Latest News - Page 2871

Just one day operating under its new name, OCZ Storage Solutions has released its first new SSD of 2014. The Vertex 460 SATA III series of SSDs is a client level SSD designed to meet the needs of consumers looking for solid state storage. The Vertex 460 is an evolved designed based off the Vertex 450, but features new Toshiba-based 19nm MLC NAND Flash as well as OCZ's in-house Barefoot 3 M10 controller.

OCZ says that the Vertex 460 will be fast out of the gate and remain so throughout its life without the use of "synthetic software-based optimization." The new SSD series offers up sequential read speeds of up to 545MB/s with sequential writes hitting 525MB/s. 95,000 4K random read IOPS, and up to 90,000 4K random write IOPS are achieved, while featuring sustained 4K random write performance up to 23,000 IOPS.

The real gem here is the use of OCZ's Barefoot 3 M10 controller which now features AES-256-bit encryption, and a power-optimized clock that is designed for the consumer market and does not compromise performance for efficiency. The Vertex 460 line is rated to deliver 20GB of host writes per day and includes a three-year warranty. Available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB, each Vertex 460 SSD includes a 3.5-inch desktop adapter, as well as a copy of Acronis True Image software to make cloning your data over quite easy.

The co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, has made quite the prediction in the Gates Foundation's annual letter. Gates has said that there will be "almost no poor countries by 2035."

The Gates Foundation is expected to give away the entire Gates fortune of around $67 billion once the couple has been dead for over 20 years, has published a letter for each of the last dive years, detailing global philanthropic progress. Gates talked with Forbes Magazine's Editor, Randall Lane, where he said there will soon be a point where "you'll have to give a reason why a country is poor."

Gates wrote: "I am optimistic enough about this that I am willing to make a prediction. By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer. It will be a remarkable achievement. When I was born, most countries in the world were poor. In the next two decades, desperately poor countries will become the exception rather than the rule. Billions of people will have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The idea that this will happen within my lifetime is simply amazing to me."

You thought free-to-play games made nothing? Think again: Tencent's free-to-play first-person shooter made $950 million last year. This is quite the sum of money, considering Riot Games' League of Legends only managed $624 million.

The remaining top 10 popular free-to-play titles were from developers Nexon, Electronic Arts and Blizzard. Nexon's fantasy title, Dungeon Fighter Online, made $426 million in revenue, while World of Warcraft made $372 million. For EA, Star Wars: The Old Republic made $138 million, after the developer's decision to shift away from its subscription-based model.

Super Data Research, the company behind these numbers, noted that the digital free-to-play market grew by 45% in the US last year. With free-to-play titles making $2.9 billion total, with earnings from subscription-based titles dropping 21%, to just $1.1 billion.

During a recent Reddit AMA, Valve god Gabe Newell had something interesting to say about Steam Machines, and EA's Origin service. "We're trying to make it as open as possible," said Newell, continuing: "If EA wants to put Origin on it, that would be fine, etc... (trying to pick an example of something that people think we would prohibit)."

One of the big hurdles of Steam Machines in the market, would be to cut themselves off from the world, and not accept competitors' digital distribution or gaming services on its devices. But as we can see here, Newell is all for it - a totally open platform.

I think we're seeing the beginning of something very special here, a true living room PC. All we need are some awesome games like Half-Life 3, Team Fortress 3, Left 4 Dead 3 and more, and we'll be in gaming heaven.

The cash-strapped Jamaican bobsleigh team is in dire need of funds to reach the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games, and it looks like they might get there thanks to the crypto-currency, dogecoin.

A fundraising campaign was put together following news over the weekend that Team Jamaica had qualified for the Winter Olympics for the first time since 2002. Winston Watt, who leads Team Jamaica, spent his own money transporting the team to training sessions, but didn't have enough funds to make it to Russia.

Watt then opened a PayPal account, hoping to raise the $40,000 or so required to attend. Dogecoin founders, Liam Butler, Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus, all happen to be fans of the Jamaican bobsleigh team, with Butler telling the Guardian: "As someone who grew up in the '90s, Cool Runnings was the ultimate feel-good movie about underdogs out of their element achieving their dreams. When I was about seven years old, my best friend and I had a billy-cart that his dad built. When we would start our run down his driveway, we would shout out the catchphrase from the movie: 'Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, get on up, it's bobsled time!"

