Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 2GB OC Review
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XFX R7790 Black Edition Overclocked Review
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Bioshock Infinite Review
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PowerColor Radeon HD 7850 PCS+ Review
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Free Anti-Virus Comparison Review
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How To Install Windows 8 Guide
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How to Install Windows 7 Guide
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Noctua 140mm/150mm Case Fan Roundup Review
Noctua 140mm/150mm Case Fan Roundup
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Frame Capture and Analysis Tools Review
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AZiO Large Print Tri-Color Backlight Keyboard Review
AZiO Large Print Tri-Color Backlight Keyboard Review
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650Ti Boost Review
NVIDIA fills out the sub $200 product stack with the GeForce GTX 650Ti Boost.
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PowerColor Radeon HD 7790 Turbo Duo Review
Taking PowerColor's HD 7790 Turbo Duo for a spin.
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Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X OC Review
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Unigine Valley 1.0 Benchmark Tool Walk Through
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Corsair Hydro Series H110 Review
Evaluating the performance of Corsairs latest addition to its Hydro Series the H110 2 x 140mm High performance liquid CPU cooler.
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Build Your Own HAL 9000 for $100
The lovable
Head on over to the source to see everything involved with getting your own HAL 9000 up and running. Remember, if it starts singing "Daisy Bell," find a spacesuit.
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Techland's Project Hell Officially Named Hellraid
Back in August of last year, we unveiled Dead Island developer Techland's newest project, Project Hell. Today, Techland posted a new blog entry, officially unveiling the game's title as Hellraid. Project Manager and Designer Marcin Kruczkiewicz (Kruq) calls the game a "first-person co-op slasher" set in a unique dark fantasy world. The combat system will require "precision and good timing when striking enemies and parrying their attacks," highlighted by copious amounts of blood. That being said, it's not all about melee attacks, as the game also features ranged weapons and magic.
Hellraid consists of two game modes: a single-player, story-driven campaign and four-person cooperative multiplayer against hordes of hellish monsters. It's the latter that is Techland's main focus, and despite the co-op nature, it'll actually feature a bit of competitive flair. Players will earn points by performing various actions, such as killing monsters or aiding a dying companion. Not only will there be leaderboards, but the best players will receive "special rewards." Lastly, Kruq discussed a feature of the game called the Game Master, which adds a bit of randomness and replayability to the game. The Game Master system randomly generates loot and enemy spawn locations, as well as online challenges. The latter essentially sounds like a dynamic quest system, which could make each game feel quite different.
Unfortunately, there's no trailer to show just yet, but hopefully we get one soon – Kruq does say more will be revealed in the coming weeks. It all sounds very promising so far, but I just hope the focus on the cooperative multiplayer aspect of the game doesn't negatively impact the single-player campaign. The screenshots and enemy models below sure do look sweet though! Hellraid is coming to PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, but a release date is unknown.
Source: Official Hellraid Site
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Four Tablets Rumored From Samsung
Samsung is reported to be working on four tablets for release this year with a variety of sizes and features. The Galaxy Tab DUOS 7.0 will use a 7" LCD with front and back facing cameras. The dual core tablet will also have the ability to support dual SIM cards. The Galaxy Tab 8.0 features an 8" AMOLED screen with 1080p resolution, dual cameras, and a quad-core Exynos 4412 CPU. A pair of 11" tablets, the Galaxy Tab 11 and Nexus 11, appear to differ only in the CPU used to power them. The Tab will have a dual-core Exynos 5250 while the Nexus is expected to be the first eight core tablet. Both will have dual cameras and a 64GB Micro SD card.
Source: SamMobile
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Tactile-Pixels May Bring Advanced Touch-Sensitivity to Devices
Touchscreens are becoming a near ubiquitous technology with smartphones, tablets, laptops and more employing them. Indeed it can be hard to imagine what our devices would be like if touch-sensitive screens were never developed. Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working on a next generation of touch screens with much greater resolution and sensitivity.
At the heart of this new technology are touch-sensitive transistors called taxels that are made of zinc oxide nanowires. These wires exhibit the piezoelectric effect, which is a linking between electricity and mechanical force. When pressure is applied to a piezoelectric material, an electrical voltage is produced, thereby registering touch. These nanowires however are special because they are also semiconductors, so as pressure is applied to them, their resistance changes. This allows the researchers to achieve much higher sensitivity, comparable to that of human skin, and at a resolution approaching 100 micrometers.
There is still a fair amount of work to do before taxels could enter our devices, including finding a way to produce them from single nanowires instead of bundles and integrating them into CMOS silicon devices. Fortunately the touch-sensitive transistors are already transparent, which is important if they would be placed on our displays.
