Wednesday, December 16, 2015

IT News Head Lines (Overclockers Club) 17/12/2015

Overclockers Club



Corsair Strafe RGB Mechanical Keyboard Review


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NVIDIA Plans CES Press Conference for January 4
NVIDIA has announced that it plans to hold its annual press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on January 4, 2016. The press conference will occur before the start of the event on January 6 and is expected to focus on "several key innovations in the graphics sector" and "autonomous driving." WCCF Tech is predicting that NVIDIA will unveil more details on its Autonomous Drive Modules, a result of recent partnerships with companies such as Tesla and Audi, and the desire to create improved machine learning systems. The company has a history of announcing new Tegra Systems-on-a-chip at CES and this year should be no different, with the successor to the Tegra X1 potentially making an appearance. Announcements could also be made regarding the next generation of GPU updates, though the Graphics Technology Conference is believed to be a more likely reveal occasion.
Source: WCCF Tech


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Patch 6.86 Announced for Dota 2
With the recent conclusion of The Summit 4 and the upcoming World Cyber Arena 2015 tournaments, Valve and the mighty IceFrog have announced patch 6.86 for Dota 2. Titled "The Balance of Power Update," one of the most significant changes to the game is the introduction of a new hero, Zet the Arc Warden. Zeus also receives a rework and an Arcana item, as voted on during The International 5. A comic is included that highlights the new item and hero. The desert terrain map, a reward from TI5, has also been added along with an extensive list of map changes. The Dota 2 client will now present improved hero stats to players, an updated armory interface and store, and the ability to create private chat channels. Several new in-game items were added, and some heroes received ability changes. Check out the full patch notes for info on the extensive list of changes to all of the heroes. Anyone that has looked at my Steam profile can see that Dota 2 is my favorite and most played game and I cannot wait to try out the new patch.
Source: Valve


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Hardware Roundup: Tuesday, December 15, 2015, Edition
A new Tuesday is here, with a few items to help you through the day. There is a review of the Samsung 950 Pro M.2 SSD, which comes in 256 and 512GB capacities and only in that M.2 2280 size. If you need a new control method for your games, perhaps the Corsair Strafe RGB MX Silent Gaming Keyboard, with its unique silent Cherry MX Red switches, is the solution. There's also a review of the TRENDnet TEW-824DRU AC1750 Dual Band Wireless Router that sports one of the newest WiFi standards around. Finishing things off today is a look at AMD's new GPUOpen initiative to push gaming further, similar to NVIDIA's GameWorks.
Storage/Hard Drives

Samsung 950 Pro M.2 SSD @ TechSpot
Keyboards/Mice

Corsair Strafe RGB MX Silent Gaming Keyboard @ Benchmark Reviews
Networking

TRENDnet TEW-824DRU AC1750 Dual Band Wireless Router @ Madshrimps
Gaming

AMD Announces GPUOpen - Open Sourced Gaming Development @ PC Perspective


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AMD Announces GPUOpen Platform
Recently we have been seeing an interesting, and long awaited, pivot by AMD to focus more on software. The release of Radeon Software Crimson Edition is an example of this, as it completely rebuilt the AMD driver experience for users and brought with it many stability and performance improvements. Today AMD has announced GPUOpen, which provides developers with a host of tools for getting the most out of GPUs.
The most obvious comparison for GPUOpen is with NVIDIA GameWorks, which provides middleware solutions for adding advanced visual effects to games, like HBAO+ and TXAA. A developer can practically drop the appropriate files into place and have these effects running, but the program has come under fire for its more closed nature and hardware biases. The GPUOpen platform, however, provides everyone with access to the source code for the various technologies under its umbrella, and does so with MIT's open source license. These technologies include different graphics technologies, such as TressFX for tessellated hair, DirectX 11 and 12 code samples, and the Linux drivers. Yes, Linux will be getting open source graphics drivers called AMDGPU that features a redesigned driver stack, and anyone will be able to work with it.
Potentially this could allow for console-level access to graphics hardware on PCs, which would be a boon for PC gamers, and could make porting between the current-gen consoles and the PC easier. GPUOpen will be launched in January when its effects, tools, SDKs, and code samples will be put be put up on GitHub.
Source: WCCFtech [1] and [2]


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Futuremark Reveals New 3DMark GPU Test That Incorporates DirectX 12 API
Pasi Virtanen, the product manager for Futuremark’s 3DMark, has taken the time at a Chinese media event to reveal a new GPU test that will be included within the next version of 3DMark. The new test, which is currently known as "Time Spy," utilizes DirectX 12 in order to push graphics cards to the limit. The test is supposed to be roughly five times heavier on GPUs than Fire Strike is, and will render in 1080p, 1440p, and 4K for cards that have over 2GB of memory.
While no official release date for the new 3DMark suite has been announced, it is expected that it will be released in the first quarter of next year. The suite will include the newly revealed GPU test as well as an additional GPU benchmark and a CPU test.
Source: eTeknix and TechPowerUp


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At the Nanoscale, Heat Travels Much Faster Than Expected
In a great many fields, heat transfer is of significant importance, and computer chips are no exception as circuitry reaches ever smaller sizes. On the macroscale we live on, the rules for how heat flows are well understood, but at the nanoscale the game can change and for decades a debate has continued over how to describe it. At last we appear to have an answer, thanks to researchers at the University of Michigan.
Radiative heat is the light that objects emit from the movement of particles, and over a century ago Max Planck wrote the equations that explained the process. However, as the gap between two objects shrinks, the equations start to fall apart. A new theory was developed in the middle of last century by Sergei Rytov, but some experiments reported significant differences from it. Now the Michigan researchers with a very advanced lab have confirmed Rytov's theory experimentally. The experiment involved placing a heated surface of silica, silicon nitride, or gold beneath a scanning thermal microscopy probe of the same material, and moving the probe closer to the surface. The researchers discovered that at very small distances between the surfaces and the probes, the heat flow would jump to 10,000 times that we experience on the macroscale. The reason is because the surface and evanescent waves of the two objects start to overlap at these distances.
The significance of this research is with how it will impact nanotechnologies that require controlling heat flow. It was for this reason that the researchers worked with silica, silicon nitride, and gold as all three materials are used in nanotechnologies.
Source: University of Michigan


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Available Tags:Keyboard , NVIDIA , Hardware , AMD , GPU

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