General Gaming Article |
- Build a PC: Recommended Builds (August2014)
- Nvidia Shield Tablet Review
- Rebooted King's Quest Adventure Game Won't Be a Point and Click
- Microsoft Yanks Patch Tuesday Kernel Update Containing a BSOD Bug
- Blizzard's Bumping Up the Price of World of Warcraft Subscriptions in the U.K.
- Take a Sneak Peek of Three Upcoming Gigabyte Motherboards for Haswell-E
- Hackers Gain Access to Personal Info of 4.5 Million Community Health Patients
- Newegg Daily Deals: Intel 730 Series 480GB Solid State Drive, AMD A10-6800K Richland, and More!
- Surface Pro 3 Docking Station Now Available in Canada and U.S.
- Microsoft Releases Hotfix for Recent Internet Explorer Speed Issues
| Build a PC: Recommended Builds (August2014) Posted: 18 Aug 2014 03:02 PM PDT Budget, baseline, and performance PC builds!What time is it? It's time to Build a PC with our Blueprints! This month, we've built three rigs at three approximate price points: Budget Gamer, Mid-Grade, and Turbo. That's right, we're mixing things up again. No more rotation of four systems into three slots. For the foreseeable future, there will always be a budget system in our Blueprints section. Yay! Prices listed here reflect print time and may not match the ones you find elsewhere online. In addition, Newegg has jumped on board to offer packaged deals for each of the builds below in an attempt to offer a better overall value. To see these bundle prices, click the "Buy or get more info at Newegg" button at the bottom of each build. Feedback is welcome. Tell us what you think! Note: Some of the prices/links listed below may not show up properly if this page is ad-blocked. BUDGET GAMER
For the first time in a while, we have reached equilibrium at the budget level. Each part on this list is pretty much the best bang for your buck. You could put a closed-loop liquid cooler (CLC) in here, but the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO is too good a value to pass up at this tier. Might as well put the extra cost of a CLC toward something else. If you're prepared to spend about $700, we'd bump the SSD up to a 256GB Crucial MX100, which currently goes for $110. That'll give gamers a lot more room to install their favorite games on a zippy storage device. Note: We apparently snagged a few of these items on deep discount at the time that we assembled our list, so the Newegg live price might be a little higher. MID-GRADE
The Strider Plus, a fully modular 850-watt power supply from Silverstone, is reasonably priced, so it replaces the 750-watt semi-modular Seasonic unit we slotted last month. The extra juice better prepares this system for multiple video cards down the road. Intel's Devil's Canyon Core i5-4690K arrives, replacing the i5-4670K. The new one's base clock speed is 4Ghz, which is 600MHz higher than before, and it will turbo to 4.4GHz. Radeon cards continue to fall in price, and the R9 280X is now within reach; it's now a better value at this tier than a GeForce GTX 760. But the 250GB Samsung 840 Evo at $160 is no longer competitively priced, so we've replaced it with the 256GB Crucial MX100, which isn't as fast but is a much better value. Note: We apparently snagged a few of these items on deep discount at the time that we assembled our list, so the Newegg live price might be a little higher. TURBO
THIS BUILD PREVIOUSLY FEATURED a quad-core Ivy Bridge-E (IVB-E) CPU on the LGA 2011 platform, aka X79. With the zippy Devil's Canyon CPUs available, we've switched to Intel's Core i7-4790K. It's a refresh of the company's newer "Haswell" generation on the less expensive LGA 1150 platform. Since LGA 1150 is limited to 16 PCI Express lanes, whereas X79 has 40, the new mobo and CPU don't handle three or more video cards nearly as well. But if you stick to "only" two video cards, you'd need a benchmark to see the difference between the two platforms. Like the i5-4690K, this chip starts at 4GHz and boosts to 4.4GHz. (We also don't want to recommend an X79 system, since it will be retired within the next few months, in favor of the incompatible LGA 2011-3, aka X99.) We're also sticking with the GA-Z97X-UD5H motherboard at this higher tier, because its mixture of price, performance, and features is hard to beat. We could get a less expensive SSD, but money isn't as strong of a concern at this tier. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 18 Aug 2014 02:36 PM PDT Updated: Now with video review!Despite its problems, we actually liked Nvidia's original Shield Android gaming handheld. Our biggest issue with it was that it was bulky and heavy. With rumors swirling around about a Shield 2, we were hoping to see a slimmer, lighter design. So consider us initially disappointed when we learned that the next iteration of Shield would just be yet another Android tablet. Yawn, right? The fact of the matter is that the Shield Tablet may be playing in an oversaturated market, but it's still great at what it sets out to be. We've updated our review to include the video review above. At eight inches, the Shield Tablet features a gorgeous 1900x1200 display, which shares the same resolution as Google's flagship Nexus 7 tablet. At 13.1 ounces, the Shield Tablet is about three ounces heavier than the Nexus 7 but still a lot lighter than the original's 1 lb. 4.7 ounces. Part of the weight increase with the Shield Tablet over the Nexus 7 is due to the extra inch that you're getting from the screen, but also because the Shield Tablet is passively cooled and has an extra thermal shield built inside to dissipate heat. It's a little heavier than we like, but isn't likely to cause any wrist problems. On the back of the Shield is an anti-slip surface and a 5MP camera, and on the front of the tablet is a front-facing 5MP camera and two front-facing speakers. While the speakers are not going to blow away dedicated Bluetooth speakers, they sound excellent for a tablet. In addition to the speakers, the Shield Tablet has a 3.5mm headphone jack up at the top. Other ports include Micro USB, Mini HDMI out, and a MicroSD card slot capable of taking up to 128GB cards. Buttons on the Shield include a volume rocker and a power button, which we found to be a little small and shallow for our liking.
