we found. The Budget GamerThe Fall 2015 Budget Gamer has fairly modest specs. With a 4GB GeForce GTX 960 and an Intel Core i5-6500 Skylake, this rig is the least powerful of the three. Don't let the name fool you, though: This rig is budgeted to be around $800 (when we built it, the tab came to $770), and it's quite the capable 1080p gaming rig. Since the GTX 960 isn't really built for gaming over 1080p, we started from there and worked our way through the preset settings. We first tried playing with the Ultra preset, but we found ourselves dipping into the high 40s and low 50s at times while in combat. To perk up our frame rates, we nudged the graphics settings down to High and began to customize them from there. We were eventually able to eke out an average of 65fps, and got away with upping a setting or two as well.
As we played with some of the settings, we found that we couldn't find much play in a lot of the heavy-hitting settings. However, we did spend some power on the terrain. We did this for one big reason: The maps in Battlefront are quite expansive and open in many places. By keeping the landscape geometry at a high quality, we environment stays looking good. This is especially noticeable when flying X-wings or TIE fighters. Draw distance of terrain and ground features when flying low can make a big difference between flying nap-of-the-earth or into-the-earth. We decided to set the lighting settings to Ultra because it turned out to be only a modest hit to frame rates. We tried adding shadows to the mix, but couldn't keep frame rates above 60 when we did so. As it turns out, Battlefront has a lot of dynamic shadows and dark areas (just look at the images of Endor). While some could argue in favor of boosting other settings, the GTX 960 does great at the High preset, once you nudge anti-aliasing down to Medium. Anti-aliasing is not cheap, and aside from the raw render size, is probably going to be the biggest hit on a game when cranked up. Everything else after that is a personal choice on where you want to spend your extra frames, since you really can't have everything. The MidrangeThe Midrange build is only mediocre in name. We usually build the Midrange to be a powerful single-GPU rig paired with a K-SKU Core i7 or equivalent, with a budget target of about $1,500. For Fall 2015, we packed a Core i7-6700K and a reference model GeForce GTX 980 into a Phanteks Enthoo Evolv mini-ITX case. This rig offers plenty of power in a small form factor, which is great for folks who are a little short on spare desk space. The GTX 980 is a powerful workhorse that can handle just about anything, but falls just short of the 4K gaming mark. As such, we didn't have to do much to the settings to get a great experience. At 2560x1440, this rig performed admirably, pulling off 72fps on average. That's using the Ultra graphics quality preset, mind you.
While we were able to get the Ultra settings going at full clip at 1440p, there is still one more thing we could recommend to get the best image quality possible: resolution scale. To get a little extra prettiness out of each frame, we'd recommend toying with supersampling a bit until you get down to an average frame rate of about 65 or so. For those of you who have G-Sync monitors capable of 90 or 144Hz, turning down anti-aliasing a notch could yield you an average frame rate even higher than 72fps, and will likely reach into the mid 80s. This same advice can go for R9 Fury owners who have a FeeSync monitor to pair with their system. The TurboThe Turbo rig we build isn't the type of computer you build on a budget. It's not the type of thing you give to your college-bound kid, either. It's pure, unadulterated, enthusiast-grade power with a price target of $3,000. It's the Dream Machine's younger cousin. And when it comes to Battlefront, it plays like a dream. The Turbo build took advantage of two reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti video cards in SLI paired with a Core i7-5820K Haswell-E CPU. We mounted these components on an Asus micro-ATX board and stuck them into Fractal Design's Node 804 case. This rig didn't even blink when we ran Battlefront at 4K, giving us 70fps at the Ultra preset.
There really wasn't much to say when it came to tuning this rig, except that we had plenty of frame rate headroom to up the supersampling. Even at 115 percent scaling, we pulled off frame rates that topped 70fps. We could probably scale up to 118 or 120 percent while staying over 60fps, if we wanted. People who are going to build this type of rig should definitely pair it with a monitor to match. The Dell UP2414Q 4K monitor we used with this rig isn't really a gaming monitor, though it can hit 60Hz at 4K when using DisplayPort 1.2. For gamers who prefer higher refresh rates and at 1440p, this rig will definitely put a high-end monitor's 144Hz refresh rate to use. With the UP2414Q's pixel density, you can make the argument to turn down anti-aliasing at 4K. The process is really expensive at 4K, and at that resolution (and density), jaggies are pretty tough to make out. Turning anti-aliasing to medium or low would suffice for most, allowing for yet higher frame rates. For all its flaws, Star Wars: Battlefront is a beautiful game to look at and listen to. The game is quite playable at 1080p with modest hardware as well. Knowing what your hardware can do will help keep expectations in line, and ultimately reward you with a fun experience full of eye candy. Let us know what hardware and settings you're playing with, and may the (Ge)Force be with you. |
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