Warren.Smith

Mount & Blade FREE for the next 48 hours, 700+ titles up to 90% off, daily deals, and flash sales!

Long evenings and gloomy mornings? That's why Fall is for gaming! Let's begin the gargantuan 2014 DRM-free Big Fall Sale! We've prepared a head-spinning lineup of 700+ titles discounted up to 90% off. It kicks off with an exceptional offering: the bottomless sandbox action-RPG Mount & Blade is available for free for the first 48 hours of the sale. You can sign up for your free copy on our front page. You can also complete the Mount and Blade collection with the remaining titles bundled 75% off.

Impressive? We've only just begun. Look here, what's that? Another bundle? Yes! It's the all-time favorite Ultimate Dungeons and Dragons Bundle making a comeback by popular demand. Only $21.10 for a collection of ten D&D classics with hundreds of hours worth of gameplay time. Available for 24 hours only, as tomorrow this amazing deal will step down to make room for another gratuitous daily offer. Not feeling like waiting an entire day for a new offer? No worries, we've got you covered. Throughout the sale a line up of flash deals will be available on our front page to give you amazing offers on great games hour, by hour, by hour.

Finally, more free stuff! Visit us daily and collect special stamps on our front page. Gather 7, and you'll receive a copy of CD PROJEKT RED's flag-ship RPG, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and a brilliant movie The Gamers: Director's Cut absolutely for FREE. There you have it, our BIG Fall Sale to make your November evenings a little bit brighter and way, way more fun. Stay with us for gaming goodness happening daily!

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Platform: Xbox One

Back in the olden days of gaming, we didn’t have the convenience of auto-saves or, in more drastic scenarios, checkpoints. It was just us against the world as we took on some of the toughest challenges thrown at us, from Ghosts ‘n Goblins to the unspeakably difficult Astyanax, among several others. These days, you don’t see that sort of game often, mainly because too many developers simply play it safe.

But not Crazy Viking Studios. Last year it released a side-scrolling action/adventure through Adult Swim Games called Volgarr the Viking that challenged modern-day gamers to go with something more old-school, daring them to finish a brutally tough game on one life. Otherwise, it was right back to the checkpoint you’d go, starting the thing all over again. Now that experience has come to the Xbox One, and surprise, it’ll still beat you to death. But more persistent gamers will certainly reap the rewards that await – provided that they enjoy perishing a lot.

Think Rastan on steroids

Volgarr the Viking has a lot in common with Taito’s classic arcade game Rastan, featuring a lone warrior with a sword battling all sorts of menacing forces, from pesky flying bees to charging beasts to leaping spiders. In order to stay alive, you’ll need plenty of classic platforming skills, as well as items that you’ll find in treasure chests, including shielding and armor that will keep you alive… for a bit longer, anyway.

Volgarr has plenty of techniques he can use as well. The addition of a double jump slash not only allows him to reach higher platforms that look impossible to get to, but also provides him with an offensive technique to do away with nefarious enemies in the air (like those bees). He can also throw spears on command, although he never really explains where they come from. Hey, no need for that – time to deliver death!

While some may consider Volgarr to be an unfair experience – and in some ways, they may be right, depending on skill level – it’s the sort of game that pushes you forward to keep trying, rather than discouraging you by yelling, “you’ll never make it.” With each death, you’ll learn what you did wrong and push to make it right, figuring out something to the point where you’ll say, “Oh, so that’s how you beat that guy.” Think Dark Souls if it came out in the ’90s generation, and you have Volgarr (but without the convenience of camp fires, obviously).

Old school look and sound

For its arrival on Xbox One, Crazy Viking Studios didn’t go the extra mile with Volgarr – but it didn’t need to. The game’s side-scrolling graphics remind us a lot of the ’90s Genesis/SNES era games, but with some stylish touches, like the flaming effect when you do a spin jump or the way a spear can turn an enemy into a pile of bloody goo on contact. Even the bosses show their obvious weak points, although reaching them is a completely different story, since they charge at you with all the aggressiveness of a football player on crack.

Although the level design is similar to Rastan at first (even the first stage has the break-through floor to reveal a hidden cavern below, just like that game), Volgarr has plenty to offer in the design department, with challenging new enemies and layouts that dare you to charge forward foolishly – with obviously poor results. It also has some great winks to games of old, including Odin’s call of “Rise from your grave!” that starts the game, a loving nod to Altered Beast.

