Latest News - Page 2579

CES 2016 - Lenovo seems to be enjoying its unleashing of interesting devices at CES this year, with the new IdeaCentre 610S being no different. It is pretty much a projector PC, which is just awesomely unique.

The IdeaCentre 610S is a super unique design, where inside it features an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 2TB HDD (or a 128GB SSD), and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti. The unique part is the projector, which is capable of driving a 110-inch screen onto your wall.

The projector on-the-go is super-small, at just 2.2L, with 4 x USB 3.0 on the back, HDMI, and an Ethernet port to top it all off. As for price, we're looking at $850, with availability in June.

Visiting Cooler Master and seeing what they had on hand was a blast. They really believe in where they're going, and not just in the usual marketing sense you might assume. The people behind the products are passionate, and committed.

They feel such optimism because of how they're consolidating their product lines into more manageable and easier to digest categories. Cooler Master has had a lot of different lines of cases, fans, coolers and a lot of other products in the past. It was a little confusing to some customers. Even enthusiasts could find themselves a bit taken aback by the sheer number of choices.

And that much choice isn't always necessarily a good thing for business either. It can make it hard and even expensive to manufacture so many different things at once. Hence this great effort towards making their products lines more manageable for themselves and manufacturing as well as for us. A business decision this is, but benefit the consumer much, it does.

CES 2016 - Lenovo unveiled its impressive new ThinkPad X1 Tablet, which features up to an Intel Core m7 vPro processor, up to 16GB of RAM and up to a 1TB PCIe-based SSD.

The display arrives as a 12-inch 2560x1440 panel, and like the Surface Pro 4 it is in the 3:2 ratio. Lenovo's latest slate is just 13mm thick, weighing 1.1kg with the keyboard attached. The keyboard can be magnetically snapped onto the tablet, without much hassle.

But where Lenovo takes it in a new direction is with the use of a pico-projector inside, featuring 50 Lumens of brightness. Lenovo says that it's enough to blast a 60-inch screen onto a wall around 2m (6ft) away. The 3D imaging module is an Intel RealSense 3D camera, which can be used for 3D scanning objects by playing them in front of the camera.

The full trailer for Hulu's adaptation of Stephen King's time travel novel '11.22.63' is here and it looks like it could be a very solid adventure indeed.

The eight episode series deals with high school history teacher Jake Epping's (James Franco) attempt to travels back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Of course, time travel is never clear cut and Epping soon finds multiple forces fighting back - including time itself.

King's 2011 novel was a New York Times best-seller, which quietly gathered rave reviews. Helmed by Academy Award-winning Director Kevin Macdonald and co-produced by 'Force Awakens' director J.J. Abrams, and writer Stephen King, and starring James Franco, Chris Cooper, Josh Duhamel and T.R. Knight, '11.22.63' premiers on the Hulu platform on February 15.

CES 2016 - AMD unveiled their new Wraith cooler at CES 2016, but had some more surprising news: that their upcoming socket AM4 platform will have a single socket. Yes! A single socket.

This means that there will only be one socket to choose from for the Zen-based CPUs and APUs, bringing their platform into unison. Right now, both AMD and Intel's sockets are fragmented, but everything goes into one path with AM4 which is just so great - not just for consumers, but for system builders, too.

As for Zen, AMD is promising 40% more instructions per clock than the current Excavator cores, by utilizing simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) architecture, that is similar to the way Intel does things with its Core series, compared to the cluster-based multi-threading (CMT) approach.

If you've ever made a "Let's Play" video, and you put that tagline in the title, watch out for Sony, because they actually own the trademark to that tagline. Not that anyone's actually in danger of being sued, however.

A user at NeoGaf was poking around and discovered that particular trademark registration by Sony. They originally filed for the trademark with the USPTO in October of 2015 and from the listing, they've been issued a non-final action, meaning more information is needed. And that was on December 29th.

