Displaying items by tag: Gaming

Friday, 29 July 2011 23:04

MSI Z68A-GD80 B3 Performance Review

Board03Ok, we have taken a look at the MSI Z68A-GD80 B3 and its design, and features. We uncovered a few things that gave us some concern. Will the board be able to handle being loaded up with cards or other devices? How will the relatively small number of PCIe lanes behave if we give them too much to think about at once? Well we are going to find that out as well as see how far we can push this board and our Core i7 2600k CPU. Let’s pick up where we left off and dive into the BIOS before we move onto the performance numbers.

Wednesday, 27 July 2011 21:08

Console games are getting shorter and shorter?

84If anyone has ever really thought that console gaming is better than the PC then here is one to put a nice monkey wrench into that thought machine. As we see the installers for PC games getting larger and extending into more DVDs we find that the console gamers are hitting something of a wall. You see even with Bluray you have a finite amount of space to stuff everything in.  This means that as graphics and other objects in a game grow you lose out in many other ways. Bulky AI code gets slimmed down, expansive maps get trimmed.

Published in News

01AMD is a company that not too long ago was on top. They had done something that no one thought possible; they were able to outperform Intel clock for clock.  But they had a problem; they had a winning CPU but had to rely on others for a solid platform to run on. This prompted AMD to buy ATi (one of the companies that had a good chipset for AMD) which gave them a GPU business and a chipset business. The problem has been paying the bill on that particular purchase. This has prevented them from putting a lot of money into R&D and has also led to some, well unimpressive products (on the CPU side not the GPU). We have worked through several CPUs and chipsets; each one improving a little over the other but never really catching up to what Intel has on the market.  Now things could be different; nVidia has allowed SLI on an AMD chipset and AMD is making good strides in terms of what their chipsets can do (with limitations from the CPU and IMC). We have their latest chipset in the form of the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5. This is a Three-Way SLI AMD motherboard with lots to offer. We are going to look at the design, layout, and cover some design philosophy and features along the way.

Wednesday, 20 July 2011 23:35

Asus Sabertooth P67 B3 Performance Review

15We have told you about Asus’ design choices for the Sabertooth P67 and even gone into some detail about the mindset behind this and other products in the TUF line. However all of the best design choices and components in the world will not make a board perform. To get great performance takes a little more. In this half of our Sabertooth review we are going to look into that side of the product. Asus has always had a reputation for tinkering with their BIOSes (not always a good one though).  So let’s start off there and see where it takes us.

Published in Pro Motherboards

04Asus has a flare for design and for choosing the right parts to go on their products. Over the years of working with them I have often had them tell me “wait for our design” instead of tinkering with the reference parts. The benefit of this is that the consumer usually gets a much better product in the end and we see the upper potential of a GPU, CPU or Chipset. We have walked you through the layout and design of the Asus Crosshair IV, now we are going to show you how well it performs.

 

 

07The launch of the 450Mbps segment of the 802.11n specification was sort of backwards. We saw some of the first routers last year in the September – October time frame. Then at CES we got our first glimpse of one of the new 450Mbps wireless adapters. This was the TRENDNet TEW-687GA that we just finished testing. But we are not going to stop there as we have another 450Mbps adapter from TRENDNet in the lab. This one is more PC specific and connects over USB 2.0. You lose the universal appeal that the 687GA had but gain more on portability. So let’s introduce the TRENDNet TEW-684UB 450Mbps Dual Band USB wireless adapter.



01Home networking is something that everyone knows a little about. Often times what they know is not accurate (to put it nicely). I have heard some of the most bizarre “facts” about home networks, wireless networking and pretty much everything under the sun. We here at DecryptedTech are officially kicking off our networking section with a review of the TRENDNet TEW-687GA; this is a 450Mbps wireless adapter (sort of). We first saw this back at CES when we had our meeting with Zak from TRENDNet. It is a rather large adapter that boasts the full Duplex speed of 450Mbps at a price of $94.99. Let’s take a look at this product and talk a little about wireless networking in general.

 

 

01With all the news about the Z68 and P6x chipsets these days is seems that many people feel the X58 is done. Well that is not the case; many manufacturers still see this as a viable top end platform for Intel and are making some great boards for this market space. The nice thing about this is that they are not just making the high-performance/dollar products but are still working on quality boards for every price level. One of these is the Gigabyte X58-USB3. It is a mid-range board that leaves out SATA 3.0 but still keeps many of the other features you would expect from an X58 board (SLI, Crossfire, etc). Gigabyte has made sure they add in USB 3.0 for you while keeping everything around $180. Let’s take a look and see if it is worth that price.

Published in Consumer Motherboards



01Cooler Mater is a company that is certainly moving up. It was not that many years ago that they were not well thought of. This was until they released a lineup of cases and coolers that showed they were serious about their business. We saw products like the HAF932, the CM storm series cases and mice, the V8 cooler and others. While this was going on their more consumer based products were benefiting as well. We saw the Hiper 212+ become a favorite of many air cooling aficionados. We used them exclusively for over a year in our labs. Back in January we saw some nice new designs from Cooler Master in their suite at the Bellagio, today we have one of these in the lab and are eager to tell you how it performed. This is the CM Storm Spawn Gaming mouse. Let’s see if it has increased our frag rate.

Published in Enthusiast Peripherals



Another GPUNot too long ago while working on a GPU review I ran into an issue with a benchmark. Well per my usual policy I contacted the manufacturer and explained the situation. I was a little surprised at part of their response; "use better games". I have to say that one line stood out in my head. I do not think I even registered the rest of the e-mail. Well that got me to thinking; what games should I use? I have ones that I personally like, but they are certainly not the end-all of testing. So with that in mind I am going to ask you, my readers to help me pick the next round of games.

 

To do this either post below this short article or post on our Facebook page. We will choose seven games, two of each DX 9 and 10, and three DX11 games. We will also take suggestions on other benchmarks for our GPU testing.

Thanks for your help in making Decryptedtech.com better.

Published in News
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