EVGA’s booth was among the few hardware exhibitors carrying new product at PAX West. The company’s DG-7 series is finally nearing completion, now going on a year of press coverage, and has one final round of showings prior to a November launch. With that final round, EVGA has begun showing white and white/black two-tone versions of the high-end DG-77. The tooling is the same, it’s just a matter of color preference.

The DG-77 was on show again at PAX West, now in white, and included some semi-finalized specifications for November launch. The DG-77 should likely include four fans – we’re not sure on sizes, but probably 120mm – with support for 280mm front radiators (potentially up to 360mm, unconfirmed) and 240mm top radiators. A single rear exhaust port is also available at 120mm, and likely will be populated stock. The case market is competitive enough right now to demand a $100-$130 price range on the enclosure, but EVGA hasn’t finalized pricing just yet.

Thermals and noise to align with final launch.

There were a lot of challenges going into this build: A lack of magnetism, a lack of lighting on the show floor of a convention center, and some surprises in between. Cooler Master allowed us to build in the brand-new Cosmos C700P case – a modular chassis with an invertible or rotatable motherboard tray – live at PAX West. After being faced with some challenges along the way, we recruited Cooler Master’s Wei Yang to turn it into a collaborative team build. It was one of the most fun builds we’ve done in a while, and the pressure of time meant that we were both taking turns dropping screws and reworking our aspects of the build. This was a real PC build. There were unplanned changes, parts that GN hasn’t used before, and sacrifices made along the way.

All said and done, the enclosure is exceptionally easy to work within: Every single panel can be removed with relative ease, so we were able to strip-down the case to barebones for the build. Our biggest timesink was asking to invert the motherboard tray to face the other side, since that’d add some flare to the build. This process isn’t intrinsically difficult, but it does require removal of a lot of screws – after all, the entire case can be flipped, and there are a lot of structural elements there. The motherboard tray detaches by removing 4-6 screws on the back-side, followed by six screws in the rear of the case, followed by a few more screws for the shrouds. We got some help for this process, as the case is one of the first working samples of the Cosmos C700P and there’s not yet a manual for which screws have to be removed.

(The video for this one is a read-through of this article -- same content, just read to you.)

Going hands-on at PAX West 2017, we stopped by Logitech’s booth to get more technical details on the Logitech G613 wireless keyboard, G603 wireless mouse, and some follow-up information on the PowerPlay mat and G903/G703 mice. The latter set of information will go live in our pending-publication review. The former is up for discussion today.

Both devices leverage the same wireless hardware used in the G900 mouse, which we previously reviewed and found to perform equivalently or superior to high-end wired mice. The myth of “wireless is always slower” was immolated by that product series, mummified and entombed alongside other black magic gamer peripheral mythology. The G613 is the first high-performance wireless keyboard that we’re aware of, levying Logitech’s Romer G switches (which feel similar to o-ring damped browns) and two modes of wireless connectivity. These include Bluetooth and Logitech’s now-standard high-performance wireless setup, dubbed “Lightspeed.” Interestingly, these two systems can be used asynchronously to create an ad-hoc KVM, switching to wireless for the high-performance machine (e.g. gaming box), then Bluetooth for the accompanying streaming box or compression machine. This, we think, is the most marketable feature of the G613, and so happens to also exist on the new G603.

Northgard is an unusual sidestep for Shiro Games: Moving from the genre-exploring Evoland titles to city building and real-time strategy is not the usual course, it’d seem. Shiro Games assured us that Settlers and Age of Empires were as important to them as gamers as the RPGs that inspired Evoland, and have set forth to build Northgard.

As Evoland picked the most memorable bits from the history of JRPGs, Northgard feels like it must be made of Shiro Games’ favorite bits of the 4x and RTS genres. Those familiar with Settlers will recognize the similarities in Northgard immediately, and AOE fans also have some familiar items.

Anyone who sticks to one medium for gaming -- PC, Xbox, Playstation, destroyed Switch -- inevitably misses out on some games. For us at GamersNexus, Monster Hunter has long been one of those franchises. Luckily, Phoenix Labs felt the same way, and so created a more platform-favorable co-op, behemoth-slaying RPG called “Dauntless.” Dauntless aims to bring a refreshed, new take on the hunting experience, adding a healthy dash of Dark Souls-inspired combat for the PC platform.

