Latest News - Page 4406

Valve are not a company afraid of change, they've dominated digital distribution in the past near-decade or so and now are expanding out into the lounge rooms of gamers worldwide. The announcement is not detail heavy, but it does give a few facts.

"Big picture" mode will provide "controller support and navigation designed for television interaction", it will also allow players to "enjoy Steam and their library of Steam games on more screens throughout the house." This probably means they've re-jigged the Steam interface to fit a large TV or projector setup and have it accessible via controller.

Google is currently investigating a problem with the e-mail portion of its company following complaints from some of their Gmail users saying that all of their messages, attachments and Google Chat logs have vanished.

Google issued a warning via it's App Status Dashboard saying they had been hard at work attempting to recover the lost data. "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future," the website reads. "Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change. This issue affects less than 0.08% of the Google Mail userbase. Google engineers are working to restore full access. Affected users may be temporarily unable to sign in while we repair their accounts."

iFixit are at it again, this time ripping apart the 2011 edition of Apple's MacBook Pro. Some facts about the dissection of it show that the RAM and HDD are still user-replaceable parts, which is a good thing. The battery inside is a 77.5 watt-hour battery with Apple's claims of 7 hours of use.

They did find a tonne of thermal paste on the CPU and GPU and noted that this may cause overheating issues in the future, so to anyone who purchases one of these new MBP's, this is something of an important note. Another surprising thing they found was one of the screws near the subwoofer enclosure had been stripped and there was also an unlocked ZIF socket for the IR sensor, tsk, tsk.

Rumor has it that NVIDIA will be the first one out of the gate with a dual-GPU for 2011. Sources close to Taiwan-based Digitimes are saying that both AMD and NVIDIA are noticing a drop in demand for low-end discrete GPUs as IGPs and especially APUs are absorbing this segment.

The results of this? NVIDIA and AMD are looking to pump up hardware for the performance market given the shift in demand. Word is that NVIDIA is set to unveil the dual-GPU based Fermi card by the end of next month in the form of the GeForce GTX590. The GTX590 is looking to sport two GF110 cores with a total of 1024 CUDA cores, 3027MB of GDDR5 memory, dual 384-bit memory buses, 128 texture units and 96 ROPs - effectively, double the GTX580 specs.

Earlier on today we visited the GIGABYTE headquarters in Taipei and had a good old fashioned full look at its newest motherboard that will be officially launched next week at CeBIT in Germany. We are talking about the X58A-OC aka Hi Cookie's baby.

GIGABYTE has long wanted to produce a motherboard dedicated strictly to overclockers - that wait is now over. We are talking about a board that doesn't just overclock well, but one that cuts out the crap and nonsense and just gets down to the business of high-end overclocking.

The Taiwanese company has long been involved with overclockers and overclocking events around the world where it has managed to create a sizable market for itself. It has learnt much from the investment put into these events over time and even managed to pick up a famous Taiwanese extreme overclocker named "Hi Cookie". This guy is the brains behind the X58A-OC, an overclocking motherboard designed by a real overclocker. Logically it makes perfect sense, but how does it actually work out? From what we saw today, pretty well.

HP now have a notebook that is capable of watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on a single charge. Color me impressed HP. The new notebooks feature new processors and a sturdier, more power efficient design. HP's latest offerings go by the names of EliteBook and ProBook and are constructed with HP's "Forge" framework that includes aluminum-allow hinges, titanium-allow display latches, a magnesium-reinforced ABS chassis, a bottom-case drain in case of spills and a HP "DisplaySafe" frame.

The EliteBook 8460p (14-inch) and 8560p (15.6-inch) seem to be the premium outings which feature the HP DuraCase that meets the MIL-STD 810G military standards and boast up to 32 hours of runtime with an HP BB09 Ultra Extended Life battery. The ProBook line features the same attributes while offering more options in configurations ranging from ultra-light to desktop replacement.

Remember Gran Turismo? Well, you won't after watching the below video. Shift 2: Unleashed has its eyes on the prize and judging by this video it looks like it's going to take the #1 position on the podium.

The trailer features some insane eye-candy, and even more insane levels of realism. You can see the depth the team as gone into to make Shift 2 Unleashed a near-realistic driving game. For those of you who don't own steering wheels, I'm pretty sure Logitech just saw me posting this news and have started production on some new steering wheels.

Apple has let the Lion out of its den and out to developers around the world. Apple's OS X 10.7 "Lion" is Apple's next-gen personal computer operating system and a preview build has been released to developers, it is much different to the current Snow Leopard in that it merges bits of iOS into the new operating system.

Apple states this in their press release as "some of the best ideas from iPad and brings them back to the Mac." The results? 10.7 is built around the Mac OS X app store and multi-touch, a new Launchpad offers the ability for users to arrange and run apps similar to how they would on an iOS-based device. There's also a new feature called "Mission Control" which allows users to use the multi-touch input to preview and switch between apps that are currently running.

The trailer to Bethesda's latest Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, has been released and boy does it look impressive. We finally get to see the game in action with it's brand-new, built from the ground up graphics engine.

Impressive, huh? The UI looks very slick with nothing to interfere with your fight for survival. It really increases the atmosphere (for me at least, and just in a video) as you're not constantly checking stats. The trailer shows off some impressive fighting (you versus a freakin' dragon!) and shows off some of the levels in which the graphics are fantastic.

Apple has unleashed their 2011 edition MacBook Pro's and they're a beautiful sight. They sport Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors, AMD 6000 series mobile GPU's and they also include the first introduction of Intel's LightPeak tech, now called Thunderbolt.

The new MacBook Pro range comes in 3 different sizes, 13-inch, 15-inch and 17-inch. The 13-inch MBP features a dual-core i5 or i7 chip while the 15 and 17-inch models feature quad-core Sandy Bridge goodness. All models include Intel's integrated graphics while the 15 and 17-inch feature AMD Radeon GPU's. All models feature the new Thunderbolt technology which is capable of 10Gbps bi-directional.