As for the music, it’s not earth-shaking, but it’s definitely Conan-like, and a good fit for the game. The sound effects can be fun as well, although hearing Volgarr’s death cry is more effective than you might think. All the more reason to charge forward and try again, right?

Rewards For the Resilient

If — and that’s a big if – you do make it through Volgarr the Viking and defeat the final boss, an all new mode called Path of the Valkyrie opens up, providing an even greater challenge than the first time around. “That’s impossible!” you may be thinking after perishing a kabillion times, but, yep, it’s like a New Game Plus for those who demand to be punished. And beating it all in one sitting will earn you the best ending.

As you might guess, only the truly patient will push their way to getting to that point, since Volgarr is a game that simply isn’t made for everyone. However, those insisting that games have gotten too “soft” as of late with checkpoints and auto-saves should load this game up and expect a real challenge.

Better still, if you’re an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, you’ll be able to do so at no charge, since it’s Microsoft’s free offering for the system in November. So you can suffer without letting your wallet do the same. Huzzah!

My View

These are the criteria I consider most importantly for reviewing Volgarr the Viking.

Graphics: 8/10

Old-school all the way, but modern enough to feel like a proper fit on the Xbox One.

Sound: 7.5/10

Decent background score and effects, but Volgarr’s death scream will likely leave you a bit shaken.

Gameplay: 9/10

Hard, hard, HARD. But that’s the point. Volgarr is a game that forces you to bring your “A” game, and nothing less.

Replay Value: 8/10

Only the truly dedicated will push to see the end, but it’s worth it just to open up the Path of Valkyrie.

Overall: 8.1/10

Although Volgarr the Viking probably won’t soothe everyone’s gaming aches (in fact, it’s likely to leave a few lingering in impatient players that hate death), it’s a wonderful throwback to the days of the NES, when all you needed were the best gaming skills to have a good time.

 

GameCrate reviews represent the opinions of the GameCrate writer who wrote them, and not necessarily those of Newegg. In most cases, GameCrate reviews are performed using products or samples provided by the manufacturer/producer of the product.

The post Review: Volgarr the Viking is hard-as-nails old school appeared first on GameCrate.

No quarters required

It used to be that if you wanted to waste some time at work, you fired up Minesweeper, Solitaire, or my personal favorite, SkiFree. Boy have times changed. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet and the efforts of the Internet Archive, time wasting just got a whole hell of a lot more fun. Now when you have some spare time to kill -- or even when you don't -- you can head over to the Internet Arcade and relive 900 classic arcade games right within your browser.

Feel free to offer up excuses in the comments that I can use to explain why I'm suddenly late turning in assignments. Even typing this short article is taking way longer than it should, and it's because I'm getting lost in a sea of nostalgia replaying arcade hits that stole my youth and my quarter collection.

The Internet Arcade is a logical fork of the Console Living Room, which itself is a collection of old school console games broken up by console, like the infamous Atari 2600 and lesser known gaming machines like the Amstrad GX-4000.

In both instances, the Internet Archive has done a marvelous job backing up all that classic gaming goodness through JSMESS, or the JavaScript MESS project, which emulates all those titles through JavaScript. It took a bit of work, but it's working well now, and working in your browser -- it doesn't get much more convenient than that.

"Of the roughly 900 arcade games (yes, nine hundred arcade games) up there, some are in pretty weird shape – vector games are an issue, scaling is broken for some, and some have control mechanisms that are just not going to translate to a keyboard or even a joypad. But damn if so many are good enough. More than good enough. In the right browser, on a speedy machine, it almost feels perfect. The usual debates about the 'realness' of emulation come into play, but it works," said Jason Scott, who's leading the online project.

The occasional quirk aside, this is an awesome thing Jason has done. There are so many titles to revisit, like Birdie King, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Street Fighter II, Zaxxon, and the list goes on.

Clear your schedule for the rest of the day and then check 'em out here.

Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

You suck, humans!

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Platform: PC

Older gamers will remember Gauntlet as one of the more threatening games in the arcade, with its hordes of monsters, intimidating levels, and a health system that had players slowly dying as soon as they entered the game. Not-as-old gamers will probably know Gauntlet from its more recent incarnations Gauntlet Legends or Gauntlet Dark Legacy, which offered a three-dimensional perspective and some light RPG elements, like leveling and core attributes. Despite the new direction, the traditional Gauntlet gameplay of heroes throwing weapons at monsters remained intact. Now, Gauntlet returns in 2014 with a hybrid of nostalgia and new features. Regrettably, while the nods to the previous games will titillate gamers with good memories, too many changes to the core gameplay make Gauntlet feel more like a clone of Diablo than a true evolution of the series.

