NVIDIA GTX 690 Review
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EA Wants Our Opinion on Origin
EA is trying to do all it can to improve its image, especially in light of a recent consumer vote. Some of you may use EA's Origin service for certain games, like Mass Effect 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic, or Battlefield 3, but there are some problems with the service itself. Compared to Valve's Steam service, EA pales in the amount of features and support, but it seems EA is trying to fix that. EA is asking for user opinion on Origin and just what we would like to see change with the service. The publisher wants to know what your favorite feature of Origin is and also one thing that could be improved or added to make it better. You can post your comments on the EA Origin page, which is currently over 1,000 responses so far. EA will host a live question and answer session on May 8th at 10am PST and will provide instructions on how to RSVP. Now is your chance to tell EA your thoughts on Origin and hopefully see it improve.
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Bringing Holograms to Videoconferencing
Videoconferencing is kind of cool. The ability to actually see the person you are talking to allows you to pick up on nonverbal cues and, for some people, is more comfortable than talking to a disembodied voice. Still, talking to a flat screen is not the same as talking to someone standing in the room, so researchers at Queen's University have created a cylindrical display system for projecting 3D holograms.
By using a 3D projector, acrylic cylinder, a convex mirror, and some Kinects, the researchers built the TeleHuman and BodiPod systems. TeleHuman is a videoconferencing system that creates a 3D image a person can walk around. If for some reason you want to see the other person’s back, just walk around the cylinder and see. The BodiPod system is for the display and manipulation of 3D human anatomy model. With gesture controls a user can peel away layers to the body while voice commands can be used to zoom in on specific organs.
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Notch Blasts EA's 'Indie' Bundle
If you happen to load up Steam, you will no doubt see the EA Indie Bundle for sale. This bundle packages five games (and one expansion) for the low price of $21, which is 70% off the normal price. However, EA's use of the term "indie bundle" is causing some problems with members of the game industry, like Notch. Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson laments EA's usage of the "indie bundle" term by saying "EA is methodically destroying" the gaming industry. Notch sees indie games as saving the industry, and judging by how popular indie bundles are, he is on to something. Websites like Humble Bundle, Indie Royale, and Indie Gala offer unique indie games at a name your own price, which helps to get the word out about some otherwise unheard of games and helps support the developers. Notch makes it clear he has no problems with the games in EA's bundle, but says he has a problem with EA marketing it. This is not a way to raise money for a cause, but simply EA trying to cash in on the newest trend.
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New Design Improves Thermoelectric Semiconductor
Many processes are imperfect and waste energy by generating unwanted heat. Car engines and electronics are two examples. As just improving efficiency is not always easy, researchers are working on thermoelectric materials that convert heat differences into electricity. Researchers at Boston College and MIT have recently found a way to significantly improve the efficiency of one of these materials.
Silicon germanium, SiGe, is a semiconducting alloy that has been used for its thermoelectric properties for years. Some NASA missions actually use it in their radioisotope thermoelectric generators. The researchers applied a technique used in the thin-film semiconductor industry called 3D modulation-doping strategy which increased electrical conductivity while decreasing thermal conductivity.
Ideally a thermoelectric material will conduct electricity well, but not heat. The reason heat cannot be allowed to flow well is because a temperature difference is needed to generate an electric current. If the heat is able to quickly diffuse through the material, there will no longer be a temperature difference.
While the increase in performance is important, the process also reduced the amount of germanium used in the alloy by 30%. Germanium is not cheap, so this kind of reduction helps make the thermoelectric material more economically viable.
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The Elder Scrolls Online Confirmed - Set 1,000 Years Before Skyrim
The rumors have finally been proven true after all these years, as The Elder Scrolls Online has been officially confirmed. ZeniMax Online will be handling the duties for the MMO and have been working on it for the last five years. The Elder Scrolls Online will be set 1,000 years before the events of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which should put it squarely in the Second Era of TES history. There will be three main factions in the MMO and you will be able to journey across all of Tamriel. That means you can see Skyrim, Morrowind, Elsweyr, Valenwood, High Rock, and all the other provinces, which makes The Elder Scrolls Online an impressively large MMO. The number of races you can play as is currently unknown, but hopefully that will be revealed shortly. The main enemy will be Molag Bal, who wishes to turn all of Tamriel into a terrible nightmare filled with daedra.
