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Why Robin Makes Batman Better After many months of talking up its latest architecture, Nvidia reclaimed the single-GPU performance crown with its GeForce GTX 680, which outpaced the Radeon HD 7970 by about 7 per cent in our tests. Kepler’s arrival forced AMD to slash prices across its Southern Islands lineup, including a $US70 drop on the HD 7970, putting it at $US479 or about 4 per cent cheaper than the GTX 680′s MSRP of $US499.
Six years ago, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton set out to reignite programming in schools with a cheap, compact computing platform. Despite targeting students, his foundation’s $US35 computer captured the imaginations of tinkers worldwide, resulting in overwhelming demand.
Most of our game performance reviews feature triple-A blockbusters, but we’re changing pace for this write-up as we examine Tribes: Ascend, a free-to-play shooter released by Hi-Rez Studios on April 12. The Tribes franchise has deep roots in multiplayer shooter history, with Starsiege: Tribes making huge waves in the late ’90s and two other PC entries following in 2001 and 2004. The series has lain dormant since, but Hi-Rez hopes to revive the classic shooter with a 21st century monetization scheme.
Since late last year Ivy Bridge seems to be the architecture everyone is waiting for. Although Intel is only anticipating a 10–15% processing performance bump when compared to Sandy Bridge, the big news comes in the form of improved graphics and efficiency, thanks to the move to a 22nm design process using new 3D transistor technology we recently explained in detail here.
Continuing its tick-tock release cycle, Intel plans to unveil a new CPU microarchitecture at the end of April. Codenamed Ivy Bridge (tick), the update will bring a 22nm die shrink of current 32nm Sandy Bridge technology (tock), bringing greater efficiency and allowing Intel to cram more into the same size die.
Intel is set to roll out its latest generation of processors later this year despite a minor setback affecting ultra low-voltage models — the ones destined for super slim notebooks. By normal standards, the launch should mark a new “tick” in the company’s product roadmap, but Intel is going beyond just shrinking the current 32nm Sandy Bridge processor by introducing some fundamental advancements along with its new 22nm process.
Last year we reviewed OCZ’s RevoDrive Hybrid, which saw the marriage of a 1TB hard drive and a pair of 50GB SandForce SSDs on a PCI Express card. The idea was to use the SSD controllers and 100GB of NAND flash as a high-speed cache for the much larger spinning disk drive.
As you’ve undoubtedly heard, the third instalment of BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy hit shelves last Tuesday. Being one of the year’s most anticipated launches, it’s no surprise to see it with an aggregate review score of over 90. However, in what has become common among high-profile PC game releases, tons of unsatisfied users have slapped the title with negative feedback on Metacritic, Amazon and elsewhere.
Windows 8 Consumer Preview cracked one million downloads shortly after launching last Wednesday and I’m sure many of you have tried it already. Whether you went with a dual-boot, upgrade, clean install or virtual machine, if you’re coming from Windows 7 you’ll notice significant changes immediately, while others may not be as obvious.
