Tristellar S Mod ITX Chassis Debuted by DEEPCOOL
Back in May of this year, DEEPCOOL announced that its Tristellar case was the first to join its impressive GAMER STORM product line. The case was available to purchase this last June for roughly $400, and now DEEPCOOL has announced that it has teamed up with one of the most distinguished modders, Bill Owen, to debut the Tristellar S Mod. This latest offering from DEEPCOOL is an ITX chassis that is based on a spaceship and Star Wars design. The Tristellar S Mod features an intriguing paint job, custom air ducts, side windows that show off GPUs and SSDs, and the signature of Bill Owen. All of the baseline features found within the original Tristellar case are present, but with DEEPCOOL manufacturing only 50 units of the Tristellar S Mod, the latest case may prove even more popular than the first.
The DEEPCOOL Tristellar S Mod chassis will be available globally sometime this month, and features a hefty MSRP of $599.99. More information on the case can be found on the official product page.
Source: Press Release
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Hardware Roundup: Friday, September 11, 2015, Edition
Friday is upon us, with a few things to get you into the weekend. There is a review of the Logitech G310 Atlas Dawn mechanical keyboard, a tenkeyless model featuring the company's Romer-G switches. It is a paired down version of the bigger G910 keyboard, so be sure to read on to see how this second Romer-G keyboard performs. A new case mod uses the Corsair Graphite 780T and a black, white, and lime green theme for a truly unique look. Wrapping things up today is a new podcast covering the latest reviews and news from the past week.
Keyboards/Mice
Logitech G310 Atlas Dawn @ TechSpot
Miscellany
Case Mod Friday: Green Carnage @ ThinkComputers
Podcast #366 @ PC Perspective
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Study Examines How Free Products May Influence Bloggers
Researchers at Penn State have recently examined how compensation and free products can influence reviews by bloggers. Some fear that when compensation is provided by companies to bloggers who review their products, the bloggers are more likely to give these products more favorable reviews. According to the study this is not the case, and the reviewers will tend to believe they have more control over the organization providing the compensation.
For the study the researchers sent a questionnaire to 173 technology bloggers, as these bloggers tend to receive more compensation and review items than others. The results showed that the bloggers recognized that giving positive reviews for bad products would damage their credibility, and therefore their readership. Also the bloggers view PR representatives as sources for stories, and not income sources, while PR professionals view their relationships with bloggers as a way to spread the word, and not as a form of advertising. Further, requesting a positive review for compensation would kill the relationship with the blogger.
As the researchers point out, the compensation, such as receiving a product to review, is to balance the needs of both parties, as one needs the product to review it and the company wants to see their products talked about.
Source: Penn State
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PowerColor Announces R9 NANO Video Card
Amid the controversy regarding the lack of reviews of AMD R9 NANO video cards, PowerColor has announced its take on the card, the R9 NANO 4GB HBM. The card is just 6" in length but it "is the first GPU with on-chip High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) delivering extreme 4K gaming performance." The HBM uses a 4096-bit memory interface while running at 500MHz with a core speed of 1000MHz. The card features support for DirectX 12, CrossFire multi-GPU setups, three DisplayPort and one HDMI outputs.
Source: Press Release
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Hardware Roundup: Thursday, September 10, 2015, Edition
The first full week of September is drawing to a close, but not before we have some items for you to look over. There is a review of the AMD Radeon R9 Nano to see how this tiny video card handles the task of running a full Fiji core in something close to half the size of the larger Fury cards. We also have the Mionix Castor optical gaming mouse, a comfortable option with a 10,000DPI optical sensor for some truly fast movements. Lastly, we have an article looking at what the Apple iPhone 6s does different than the past model, and what all its specifications look like.
Video Cards
AMD Radeon R9 Nano @ TechSpot
Keyboards/Mice
Mionix Castor Optical Gaming Mouse @ Benchmark Reviews
Mobile
Everything You Need to Know About the iPhone 6s @ ThinkComputers
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Encapsulating Nanotubes for Integrated Circuits
There are several technologies we want to use in certain applications, but several hurdles still exist preventing us from doing so. One example of this is carbon nanotubes being used in integrated circuits, because when exposed to air, the nanotubes quickly degrade. Researchers at Northwestern University though, have developed a solution, similar to that found for OLEDs that suffered a similar problem.
Carbon nanotubes have practically all of their atoms on their surface, so anything that interacts with the surface can dramatically affect their properties. Water and dust from the air are two things that can damage the nanotubes, resulting in them only surviving for hours instead of years or decades. To solve this problem the researchers developed a material to encapsulate the nanotubes. Organic LEDs have a similar problem and encapsulation layers had to be developed for them as well, which inspired this work, but the encapsulating material has been tailored for nanotubes.
