CES 2013 Coverage
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Corsair Hydro H60 Review A look at the improved Corsair Hydro series H60 High Performance Liquid cooling solution. Read More ...
PowerColor PCS+ HD 7870 Myst Edition Review An in depth look at the PowerColor PCS+ HD 7870 Myst Edition video card. Read More ...
Humble Indie Bundle 7 Review Read More ...
ASUS HD 7970 DirectCU II Review Read More ...
ASUS Maximus V Formula Review Read More ...
CM Storm Recon Mouse, Pad, and Bungee Roundup Review CM Storm Recon Mouse, Speed RX-L Pad, and Skorpion Bungee Roundup Review Read More ...
Thermaltake Armor Revo Gene 'Snow Edition' Review A comprehensive look at the Armor Revo Gene Snow Edition case from Thermaltake. Read More ...
CM Storm QuickFire TK Keyboard Review Cooler Master CM Storm QuickFire TK LED Backlit Keyboard Review Read More ...
Sapphire Vapor-X Universal CPU Cooler Review An in depth look at Sapphires entry into the CPU cooling market. Read More ...
ASUS F2A85-V PRO Motherboard Review A review on the ASUS F2A85-V PRO Motherboard. Read More ...
BitFenix Recon and BitFenix Hydra Pro Fan Controller Roundup Read More ...
Asus P8Z77-V DELUXE Review Read More ...
Corsair Carbide Series 200R Case Review Read More ...
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H-WiFi Review Read More ...
NVIDIA Black Ops II Grand Finals in Santa Clara on Saturday - Free Registration! If you live in or near the Santa Clara, California, region (or even if you're far away), NVIDIA has something for you. NVIDIA is hosting the Grand Finals of Call of Duty: Black Ops II | Rivalries between different universities on its Santa Clara campus on Saturday, January 19. and wants you to attend. Registration for the event is free, but on a first come, first serve basis so RSVP early! There will be some great matchups to watch while sampling different food and drinks. Everything begins at 1pm PST and lasts until 6pm PST, so if you want something fun to do on Saturday, head over to the registration site and reserve a seat. Attendees must be at least 18 years old to go however, and are responsbile for their own travel and accomdations. Check out the website for more details, and remember to register early! Competing universities include: University of California, Berkeley, University of Southern California, North Carolina State, Easte Carolina University, and Oregon State. Read More ...
Fourth Batch of Greenlit Titles Announced for Steam Greenlight Valve unveiled the fourth batch of Greenlit titles, bringing the total to over 60. Ten games and two software titles made the cut, including a few games that have appeared in indie bundles and The Age of Decadence, which was an OCC Steam Greenlight Spotlight back in October.
Games:
Akaneiro: Demon Hunters
Asylum
DLC Quest
Eador. Masters of the Broken World
La-Mulana
Leisure Suit Larry
MaK
The Age of Decadence
Unepic
War For The Overworld
In addition, Kentucky Route Zero and Incredipede were automatically greenlit last week for being Independent Games Festival (IGF) Main Competition finalists. Not as many titles as we saw in the previous two updates, but I'm certainly glad to see The Age of Decadence make the cut!
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Superconducting Generators to Cut Costs Whenever one tries to grow a technology out of local situations to commercial levels, they will find issues that have grown as well. Wind power is no exception as researchers are finding its efficiency is limited by the materials and methods the technology currently employs. Now researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and eight other partners are working on a new design that should cut costs greatly while also increasing output. Traditional generators use permanent magnets to create a magnetic field which is then used to generate electricity. The stronger the magnets the more power can be generated, but making strong magnets requires rare earth metals, which are often expensive and heavy. What the researchers are working on is a new design for wind turbines which utilize superconductors to create the magnetic fields and then carry the induced current out of the generator. This is not an easy thing to accomplish though as the superconductors to be used must be kept at 20 K (-253.15 ºC). When completed, such a direct-drive superconducting generator could produce 10 megawatts of power, but with less than one percent of the amount of rare earth metals used in conventional generators. This new design will also decrease transport and maintenance costs while extending the life of the turbine, making the design an all-around improvement of what is currently used. Read More ...