The trademark itself is associated to all the things that it's used for by a huge amount of people, for "Electronic transmission and streaming of video games via global and local computer networks; streaming of audio, visual, and audiovisual material via global and local computer networks". So what does that mean for the hundreds of thousands of people that use it in that context?

CES 2016 - ASUS unveiled a pair of VivoBook Flip devices at CES 2016, with the TP301 and TP501. The TP301 has a 13.3-inch screen while the TP501 bumps it up to a 15.6-inch display.

We went hands-on with the VivoBook Flip TP301, with its 13.3-inch screen coming in two options: HD or Full HD. Inside, you can customize it with an Intel Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 processor. It comes with 4GB of RAM, but can be optioned to 8GB while it arrives with both SSD and HDD options. GPU duties are taken care of by the iGPU in the form of Intel HD 520 graphics, while the discrete GPU comes in the flavor of an NVIDIA GeForce 920M, or 940M.

Where the VivoBook Flip takes a different turn, is its 360-degree hinge that lets you flip the display all the way around, and use it as a tablet. You can also use it in laptop mode, tent mode, stand mode - or as a tablet. It's super versatile.

CES 2016 - Nikon has released two new cameras in two different segments that have some fantastically high specs. The D5 halo DSLR and the D500 APS-C based DLSR have the highest ISO sensitivity in any consumer available sensor, not to mention a whole lot more when they release in March.

The D5 is the flagship camera for Nikon that builds wildly on the successes of the line of massive full-frame cameras with a much improved 35mm sensor that can shoot at a whopping 3,280,000 ISO. This opens up so many possibilities with low-light photography. Just don't expect print quality at that 3 million setting, but this does mean that noise should be better at higher than usual ISO settings that might be used on real shoots

The D500 uses a similar cropped APS-C sized sensor (DX format) that has slightly less megapixels though it's still just as sensitive as it's big brother. This is Nikon using the majority of the technology found in their halo product and trickling it down. On the back is a 3.2-inch touchscreen and all the manual controls you'd want.

CES 2016 - Alienware has announced a new promo aimed at new VR adopters that discounts the price of an Oculus Certified PC when purchased alongside an Oculus Rift headset.

With the Oculus Rift opening up pre-orders at $599, key hardware titans are piecing together VR-compatible builds to prepare for the oncoming storm of virtual reality. Dell's Alienware line has joined the VR Ready program by announcing the $1200 Alienware X51 R3 Gaming Desktop, which sports the minimum specs required to power the Rift. The Alienware X51 comes with an Intel i5-6400 Skylake CPU, 8GB of onboard DDR4 RAM clocked at 2133MHz, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (model unspecified, probably stock), and a 1TB hard drive. No keyboard, mouse or monitor is included.

$1200 seems like a lot, especially for a PC that only sports the bare minimum specs. Alienware will actually lower the X51 R3's price down to $1000 if you pre-order the Oculus Rift along with the PC...but of course that brings the grand total of your bill to $1600 plus tax. Apart from the discount, one of the major benefits in going this route is that you automatically get skipped to the front of the Oculus Rift pre-order line and are guaranteed to receive your headset when the first batch is released.

CES 2016 - TP-Link has unveiled the world's first 802.11ad router that leverages three bands for a total speed of up to 7.2Gbps.

TP-Link's new Talon AD7200 router taps into the power of WiGig--the brand for Qualcomm's new 802.11ad standard--to deliver ultra-fast speeds. The Talon AD7200 sports a tri-band access point chipset that combines the monstrously-fast 60GHz WiGig with 802.11ac's 2.5GHz and 5GHz frequencies, totaling up to an insane speed of 7.2Gbps.

Although WiGig presents tremendous gains over traditional Wi-Fi, the new band can't penetrate walls and is limited to a single area. Luckily the Talon AD7200 will automatically switch over to the most efficient frequency at any given moment without interrupting tethered connections. So if you walk outside of WiGig's potent-but-limited range, the router will switch over to 802.11ac Wi-Fi without breaking a stride. The AD7200 also supports older frequencies including 802.11 a/b/g/n.