The Story

The story is threadbare and is only included for perfunctory reasons. The original four heroes of Gauntlet (Thor the warrior, Thyra the Valkyrie, Questor the elf, and Merlin the wizard) meet to explore some ruins that might hold some powerful artifacts. Once inside, they meet a mysterious character named Morak, who gives a brief history of the ruins and explains that he needs the party to brave the Gauntlet and retrieve the items of power lost within.

Gameplay

At its core, 2014′s Gauntlet is a top-down 3-D hack and slash/shooter, depending on the character the player chooses to play. The player will explore various locales, including crypts, bone-filled caves and chambers overflowing with lava. Enemies spawn from monster generators that rise from the ground and take a challenging amount of hits before falling. There are three worlds to explore, and at the end of each world is a boss fight. A single play-through from beginning to end will typically last roughly four hours.

Fans of the series will most likely be disappointed by the change in the core gameplay from previous Gauntlet games. In previous games, all of the characters had a ranged primary attack. Now, only the elf and wizard are purely ranged. The Valkyrie has a cool-down special attack that is ranged, and the warrior has no ranged attack at all. Additionally, previous Gauntlet games featured a brawling mechanic that would have characters switching to melee attacks if enemies touched the character without the character shooting back. Now, characters just take damage.

The maps are also a bit of a departure from previous games in the series, attempting to strike a balance between the original arcade games and the later 3-D versions. Unfortunately, the maps feel small and are often completed very quickly (especially on repeated runs). There are new floor hazards, like spikes and blades, and there are platforms that allow players to leap across gaps for strategic attacks or simply progress in the game. Keys still exist, but only for opening doors, since chests come pre-opened. And because the maps feel small – or at least the amount of map that fits in the field of view feels small – there aren’t many options for “key choice” in the game. Players are rarely faced with having to decide what doors to open.

Death no longer pops out of chests to harass players, since none of the chests are locked, and instead has its own special maps that are randomly generated. Death appears out of the ground to chase players across the map and, since Death can’t be attacked or banished by potions now, players must continually run away until they get to the end of the level. These levels are usually completed in just a few minutes.

Potions also do not have the same functions as in previous Gauntlet’s. They now act as charges for individual relics that players can purchase from the shop at the hub of the Gauntlet. Relics have various powers, like imbuing the player with extra speed or creating a bait totem that will then explode. Only two relics can be equipped at a time and each one can be upgraded with subsequent purchases.

These game design choices are not necessarily bad; they just don’t make this game feel like classic Gauntlet. Instead, the experience feels more like Diablo, with players continually running the same areas over and over again, killing the same bosses. Unfortunately, Gauntlet can’t hope to offer the same robust leveling and loot system. In fact, half of the items that can be earned/purchased are purely cosmetic.

Major Issues

In previous installments, players could pick any of the characters and still receive a similar experience as the player next to them. That can’t be said here. For instance, the elf is the only character that can move and attack at the same time in any direction. The wizard comes close to the same mobility, but even he has to stop to attack. This makes the elf a tremendous treasure hunter, because he doesn’t have to choose between helping the team and helping himself.

Nabbing treasure in general is also imbalanced across the characters due to other mobility disparities. For instance, the elf and Valkyrie both have instant dash moves that have no cool-down. So whenever the party runs down a hallway together and spots a treasure chest, the warrior can never keep up with them. And the wizard can only do so if he has a particular spell ready and his cool-down isn’t blown.

There are also a few problems with multiplayer. First, it takes uncomfortably long to find an adequate game. There is no game lobby from which to choose a game. Players simply choose a difficulty level and the game will search for an open session. But players don’t know at what difficulty level the majority of other players are playing at. Once players are in a session, the fact that there can only be one type of each character in a party can cause more issues when players don’t get to play their favored character. This usually results in incomplete parties who rush into the game simply because they’re tired of waiting.

Currently, there is also no way to rebind keys, which is a major oversight for the PC community. This is especially problematic when playing the wizard, who requires a combination of inputs to switch spells.

