Latest News - Page 2578

In our report earlier this week, we noted pre-orders for HTC VR headset known as the Vive would be starting next month. At the time, no specific date was known, but that's changed; the official word is February 28 is the day pre-orders will begin.

Just recently, HTC added a front-facing camera to the new Vive Pre headset, something that our own Anthony Garreffa tested, and loved. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan X powered the HTC Vive Pre demos at CES 2016, providing enough GPU horsepower to drive the VR headset. The Vive will begin shipping in April, for an undisclosed price.

Our impressions of the Vive from CES 2016 were strong. Keep an eye out for our article on it, due to go live soon.

We've seen some pretty amazing things from G.SKILL in the past, but now the memory master has just smashed yet another barrier with a new titanic DDR4 RAM kit that packs an no less than eight 16GB DDR4 memory sticks to power insane workstations.

G.SKILL has consistently one-upped itself over the past few months: first it unleashed 8GB TridentZ DDR4 RAM modules that hit an insane 4,133MHz clock speed, then shortly after came the ultra-performance 64GB DDR4 RAM kits that hit 3,200MHz. Now the hardware-maker has unleashed its latest juggernaut, the 128GB (8x16GB)Ripjaws V DDR4 RAM kit aimed at 3D workstations and hardcore enthusiasts.

The Ripjaws 128GB DDR4 CL14 kit has an ultra-low CAS latency with 14-14-34 timing, and is specifically built for "high capacity and low latency" builds on the X99 platform. Support for the latest Intel XMP2.0 standard is baked into the modules, and you can check below to see how the kit holds up when tested with an Intel Core i7-5820K CPU fastened into an ASUS ROG Rampage V Extreme motherboard.

The price of the R9 Nano from AMD just dropped by $150 to $499, which makes it a much better value and accessible to more people than it has been before.

In our review we really enjoyed the form-factor and performance given the power target of the Nano compared to it's big brother. In most cases it was 90% or above of the performance of the Fury X while sucking far less power and only being slightly louder. But what we didn't like was the high-price when it wasn't exactly performing at the same levels as the other $649 card in AMD's stable. It just didn't make sense, even if it was a fully enabled Fiji XT. Now that's been fixed.

This allows the Nano to potentiall be a more viable option in the eyes of gamers for their ITX rigs. It can do 4K when paired with the right CPU (and with the right graphical settings), and is now the only card of it's kind at this price point in this form factor. NVIDIA doesn't have anything to compete with it. The 970 ITX flavors are cheaper, but also not nearly as fast in any metric. So now there's no excuse not to at least consider team red when looking at your next minuscule system.

CES 2016 - Supermicro is adamant about entering the gaming market. And that's a very good thing for gamers. They're known for producing some of the most reliable motherboards around for the workstation and data-center markets, and now they're taking all that engineering know-how into the gaming macrocosm.

They've had motherboards before that're geared towards gamers, but they haven't quite been too popular due to the association of them strictly with the enterprise segment. But Supermicro is adding a lot more motherboards to their roster in 2016. They're breaking out Z170 boards in micro-ATX and ATX flavors that'll feature some very cool color combinations and be backed by their incredibly strict validation process. They aren't a value brand, and they make equipment that's designed to last in 24/7 operating environments for many years, so they're a safe bet in most respects.

Supermicro will have a new Z170OCE overclocking friendly board in a green motif, as well as a micro-ATX H170 variant that'll carry on the red colors of it's big brother, the Core Gaming Z170. The new Z170OCE will have 6 USB 3.0 ports, 1 USB 3.1 and a Type-C port on the rear. It also has 6 SATA 3.0 ports and a PCIe x4 enabled M.2 slot just waiting for that NVMe enabled Kingston Hyper X Predator shown off at CES.

CES 2016 - ASUS had a tremendous showing at CES this year, with all manner of great new motherboards to look forward to and of course fantastic looking monitors. Now that Skylake has been out for a little bit, they're going to infuse the lower-end B150 chipset with some gaming love.

Even though these boards are not overclockable in the traditional (and official) sense, you can have a good stable board that uses all of the available resources that B150 has to offer, and in a small mini-ITX form-factor for those looking for a tiny, reliable and attractive package.

