It seems that the era of bulky gaming laptop beasts is over as most PC builders are releasing slim machines that deliver impressive gaming performance in surprisingly svelte form factors. Origin PC and CyberPowerPC are on the bandwagon as both companies are releasing new gaming notebooks. The Origin PC EVO 15-S weighs...Read more...
Sometimes, you just have to pull out all the stops, which is essentially what Dell is doing by making its Alienware Aurora gaming desktop available with the option of including an NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z GPU. Alienware notes that the Titan Z boasts 5760 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR5 memory, and 8 TeraFLOPS of compute...Read more...
SFF (small form factor) rigs can be tricky; depending on the configuration, they can be decent if underpowered machines or performance beasts, and although many system builders are putting out whole lines of the compact computers, you’ve in some cases only been able to configure them so much, often limited by...Read more...
If there was any doubt that Chinese smartphone and tablet maker Xiaomi was the real deal, have a look at the company’s sales numbers for the first half of the year. Hugo Barra, who left Google and his position on the Android team last year to become Xiaomi Global’s Vice President, posted on Google+ that sales have exploded. “In...Read more...
One of the trickiest aspects to launching a major new platform update is the chicken and egg problem. Without any hardware to test on or take advantage of, developers are leery of committing to supporting new hardware features. Without software that takes advantage of new hardware capabilities, customers aren't...Read more...
Google's ongoing I/O conference has so far been bursting at the seams with interesting announcements. In fact, there's been so many announcements that it's been a little hard to keep up. One of the more interesting ones surprisingly doesn't come from Google, though. Rather, it comes from NVIDIA, and it's a development...Read more...
Google is undeterred; after brilliantly failing to wedge itself into our living rooms with Google TV (though it’s made modest inroads with the Chromecast dongle), the company is rumored to be mounting another effort by partnering with other companies to put out set-top boxes loaded with Android. According to...Read more...
Like any smart company, NVIDIA is always looking for new markets and segments to dig into, and the company is doing just that with a push into high-performance computing (HPC). NVIDIA announced that its Tesla GPUs are being used to bring ARM64-based servers to a new level of performance. There are several vendors...Read more...
Google hasn't been bashful about tapping into various manufacturers to build Nexus-brand devices, and if you've been listening to the chatter coming out of the rumor mill, you may have heard that HTC's been working on a bigger size tablet to serve as the forthcoming "Nexus 9." Some recently leaked specs and photos...Read more...
Previously, Apple’s least expensive Intel Haswell-based iMac was the 21.5-inch version with a quad-core Intel Core i5 (2.7GHz) that started at $1,299, but the Cupertino company has bumped the bottom line down a bit with a new model that costs $1,099. Apple tends not to skimp on specs with its pricey machines, but the company surely had...Read more...
Turn out the lights, the party's over. Graphics card vendors enjoyed a boost in sales thanks in large part to the Bitcoin mining craze (along with other forms of virtual currency, like Litecoin) that everyone seemed to get caught up in, but the thing about these cryptocurriences is that they're exceedingly difficult...Read more...
MSI's Dominator Pro GT60 packs two significant firsts. It's the first high-end gaming laptop we've reviewed with a HiDPI display (the GT60's 2880x1660 panel is the equal of the vaunted MacBook Pro's Retina display), and it's the first system we've looked at to sport NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 880M. MSI has also packed this system with a plethora...Read more...
MSI's Dominator Pro GT60 packs two significant firsts. It's the first high-end gaming laptop we've reviewed with a HiDPI display (the GT60's 2880x1660 panel is the equal of the vaunted MacBook Pro's Retina display), and it's the first system we've looked at to sport NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 880M. MSI has also packed this system with...Read more...
Over the past few weeks, I've spent a significant amount of time with Watch Dogs. The game is infamous for not running very well on PCs -- and after some legwork, I've figured out a hefty chunk of the reason why: Ubisoft royally screwed up its suggested VRAM (graphics card frame buffer) settings. Watch Dogs...Read more...
One of the ongoing questions around AMD's Mantle API is how much support it would garner in actual shipping titles. True, EA had committed to adding support to the Frostbite engine, but that's the kind of announcement that can be quietly swept under the rug or might be integrated into the engine but with a minimal...Read more...
Google's Project Tango Tablet development kit is a 3D mapping and spatially-aware device that, with a number of cameras and sensors on board, can detect its surroundings and your movements in three dimensions. As such, you can utilize the device to develop applications and uses that integrate the physical world around...Read more...
Small form factor PCs are all the rage these days, and the boutique builders are no exception. Increasingly, companies are looking for ways to push the envelope in terms of what they offer in a compact rig, and to that end Maingear built a liquid-cooled system called the Epic Torq. The system offers closed-loop liquid...Read more...
Ubisoft’s “Watch Dogs” has been a hotly anticipated title--a franchise, even--and both AMD and NVIDIA are releasing graphics drivers for the game’s release. This game is a demanding one, to be sure. NVIDIA says that minimum requirements include an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 (2.66 GHz) or AMD...Read more...
NVIDIA's GRID is a virtual GPU technology that allows for hardware acceleration in a virtual environment. It's designed to run in concert with products from Citrix, VMWare, and Microsoft, and to address some of the weaknesses of these applications. The problem with many conventional Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDIs) is that they're often either...Read more...
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...Read more...
Leave it to Zotac to build a mini-PC designed for gamers. Zotac lives and breathes pint-sized PCs, and thanks to an era where the hardware is generally outpacing the software, Zotac was able to build a pretty impressive gaming system within the popular ZBOX mold. Specifically, Zotac's new ZBOX EN760 comes out swinging...Read more...
As one of the top-shelf systems in the company's mainstream line-up, the Inspiron 15 7537 is in an interesting position in Dell’s extensive family of laptops and ultrabooks. This laptop is too pricey to be considered affordable by most consumers, and yet it’s not quite in the same class as and doesn't have the luxury features of...Read more...