ASUS has just revealed its new high-end monster motherboard, the ASUS ROG Maximus IX Extreme, which is their "seriously powerful new Z270 gaming motherboard that's expertly tooled to be totally cooled, with an integrated monoblock for water-cooled performance right out of the box" - awesome, right?!

The new ROG Maximus IX Extreme is based on the Kaby Lake compatible Z270 chipset, ready for the latest Core i7-7700K processor - and of course, ASUS' awesome Aura Sync technology. There's built-in support for insanely fast DDR4 4133MHz RAM, the latest SupremeFX S1220 codec with 113dB SNR, and so much more.

We have dual M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slots, a USB 3.1 front panel connector, the latest 802.11ac with MU-MIMO and 40Gbps speeds through Thunderbolt 3.

Project CARS was one of the best looking car racing sims ever created, but its sequel is taking things to the next level: Project CARS will include '12K' support - which is really 3 x 4K monitors (11,520 x 2160) and VR support at launch.

Bandai Namco describes Project CARS 2 as "the next evolution in the award-winning racing series, featuring the most iconic cars under the most thrilling of conditions to deliver the "Ultimate Driver Journey" experience. Created by gamers, tested by world-class racing drivers, and the definitive choice of e-Sports pros - Project CARS 2 brings together the essence of motorsports racing in the most beautiful, authentically crafted, and technically advanced racing game on the planet".

Project CARS 2 should have over 170+ cars and 60+ tracks, with mud, gravel, dirt, ice, and of course tarmac to drive over at ridiculous speeds. LiveTrack 3.0 will provide dynamic time of day and weather affects, so that "organic evolution" can occur as you play.

Samsung is only a couple of weeks away from launching the Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones, which are sure to be some of the best-selling smartphones of 2017 - and now, we're getting a better look at the design of the new smartphone up against the previous Galaxy smartphones, and the current iPhones.

From left to right, we have the current iPhone 7 Plus, the upcoming Galaxy S8+ and S8, and iPhone 7. As you can see, the upcoming Galaxy S8+ and its massive 6.2-inch display will be in the same - if not slightly smaller size than the iPhone 7 Plus - which for its huge design, has only a 5.5-inch display. Apple has a huge chunk of bezel around both of its smartphones, while Samsung seems to be running away from the bezel with some beautifully designed smartphones.

Samsung is expected to reveal its next-gen Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ later this month, with a release of April 28.

Microsoft has a competitor to its expensive, but glorious Surface Hub - which arrives in a $9000 model, but can be purchased as an 84-inch touchscreen beast for $21,000 - while Google is targeting Surface Hub with its new Jamboard.

Google's new Jamboard is a 4K-capable 55-inch smart TV that you can draw on, capable of taking 16 simultaneous touch points, Google Cast abilities, a built-in camera (for the CIA to watch you and your important meetings through), NFC, handwriting abilities, and even shape recognition.

Jamboard will cost $5000, alongside a $600 annual "support fee" - but considering Surface Hub starts at $9000 and scales to $21,000 - Google has a good chance of scooping some of that Surface Hub marketshare away from Microsoft with Jamboard.

If there was a single game that I pumped thousands of hours into in the 90s, it would be Quake - and Quake II, and of course - Quake III Arena. Now we're getting closer to the release of Quake Champions, with developer id Software throwing up the closed beta.

Bethesda released a new trailer for one of the new champions in Quake Champions, an assassin known as Nyx. Quake Champions is going down an ability-focused, character-based direction that id Software and its partner in Saber Interactive, think will be great. Nyx has the powers of "Ghost Walk", letting her disappear in front of enemies - without being detected, or taking damage - but Nyx can reappear and consume the same space as an enemy, killing them instantly - nice.

But don't worry, rocket jumps and the usual fast-paced Quake is all there in Quake Champions - but an eSports future can be seen in the game, which is exciting me quite a lot.

NVIDIA unleashed a virtually perfect high-end/enthusiast graphics card with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition, but the new GeForce 378.78 WHQL drivers are an important step, too.

NVIDIA says that there are over 500 engineering years of work in the new GeForce 378.78 WHQL drivers, with DX12 performance boosts in many games - with up to 33% more performance on offer for Rise of the Tomb Raider. 368.25 drivers were used as a comparison, with the following performance improvements in these games:

AMD launched its Ryzen CPU family - at least the high-end 8C/16T parts in the Ryzen 7 range, but the server CPU market is about to be disrupted by their upcoming Naples CPU family.

