Written by John Ponio
on
Tuesday, 05 June 2012 17:32 |
Web and Industry News
|
  
Today, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba all unveiled their new line of laptops and ultrabooks. They're pretty much all standard laptops and ultrabooks, but man are most of the ultrabooks pretty. Aside from the standard Ivy Bridge ultrabook specifications we've gotten used to, some include dedicated graphics cards. With the $700-$1000 or more price of an ultrabook, the graphics card really make it worth not. Not only do you get a small, thin, stylish laptop, but you get a well-performing laptop as well. Read on for more about the new computers
|
Written by John Ponio
on
Monday, 04 June 2012 16:44 |
Web and Industry News
|
Toshiba today, on the 25th anniversary of their invention of NAND memory, announced their new line of 19nm process based SSDs, which use a ridiculously small amount of power while doubling the speed of Toshiba's HD3 SSDs. This series, dubbed THNSNF, comes in four sizes and three forms factors. For sizes, there are 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB drives. For form factors, there is a 9.5mm height model, a 7.0mm height model, and an mSATA model. All have SATA 6Gb/s speeds. Power consumption is less than 0.1W, which is absolutely crazy. For reference, Corsair's Force Series 3 240GB SSD uses a max of 2.0W. Read on for more.
|
Written by John Ponio
on
Monday, 04 June 2012 16:28 |
Web and Industry News
|
About a month ago, Sony announced that they'd be releasing an ultrabook, and the expected launch date was in early June. Today, Sony unveiled their new line of Vaio laptops, including the T series ultrabook. The specifications launched back in May are about the same, although the released T series uses Ivy Bridge processors instead of Sandy Bridge. Read on for more about the new Vaio lineup.
|
Written by John Ponio
on
Friday, 01 June 2012 16:06 |
Web and Industry News
|
Usually AMD releases a new Catalyst driver for their video cards about once a month. This kept people updating drivers frequently, but also helped resolve issues quickly. In a recent blog post, AMD announced that they're going to be moving away from monthly updates, and that their goal will now be "to ensure that every Catalyst release delivers a substantial benefit to our end users." With this announcement also comes the Catalyst 12.6 Beta, which brings a whole slew of great updates to the table. Read on for more.
|
Written by John Ponio
on
Friday, 01 June 2012 15:44 |
Web and Industry News
|
Love free things? That's a silly question, everyone loves free. That's why you'll like this story. Valve has launched Dota 2: Spoils of War free to play, with free access to all heroes, though admission into the game is still selective. Although Valve isn't calling it a beta, there's still a little work that needs to be done before they let everyone onto the servers. One of the things I'm most happy about is that, while there are microtransactions in the game's store, what you buy won't affect gameplay, as they're customizations only. You don't have to buy stuff if you don't want to, though, because they've set it up similar to how Teamfortress 2 is set up where you can get random item drops. Read on for more.
|
Written by John Ponio
on
Thursday, 31 May 2012 14:07 |
Web and Industry News
|
Lately there's been a lot of debate over whether or not an optical drive is still needed. On the PC side, there's always the option for an external drive. But on a console, who would want to buy an external drive (which, if prices of current console accessories are anything to go by, would probably be pretty expensive) just to play a game without waiting hours and hours for a game to download? Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, the next generation Xbox and Playstation will keep their optical drives. Owners and managers of brick and mortar game stores can breathe a sigh of relief. Read on for more.
|
Written by John Ponio
on
Thursday, 31 May 2012 13:17 |
Web and Industry News
|
Finally, a day before the rumored time frame, the Windows 8 Release Preview has been launched. This includes quite a few updates from the previous Developer and Consumer previews, such as an updated desktop theme and more features working. There may be a few changes and updates to the build between now and RTM (release-to-manufacturing), but this should give you a good idea what the final product will be like. Read on for more.
|
Written by John Ponio
on
Wednesday, 30 May 2012 16:02 |
Web and Industry News
|
A leak of the Windows 8 Release Preview, which is the final beta-build for Windows 8 before the retail release, has happened over in China, and thanks to the wonderful internet we can see screenshots of it in all of its glory. They did change the design of the desktop, so it seems, but it really isn't as bad as I was expecting. Not everything works in the leaked release, because the Windows servers probably aren't accepting connections yet, but it appears that this is indeed a "legit" leak. I won't steal the glory from where the leak is posted, so go ahead and check it out here. It's in Simplified Han, but I believe all major browsers have translation features. If you're wondering about the US Release Preview, it should be out soon. The "official" time was somewhere in June, but if Microsoft already has a complete Chinese preview, the US one is surely done.
|
Written by John Ponio
on
Wednesday, 30 May 2012 15:44 |
Web and Industry News
|
OCZ has recently launched their "value-conscious" Agility 4 series of SSDs, bringing high performance to a price point just above $1/gigabyte. Performance wise, you can expect around 300-400MB/s sequential reads (depending on the size of the drive that you buy) and around 200-400MB/s sequential writes (again, depending on the size of the SSD). Random 4k read IOPS range from 46,000 to 58,000, and random 4k write IOPS range from 47,0000 to 85,0000. With sequential read/write, the bigger the drive is, the better your performance will be. With IOPS, however, it changes with each drive. Read on for more.
|
Written by John Ponio
on
Tuesday, 29 May 2012 14:45 |
Web and Industry News
|
With every new generation of consoles comes a debate about the cost of PC gaming vs the cost of console gaming. It eventually boils down to performance and price, in which the PC loses in price but wins by far in performance. Well, here's a cost that not many consider: the cost of electricity. A recent article by a company that does a lot in terms of using less electricity in the IT world shows just how much it costs to be a PC gamer, in terms of electricity cost. Read on for more.
|
|
|