Source: Georgia Institute of Technology
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LG Now Accepting Pre-orders on Curved TV
LG was the first manufacturer on the TV market to launch an OLED TV, and it has now put that technology to use by manufacturing a new type of TV. The screen is 55 inches diagonally with only a 4.3 mm side profile and weighing a mere 17 kg. What sets this TV apart from the crowd is its curved nature while still maintaining a very slim side profile. To top it off, the TV comes with special "thin-transparent film speakers" that are integrated into the TV's stand to achieve an overall slim design. The curved design will allow a more realistic viewing experience, since it will match our eyes better; however, the effect is only achieved when sitting at a certain distance. According to LG, the display is supposed to deliver an IMAX-like viewing experience, which means the display will have a very high resolution resulting in sharper pictures with a more natural look. Whether that is true has yet to be experienced, but it is definitely tempting to have three TVs hooked up as monitors with some good headphones and get fully immersed in one's favorite game.
The 55EA9800, as it is called, is supposed to cost $13,500 USD and is up for pre-orders now with availability starting next month. Availability in countries other than Korea will be announced at a later date.
Source: CNET Asia
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System Simulates Neuron Activity in Real-Time
The most powerful computational machine man has access to is not some supercomputer in a laboratory, but the human brain. The reason the organ is superior is that its billions of neurons have the ability to operate in parallel, unlike supercomputers which largely operate sequentially. This makes it so difficult for a supercomputer to simulate the human brain that what would take a brain a second to do, the computer requires hours to complete. As reported by NSF though, researchers have developed a news system with the ability to simulate the brain in real-time, while being far less power-hungry than a supercomputer.
Called Neurogrid, the system is made up of only 16 chips with 65,000 simulated, silicon neurons each, and each neuron is networked to thousands of others. While this does emulate the structure of the brain, what really gives Neurogrids its simulation superiority is how the neurons behave. Within the brain, neurons send signals to each other in a binary way, like computers, but within each neuron signals are processed non-linearly. Essentially neurons communicate digitally but think in analog, and supercomputers have a hard time compensating for this, but Neurogrid's neurons have been designed to operate similarly.
Along with being significantly faster than a supercomputer, Neurogrid is also much more efficient at mimicking the brain. While a supercomputer like Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory can require 8 megawatts of electricity to run, Neurogrid can operate with just 5 watts, making it much more accessible for future research into the brain.
Source: National Science Foundation
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Hardware Roundup: Monday Edition
We have a lot of items to start the week, including a contest to win a Thermaltake Chaser A31 Snow Edition case, Smart Series 750W PSU, and a Water 2.0 Performer CPU cooler. The contest runs through May 10, so head on over to the link to see how to enter (Facebook is required). Next there's a look at the Corsair Obsidian Series 350D case, which brings the company's venerable Obsidian cases to the Micro-ATX size. We also have a case from Lian Li that, while small, is still able to fit an E-ATX motherboard. All these cases need some components inside, and luckily there's a BIOSTAR NM70I-847 motherboard to check out. There's plenty of other stuff to check out, including an Acer Aspire laptop, a guide on how to boot to safe mode in Windows 8, and a look at the HWBOT TeamCup 2013.
Cases
Video Perspective: Corsair Obsidian Series 350D @ PC Perspective
Lian Li PC-V750WX Compact E-ATX @ Benchmark Reviews
Motherboards
BIOSTAR NM70I-847 @ Madshrimps
Laptops/Tablets
Acer Aspire E1-531 @ Madshrimps
Contests
Win a Thermaltake Case, Power Supply, and CPU Cooler! @ ThinkComputers
Miscellany
How To Boot Into Safe Mode On Windows 8 @ ThinkComputers
HWBOT TeamCup 2013 Stage 4 @ Madshrimps
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Galaxy Found in Rare Stage of Life
Though star formation may seem common based on what we see in the night sky, the process is somewhat delicate with winds and radiation from older stars able to prevent new stars from forming. This puts a limit on the efficiency with which a galaxy can form new stars, and now researchers have found a churning out stars at almost that limit.
The galaxy, SDSSJ1506+54, came to the researchers attention when NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) recorded massive amounts of infrared light being emanated from it. The researchers then brought in the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer which is able to detect carbon monoxide, an indicator of hydrogen gas. Combining the data from the two observatories revealed that the galaxy must be forming new stars almost at the Eddington Limit, the theoretical maximum for star formation. Any faster and formed stars would be disrupting the proto-stars made of hydrogen gas that would otherwise collapse into stars.