Naples is a massively scalable 32C/64T system-on-chip (SoC) design, with support for two high-performance threads per core. We have 8-channel DDR4 support with room for 32 DIMMs on server boards, and so much more.

AMD Naples Features:

Microsoft has teased it is getting up close and personal with Middle-earth: Shadow of War, which will benefit from the beefier hardware found inside of Project Scorpio.

We've already seen Shadow of War gameplay footage, but now Microsoft is talking about the game and its upcoming Xbox Scorpio console. Matt Allen, director of technical art at Monolith said: "So far, we really like it. I don't know how much they've revealed the specs, but it is an upgrade. It's not just sort-of, 'We're going to upgrade some stuff.' There's things you can do with it. So, we're pretty excited to be working with them specifically".

Allen also talked about Project Scorpio running Shadow of War in 4K with HDR enabled, adding: "Until you've seen the game at 4K and HDR, it's different ... you can watch it [in HDR] for a while, and after seeing it for a couple of months, you normalize it. Then you go back to not looking at it [HDR], and it actually is really different". He continued: "I don't know how much consumer uptick is going to be of 4K HDR TVs, but we've got a couple, and the game looks fantastic. For me, I'm really excited about showing it off at some point. Hopefully, in the near future, we can show that off".

Indies on the Nintendo Switch may end up consistently costing more than their PS4, Xbox One and PC ports, especially if the games in question release on a physical cart for the Switch. We discuss some of the reasons this is happening in an effort to put things into perspective.

As a Nintendo Switch owner I'm not too happy about paying a premium for games that are cheaper on other platforms. Take Rime, for example: the indie will be $30 on PS4, Xbox One and PC, and $40 on the Switch. This is presumably because Rime is getting a cartridge release on the Switch, but it's also getting a disc release on PS4 and Xbox One. We can only posit the cartridge is more expensive to make then a Blu-ray disc, but it'll also be up on the eShop too for the same price. I think the pricing decision goes deeper than this, though.

As Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime confirms, third-party indie developers set the prices for their games on the Switch. "We don't make that pricing decision. When you see those differences in prices, call up that third-party publisher and ask them."

Zelda: Breath of the Wild feels alive in no small part thanks to its array of humorous, lovable, and extremely cute NPCs.

Breath of the Wild isn't just a beautiful game filled with enchanting majesty and fantasy: it's also filled with whimsy, charm, and heart-warming characters. As the first true open-world game in the series, I thought perhaps the whimsical elements would be put on the back burner. Boy was I wrong: the NPCs are absolutely amazing and go massive lengths to make the world of Hyrule feel alive. Everyone you meet in the game leaves an impression and adds a very real sense of agency to the world itself.

I'll be the first to admit I've barely scratched the surface of the game, but I wanted to share some of the quirky NPCs and how they've made me smile throughout my journeys.

Microsoft's new "monster" 4K-ready Project Scorpio now has an official Microsoft Store listing, strongly hinting at a reveal in the near future.

Xbox division head Phil Spencer has said he wants to reveal Microsoft's high-end Project Scorpio console before E3 2017 in June, and now we have the first storefront listing opening up on the MS Store. This means we could see a special Xbox event being held sometime in April or May ahead of E3, with Microsoft focusing solely on Project Scorpio and Xbox games during the June showcase. Of course there's no price tag on the Project Scorpio pre-order listing, but it does indicate a reveal is on the way.

Microsoft has confirmed that Project Scorpio's 6TFLOPs GPU will enable native 4K gaming, which will make it the world's most powerful games console.

The Nintendo Switch isn't perfect, and like any other system, it can corrupt saved games data. Since the Switch doesn't have any means to backup or migrate saved games (yet), if your data gets corrupted you could lose all your Zelda: Breath of the Wild saves. Fortunately for us, this didn't happen. Here is our experience with corrupted saved data on the Switch.

First of let me say that we were apparently quite lucky with our experience with corrupted saved data. We didn't lose any of our saved games for any of our games--even the game that was affected by the corrupted data. Here's what happened.

When I fired up Specter of Torment yesterday afternoon, I got an error message and the game crashed. The console told me my saved data could be corrupted. After spending quite a lot of time on Breath of the Wild the possibility of losing everything was extremely daunting.

Samsung will unveil the Galaxy S8 and S8+ on March 29th, and every day we get a better image of what to expect.

The latest leak comes from Roland Quandt, who has been quite reliable in the past. According to him, Samsung's upcoming flagships will be available in Black, Silver, and Violet colors.