The New Year is here, but where are my New GPUs from NVIDIA? Well, it looks like they - yes, they, plural - could be very close. VideoCardz.com is reporting that we should expect two new high-end GPUs from NVIDIA: the GeForce GTX TITAN Black Edition, and the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 790.

Starting with the GeForce GTX TITAN Black Edition, which should be the same GPU found on the GTX 780 Ti, but it would feature higher double precision computing, in other words: more CUDA cores. We should see this GPU arrive with 6GB of VRAM on board, twice as much as the GTX 780 Ti features, something that is quite important to NVIDIA these days with 4K here.

We should expect the GTX TITAN Black Edition to feature 2880 CUDA cores, 240 TMUs, and 48 ROPS. The price on the GPU will be around $999, and we should hear more information on it shortly.

Today, Toshiba announced that it has completed the acquisition of OCZ Technology's SSD assets and has closed the deal worth $35 million. This is the final chapter in the long-running saga that was OCZ Technology, and the culmination of months of speculation, rumors, and sharp downfalls of one of the pioneers of consumer SSD storage.

"The acquisition of OCZ further expands our solid state storage capabilities and represents Toshiba's commitment to this high-growth area," said Mr. Seiichi Mori, Vice President of Toshiba's Semiconductor and Storage Company and Corporate Vice President of Toshiba. "Our goal is to offer a leading edge portfolio of solid state solutions to address the storage challenges faced by both client and enterprise customers, and the acquisition of OCZ is an ideal addition to our team in realizing this strategy."

In the deal, Toshiba purchased OCZ Technology's enterprise and client SSD business which already has a massive customer base. Toshiba has kept the OCZ name alive but has founded a new subsidiary named OCZ Storage Solutions and will operate independently of Toshiba while continuing to provide high-performance enterprise and client level solid state storage devices. OCZ Storage Solutions will continue to maintain its established world-wide sales channels and its company headquarters will remain in San Jose California.

Late last year, BlackBlaze, a online backup hosting provider published a comprehensive study on hard drive failure rates based on the 25,000 units it has in service. While no manufacturer names were published, the study stated that failure rates were highest in the first 18 months of service or as well as after the first three years.

Today the company released the second part of its report and has officially gone on record and listed out which brands are associated with the study. Unfortunately, Seagate appears to be the worst with an annual failure rate of about 14-percent on its 1.5TB model while its 3TB and 4TB models are likely to see 10-percent and 4-percent fail within the first 12 months.

Western Digital's 1TB and 3TB models fare better in the survey with annual failure rates between two and three percent respectively. Surprisingly Hitachi branded hard drives are the most reliable with the 2TB, 3TB and 4TB models all experiencing less than a 2-percent annual failure rate. The study even goes as far as to note that Seagate's Barracuda LP 2TB and Western Digital's Green 3TB both begin accumulating errors as soon as they are spun up for the first time.

When Valve first announced that it was working with OEM partners to develop a full range of Linux-based gaming devices called Steam Machines, great emphasis was placed on the fact that the devices were to be PC based and fully upgradeable. Unfortunately today we are seeing the first major OEM break away from this philosophy and built their Steam Machine devices similar to current console construction.

Alienware has long been known for its high-end gaming PCs and while overpriced in some opinions, the company's wares have always been fully upgradeable. Today, Frank Azor, Alienware's general manager said in an interview that "There will be no customization options, you can't really update it." This means that Alienware's Steam Machines are most likely being built with AMD APUs or custom GPU solutions that are hard mounted to the motherboard, much like how Microsoft and Sony are doing with the next-gen consoles. Personally I feel that this will ultimately hurt Alienware in the longrun, as the main appeal to a Steam Machine is its upgradeability.

Everyone reading this knows that both the MPAA and Hollywood studios are quite nuts when it comes to piracy, and today we are finding out just how crazy they are. While attending a showing of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit at an AMC movie theater in Columbus, Ohio, a man wearing Google Glass was removed from the theater and detained by the FBI for allegedly recording the movie.

The pair of Google Glasses were fitted with prescription lenses and the electronic side was completely switched off during the movie, but that did not stop a badge wielding official from removing the pair of glasses from the mans face followed by escorting him out of the theater. Once outside the man was met by several mall cops and the FBI who detained him and his wife in separate rooms and began demanding answers as to why he was recording the movie.