The guts of the Nvidia Shield Tablet. All of this is running on the latest version of Android KitKat (4.4). Nvidia says that it will update the tablet to Android L within a few weeks of Google's official release. If Nvidia's original Shield is any indication of how well the company keeps up with OS updates, you should be able to expect to get the latest version of Android after a couple of weeks, if not a months, after release. Regardless, the Shield Tablet is running a pretty stock version of Android to begin with, the main difference being that Nvidia has pre-loaded the tablet with its Shield Hub, which is a 10-foot UI used to purchase, download, and launch games. Arguably, the real star of the tablet is Nvidia's new Tegra K1 mobile superchip. The 2.2GHz quad-core A15 SOC features Nvidia's Kepler GPU architecture and 192 CUDA cores along with 2GB of low-power DDR3. K1 supports many of the graphical features commonplace in GeForce graphics cards, including tesselation, HDR lighting, Global illumination, subsurface scattering, and more. In our performance benchmarks, the K1 killed it. Up until now, the original Shield's actively cooled Tegra 4 is arguably one of the most, if not the most, powerful Android SOC on the market, but the K1 slaughters it across the board. In Antutu and GeekBench benchmark, we saw modest gains of 12 percent to 23 percent in Shield vs. Shield Tablet action. But in Passmark and GFX Bench's Trex test, we saw nearly a 50 percent spread, and in 3DMark's mobile Icestorm Unlimited test, we saw an astounding 90 percent advantage for the Shield Tablet. This is incredible when you consider that the tablet has no fans and a two-watt TDP. Compared to the second-gen Nexus 7, the Shield Tablet benchmarks anywhere from 77 percent to 250 percent faster. This SOC is smoking fast. In terms of battery life, Nvidia claims you'll get 10 hours watching/surfing the web and about five hours from gaming with its 19.75 Wh battery. This is up 3.75 Wh up from Google's Nexus 7 equivalent, and from our experiential tests, we found those figures to be fairly accurate if not a best-case scenario. It will pretty much last you all day, but you'll still want to let it sip juice every night.
