Analysis

Article: NVIDIA: ShadowPlay Retroactive Recording, Official GTX 780 Specs, More

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.

Article: SilverStone Raven RV02 Review - "Breaks All The Rules"

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...

Article: TechRAID2: GTX 700 & AMD 9970 Specs, Haswell Benchmarks

The past few weeks have seen the unveiling of nVidia's GeForce GTX 700 series, leaked specs, official AMD Radeon HD 9970 specs, benchmarks of Intel's Haswell HD 5000/HD5200 IGPs, and new advancements in UEFI BIOS. To say the least, it's been an exciting few weeks in hardware news. PAX East felt decidedly slow this year for hardware when compared against last year's launch of IB and the NUC, but now the hardware companies have had time to...

Article: Logitech G700s Review - Wireless Gaming Mouse Tear-Down

Gaming peripherals are currently spearheading our efforts to deconstruct the underlying components within gaming hardware and, following our Genius Gila review, today we look at Logitech's new G700s mouse. We first spoiled Logitech's new gaming peripherals right before PAX East, where we covered hard specs and talked a bit about...

Article: Corsair Obsidian 350D M-ATX Mini Gaming Case & Specs

A recent retailer photoshoot of impending Corsair product launches saw leaked photos of an upcoming Micro-ATX case, branded the Obsidian 350D. Some specs for the Corsair Obsidian 350D Micro-ATX case are already confirmed, including cooling/radiator support, cable management, and other features (see below).

Article: Genius GX DeathTaker MMO/RTS Gaming Mouse Review

We've been busy with PAX here at GamersNexus for the past weeks, but now the team is back and it's time to catch up on some peripheral reviews. First in line is a mouse—and it isn't Logitech this time (but you should also check out our Logitech roundup)—no, this time it's the Genius DeathTaker. Just let that name sink in for a...

Article: Corsair H110, H90 vs. NZXT X60, X40 Liquid Cooler Round-Up

As with any modernized adaptation of an existing technology, closed-loop liquid coolers (CLCs) have become almost fad-like in their adoption. In part, this is because CLCs actually do have very legitimate advantages over traditional air coolers - they are highly noise-to-temperature efficient, for one thing, and have an aesthetic appeal for some users. The other part of this liquid cooling craze, though, I believe is attributable to a...

Article: $2038 Professional Game Streaming / Video Editing DIY PC

Few things tax hardware to the extent that video encoding and rendering tasks do; H.264 encoding (soon to be superseded by H.265 - which is incredibly promising) is one of the best-optimized, multithreaded encoding methodologies and scales predictably with increasingly-advanced hardware. Still, with all this optimization, it's easy to want more. Always more. Rendering is an arduous task that...

Article: AMD Launches TressFX: An Important Stepping Stone In Soft Body Dynamics

You know graphics are starting to get good when hardware developers and game developers have time to work on hair. Rendering realistic hair has historically put GPUs under tremendous load, and actually we've often used FurMark—literally just a ball of dynamic fur—for stress-testing GPUs and testing for thermals. The obstructions to realistic, real-time hair rendering are mostly...

Article: PS4 Hardware Specs Explained: Implications for PC Gaming & The Future

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...

Article: Unigine's Valley GPU Benchmark: Successor to Heaven

Unigine Corp. has announced its successor to the famed Heaven Benchmark GPU stress-testing utility, Valley Benchmark; as we've stated in our "how to benchmark your PC guide," Heaven has been one of the longest-standing, most effective tools for real-world (non-synthetic) graphics hardware stress tests. The utility's primary advantage is that it renders environments similar to what...

Article: Neverwinter MMORPG Preview & Gameplay Impressions

MMORPGs: Plunging into a world wrought with thousands of heroic warriors, each challenging god-incarnates, courageously marauding across war-ravaged country-sides, donning immaculate armor, and -- who are we kidding? They're killing a pseudo-arbitrary count of orcs; waiting until level 15 to wear the red gloves; and they're delivering letters from one lifeless NPC to another, whose pointlessness is superseded only by that...

Article: AMD: No 8000-series GPUs in 2013

Japanese publication 4Gamer.net recently interviewed AMD Product Manager of Desktop Graphics Devon Nekechuk, who made an official statement that the company would not be introducing a new line of RADEON HD graphics processors in 2013. That doesn't mean AMD fans (and fans of competition) have nothing to look forward to, though.

Article: NZXT Phantom 630 Gaming Case Benchmark / Review

As I've explained innumerable times this past month, the overwrought enthusiast market has clambered over itself with new hardware for 2013. It's really quite unbelievable: As the mainstream desktop market wanes—due to many factors, like prolonged usable system lifespan and minimized consumer interest—the enthusiast and gaming markets have picked up competitive interest among manufacturers. There's suddenly a much greater incentive to...

Article: RAIDMAX Cobra Gaming Case Benchmark-Review

After the thorough lashing we gave Rosewill's Armor Evolution case—even with its claim to the best cooling performance we've ever seen—we immediately benched the next two cases in our queue. Normally I'd impose a delay between case reviews for better (and more interesting) spread of coverage, but this time, we were all eager to see what the stuff we previewed at CES could...

Article: Rosewill Armor Evolution Gaming Case Benchmark / Review

UPDATE: Rosewill has read our review and is addressing the quality issues in an upcoming "version 2" of the Armor Evolution case. We will review this case once it is complete and in our hands. As noted in our post-CES case round-up, mid-tower and full tower / enthusiast cases were all the rage this year; in a frighteningly unstable desktop PC market—one which s...

Article: Hands-On: Antec GX700 Budget Gaming Case & TrueQuiet Case Fans – CES 2013

My first gaming PC build actually used an old Antec case – long discontinued at this point – but since then, I’ve closely followed their progression in the market. The company has produced some of the undisputed leaders in sales and innovation, specifically in the form of the Antec 900, which was almost single-handedly responsible for guiding case design methodologies toward our modern featureset. The 1100 has been ranked one of the highe...

Article: CES 2013 Hands-On: NZXT Hale90 V2 Series PSUs Have Promising Engineering

NZXT announced at this year’s CES three new additions to its HALE90 power supply series: the HALE90 V2 850W, 1000W, and 1200W PSUs. This is NZXT’s first fully-modular power supply series.

Article: Pepcom/CES are in 2 Days - And We'll Be There. Here's Why You Care:

The biggest electronics and hardware convention of the year is just a few days away. Insanity - pure insanity. The International CES—known to many as the Consumer Electronics Show (though we're told we'll be paddled and put in a corner if we call it that)—runs from January 8th through January 11th and is hosted all throughout Vegas; the show takes place in the multi-million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), the famed Ven...

Article: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Benchmark / Review

Adding an aftermarket CPU cooler to your gaming system will undoubtedly tighten thermal differentials to a more predictable range, and while semiconductors do "like" heat to a limited degree, CPUs have trouble operating under intense, fluctuating thermal load. Aftermarket CPU coolers, much like RAM, are a commodity in the mainstream market; they're not necessary to operate at...