hardware posts

Razer has unveiled some new products this last week, keeping in line with its dedication to the PC gaming accessories market. First comes two new mice, although they are the same mice with different skins: the Naga Maelstrom and Naga Molten mice. These are special editions of the Razer Naga mice created to commemorate the new Cataclysm expansion for World of Warcraft, so if you collect WoW memorabilia, this is for you! The other release is a metal mouse pad for gamers, which allows for greater precision thanks to its smooth surface and reflective qualities.The mice retail for $80, while the pad retails for $60.

The NVIDIA line of graphics processors are among the most popular (if not the most popular) brand of high-end gaming hardware available today. However, some would argue that these days, graphics cards are offering fewer significant returns with each successive generation. With this in mind, it becomes important for the company to start shifting focus from strictly speed and high resolution frame rates (which are still a very important aspects of PC gaming) to the addressing the gameplay experience itself. One step in this direction was through adopting PhysX technology into its repertoire and having the software run using GPU instead of through a separate card. With PhysX, PC games offer deeper immersion using effects that operate in a realistic non-scripted fashion, like with smoke, cloth and liquids moving in real-time.

NVIDIA's 3D Vision technology takes the game experience even further by bringing games into the third dimension by stereoscoping games in real-time and using special shutter glasses. Unfortunately, not a lot of gamers have $600 to spend on 3D graphics. The glasses alone cost over $100 and the required 3D ready monitors that have a 120Hz refresh rates are very expensive and hard to find, leaving 3D out of the hands of the average consumer. However, NVIDIA has found a way around the prohibitive costs and an easy way to deliver a 3D experience. Not counting the cost of the video card itself, gamers can use NVIDIA 3D Vision Discover for almost nothing... or in some cases, exactly nothing. That's right, by taking the PhysX approach and incorporating 3D technology into the software drivers, PC gamers can literally give their games more depth.

Download the Resident Evil 5 Benchmark

Apparently, there's some big event of some sort happening in Los Angeles this week. Supposed to be a huge deal in the video game industry, something like that? Lots of news? Anyone know what all the fuss is about?

BI just keeps seeing poorly-lit phone-cam pictures of hotel rooms from Callaham's Twitter feed and snarky IM's from our head honcho about how long the line at Starbucks is.

Why, yes, BI wasn't able to make it to the E3 party (apologies to the fine folks at $Unspecified_Vendor, at whose party we were not able to cause chaos the likes of which would be spoken of in hushed tones for decades to come; maybe next year). Truthfully, we're not actually bitter about it. Given the flood of news that's been coming from this year's edition of the expo, hardware, especially for anyone not using a console and/or prone to waving things around, seems to be pretty much an afterthought.

Well, there was a particularly festive flight sim joystick. Thank you, Logitech.

We were halfway to Betelgeuse when the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters kicked in. We had two bags of--

... but first, we interrupt this column to bring you a Public Service Announcement:


At some point, whether it's because you're doing something warranty-voiding, or just because it's the worst possible time, the specter of data loss is going to rear its inconvenient head, maw dripping with negated bits. Whether this results in an epic cascade of profanity and spontaneous weeping, or just some muttering and the retrieval of some storage media is directly proportional to how recent your last backup was.

Yes, this falls solidly into the realm of Stuff You Think About Moments After It Will Do You Any Good Whatsoever, right up there with taking a headlong plunge into a room of whelp eggs, tasting day-old fugu, or doing that thing with the mayonnaise and the goat.

We spend most of our time in this space discussing the various ways we can make our games run faster, or look better, and rightfully so. However, that leaves out a fairly substantial portion of what brings us atmosphere and immersion in what we're doing (or, in some cases, what we're doing when we ought to be doing something else).

That something is audio. And no matter how good your sound card is, whether it's the motherboard's onboard offering or an add-on audio device, if your speakers suck, your gaming (and music-listening, and movie-watching, and Hulu-surfing) experience is going to suffer.

But first, let's see what everyone's using to turn those little electric impulses into sound waves:

Ardent fans of this column will doubtless have noticed that BI has been a little, shall we say, thin on the ground of late. There are two main reasons for this -- one, BI's biennial sojourn to the other side of the country for a week of testosterone poisoning, and, two, a multi-week stint with a rather demanding guest around the house.

The guest in question, however, wasn't an unemployed former college buddy, a surprise visit from the in-laws, or a couch-surfing second cousin. It was, rather, a sixty pound, gloss-black obelisk -- Alienware's top-of-the-line gaming system, the Area-51 X58, tricked out by them with damn near every bell, whistle, and go-fast toy in their arsenal. And BI had their blessing to, and we quote this with great relish, "Send it back as a smoking pile of slag. But, seriously, watch Iron Man on the Blu-Ray drive first."

We were skeptical. Surely, entrusting someone of BI's questionable restraint with a valuable piece of equipment would carry more stringent usage guidelines than, "Give it back when we ask for it." They were adamant -- this was the third such system released to the wild, and they wanted it to be abused.

Fortunately, the conference call ended before our mad laughter began.

Congratulations to Julius Bray from Lee's Summit, MO for being the lucky winner of a MIMO UM-710 USB mini display. It was fun having it around, but we hope you get great use out of it. Thanks again to all the participants who helped make the contest a success and to MIMO for providing the prize.

Read the MIMO UM-710 Review

We all love upgrades -- whether it's just an additional stick of memory, a new sound card, or a whole new rig -- but there's the small matter of what to do with the upgraded-from stuff. At some point, all your tech-averse family members will have systems built out of your cast-off components, and want something a tad more potent than a P3 800. At the same time, your significant other, who has caught onto the fact that fragging you is an excellent way of relieving stress, will demand to be on equal technical footing.

You are, in short, eventually going to be stuck with some dead tech. Or, as a reader of this column, something more akin to a moderately-sized drift of it. The laws of physics being what they are, and lacking a handy TARDIS in most of our spare bedrooms, we will eventually need to do something about it.

There is a tremendous amount of discussion as far as what to do when your PC reaches end-of-life (and, truly, this has hit close to home for BI, as the three-year old Dell at his day job gave him the electronic middle finger, and summarily refused to boot this week, earning much-needed retirement, and subsequent replacement with a shinier, faster, and far less recalcitrant black obelisk).

But what should you do with that dead tech? Googling "old computers never die" yields more than six million results.

So, the curtain is finally up on the Phenom II, and folks seem to be pleasantly surprised by what the green arrow group have pulled out of their collective hats, especially with the Black Edition X3 (model 720), which is aimed solidly at our enthusiast-flavored selves. The BE is the unlocked version, which means we can tinker with both the multiplier and the FSB to find the sweetest spot to hang our performance hats, and is a welcomed throwback to the old days when both chip manufacturers didn't try to dictate what their consumers did with our toys.

Fogey Check: Anyone else remember the pencil trick? Anyone ever do it? BI lacked the deft and delicate touch to succeed in his attempts, but it wasn't for lack of trying. Just another failed DEX check....