The very existence of humanity is being threatened by aether-fueled behemoths, we’re told, and so you shouldn’t feel bad about eradicating entire families of beasts, Design Director Chris Cleroux informed us. Just murder all of them. They’re all bad.

Thunder Lotus has hit their stride in game making. Their first game, Jotun, made waves largely due to the beautiful hand-drawn visuals. They’ve now embarked on their second title, Sundered, and they’re hoping to do the same again. Shifting to a more “Metroidvania” style game has only benefited from the appeal of Thunder Lotus’ hand drawn aesthetic, which carries over into the new action/platformer title.

In Sundered, you control Eshe, a survivor in a post-apocalyptic world. Separated from your group by an eldritch sandstorm, Eshe is forced to investigate the powerful arcane forces that shattered the world. Throughout the game, enemies come from two fractions: the Valkyries and the Eschatons. The Valkyries were once humanity’s best soldiers, formed to try and stop the cataclysm that shattered the world. The Eschatons, on the other hand, were humans that fell under the sway of those same eldritch powers. Eshe will have to overcome both throughout the game.

The march toward completion continues for Hob, the latest offering from Runic games. Hob is also the first title from Runic since founder Travis Baldree left to form Double Damage Games, following the wild success of the Torchlight dungeon crawler. It's hardly surprising, then, that Hob takes a sharp change in direction from the franchise Runic had previously built. Where the prior series had been a Diablo-esque hack’n’slash dungeon crawler, Hob is moves to focus on world exploration and puzzle solving, using both as a means for storytelling. Adventure is the focal point, here, although some dungeon crawling does remain.

Hob drives a point of world-building in a very literal way. The world of Hob is a striking blend of natural wilds and harsh mechanical creations. In the above realms, you'll find wild animals such as the effable “duckdeer” and overgrown (and aggressive) vines and thorns. This is dotted with mechanical creations, and is where our as-yet-and-to-remain untitled hero comes in. The player leads the hero through both the organic overworld and the metallic underworld to restore both to working order. As we manipulate ancient devices above and below ground, machines come online, and piece by piece the bits of natural world below ground are brought up to complete the natural world above. There’s a slow, methodical transition as organic and metal merge.

PAX really couldn’t stop growing if it tried, at this point. In 2016, there were five PAX events: PAX East, West, South, Australia, and Dev. But this really wasn’t enough for Gabe and Tycho, plus they thought that there was a little too much free time in November. But the downside to all the other PAX events is the massive power bill, and so to fix this problem the new event is like Nirvana in ‘94 -- Unplugged.

While some of that isn’t entirely true, what is true is that the popularity of board and card games is on the rise, a fact to which attendees of PAX West can attest. Every year, the designated unplugged gaming areas get more and more difficult to navigate and Magic: the Gathering’s displays get more elaborate. From the 17th to the 19th of November in Philadelphia, PAX will bring together those gamers who don’t need cables to get their kicks.

We saw a lot of games at PAX West and, as always, didn’t get a chance to cover all of them individually. One little game stood out, though: Midair, the spiritual successor to the Tribes series.

Cloistered away in the back of the sixth floor of the Seattle Convention Center, Archetype Studios barely got their game into PAX. Another exhibitor dropped out of the show two weeks prior to kick-off, opening a slot for waitlisted Archetype. As longtime fans of the Tribes series, Archetype Studios and its founders were disappointed by Tribes: Ascend’s support and payment model, leading to the creation of Midair. The game was already successfully Kickstarted for nearly $130,000, about 30% more than initially asked.

This year has been the most travel-intensive year in the history of GN. We've made a few international trips for the company – Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Macau, and London, mostly – and have had a merciless bombardment of domestic flights for coverage opportunities. One of those was PAX West, now behind us, and the next will bring us back to California for some company tours. We haven't done a full-on tour of major manufacturers on the west coast since about 2013, and the site has undergone major skill improvements (from both of our video staffers, especially) and equipment improvements.

The next steps for GN will be to push through another week of GPU and laptop coverage. That'll include the GE62VR, a final (for now) round of liquid cooled GPU reviews, and some special coverage that will soon be posted. Once that's past, we're taking a step back to cases and cooling, including coverage of Phononic's HEX 2.0 cooler, and then making plans for the next trip.