Finally, the perk system is poorly designed. While many of the perks are normal, offering bonuses for positive achievements, there are several rewards for bad play. For instance, dying so many times in a level will actually give players a permanent penalty reduction for future deaths. It’s already irritating when playing with people who are achievement hunting. Now, imagine playing with someone who is purposefully playing poorly for a reward.

My View

Here are the criteria I consider most important for judging Gauntlet:

Gameplay: 7/10

As a game unto itself, Gauntlet can be a blast the first time through. With the right group and difficulty level, the game offers an excellent controlled chaos experience. As the latest incarnation in the Gauntlet series, however, this offering falls well short of what fans will expect. Balancing issues also degrade the satisfaction.

Nostalgia: 7/10

Most people playing this game will do so out of brand recognition. Gauntlet satisfies in this regard, but mostly cosmetically. The game nods at previous installments with familiar sound effects, enemies and the disembodied voice that describes the action on-screen. Regrettably, the game is also too much of a departure to really rekindle the simple joy fans will remember having from playing the previous games.

Replay Value: 6/10

Unlike Diablo most of the maps in Gauntlet never change, and there is no epic loot that players will hope will drop. Once the short list of relics are all upgraded, there’s very little to work for beyond placing high on the leaderboard, but even that is limited. On day one, someone had already maxed out the score on one of the maps. After the game is beaten and all the worlds seen, what else is there?

Presentation: 7/10

Gauntlet looks and sounds great in most parts. The character models move smoothly and the Gauntlet textures are all detailed nicely. The various lines the characters spout at or about each other are cute and make the game feel more alive and dynamic. In other areas, the game feels rushed, like with the overuse of the “Death Runs” and simple artwork stills to convey story elements. It’s these blemishes that make Gauntlet feel like a cheap downloadable console network game.

Overall: 6.8

Even with all these shortcomings, Gauntlet can be fun to play — especially at higher difficulty levels. The monsters become formidable and managing cool-downs and spatial awareness becomes paramount as players frantically navigate the tight arenas. In those moments, shooting food can be absolutely heartbreaking. Additionally, given that communication can only be done via a handful of emotes, the rare joy of joining a coordinated group is indescribable.

The fun just doesn’t last long enough.

GameCrate reviews represent the opinions of the GameCrate writer who wrote them, and not necessarily those of Newegg. In most cases, GameCrate reviews are performed using products or samples provided by the manufacturer/producer of the product.

The post Review: Gauntlet is Diablo-Lite appeared first on GameCrate.

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Saving the world is hardly a unique motif in role-playing games, and it usually goes something like this: A ragtag group of strangers-turned-into-allies face a great evil they must defeat in order to prevent total world annihilation.

In this sense, Final Fantasy VII closely follows the script.

Cloud, a mercenary, joins a flower girl, a rebel fighter with a machine gun arm, a vampire (sort of), a barmaid boxer and several others to take down Sephiroth, a spawn between a human baby and an alien life form hell-bent on destroying the earth and becoming a deity.

What distinguishes Final Fantasy VII from other RPGs released in the mid to late ‘90s, however, are two powerful themes that are explored during the course of the game.

In this week’s Throwback Thursday we’re taking a look at how Square (now Square Enix) was able to set Final Fantasy VII apart from competing role-playing games through its insight into insidious problems that modern societies face today.

Mako and ecological preservation

The Lifestream is an ethereal substance that all living things are a part of when they are born and return to when they pass away. The Lifestream is crucial for life on the planet and contains all the memories of every being that has every lived. It is analogous to the Chinese concept of Qi, a life force that courses through all organisms.

Somewhere down the line, the inhabitants of Gaia (the planet that Final Fantasy VII takes place in) figured out how to harness the power of the Lifeforce by extracting its liquid form, known as Mako, through reactors. Mako allowed for electricity, setting off a period of industrialization that saw the rise of large cities like Midgar and entertainment complexes like the Gold Saucer. Serving as an analog to nuclear energy, Mako could also be condensed into a substance called materia, which could be used for magic. *cue steampunk motifs à la Final Fantasy VI*

Mako may be likened to oil and uranium, which have both unraveled massive ecological concerns. In addition to global warming and the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters, nuclear weapons remain a politically tense issue with respect to Iran and North Korea. In Final Fantasy VII we see Gaia slowly dying as mako continues to be harvested for energy, and the mako cannon serves to show us the power of nuclear warfare.