Violet is a bit unusual, but that just might be a trend this year since Huawei introduced a not-so-typical green version of the P10 and P10 Plus.

BlackBerry Aurora, the first device manufactured by BB Merah Putih, which holds the license for making, marketing, and selling BlacBerry-branded phones in Indonesia, had been officially announced.

The phone "is not only the first BlackBerry-branded device to ever be produced in Indonesia, but it is the first BlackBerry device in the world to be equipped with dual-SIM functionality," said Stanly Widjaja, Vice President BB Merah Putih.

The BlackBerry Aurora is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 425 processor and comes with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory. The 5.5-inch display phone sports a 13MP main camera and an 8MP selfie cam.

Huawei P10 and P10 Plus have just been announced at MWC 2017, and it seems that the company has realized the potential of the show.

Bruce Lee, Huawei's Vice President of Handsets Product Line, said that the next P series device would be announced at next year's MWC in Barcelona.

Read also: Huawei unveils the P10 and P10 Plus

The Nintendo Switch handheld-console hybrid is meant to be a dedicated games device, not facilitate media apps and other forms of entertainment. But at the same time, ancillary features would be nice, and if it's truly a "home console first and foremost," the Switch would do well to have certain concessions like Hulu and Netflix video streaming. And it will--in time.

Nintendo America President Reggie Fils-Aime recently confirmed that Nintendo is negotiating with other companies like Neftlix, Hulu, and Amazon to bring their respective media-streaming apps to the Switch. But those apps will come in "due time," and app support isn't a priority for Nintendo. Games absolutely come first.

"We built the Nintendo Switch to be a world-class gaming device, meaning we want you first and foremost to play games on the system and have an incredibly fun experience," Fils-Aime said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.

AMD has well and truly shaken up the CPU market with the release of Ryzen processors, led by the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X. Now that Ryzen is here, we're already hearing about Zen 2 - which will be known as Pinnacle Ridge.

The current Ryzen family of CPUs is known as Summit Ridge, but Zen 2 and Zen 3 should deliver better IPC performance, new features, and other goodies. Ryzen in its first-gen appearance had a 52% IPC (Instructions Per Clock) over the previous generation AMD CPU architecture - while Zen 2 and Zen 3 should deliver 5-15% improvements in IPC.

During a recent AMA on Reddit, AMD CEO Lisa Su said: "In new product development, you always learn a lot and we have our list of thingsthat we are adding to zen2 and zen3 to get even more performance going forward".

NVIDIA is ramping up the marketing engine for Mass Effect Andromeda, with the full details on the PC graphics options revealed.

Mass Effect Andromeda will have 16 different graphics knobs to tweak, with a few of them including multiple detail levels: Ambient Occlusion, Anti-Aliasing, Chromatic Aberration, Effects Quality, Film Grain, Lighting Quality, Mesh Quality, Post-Process Effect Quality, Resolution Scaling, Shader Quality, Shadow Quality, Terrain Quality, Texture Filtering Quality, Texture Quality, and Vegetation Quality.

NVIDIA also revealed the PC requirements for playing the game smoothly at 720p and 1080p:

While audiences await the incoming 'Alien: Covenant', 79 year old Director Ridley Scott is seemingly open to staying with the franchise for the rest of his career.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Scott threatens that "If you really want a franchise, I can keep cranking it for another six. I'm not going to close it down again. No way", referring to the franchise remaining dormant for over 15 years between 1997's 'Alien Resurrection' and 2012's 'Prometheus'. The next film in the series; 'Alien: Covenant' features the return of the classic Xenomorph alien which is set to scare a new generation of film goers. The malevolent android David (Michael Fassbender) will be the only other returning character from 'Prometheus'.

'Alien: Covenant' will hit 3D and 2D cinemas on May 19 2017.

With tomorrow's firmware update, Sony's new 4K-ready PlayStation 4 Pro will see tighter frame rates across the board in select PS4 games.

Sony today announced that System Firmware Update 4.50 will release tomorrow, bringing the PS4 Pro's coveted Boost Mode. Sony is careful to explain that Boost Mode won't affect all legacy PS4 games that haven't been patched with PS4 Pro Forward Compatibility updates, and only a select few will be compatible with the enhanced mode.

Boost Mode will affect PS4 games with variable frame rates the most by affording higher frame rates, and games with specific locks will maintain a more fluid and consistent frame rate cap. For example, Bloodborne won't magically be patched to run at 1080p 60FPS on the PS4 Pro, but the game will maintain 30FPS more solidly with Boost Mode activated.