In an official press conference hosted by nVidia last week, the company made several announcements pertaining to video capture software, frametime optimization, and the GTX 700 series release dates, MSRP, and specs.

Supporting the expected GTX 700-series GPU announcements, nVidia surprised attending press with a redoubled focus on additional software packages and driver optimization. In this nVidia news coverage, we'll focus on ShadowPlay (similar to FRAPS), the GTX 780's release, GeForce Experience, and day-one drivers.

Enthusiast-class cases have trended toward heavier focus on ease-of-installation features, almost creating the perception that performance features were "maxed-out," so to speak. There's inarguably a place for enthusiast enclosures whose headlining acts are the likes of a 70-color LED strip (like the Phantom 820), but there's an equally-large market contingent that demands nothing but the best performance.

SilverStone originally impressed us with their SG08 mini-ITX SFF case (which we used for an HTPC); they further impressed us at CES 2013, where we were given a pre-production look at the RV04/FT04 enthusiast-class enclosures. SilverStone's recurring message to us has been communicated as a focus on performance. At CES we asked SilverStone for thoughts on the industry's trend toward ease-of-installation and cable management perks, to which they countered: "How many times are you going to install the system? Probably once." They have a solid point.

Welcome to another edition of Mik's Picks! After scouring the interwebs for deals, I've once again found some decent deals out there for anyone looking to build or upgrade their PCs. Intel and NVidia sales aren't as abundant this week -- likely in the face of the next-gen launches for Intel and nVidia products -- but we found some other cool stuff.

This week I found a controller sale, the Genius Gila mouse, a $90 120GB SSD, a $50 1TB HDD, and a great video card discount.

Minecraft has undeniable appeal to creative gamers, especially those with a love for Legos, but it's also incredibly easy to get burned-out on Minecraft. There's not a lot of depth beyond building, so once you've got an empire constructed, it's often a case of "well, now what?"

As the sequel to one of our most beloved mid-range racing games draws near, Codemasters called a discussion roundtable with press to answer final questions about Grid 2. We first played Grid 2 at PAX East and later published an in-depth look at the game's multiplayer, but until now, it's still been in development. With the game shipping in less than two weeks (May 28), the devs were prepared to answer some of our burning gameplay questions.

We covered a variety of topics for this pre-launch Grid 2 discussion, including vehicle customization, car tuning and tweaking, locations, RaceNet integration, and the revamped direction of the Grid franchise.

As a veteran of nearly every major racing game on the market -- to include the entire Need for Speed series, Gran Turismo games, Grid, DiRT, Driver, and more -- I was eager to hear how the overall feel of Grid 2 would be represented. Let's start with Grid's objectives.