Thief will be released in just over a month's time, but Eidos Montreal have decided that now is the time to unveil the PC hardware specifications required to play its reboot of the stealth title.

Square Enix have used Nixxes for the PC version of Thief, the same team who did the great PC port of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and many more over the years. Thief will be released on February 25 in North America, and three days later in Europe, on February 28. It will reach the Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, and PC.

There will also be support for AMD's Mantle technology, which will provide performance improvements on GPUs that are compatible. Eyefinity support will be included, as well as AMD's impressive TrueAudio codec.

If you were to download Dead Rising 3 from the Xbox Games Store, it would be around 30GB to download. This sounds huge, but we're in an age of massive games - and this comes as no surprise. But massive DLC? No.

Dead Rising 3's latest patch weighs in at 13GB, which is just massive. This represents 56% of the full-size game itself from the Xbox Games Store, which I think is ridiculous. Dead Rising 3's Executive Producer, Josh Bridge, explains that Capcom Vancouver, the developer behind the zombie title, has been "actively engaging and monitoring fan feedback" in regards to bugs and issues in the game, since it dropped in November 2013.

Capcom Vancouver then brewed up the 13GB patch "in reaction to everything we could find." The patch is 100% mandatory, so you need to download it, or you won't be able to play it with an Internet-connected Xbox One. The full list that the patch covers is for your convenience, below:

We reported over the weekend on the 16-core processor from AMD, but if you want to get in early, you can buy the Opteron variant of it... right now. The AMD Operton 6300-series, or "Warsaw" processor, is designed for 2- and 4-way goodness in servers.

It uses the socket G34, and are based on the Piledriver architecture. The new chips feature between 12 and 16 cores, 16MB of L3 cache, quad-channel DDR3 memory and much more. They should have a much better performance-per-watt ratio over today's Opteron 6300 series, too. The company were poised to release these new CPUs later in Q1 2014, but ShopBLT is offering a pre-order on the 12-core version for $421, and the 16-core Operton for $663.

The details on the processors are as follows: the 12-core version is the Opteron 6338 HE, which has a 99W TDP. The 16-core processor, is the Opteron 6370 HE, and also has a 99W TDP. The HE stands for high efficiency, and should feature moderate clock speeds to keep the power numbers down.

During the DLD conference in Germany, WhatsApp CEO, Jan Koum, shared some exciting news with attendees about the messaging app's usage numbers. WhatsApp now has more than 430 million monthly active users, which makes it the worlds largest messaging app by leaps and bounds.

More importantly though are the number of messages sent every day on the service. More than 36 billion outbound messages are sent in a day while 18 billion inbound messages are received each day. That equates to 50 billion text messages sent over WhatsApp each and every day. To put that into perspective, that is more messages sent each day than all SMS messages on every carrier world wide in a 24 hour period.

With many of the largest mobile carriers still charging fees for a set amount of text messages every month, WhatsApp is now the biggest competition in the SMS realm for every wireless carrier in the world. Most of my friends as well as almost everyone I know uses WhatsApp on a daily basis, and many who use it as their sole text messaging platform. With growth like this, I feel that there is no stopping WhatsApp and if the company can released a PC version as well, the sky is the limit on how far WhatsApp will go!

The United States government believes National Security Agency (NSA) whistle blower Edward Snowden possibly received support from the Russian government.

"I don't think Mr. Snowden woke up one day and had the wherewithal to do this all by himself," said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Teaxas), in a recent TV interview. "To say definitively I can't answer that, but I personally believe he was cultivated by a foreign power to do what he did. Again, I can't give a definitive statement on that, but I think given all the evidence I know Mige Rogers has access to, that I've seen, that I don't think he was acting alone."

Snowden has evolved into an enigma since his public data breach last year, as the former CIA technical assistant received a GED and dropped out of a Maryland community college. Described as a "geek," it seems shocking that he would eventually find his way to the U.S. government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton - and would remain there until he quickly left for Hong Kong in 2013.

This morning MSI officially announced the release of its mid-grange Radeon R7 260 1GD5 OC video card to the public. The new GPU is a very budget friendly entry into the 4K gaming space, and is equipped with AMD TrueAudio technology for an immersive sound experience like any other.