If you're planning on jumping on the VR bandwagon and just need to upgrade your video card, then we've found a good deal for you.

We've seen some pretty stellar deals from Tiger Direct over the last few weeks, including a VisionTek AMD R9 Nano for just $400. The latest sale sees a pretty beefy discount on a tremendous VR-capable video card: an XFX AMD Radeon R9 290X for just $251.99.

The deal shaves a clean $128 off of the card's retail price tag, and arms you with a substantial graphical contender that will carry you through this generation of virtual reality tech. The XFX Radeon R9 290X Black Edition's specifications include 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM, a core clock speed of 1050MHz with a memory clock speed of 5,000MHz, double dissipation Ghost2 Thermal cooling, 2,816 stream processors, and is packed on a 512-bit bus.

CES 2016 - I'm a huge fan of LinusTechTips, watching virtually all of their videos as soon as they're released, but their latest project is something truly glorious.

The guys at LTT built an insane $30,000 gaming PC that is capable of driving 7 different PCs, each with their own 3440x1440 UltraWide monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The 7 systems run as separate virtual machines, each rocking an Acer Predator X34 monitor (Linus and I have impeccable taste when it comes to 21:9 displays) with the beasty system featuring AMD Radeon R9 Nano cards.

The system itself is powered by two Intel Xeon E5-2697 processors, each with 12 cores (24 if we take into consideration Hyper-Threading), which provides the equivalent of a quad-core CPU per user. The motherboard of choice was an ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS, with an insane 256GB of DDR4 RAM (8 x 32GB sticks) and 8 x 1TB SSDs. An EVGA T2 1600W PSU was used, with the entire PC housed inside of a CaseLabs Mercury S8.

CES 2016 - During NVIDIA's CES 2016 press conference, CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage to talk about where NVIDIA is in its journey on automotive technology.

Huang announced that NVIDIA's next-generation Pascal architecture would be powering their automotive efforts this year, with it being as fast as 150 MacBook Pros. But, during my downtime in my hotel to read up on some of my favorite tech sites, I stumbled across AnandTech's piece on Drive PX 2.

One of AT's readers noticed that NVIDIA didn't use Pascal GPUs when Huang held up a prototype PCB with two Pascal GPUs. AT reports: "Kudos to our readers on this one. The MXM modules in the picture are almost component-for-component identical to the GTX 980 MXM photo we have on file. So it is likely that these are not Pascal GPUs, and that they're merely placeholders".

CES 2016 - Lenovo displayed their latest push into mobile gaming at CES 2016 with a new gaming notebook, the Ideapad Y900. The Ideapad Y00 is a 17-inch Full HD gaming notebook with some impressive specifications.

Inside, we have an Intel Core i7 K-series processor meaning it can be overclocked, and to handle the gaming side of things Lenovo has included an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M with 4GB of GDDR5. Lenovo has crammed a 512GB SSD inside of the Ideapad Y900, and a 1TB drive for storage. The Lenovo Ideapad Y900 sports a mechanical gaming keyboard, making the product all that more alluring.

Lenovo will be starting the price of the Ideapad Y900 at $1999, with a release window of June.

CES 2016 - Deepcool's new Genome case combines the spacious utility of a performance PC chassis with a complete AIO closed-loop cooling system.

Set in a mid-tower form factor, the Genome case sports an integrated AIO closed-loop CPU liquid cooling system that works in tandem with a fan array to maintain excellent heat processing in ATX PC builds. The cooling system rocks a 360mm radiator equipped with 3x LED-lit PWM fans, and the liquid cooling solution is held in a wicked T-Virus-esque helix spiral surrounded by a glass tube.

The case can fit video cards up to 300mm in length and supports 2X SLI, and measures 506mm x 210mm x 510mm with a hefty weight of 21.5 pounds. It features a 120mm exhaust fan, 20mm radiators on the front and rear, 1x 120mm fan at 7x expansion cards, 4x 2.5" SSD drive bays and 2x 3.5" HDD bays and doesn't accommodate 5.5" drives.