The Elder Scrolls Online is expected to launch in 2013, so MMO fans will have to wait a little while longer. Hopefully ZeniMax Online knows what it is doing and can deliver an MMO worthy of The Elder Scrolls name. Bethesda Game Studios is not working on the MMO, so it should be free to work on single player installments in the future. Feel free to discuss your thoughts in the comments below or in this thread.
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Steam Adds Remote Download Function in Latest Beta; Full Launch Soon
When Valve launched its mobile version of Steam, many people were wondering just when they could purchase a game and also have it start downloading on their computer. Currently you can purchase a game on mobile Steam, but then have to start the download on your computer. A little inconvienent if you wanted to start playing the game as soon as you got home, but that will soon change. Valve is launching a beta version of the remote download function, with a full version expected to launch soon. However, a little snafu rose where some users could not manage their downloads or even boot the games once downloaded. It sounds like Valve has corrected the issue, which means you can remotely manage your account from your phone or another computer. If you are at another computer, you will be able to start the download on your main system to be ready to play when you get home from work or school.
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Working on Liquid Solar Cells
When developing solar cells researchers and engineers have to strike a balance between efficiency, flexibility, and cost. Generally, the more efficient the material the less flexible and more expensive it is. The cheaper and more flexible the material the less efficient it is. These relationships are true for the time being, but researchers are hard at work to change them.
Researchers at the University of Southern California have been working on liquid solar cells and recently made an important discovery. Liquid solar cells are actually solutions of nanocrystals which produce electricity when light shines on them. These crystals can be made very cheaply and be painted onto any transparent material, like glass or plastic. The catch is the nanocrystals normally have organic ligands attached, to prevent them from sticking together in solution. These ligands resist the electric current produced by the crystals though.
To overcome the resistance of the organic ligands, the researchers developed synthetic ligands which still stabilize the solution but do not resist electricity as much. Liquid solar panels are still years away from being commercial products, but this is an important step towards realizing that future.
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Rumors Say Microsoft Will Launch $99 Xbox 360 with Two-Year Contract
Rumors are certainly a funny thing. They come in all shapes and sizes with varying degrees of actually coming true, but many of them are simply false. Typically when you hear "rumor" and "Microsoft" in the same sentence, you instantly think of the Next Xbox. This is not the case today, as the newest rumor pegs Microsoft as launching a $99 Xbox 360 on a two-year contract. The system would sell in Microsoft Stores and be a 4GB model with a bundled Kinet sensor, Xbox Live Gold, a two-year warranty, and potentially streaming content from cable or sports providers. A two-year contract is typically associated with a cell phone and not a game console, but I could see this one becoming true. There would be an early-termination fee as well, although the amount was not mentioned at this time.
Supposedly Microsoft will charge $15 a month for the subsidized 360, which comes out to $459 over the course of the two years. This is a little more than the cost of a 4GB console, Kinect sensor, and two years of Xbox Live Gold on its own ($420), so it will be interesting to see who goes for the two-year contract option.
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Folds and Wrinkles to Improve Solar Cell Efficiency
Though interest in solar panels is greatest now, solar absorbers have existed longer than man. Every leaf on a tree is the product of hundreds of millions of years of experimentation to find the best way to capture photons. Researchers at Princeton University, Engineering School are borrowing from the design of leafs and have made incredible advances in plastic photoelectric cells.
Plastic solar panels work just like silicon solar panels do but instead of using silicon they use plastics, or polymers. While these organic materials can be made more cheaply than silicon and are more resilient, they are not as efficient as the semiconductor. The Princeton researchers appear to have found a way to close the efficiency gap between the two materials by putting folds and wrinkles on the surface.
Just as on leafs, these surface features act as waveguides to the captured light. When light strikes a leaf or the new solar panels, instead of being either absorbed or reflected, it can become trapped until the cell can absorb it. This allowed the cell to reach 10.6% efficiency, which is not necessarily spectacular but is getting to the 10-15% efficiency range believed to be needed for commercial development. However the solar cell has able to absorb long wavelength light six times better than most other cells.
Perhaps the greatest discovery of this research is that it is not limited to plastic solar cells. These surface features should improve the efficiency of any solar cell they are imprinted on.
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Hardware Roundup: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Edition
NVIDIA teased us and then announced the GTX 690 dual-GPU video card at GeForce LAN in Shanghai last weekend and now the restrictions have been pulled from the review sites and we have all the latest performance numbers for you to examine. The GTX 690 featrures two GK104 GPUs at a base clock speed of 915MHz. The other numbers include 3072 CUDA cores, 64 ROPs, 128 Texture units, and 4GB of GDDR5 that connects via a 512-bit interface. That's all just a start, though as our OCC review checks out gaming and overclocking performance as well. Go ahead and enjoy the reviews. You know you want one!