The new wireless controller uses Wi-Fi Direct instead of Bluetooth for lower latency. Of course, if you're going to game with it, you're going to need Nvidia's new wireless Shield Controller. Sold separately for $60, the 11.2-ounce Shield Controller maintains the same button layout as the original Shield controller, but feels a lot lighter and is more comfortable to hold. While most Android game controllers operate over Bluetooth, Nvidia opted to go with Wi-Fi Direct, stating that it offers 2x faster response time and more bandwidth. The extra bandwidth allows you to plug a 3.5mm headphone into the controller and also allows you to link up to four controllers to the device, which is an appreciated feature when you hook up the tablet to your HDTV via the Shield Tablet's Console Mode. Other unique features of the controller include capacitive-touch buttons for Android's home, back, and play buttons. There's also a big green Nvidia button that launches Shield Hub. The controller also has a small, triangle-shaped clickable touch pad which allows you to navigate your tablet from afar. One quibble with it is that we wish the trackpad was more square, to at least mimic the dimensions of the tablet; the triangle shape was a little awkward to interface with. Another problem that we initially had with the controller was that the + volume button stopped working after a while. We contacted Nvidia about this and the company sent us a new unit, which remedied the issue. One noticeable feature missing from the controller is rumble support. Nvidia said this was omitted on the original Shield to keep the weight down; its omission is a little more glaring this time around, however, since there's no screen attached to the device. The controller isn't the only accessory that you'll need to purchase separately if you want to tap into the full Shield Tablet experience. To effectively game with the tablet, you'll need the Shield Tablet cover, which also acts as a stand. Like most tablets, a magnet in the cover shuts off the Shield Tablet when closed, but otherwise setting up the cover and getting it to act as a stand is initially pretty confusing. The cover currently only comes in black, and while we're generally not big on marketing aesthetics, it would be nice to have an Nvidia green option to give the whole look a little more pop. We actually think the cover should just be thrown in gratis, especially considering that the cheapest 16GB model costs $300. On the upside though, you do get Nvidia's new passive DirectStylus 2 that stows away nicely in the body of the Shield Tablet. Nvidia has pre-installed note-writing software and its own Nvidia Dabbler painting program. The nice thing about Dabbler is that it leverages the K1's GPU acceleration so that you can virtually paint and blend colors in real time. There's also a realistic mode where the "paint" slowly drips down the virtual canvas like it would in real life.
The Shield Controller is a lot lighter and less blocky than the original Shield Portable. But that's probably not why you're interested in the Shield Tablet. This device is first and foremost a gaming tablet and even comes with a free Android copy of Trine 2. Trine 2 was originally a PC game and it's made a great transition to the Shield Tablet. While the game was never known to be a polygon pusher, it looks just as good as it ever did on its x86 debut. With gaming as the primary driver for Shield Tablet, you may wonder why Nvidia didn't bundle its new controller. The company likely learned from Microsoft's mistake with Kinect and the Xbox One: Gamers don't like to spend money and getting the price as low as possible was likely on Nvidia's mind. Of course, not everyone may even want a controller, with the general lack of support for them in games. Nvidia says there are now around 400 Android titles that support its controller, but that's only a small percentage of Android games and the straight truth is that the overwhelming majority of these games are garbage. Nvidia is making a push for Android gaming, however. The company worked with Valve to port over Half Life 2 and Portal to the Shield and they look surprisingly fantastic and are easily the two prettiest games on Android at the moment. Whether Android will ever become a legitimate platform for hardcore gaming is anyone's guess, but at least the Shield Tablet will net you a great front seat if the time ever arises. Luckily, you won't have to rely solely on the Google Play store to get your gaming fix. Emulators run just as well here as they did on the original Shield and this iteration of Shield is also compatible with Gamestream, which is Nvidia's streaming technology that allows you to stream games from your PC to your Shield. Gamestream, in theory, lets you play your controller-enabled PC games on a Shield. At this point, Nvidia says Gamestream supports more than 100 games such as Batman: Arkham Origins and Titanfall from EA's Origin and Valve's Steam service. The problem, though, is that there are hundreds more games on Steam and Origin that support controllers—but not the Shield Tablet's controller. For example, Final Fantasy VII, a game that we couldn't get to work with the original Shield, still isn't supported even though it works with an Xbox controller on the PC. When Gamestream does work, however, it's relatively lag-free and kind of wonderful. The one caveat here is that you'll have to get a 5GHz dual-band router to effectively get it working. Nvidia Shield Video demo. Would we buy the Shield Tablet if we owned the original Shield (now renamed the Shield Portable)? Probably not. If we were looking for a new tablet and top-notch gaming performance was on the checklist, the Shield Tablet is easily the top contender today. We'd take it over the second-gen Nexus 7 in a heartbeat. While we understand why Nvidia decided to separate the cover and controller to keep the prices down and avoid the Kinect factor, we think a bundled package with a small price break as an alternative would have been nice. All things considered though, consider us surprised. The Shield Tablet is pretty dang cool. $300 Update: The original article incorrectly labled the Shield Portable benchmarks with the Nexus 7 figures. The issue has been resolved and both benchmark charts are listed below. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rebooted King's Quest Adventure Game Won't Be a Point and Click Posted: 18 Aug 2014 12:49 PM PDT