Underneath it'll be equipped with their Aura LED lighting that has a plethora of different colors and lighting effects. The board comes with MIMO enabled 802.11ac with an external 2x2 dual-band 2.5/5GHz antenna for maximum range and performance. There's an M.2 slot, and four separate SATA 6 ports for a mighty, yet great build. And better still is an on-board, dedicated water-pump header for the best possible cooling solutions.

Razer has a new controller coming out, the Wildcat, and it's a pretty ferocious new controller, with it's anti-slip grips and homage to the Xbox One design. They're bringing everything they learned from the Sabertooth with this one, so the quality and precision should be on point.

We were able to demo the controller in action while playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which isn't easy when you're used to playing FPS's with a keyboard and mouse. But it was easy to get into a groove due to the similarity with the stock Xbox One controller. I have to admit that a controller isn't exactly my first choice when playing CS:GO, and I'm not good by any means even with a mouse and keyboard. But that aside, the joysticks had a good feel to them, with just the right amount of resistance.

It's comfortable in the hand due to it being designed around the already comfortable and easy to handle stock Xbox One controller, so that shouldn't be an issue for anyone. The cool thing is that they're following the design language of the Xbox One Elite controller with extra inputs on the bottom, but instead of paddles, you'll find a trigger which felt like the top and bottom were separate buttons. It was much less confusing to use buttons as opposed to the paddle system on the more expensive Elite controller.

CES 2016 - Casio has entered the smartwatch game at CES 2016 with the Smart Outdoor Watch, its new wearable powered by Android.

The Casio Smart Outdoor Watch features a 1.32-inch display with its resolution hitting 320x300. It's water-resistant to 50m, US military standard, has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, and weighs in at just 93g.

The watch has two screens - a touchscreen, active color LCD display, as well as a monochrome power-conserving display. The monochrome display can work like a regular watch for a month between charges, which is pretty damn good. Both screens can be customized, with market availability in April and a price of $500.

After trying the new HTC Vive Pre at CES 2016 (more than once), I've fallen in love with it over the Oculus Rift (even though I pre-ordered the Rift in the first 2 minutes of pre-orders opening).

But HTC seems to be confident in VR, so much so that company CEO Cher Wang has said that VR and wearables has the company more excited than ever. During an interview with The Telegraph, Wang said "Virtual reality is something people have talked about for 20, 30 years, in movies, in books and finally, it is real. VR has been on our minds for a long time, and now HTC has made virtual reality real".

But it was a particular quote from Wang that had my eyes opened wide, where she defended HTC's stance on smartphones but reiterated their position in the VR market with Vive. She said: "Now we are more realistic. We feel that we should apply our best design to different type of sectors. Yes, smartphones are important, but to create a natural extension to other connected devices like wearables and virtual reality is more important".

CES 2016 - Computer audio has been somewhat stagnant lately, with even Creative letting the audio chipset they developed for the Sound Blaster Z line carry them over in the discreet audio world for awhile. But that hasn't stopped them from continually upping the game in the field of audio.

For their next trick, they're bringing 15.2-channel sound, and Dolby Atmos certification, to the living room in the form of a sound bar. That's right, a premium sound bar device that lets you enjoy what's usually reserved for theaters or the incredibly willing audio enthusiast.

The X-Fi Sonic Carrier is more than just a way to enjoy Atmos enabled content, which is where there's more positional data encoded in the source than there probably is in real-life, but it's also a complete home entertainment solution aiming to take on the living-room entertainment space. And the positional audio from one bar is actually pretty convincing too.

CES 2016 - You had better watch out for media! We were invited to a secret backroom at CES 2016 where a separate subdivision of GIGABYTE's notebook business unit gave us a tour of their latest technology. Although AORUS is still in its infancy, they have made huge waves through the gaming notebook community in the past year.

Backed by one of the largest manufacturers of motherboards, VGAs, and notebooks, AORUS takes the experience of a large technology corporation and freedom of a separate division to push out some of the best gaming notebook offerings.

Their focus is to design and produce the best gaming notebooks on the market, and we saw nothing mediocre. Every AORUS notebook we saw had a dedicated NVIDIA GPU (or more), and many of the technologies they offered were unique and on the bleeding edge of VR and gaming.

