Graphics/Sound
We are almost to the end of yet another wonderfully innovative year in technology. The non-stop innovation of the tech sector has presented us with products and services that deliver more horsepower, lower power consumption, and smaller form factors that deliver more value and features. The tradition of Black Friday began with retail merchants feverishly working over the year to pull their bottom lines out of the "red", and utilizing the US Thanksgiving long holiday weekend to bolster sales and revenue back into the "black." For 65 years value-seeking consumers in the U.S. have been looking...
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If you spent any time on the site or digging for news from GDC last week, you probably heard that NVIDIA’s CEO Jen Hsun Huang crashed one of EPIC’s talks at the show to unveil the company’s next flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX Titan X. The only details Jen Hsun revealed were that the Maxwell-based GPU powering the card packed 8 billion transistors and that it was paired to a whopping 12GB of memory.Well, we can’t disclose any more official details just yet, but can tell you that a shiny, new GeForce GTX Titan X has arrived on the lab and we’ll be putting it through its paces shortly...The...
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When NVIDIA first announced that it would create a workstation-class remote virtualization system that enabled full GPU acceleration with latency-free streaming I was more than a little skeptical. Not only did it seem like a solution in search of a problem, the bandwidth requirements and technical heavy-lifting to support professional PC users seemed too steep to surmount in a few short years. Then, this week, NVIDIA announced that it would offer a free 24-hour test drive of NVIDIA GRID to anyone who wanted to see what the technology could do. We took the company up on its offer and what we've...
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Touted as one of the biggest milestones in Windows games development in recent years, DirectX 10 ultimately didn't live up to the hype as far as end-users were concerned. A large part of the disappointment was perhaps due to a misunderstanding of what DirectX 10 was supposed to be. DirectX 10 was a fundamental refresh of the entire API and it brought a much-needed reboot to an aging API model. The reboot removed a lot of the legacy clutter left over from over a decade of previous DirectX developments. DirectX 10 was never really about the end users at all, it was really about the developers. It...
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DirectX 10 (DX10) has been one of the hottest topics for discussion and news coverage since the first DX10 compliant hardware appeared in the second half of last year. Touted as the biggest milestone in games development since programmable shaders were introduced with DirectX 8, nearly seven years ago, DX10 has generated a lot of buzz. Unlike the older versions of DirectX which were each built on top of the previous version, DirectX 10 is a completely new beast. With Windows Vista, Microsoft fundamentally changed the way drivers are designed, and they also completely redesigned DirectX from the...
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One of the major up and comers in the video card industry is HIS. In recent months, HIS has garnered some attention with several impressive additions to their product line. They put a major emphasis on overclocking, cooling and stability, while providing competitive performance. With such innovations as oversized, yet quiet cooling solutions and the ability to monitor and throttle fan speeds based on temperature, HIS is catering to enthusiasts who don't like to compromise. Today, we are going to take a look at the HIS X700 Pro IceQ Turbo 256MB PCIe Video Card. Building on...
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Terratec Aureon Vs. AudioTrak Prodigy Two 7.1 24-Bit/192kHz Cards Under $150 by Jeff Bouton September 18, 2003 For a long time, when you thought of a sound card there were two basic choices; there were cards from Creative Labs and then there was everyone else. However, over recent years, there has been an increasing number of challengers, both new and old, looking to take a piece of Creative's pie. Recently, we've seen some compelling choices arrive from M-Audio, AudioTrak and Terratec. Each offers a moderately priced, yet powerful audio card based around VIA's ICEnsemble Envy...
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The Tyan Tachyon G9600 Pro A Little Something To Break the Monotony By - Marco Chiappetta August 6, 2003 For the last few months, budget conscious enthusiasts have been enamored with ATi's Radeon 9600 Pro GPU. And when you really think about it, what's not to like? It's a relatively inexpensive product, with a great feature set and above average performance. The Radeon 9600 Pro has also earned a reputation for being quite the overclocker. Back in April, when we first got our hands on an ATi built Radeon 9600 Pro, we overclocked its core and memory well beyond their default...
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The Tyan Tachyon G9500 Pro A Power-packed card for the mainstream "Burned in" by Robert Maloney May 8, 2003 Often, when you look at hardware ads in magazines, you will see somewhere in there a benchmark score. A 3DMark score to be more specific, will scream "16,348 out of the box", or list the system components with a number at the bottom. While these are prevalent, why aren't Winstones or other system benchmarks shown as often? The reason is, no other section of the computer hardware market is as hotly contested and eagerly anticipated as...
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