The R7 260 1GD5 OC video card features a large 100mm fan that provides excellent cooling while keeping the sound levels at a minimum even when gaming. The heat exchange is assisted by dual heat pipes and an over sized heat sink that helps keep frame-rates up. Additionally, the GPU features MSI's exclusive Afterburner technology which supports core voltage adjustment technology and can be overclocked by up to 32.4% using the popular Afterburner overclocking utility. The core frequency can even reach up to 1.35GHz with just air-cooling. Enthusiasts can also use the Afterburner APP on their Android / iOS handheld devices to monitor and overclock their video cards.

CES 2014 - GIGABYTE's marketing director, Colin Brix, took a few moments to walk us through the company's new Brix devices. Up first is the new Brix Pro which features Intel's new Iris Pro Integrated Graphics, and is powerful enough to even run Battlefield 4. The Brix Pro is also Gigabytes official entry into the Steam Machine arena and is Valve approved.

We were also shown a Brix device that is coming out this year that features discrete graphics for more GPU processing power. The unnamed device features both Intel Haswell and AMD processors and will have support for NVIDIA GPUs at a later date. GIGABYTE says that the unnamed device will be perfect for LAN parties, or anywhere you need desktop performance in a small, ultra-portable package.

The last Brix device we got a chance to check out is the new Brix NAS device which is code named Brix MAXX. The device has room for up to four 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs, and is being billed as a home-sized personal cloud storage device. The Brix NAS supports SMBA, DLNA, as well as other server configurations, and features several RAID features. The Brix NAS is the first Brix device to run Android as its main OS, and features apps for your mobile devices for quick file syncing.

In a world where it seems that sharing any form of media with your friends is illegal or against the service's ToS, HBO has stepped up to the plate and said that it is OK to share your HBO Go account with friends and family. In a recent interview with website BuzzFeed, HBO's CEO Richard Plepler went on the record saying that "It's not that we're unmindful of it [ HBO GO Account Sharing ], it just has no impact on the business."

Plepler says that the company sees HBO GO as an added value feature to its Premium Channel cable service and not as an individual product in itself. He went on to say that allowing users to share their HBO Account with friends is a "terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers," and that it could lead to more HBO subscribers in the future. "HBO Go is value added - what you want to watch," Plepler said, in response to questions about offering HBO Go as a stand alone product. "Right now, that's the right model for us. Are we always thinking about optionality, of course we are always thinking about optionality... if the arithmetic changes and made sense in a different way we are not going to be caught without the ability to pivot."

I take this as a breath of fresh air, and hope that more companies will be open to this kind of thinking, and will lessen their restrictions on account sharing in the future. HBO has the right idea, and if more companies follow suit, we could see a sort of "mini revolution" in the content streaming arena that would lead to more competition and value for the customer in the future.

Today MSI launched a new variant of its Z87 MPower MAX, the company's flagship LGA1150 motherboard. The new Z87 MPower MAX AC includes an 802.11 ac Wi-Fi interface courtesy of a daughter board that features an Intel communications processor that brings dual-band 802.11 AC Wi-Fi to the popular motherboard.

MSI says that the new Z87 MPower MAX is capable of Wi-Fi speeds up to 867 Mb/s on the 5GHz channel when connected to a compatible router running 802.11 ac. Bluetooth 4.0 is also featured in the new Intel-based daughter board which allows for connectivity of Bluetooth enabled peripherals, accessories and mobile devices. The Z87 MPower MAX AC is a standard ATX form factor motherboard and features all of the same configurations and features of its predecessor, the MSI Z87 MPower MAX which we reviewed last year.

Today Sandisk became the industry's first manufacturer to launch a line of ultra-low latency, memory channel-based ULLtraDIMM solid state drives. The new Sandisk ULLtraDIMM SSDs are basically SSDs flash memory that has been populated on memory-channel DIMMs to provide as low latency as possible to ensure data gets to the CPU as fast as possible.

"The Sandisk ULLtraDIMM SSD was designed to expand the reach of ultra-low latency flash storage throughout the data center and scale to meet the requirements of any enterprise application, no matter how bandwidth or capacity intensive," said John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at Sandisk. "The ULLtraDIMM SSD's linear performance scalability and innovative DIMM form factor allow organizations to deploy flash as their application requirements change, without requiring significant infrastructure investment."