To test their encapsulation method, the researchers built static random-access memory circuits (SRAM), which can make up 85% of modern some CPUs. The encapsulated nanotubes not only survived longer than their exposed counterparts, but also showed improved spatial uniformity. As the method for applying the encapsulation layer can be done easily and cheaply, we could see many interesting applications for nanotube-based circuits, such as being integrated into credit cards to store additional security information.
Source: Northwestern University
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Radeon Technologies Group Formed by AMD
AMD ended up acquiring ATI roughly nine years ago for a whopping $5.6 billion, and since then has successfully offered a wealth of products in the graphics card realm by utilizing various company technologies. The company unfortunately has been failing to capture market share, as it was recently reported that AMD controls just 18 percent of the total GPU market, with NVIDIA obviously leading. Now, AMD has decided in a strategic decision to split off its GPU business from its CPU business and has formed the Radeon Technologies Group. President and CEO of AMD, Dr. Lisa Su, publically noted that "With the creation of the Radeon Technologies Group we are putting in place a more agile, vertically-integrated graphics organization focused on solidifying our position as the graphics industry leader, recapturing profitable share across traditional graphics markets, and staking leadership positions in new markets such as virtual and augmented reality."
The latest group formed by AMD is being led by Raja Koduri, who will oversee all of the aspects of various graphics technologies used in the company’s APU, discrete GPU, semi-custom, and GPU compute products. Koduri, who will report directly to Dr. Su, has more than 20 years of experience in developing solutions for visual computing on personal computers and has been directly involved in development of the industry’s first graphics chip with integrated High-Bandwidth Memory as well as AMD’s LiquidVR initiative.
Source: Press Release
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AMD and the Missing R9 Nano Reviews
If you have been patiently waiting for the OverclockersClub AMD Radeon R9 Nano review, well, we have some bad news for you. There won't be one. Neither will there be a Nano review for our sister site Neoseeker, or affiliate site HardOCP, or even to places like Tech Report and TechPowerUp. The reasoning behind this is rather curious, especially when all these sites, including OCC and Neoseeker, were invited to the paper launch for the Nano video card. It appears that AMD wants to send the new card to review sites that will give it a "fair review," whatever that means, and implies AMD is heavily cherry picking which sites it even wants to deal with. That isn't exactly good business as it heavily skews opinion of the card, because after all, if a product can only be seen in a positive light, how can you know it's truly all that it seems?
A big picture of this problem has been highlighted by HardOCP's editor-in-chief Kyle Bennett in an editorial, and the main thing to take away from it is how AMD PR is handling the situation. AMD's Corporate Vice President of Alliances Roy Taylor replied on Twitter to several people about certain sites not receiving Nano review samples with the line, "reviews need to be fair." When Kyle reached out to the PR, as well as Roy Taylor, the reply was less than great and pretty much backed up what Roy had said on Twitter. HardOCP received a sample of the Fury and Fury X, which apparently fits with the website, but the Nano did not. And that is with AMD sending one of the HardOCP forum users a Nano to use in a build log. Roy's response was again a little damning, "I stand by the statement that the world needs fair reviews, I am sure you agree, pretty strongly I’d have thought!"
When pressed a little further, Roy's next response pretty much shut the door on the matter: "My position is that we need fair reviews. I doubt there is anyone in our entire industry who would disagree. That's the beginning and the end of this."
That's pretty much the end of things. AMD is choosing what review sites are receiving a sample of the Nano to test in order to guarantee a fair review of its product. It may just be a ploy to drive up demand for sales, but the Nano cannot be purchased. Neither can the Fury X. Newegg has two Fury cards to purchase, but the Fury X cards are all on auto-notify. Both OCC and Neoseeker have yet to receive a review sample of the Fury or Fury X, and given the lack of supply of those cards, odds are slim we'll ever get one of those, too.
No Nano, no Fury X, and no Fury. Just what exactly is the end game of AMD here? Its PR seems poised to alienate and piss off review sites that attended the paper launch of the Nano, or were invited to attend it, by withholding review samples for "fairness." Add in how Roy Taylor is negatively affecting the PR by publicly stating AMD wants review sites that will produce a fair review, and things aren't looking too great. Maybe at some point we'll all get some clarification on this, but given this situation and the dire financial straits AMD is facing, there may be bigger problems at foot the company isn't saying. At any rate, OCC will not have an AMD Radeon R9 Nano review, nor a Fury X or Fury review, because of a lack of response and AMD's apparent desire to avoid sites that can test a card without any bias.
Source: HardOCP
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