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| Microsoft Yanks Patch Tuesday Kernel Update Containing a BSOD Bug Posted: 18 Aug 2014 12:20 PM PDT
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| Blizzard's Bumping Up the Price of World of Warcraft Subscriptions in the U.K. Posted: 18 Aug 2014 11:53 AM PDT
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| Take a Sneak Peek of Three Upcoming Gigabyte Motherboards for Haswell-E Posted: 18 Aug 2014 09:51 AM PDT
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| Hackers Gain Access to Personal Info of 4.5 Million Community Health Patients Posted: 18 Aug 2014 09:29 AM PDT
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| Newegg Daily Deals: Intel 730 Series 480GB Solid State Drive, AMD A10-6800K Richland, and More! Posted: 18 Aug 2014 08:09 AM PDT
Top Deal: It's about damn time a manufacturer blinged out a solid state drive with a skull! Why? Uh, that's a good question. But forget about the 'why' and ask instead, "Why not?" Then look at your own storage device -- is it marked with anything worthy of a case window? Want one that is? Then check out today's top deal for an Intel 730 Series 2.5-inch 480GB SSD for $360 with free shipping (normally $400 - use coupon code: [EMCHRDC42]). This more to this drive than just a sweet design -- it combines data center DNA for rock solid reliability with performance tuning to deliver sequential read and write speeds of up to 550MB/s and 470MB/s, respectively. It's also backed by a 5-year warranty. Other Deals: Intel Core i5-4460 Haswell Quad-Core 3.2GHz LGA 1150 Desktop Processor for $180 with free shipping (normally $190 - use coupon code: [EMCPBWF26]) AMD A10-6800K Richland 4.1GHz (4.4GHz Turbo) Socket FM2 100W Quad-Core Desktop Processor for $120 with free shipping (normally $140 - use coupon code: [EMCPBWF27]) Asus VE248H Black 24-inch 2ms Full HD HDMI LED Backlight LCD Monitor w/Speakers for $145 with free shipping (normally $180 - use coupon code: [EMCPBWF25]; additional $20 Mail-in rebate) Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit for $125 with free shipping (normally $140 - use coupon code: [EMCPBWF76]) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Surface Pro 3 Docking Station Now Available in Canada and U.S. Posted: 17 Aug 2014 11:47 PM PDT Connect up to two external monitors to your Surface Pro 3The Surface Pro 3 Docking Station on Friday became available for purchase both online and offline in Canada and the United States. By far the most expensive accessory for the 12-inch tablet at $199, the Docking Station promises to transform your Surface Pro 3 device into a full-fledged desktop workstation. The Surface Pro 3 Docking Station has: three USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, Mini DisplayPort video output, 3.5mm audio input/output connection, security lock slot, and power supply input. Combine the Docking Station's Mini DisplayPort with the one already present on the tablet and you get the ability to connect up to two external displays. Alternately, you could use either one of those ports to connect a 4k display just as Microsoft Surface senior product manager Suneel Goud likes to do. "I personally use it at work to connect to my 4K external monitor, ergonomic keyboard and mouse, printer, external hard-drive, and multimedia speakers. And I still have open ports for additional accessories," Goud wrote in a post on the Surface Blog Friday. Image Credit: Microsoft/Suneel Goud Follow Pulkit on Google+ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Microsoft Releases Hotfix for Recent Internet Explorer Speed Issues Posted: 17 Aug 2014 10:40 PM PDT Couple of recent security updates to blameWhen a Microsoft exec revealed that company currently has no plans of porting Internet Explorer over to Android and iOS during a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, we were left scratching our heads as to why that might be. Here's a possible explanation: It could be that the Internet Explorer team is too busy fixing IE for Windows to build entirely new versions of the browser. No sooner had Microsoft finished patching 26 Internet Explorer vulnerabilities as part of its August Patch Tuesday update than it realized Internet Explorer was a tad slow as a result of all the recent patching and that the issue was serious enough to warrant an out-of-band fix. "After you apply the MS14-037 (July 8, 2014) or MS14-051 (August 12, 2014) cumulative security update for Internet Explorer, web applications that implement consecutive modal dialog boxes may cause Internet Explorer to become slow and unresponsive over time. This issue occurs in Internet Explorer versions 7 through 11," Microsoft wrote in it security advisory. In case you've the security updates that are to blame for this issue, all you need to do is to download the appropriate hotfix file based on your operating system and browser combination from this link. Follow Pulkit on Google+ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
King's Quest is coming back in a different way
Just when you thought that BSODs were a thing of the past
As subscribers flee, subscription pricing goes up
A colorful collection of motherboards
Major hospital group falls prey to hacker attack
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