CES 2016 - Upon entering GIGABYTE's CES2016 ballroom, we were greeted by many custom PCs, each using a different GIGABYTE Z170 or X99 motherboard and GIGABYTE's latest Xtreme Gaming VGAs. The new VGAs have three RGB LED rings around the fans as well as RGBs in the Windforce cooler logo.

This makes the VGAs easy to match virtually any build. The Xtreme Gaming VGAs are also replacing the G1 Gaming video cards as GIGABYTE's top offering. The VGAs utilize heat sinks with six copper heat pipes, three low noise high CFM fans, improved power delivery (more phases), and the top of the line GTX 980 Ti has a special LN2 BIOS with an extra 6-pin PCI-E power plug. The new Xtreme Gaming series of VGAs are premium offerings using either the NVIDIA GTX 970, 980, and top of the line 980 Ti.

GIGABYTE was also hard at work breaking world records (they actually took four global WRs with non-K CPUs). The overclocking was live streamed, and on both the streaming computer (on the left) and on the Z170X-SOC Force LN2 system (on the right), the Xtreme Gaming GTX 980 Ti was used.

Last year's 'Mad Max: Fury Road' was a phenomenal piece of art, which was far, far better than anyone would have assumed. Moreover, it's $375 million worldwide gross (not too shabby for an R rated film) confirmed that there was demand for more 'Mad Max' adventures 35 years on, even without star Mel Gibson. Now, it looks like we'll be seeing more of Max in the not too distant future.

Director George Miller spoke to Entertainment Weekly Radio and confirmed that he had decided the plot of the fifth film in the franchise, and is "certainly having conversations about it." Could we be seeing more of Charlize Theron's Furiosa? Miller didn't let much slip, saying "Yeah, she's a pretty compelling character so it would be great to tell her story. Her backstory is really interesting. We only allude to it in this movie because this movie is on the run; people don't have much time for recreational talk. But you pick up, you have a sense of her having gone through stuff. That's what the film is trying to do. You're trying to put a lot of iceberg under the tip, I like saying."

Still, another film could be a number of years away, with Miller wanting to do a smaller film in the interim; "something that's contemporary that we can get through fairly quickly. And something with not too much technical difficulty. Something more performance-based and so on, just to clear the exhaust."

CES 2016 - Synology has typically been solely in the NAS market, with some very nice home office, personal and even enterprise solutions for storing all manner of data. Now they're bringing their networking expertise to the table with their first router. A router that one an award at CES this year.

The RT1900ac was on hand at their booth at CES and they connected a variety of devices to in order to show off how easy administration was when using their Synology Router Manager OS, which provides a clean user interface that's surprisingly easy to use, as it builds appropriately off of their other NAS interfaces that have been received well by the community.

Being easy to use can sometimes mean sacrificing quality, features or even security. Or at the very least it could mean hiding away the advanced features in such a way that is the exact opposite of intuitive design. But that's not the case here. This is a powerful and intuitive OS that could give other vendors a real run for their money.

Worldwide and domestic United States box office records continue to fall in the wake of 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' which continued its swathe of destruction over the weekend. Now, 'Jurassic World's spot as the third highest grossing film has been taken by the sci-fi sequel, as it now guns for 'Titanic' in the second spot.

Opening strongly in China in the last few days, 'Force Awakens' took around $53 million - impressive considering this is the first 'Star Wars' film to hit cinemas in the country. In the U.S., the film has taken the highest grossing film record at $812 million; the first film to gross over $800 million. While the film is internationally around $450 million behind usurping 'Titanic', if it continues to run as it is it might just do it.

In Win is always looking to innovate and find new ways to dazzle their customers with new things. That thinking extends to products already in the market too.

At CES this year they brought the ubiquitous 805, but with a few new changes instead. In place of the normal front panel, they put on a an infinity mirror complete with RGB lights on the inside. It's more than appropriate for the particular Las Vegas flavor, and it's not really too garish either. It's only a few cm deep, but the effect is really well done.

The infinity lighting is controlled by the ASUS RGB motherboard and can have any number of different patterns and colors. The case on display was simply revolving around the color wheel. It's a prototype and they're just looking for feedback on the design to see if it's something that they might implement in future designs, or even as an add-on later. They've also added metal extensions on the bottom of the case that hold the tempered glass side-panels in, so they don't fall so easily when you remove them.