ECS Sponsoring Case Modding Contest The Modmen case modding contest from ECS is currently running and entries will be accepted until February 28, 2013. The top five entrants will be flown to Taipei, Taiwan to show off their entries at Computex 2013 in front of a panel of judges. The grand prize winner will receive $30,000 while the remaining four participants will get $1,000 in cash and $2,000 in hardware. Marketing Manager at ECS Ivette Huang said, "Winning the ECS Modmen competition will give someone international notoriety and top-notch cash and prizes.” Read More ...
New Multi-Junction Solar Cell Design to Break Efficiency Barrier Solar cells are one technology considered by some to be a great source for clean energy, but despite our knowledge of the photoelectric effect dating back to the 19th century it is still a relatively undeveloped technology. Many of the solar cells you see today utilize single-junction design, which has an upper-efficiency limit of roughly 33%, but a multi-junction design can surpass that. Researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory have recently developed a new multi-junction design which should be able to exceed 50% efficiency. The junctions within a semiconductor solar cell are the areas which actually collect the solar energy. A single junction is only able to absorb a small window of frequencies, so adding more junctions allows a cell to absorb more light and generate more electricity. (Theoretically an infinite-junction cell would achieve 87% efficiency.) What the researchers have done is discovered a semiconductor that can be grown with a specific structure and have band gaps from 0.7 to 1.8 electron volts. The band gaps of a material directly relate to what frequencies of light it can absorb. Currently it is just a new design that has been created, and not an actual solar cell with better than 50% efficiency. Hopefully one will be created soon so we can see exactly how efficient it is and get to work at setting a new record. Read More ...
New GPU Overclocking Utility from PowerColor A new GPU overclocking utility, PowerUp Tuner, is now available from PowerColor. Through this utility, users will be able to change a number of settings for their video cards including clock speed and voltage. Fan profile settings can also be created to have a number of different fan speed settings for different situations. Also included is the ability to monitor and save measurements such as temperature and clock speed, allowing for comparisons between applications. Read More ...
Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 Could be Announced in May According to a report in the Game Informer magazine, the next generation Xbox and Playstation may be unveiled in March this year. The report suggests both companies are planning press conferences close to the Game Developer Conference 2013 that takes place in late May. This would allow next-generation titles to be demonstrated at the E3 consumer gaming expo in June. This would also enable the consoles to be released to the market at the end of the year, however some reports indicate that Sony intending to release the next-generation PlayStation before Microsoft release the Xbox. The Game Informer report contradicts many other rumours, including a number of comments made by a Sony Executive, that gamers waiting to hear about the next generation PlayStation would have to wait until at least May. Read More ...
Samsung Galaxy S II to Receive Jelly Bean Update Samsung has announced on its Korean website that it will begin updating its Galaxy S II smartphone to Android 4.1 'Jelly Bean' in February. The message has since been removed, but not before Samsung fansite SamMobile managed to get a screenshot of the page. The update will be available through the Samsung Kies software, and will take up 1GB of the device's internal memory. The update will add functionality to the device, and is set to extend its already long two year lifespan. It also follows the release of the Galaxy S II Plus last week, a Jelly Bean version of the Galaxy S II, powered by a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor clocked at 1.2GHz. Read More ...
Thermocrystals Invented for Heat Control Technologies to manipulate photons and electrons are pervasive in the modern world for the simple reason that they are simple to make and work with. This is not the case for heat though as the frequencies the phonons that carry thermal energy exist at very high frequencies. Researchers at MIT though have recently found a way to reduce these frequencies, and with that ability create a thermocrystal to manipulate heat within. Phonons are the quasiparticle for all vibrations, such as sound and heat. Sonic phonons have relatively low kilohertz frequencies, which allow them to travel great distances, while thermal phonons have terahertz frequencies and persist for only nanometers. In order to manipulate thermal phonons, the researchers had to drop their frequencies down to a window between 100 and 300 gigahertz, which was accomplished with thin films of an alloy of silicon and germanium nanoparticles. This 'hypersonic heat,' as the researchers call it, is something that specially designed thermocrystal will be able to manipulate, similar to how photonic crystals control light. The true potential of this research is not in what the MIT researchers have already done, but in what other researchers are going to do with it. This work could lead to thermal lenses, for focusing heat like light, or thermal diodes, to direct the flow of heat. Eventually thermal cloaks could be developed using similar principles as optical cloaks which rely on metamaterials. Read More ...