CES 2016 - Phison was showcasing their extensive line of storage products at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, with PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe solutions, as well as next-gen SSDs using 1Znm TLC flash. Not only that, but flash drives using USB Type-C and super-fast 128GB SD cards were also on the table.

Starting with the PS5007-E7 which is the latest PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe-based SSD controller which Phison says "is in the final phase of performance tuning", with it hitting 2.6GB/sec reads and 1.5GB/sec writes - they are not for the faint-hearted, that's for sure. The PS5007-E7 features random performance of 300K IOPS read, and 250K IOPS write. Random performance sits at 36K IOPS. We should expect it to hit the consumer space in March, with drives arriving at up to 4TB.

Moving onto the PS3110-S10, which is a SATA 6Gbps controller, but it now supports the latest 1Znm NAND flash technology. Together with the 1Znm TLC, the S10 controller "saturates" the SATA bus, but adds "additional proprietary technology to provide a robust solution".

The age-old battle against pirates and publishers has raged for decades now, but it looks like the publishers may have just won the war with a new major advancement in DRM tech.

Denuvo's new-ish Anti-Tamper technology has slowed the once-steady flow of pirated games, allowing many key AAA hits to remain uncracked a full month after their release. The Anti-Tamper system, which protects DRM solutions, has ensured that most PC games that use it wont be cracked upon their release. Just Cause 3 and FIFA 16, which a both protected by Anti-Tamper, still remain uncracked.

Due to the advancements in DRM protection, the leader of notorious Chinese hacking group 3DM says that publishers may win the war in two years time. "Recently, many people have asked about cracks for 'Just Cause 3′, so here is a centralized answer to this question. The last stage is too difficult and Jun [cracking guy] nearly gave up. According to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world," the 3DM leader said in a forum post.

CES 2016 - Our last meeting of the day for day one of CES 2016 was with German cooling giant be quiet!, where we took a look around their suite at their current array of products.

There's not much new to show, but what we did find out was that be quiet! is working on an AIO watercooler - in the same vein as Corsair's Hydro series coolers - and that it'll be shown off towards the end of the year, with it hopefully in full form at CES 2017 next year.

This will be quite exciting, as be quiet! said it would be "extremely quiet" - so I'm guessing we won't hear the pump noise that we are all used to on other AIO coolers.

In our tweak guide for Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide, we uncovered an issue with the Skin Shading graphics option where turning it on or off would also turn Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) on or off. Fatshark graphics programmer Axel Kinner has confirmed to us this is the case while also noting Skin Shading is still controlled by this setting -- it's just a very subtle effect.

Kinner says "a fix for this will hopefully be in the next patch". One would think that because both SSAO and Skin Shading are enabled as is, disabling them would net an even bigger FPS increase than normal, but this is not the case right now. As such, when the patch hits, it's unclear what effect disabling Skin Shading will have on performance, but we do know the visual impact will be minimal at best.

CES 2016 - Beyerdynamic has a good showing at CES this year with a new product that just launched, the DT 1770 PRO, as well as a much improved version of their halo product, the T1, which I took the chance to sit down and relax to some tunes while the world wizzed by.

The second generation of the T1 improves on a lot of the areas that astute audiophiles have been complaining about since they came out. First on that list are a removable cable system based off of mini-XLR that allows for customized cabling from your favorite third party. IT's a huge step forward even just for the piece of mind given that cables connections are the first to wear out anyway.

And inside they've reworked the drivers completely to give it a slightly different, but overall better sound profile. The top-end is slightly rolled-off but the low-end is perhaps even more smooth and just a bit more present. The result is a more fun headphone that doesn't completely sacrifice the neutral flavor that they're known for. Even on the loud show-floor, the sound was good on a variety of material. Subtelties in the works of Dvorak couldn't be discerned with such loud ambient noise, but even then the sound is leagues better than Apple Earpods.