As impressive a sight as this is, it will likely be short lived as the galaxy is also blowing a great deal of gas away from itself. In just tens of millions of years, it will no longer be able to create new stars and start maturing into an elliptical galaxy, the final form of a galaxy as it cools off.
Source: McGill University
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CISPA is Effectively Dead in the Senate
Last week, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) was passed in the House of Representatives. At that point it was then sent over to the Senate for them to vote on it, but it looks like CISPA is going to end there. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that while the bill is "important," its "privacy protections are insufficient." CISPA in its proposed form encompassed far too many things, as it not only allowed for security concerns to be shared but any information on specific users could be sent to the government.
It seems the Senate was concerned about that last part, as a representative of the Senate Commerce Committee stated "issues and key provisions" in CISPA are being divided up. Separate bills could come out of parts of those, like how email privacy, location tracking, and the like are being considered in a reform of the Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA). One thing that's certain with any new bills is privacy protection has to be a stronger component, as the White House will veto any legislation that doesn't include them.
Source: US News
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Presolar Grains Discovered
The Solar System existed long before man did, and will continue to exist long after humanity has died out, which can make it strange to consider times from before the Earth and Sun existed. With almost 10 billion years between the Big Bang and the formation of the Sun though, there is a lot of time there to consider, and every now and then we find something from that period. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have recently identified two grains of silica (SiO2) as not only being presolar, but from a supernova.
Presolar grains are definitely rare as they had to survive the heat of the early Solar System, but survive they did in the hearts of meteorites which later fell on Earth. To identify the grains as presolar, the researchers look at the oxygen isotopes. The materials that make up the Solar System all have roughly the same mix of isotopes, because everything got mixed together before settling into planets and the Sun. The researchers found these two grains were enriched in oxygen-18, unlike other presolar grains that have been discovered with enriched with oxygen-17. This difference the researchers believe is from the oxygen-17 grains coming from a red giant while the two oxygen-18 grains came from a supernova.
Supernova are among the brightest and most energetic events in the Universe, and it is believed that one triggered the formation of the Solar System. Potentially, these two grains are remnants of that very supernova, but only more study could possibly confirm that.
Source: Washington University in St. Louis
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Hardware Roundup: Friday Edition
It's the end of another week, but we have a nice selection of reviews for you to check out. There's a review on AMD's new G-Series SoCs based on the Jaguar core, which is the successor to the Bobcat core. The new chips are listed as more powerful while consuming less power, so be sure to read the review to see if that's the case. We have another look at the Pivos XIOS DS Media Play, which seems to be quite the popular item for the HTPC crowd. A new CPU cooler from Evercool gets put through the ringer to see how well it stacks up to the competition. Func built a name for itself over the past decade with a line of quality mousepads, and now it's released its first-ever gaming mouse. There's also a look at a new Bluetooth headset from Arion as well as a new podcast to check out.
CPUs
AMD Releases Latest Generation of G-Series Embedded Products @ PC Perspective
CPU Cooling
Evercool Venti HPQ-12025 Heatsink @ Frostytech
Keyboards/Mice
Func MS-3 Gaming Mouse @ Benchmark Reviews
Speakers/Headphones
Arion Foldable Bluetooth Headset @ LanOC Reviews
Media Players
Pivos XIOS DS Media Play @ ThinkComputers
Miscellany
Podcast #248 @ PC Perspective
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AMD Releases New $1000 GPU
AMD’s answer to the $1000 GPU has finally arrived. It is called the Radeon HD 7990 and it features two chips based on AMD’s GNC architecture. The core clock is 950MHz, which can go up to 1 GHz with Boost. The card will have 6GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1500 MHz and a memory bandwidth of 288GB/s. It is estimated to do 8.2 TFLOPs of Single Precision compute power and 2.04 GFLOPs of Double Precision compute power. The inside of the chip contains 64 compute units equaling 4096 stream processors and 256 texture units. All the information travels through a PCIe 3.0 x16 bus interface. To power the card AMD recommends a 750W PSU with two 150W PCIe connectors. For connectivity a DisplayPort 1.2 is required to run the total amount of six monitors; however, the card also supports HDMI, Dual-link DVI with HDCP, and VGA.
So if you are looking for a card that can supply your three to six 1080p or higher monitors, then look no further. The cost is fairly high, but the card is guaranteed to deliver. And as an extra treat, AMD throws in eight AAA games to ensure that you have something to push the card with. The titles are Hitman: Absolution, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, BioShock Infinite, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
Source: AMD
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