Hardware Roundup: Tuesday Edition Today we have a comparison of several liquid cooling kits from Corsair including the Hydro H60. We also have a review on the ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II 4GB SLI video card and its performance in a two-way SLI configuration. We're still seeing some followup coverage from last week's CES 2013 show in Las Vegas. Of course, OCC was there and you can check out our CES 2013 Coverage if you haven't done so already. Cooling Corsair Hydro Series Cooler Comparison and Review - H60, H80i, H100 @ PC Perspective Trade Shows/Conventions CES 2013: Archos Tablets @ ThinkComputers Video ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II 4GB SLI @ [H]ardOCP Read More ...
Mass-Based Atomic Clock Developed Standard units are among the most important inventions ever as it is only possible with them to measure and analyze the world around us. For that reason researchers are continually looking for new ways to make measurements, as one method may have more potential than another. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Berkeley Lab have developed a new method for measuring time, which is quite clever. Modern atomic clocks work by counting the number of transitions an electron makes from one orbit to another within an atom, and the second is actually defined as so many transitions for a specific transition within a cesium atom. What the researchers have developed is also an atomic clock but instead of measuring electron transitions it measures the frequency of atoms. Quantum mechanics tells us that mass exists as a wave-particle duality, so every particle, including atoms, have a frequency typically ten billion times greater than frequencies of visible light, called the Compton or de Broglie frequency. To harness this property of matter, the researchers created an atomic interferometer which takes two identical atoms and moves one while keeping the other still. Relativity tells us that the movement of the one causes its frequency to shift, and that shift the researchers have transitioned to a laser which can then be measured. This first iteration of the clock is comparable in precision to the first atomic clocks developed 60 years ago, but could one day be improved to match the most precise clocks in existence. Potentially it could have other uses too, such as defining the kilogram and even analyzing the properties of antimatter. Read More ...
New Cyber Attack Discovered A team of Russian researchers at Kaspersky has found a new cyber attack known as Red October, sharing the name of a Russian submarine from a Tom Clancy novel. Red October has been targeting diplomatic, government, and scientific systems since 2007. Infected computers have been discovered across the globe and the team doesn't plan to reveal specific organizations that were targeted. The team believes that the people behind this attack are of Russian origin and also compared the virus to the Flame virus that was discovered recently. Read More ...
Oracle Releases Patch to Fix Security Vulnerability Oracle has released an emergency patch to fix a major security flaw in the latest edition of its Java software, Java 7. The vulnerability was first reported at the end of last week and allowed hackers to remotely execute code on infected machines. The patch is available for download from the Oracle website and it is recommended that all users download and install the update. Oracle has also released an advisory statement that claims the update changes the way the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) interacts with web applets using the software. The default security level is also increased from 'normal' to 'high', which prompts the user before running certain unsigned applets. Read More ...
US Will Not Construct Death Star In an effort to encourage the American citizenry to be more involved with its government, the White House set up an online platform for submitting petitions to the administration. If enough people sign a petition, the administration is obliged to respond to it. A petition posted in November quickly reached that number and now the White House has responded to the call to "Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016." The answer is no, even though such a program would spur job creation in many important fields and strengthen national defense. The official response explains its reasoning by pointing out that such a project would likely cost more than 850 quadrillion dollars ($850,000,000,000,000,000), the original design has a critical weakness that is easily exploited by one person, and "the administration does not support blowing up planets." The response does go on to point out that there are many current and future programs to take us into a Star-Wars-like future, including programs at NASA and DARPA. If you want to read about them, follow the source link, but be warned, there are enough Star Wars references in it to choke a habogad. Read More ...
In Win's Unusual H-Frame Case Shrunk to ITX Standard In Win's H-Frame is possibly one of the most unique cases you'll ever see built, which was lauded for its daring design and quality but lost marks for being too costly for the average PC enthusiast. In Win now looks to ready to take that unusual design to Lilliputian levels with the H-Frame Mini. Details were scarce, but the H-Frame Mini manages to squeeze in a 120W PSU, comes with USB 3.0 output and will be released in a variety of colors. Compared to its bigger mid-tower sibling, the ITX-based chassis has the dwarfish dimensions of 263 x 122 x 273 mm, but retains the same open-frame concept that's bound to attract dust on your hardware too. Still, if you're looking to build a tiny PC that's scores high on uncommon design, the H-Frame Mini seems like a good bet. Read More ...
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