I’ll be attending PAX East (this weekend!) for the third consecutive year, but this is the first time I won’t be going as an exhibitor. Certainly this PAX will be much different than what I’ve experienced in my previous position—but is that a good thing? Let’s find out in my insider’s take on the highs and hells of convention/trade-show exhibiting.

Click for full image. PAX East 2012 panorama.

Being an exhibitor in the PC hardware industry is like starting college.

There was a recent burst in demand from our community (that's you guys) to cover more gaming peripherals—keyboards, mice, headsets, the works—and start reviewing the options out there. Following-up with our video production rig, which endeavored to detail some great audio peripherals, this review signifies the impending publication of several new mouse & keyboard reviews.

For the past several weeks I've had the opportunity to play around with a couple of high-end gaming mice sent in to GamersNexus, including today's Logitech G600; this Logitech G600 gaming mouse review will look at its features, value for MMO gamers, and talk about serious button enthusiasm.

RSS feeds have been around since Netscape was still a thing -- nearly 14 years since its official release candidate -- and they've managed to retain their relevance as the web has grown exponentially. The objective of an RSS feed is simply to pool articles from multiple desirable sources in one place, reducing the amount of websites you'd need to individually visit in favor of one content aggregator; the source for an individual feed can be a certain author, making it easy to stalk them across the web, a website, a forum, or even a photo gallery. The use of RSS as a framework itself has largely become irrelevant as web applications have become more intelligent in their interpretation of content, but feed reading and content aggregation is as alive as ever.

Until recently, Google Reader has made up a large portion of the userbase for feed aggregation, but the company announced just yesterday that they'd be shutting down the service officially on July 1st, 2013. The shutdown means many users are looking for web-based and desktop RSS alternatives to Google Reader -- this article showcases a few of those.

We'll start with two of the rising stars in the web space, then move to a simple desktop reader.

AMD's APUs have proliferated with ferocity over the past year or so; now making up about 75% of the company's total chip sales, AMD seems to be investing more seriously in what was previously considered a niche market. We don't suspect just APU sales could support a monolithic company like AMD (at least, not in its current form), but the recent launch of the PS4 and impending promise of an AMD APU-driven Steam Box and Xbox could mean good things for the company.

We were told at CES by AMD representatives that Steam Box would be operating on A6 and A8 APUs and the PS4 has been officially stated to include a semi-custom Jaguar 8-core APU (heavily INT-optimized with a large-width FPU); the Trinity APUs run a bit too hot for console purposes, making Jaguar a reasonable choice for what have effectively become living room PCs. Let's start this PS4 hardware specs analysis with the APU—Jaguar—and the PS4's top-level specs. We'll then talk about what implications these have on PC gaming and console gaming.