CES 2016 - Cooler master is consolidating their business, and that means new products along with that new vision. One of the most anticipated of those is the revamping of their keyboards and mice, from the value Devastator combo all the way up to their top of the line mechanical keyboards.

The Devastator bundle caught on surprisingly well when it was released in 2013. It was cheap, and actually a really decent experience for the money. They're upgrading that to the Devastator II, which should update it significantly while shooting for the same price point.

They've essentially taken a Topre switch and taken out the spring, replacing it with a rubber dome instead. They're calling it a Mem-chanical switch. So it's still a membrane keyboard, but it has the feel of a much more premium keyboard than the price might otherwise suggest. The result is a silent and more sure typing experience. Best of all is that you can customize the keycaps, because standard Cherry keycaps will fit over the switches. It'll of course be bundled with the Devastator II mouse.

CES 2016 - After our chat with NVIDIA learning about the new Android 6.0 update for the Shield, we went through two VR demos: one on the new Oculus Rift, and one on the new HTC Vive Pre VR headset.

The first was the Oculus Rift with the Oculus Touch controllers, which we wrote about here, with the impressive Bullet Train demo from Epic Games. The next was an awesome demo using the new HTC Vive Pre, where we played around with a paint brush with the Lighthouse controllers.

Not only that, but there was also an Everest demo, where we kinda scaled Everest - showing off the walking-around-a-room VR experience that HTC offers with Vive. All of the demos were powered by NVIDIA's great GeForce GTX Titan X, which can handle the ~3K resolution of VR at 90FPS.

CES 2016 - Audio is a precarious subject for a lot of reasons. Not everyone can tell the difference between two different sets of headphones and sometimes audio-quality isn't the first thing on some peoples minds when it comes to building PC's. But then you try a $55,000 set of headphones and you wonder where they've been all your life.

Sennheiser is now on to their second generation of Orpheus headphones, using the original 1991 model as inspiration, they crafted the ultimate audio experience. And no, the price-tag doesn't color the experience, they're actually that good. It's overwhelming, so much so that someone actually cried while listening to the Orpheus (not me, but almost...)

They feel expensive in your hand, and I placed them gingerly on my head, careful to avoid bending them too far. But there's no actual need to fret, because these are made to be used and actually listened to. I put them on with Hotel California playing through them, which has a huge variety of sounds to help showcase just what they're capable of. Once they're on, you get blown away by the huge sound-stage, something that extends into what might be described as natural. It's not like you're sitting at a concert, no, it's much more than that. It's like you're literally in the music itself somehow, if you close your eyes. It just envelopes and it's never harsh and I certainly never wanted to take them off.

CES 2016 - We went eyes-on with the new Inwin H-Frame 2.0 case at CES, and it's a magnificent beast that needs to be experienced to truly understand it.

The new case is leagues better than the old case, and it's also Inwin's 30th anniversary, which means there's extra flair, though again it's in-line with the motif and not at all gaudy or out of place. It's monstrous when you step up to it, with a monolithic and ominous air that makes it seem like a monument. A monument to PC gaming, of course. But the cool orange lights are not out of place, nor are they too bright, but almost beckon you to take a look behind the tempered glass.

And inside is a vast landscape that's capable of holding nearly anything you could dream of. It's spacious with what looks like plenty of room to work in as well. But that's only part of why you'd ever buy this case. This is a unique and gorgeous case, a work of art that can't compare to very many other chassis' that exist out there. It's that uniqueness that draws you to it, and In Win is a master at crafting such beautiful cases.

CES 2016 - We have already had our socks blown off by the current 4K OLED TVs from LG, but the new Signature 4K OLED TVs are really something else. Why? HDR. That's why.

The new HDR-enabled Signature 4K OLED TVs are impossibly thin and completely beautiful. With black levels you could stare at for hours, and insanely deep colors, LG has it in the bag when it comes to enthusiast TVs. Their new Signature 4K OLED TV has a beautiful glass body, and is just 2.5mm thick - this includes a speaker system that is built into the stand, too.

LG will be rolling out their new Signature 4K OLED TVs in March, but were silent when it came to pricing. I did ask if we'll see FreeSync or G-Sync TVs from LG in the future, but they didn't have too much to say... yet.