NVIDIA GTX 690 @ OCC
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Launch @ Neoseeker
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review - Dual GK104 Kepler Greatness @ PC Perspective
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690: The Dual-GPU Beast Arrived! @ Bjorn3D
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Benchmark Performance @ Benchmark Reviews
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Overclocked Sandy Bridge Runs Cooler Than Ivy Bridge CPUs
Intel's Ivy Bridge lineup has been making headlines with its latest 22nm processors, but many people who overclocked these found the temperatures to be significantly hotter than last year's Sandy Bridge CPUs. This puts the new Ivy Bridge at a severe disadvantage as the cooler Sandy Bridge chips allow for better overclocking headroom. Intel has stated in a recent report that the Ivy Bridge's 22nm die shrink does increase thermal density, but adds that "this is as designed and meets quality and reliability expectations for parts operating under specified conditions." As such, overclocking enthusiasts itching to get their hands dirty with the latest Ivy Bridge CPUs might want to invest heavily on a great cooling setup or just delay buying until Intel comes up with a better batch on its next stepping.
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Hardware Roundup: Thursday Edition
Today's roundup finds us looking at a pair of mid-tower cases that both tout cooling ability as one of the main selling points. We'll look first at the Raidmax Seiran which comes in black, red and white and comes standard with a single 180mm side fan for only $64.99US. If your tastes are a bit more refined, for about $100 more the understated design of the Corsair Graphite Series 600T chassis may be more to your liking and it can also be had as the Special Edition White Graphite Series 600T. Moving on to video components, we have a review on the HIS Multi-View+Sound display adapter that allows you to connect an additional display via an HDMI connection. We also have a look at the Zalman CNPS10X Optima heatsink.
Cases
Corsair Graphite Series 600T Mid-Tower Case @ [H]ardOCP
Raidmax Seiran Mid Tower Case @ ThinkComputers
Cooling
Zalman CNPS10X Optima Heatsink @ Frostytech
Video
HIS Multi-View+Sound Adapter @ Madshrimps
Miscellany
Biggest Tech Failures of The Last 10+ Years @ TechSpot
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MIT and Harvard Launch 'edX' Online Course Platform
Harvard University and MIT have recently launched a new online course platform called 'edX.' It has been designed with many purposes, from simply giving access to the universities caliber of instruction to the Internet community, to furthering education research for the betterment of all universities. The students of edX are not just students but may be subjects too (and there is nothing wrong with that).
Online classes are not exactly new, as universities across the country have been using them to either supplement their residential course or completely replace the classroom environment. From the point of view of these two universities though, the edX courses will only supplement their own, and will not give students course credit. However, it will be possible for an edX student to apply for certification. This certification will not be from MIT or Harvard, but will still prove a level of mastery has been achieved.
With the potential of thousands of students in a single class, the potential to study how people learn will not be wasted. Information will be gathered on how the courses are used and how the students interact, to potentially develop better teaching methods. These methods, after careful scrutiny, can then be tested on the students to see if they really do help the learning process.
MIT and Harvard invite other universities to join edX and to facilitate this are making the edX platform open source. This will allow anyone and everyone to modify the code to edX to either benefit the edX platform or to create something new. Regardless of what software changes the platform sees, and what partners join the program, this will undoubtedly be a major learning tool for thousands of people across Earth.
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Refamiliarize Yourself with Agent 47 in Newest Hitman: Absolution Trailer
When Hitman: Absolution launches later this year for PC, PS3, and 360, it will give us a deeper look into the psyche of Agent 47. Square Enix and IO Interactive would like everyone to remember just who Agent 47 is, especially considering the last Hitman game released in 2006, so today there is a new trailer giving us a chance to refamiliarize ourselves with Agent 47. The new Hitman: Absolution trailer shows some of the actions Agent 47 can perform as well as the type of world being built by IO Interactive. A brand-new game engine called Glacier 2 is powering Absolution and it is already looking great in the trailer below. Yes, it is all in-game footage so you get a good idea of how it will look. Agent 47 has not lost any if his abilities, although some of his moves are not exactly subtle. The trailer is not safe for work due to blood, violence, and language, so just be sure to keep the headphones handy.
NSFW
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Available Tags:NVIDIA , GTX , EA , Steam , Download , Rumors , Microsoft , Xbox , Hardware , GeForce , Ivy Bridge , Sandy Bridge ,
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