Perhaps more telling are the years to come. After the rolling credits of Final Fantasy VII, we are treated to a cut-scene where, 500 years after the main story line, Red XIII (or, Nanaki) is seen running up a cliff with his two cubs (who’s the mother?). As they reach the top, we see a view of a now-forgotten Midgar, covered in moss and overgrowth. A flock of geese fly over the abandoned city and we hear songbirds in the background. While Gaia has healed, it is unclear if civilization has moved elsewhere or returned to a more primitive state.

Our earth also goes through a “reset” period roughly every 100,000 years during what is known as an ice age. While we are not due for one for another 80,000 years, global warming may precipitate the return of biblical floods, as it is widely acknowledged that the melting of the polar caps would lead to a rise in sea levels that would wipe out many coastal cities. While I’m not prognosticating any certain disaster, Final Fantasy VII has a metaplot of human-created disaster that rings true to the ecological issues we currently face.

The Rise of Corporatocracies

Warring city governments and kingdoms form the typical political backdrop of most role-playing games, but in Final Fantasy VII it is a corporation that rules the world. Shinra Electric Power Company (or, Shinra), which rose to a superpower after they successfully harvested mako for energy use, employs a private army known as SOLDIER, operates multiple mako reactors around Gaia, and is obsessed with discovering the “promised land,” a mythical place where it would be possible to harvest unlimited amounts of mako.

Final Fantasy VII starts off in Midgar, the largest city in Gaia, built and controlled by Shinra. The opening scene takes the player deep inside a mako reactor that Cloud, a hired mercenary for the eco-activist group AVALANCHE (what’s with the all-caps naming schemes?), helps blow up with explosives. As Cloud and Barret, the leader of Avalanche (sorry, I can’t), head back  to the hideout, Shinra (Fox) news comes on and condemns the actions of Avalanche as those of terrorists.

As the de facto ruler of Gaia, Shinra wields all the economic and political and has a chokehold on how information is disseminated while employing Turks, a sort of C.I.A. department, to conduct covert operations.

Sound far-fetched?

It is currently merger mania in the business world, and while there are many examples of corporations being stopped by anti-trust concerns, there is a growing fear that eventually corporations will consolidate to form mega-corporations. These mega-corporations enjoy low accountability, existing across international boundaries, and concentrated power.

Still sounds too hard to believe? Watch the video below:

While the corporations of our time  do not come even close to having the level of power that Shinra has, it is illuminating to see Final Fantasy VII tackle such a mature topic, 17 years ago!

Can corporations be too big (to fail)? At what point do regulatory bodies no longer have enough resources to legislate against a corporation with an insurmountable lobbying arm?What can the powerless do against an all-powerful corporation when they do not have a chance to participate in meaningful democratic process?

These are all questions that Final Fantasy VII explores and they are increasingly becoming talking points in congressional hearings and political debates.

Parting thoughts

This article could have as easily been about the ethics of cloning, bio-engineered soldiers, the anatomy of modern love, Freudian discovery of the self and so on and so forth—a testament to the diversity of ideas presented in Final Fantasy VII. 

Each time I play through the game (a total of six so far) I learn something new, which is something I’ve found in only a handful of games. In many respects, Final Fantasy VII heralded the arrival of “serious” RPGs to the (then) next-generation platforms, which is probably why it went on to sell over 10 million copies worldwide and became known as “the game that sold the PlayStation.”

A part of me wishes that, come 2017, Square Enix will reboot the franchise with a Final Fantasy VII remake—though I believe the odds of hell freezing over are far greater. In the meantime, the original PlayStation version will do just fine.

The post Throwback Thursday: The prescience of Final Fantasy VII appeared first on GameCrate.

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Platforms: PC, Mac

The classic point-and-click adventure genre has seen a major resurgence in recent years. A staple of the ’80s and early ’90s, these text-driven games saw a huge decline once platformers, shooters, and action-adventure titles rose to prominence. You can essentially thank Telltale Games for bringing the classic adventure formula back with great series including Sam & Max, Monkey Island, and The Walking Dead. Developer Zojoi, however, wanted to go even more old school, bringing back one of the progenitors of point-and-click, choice-driven, text-based adventuring: Shadowgate. The end result is pretty impressive, even if it isn’t always inviting.

Reveling in Constant, Brutal Death

If you played the original Shadowgate on the Apple Macintosh or the subsequent NES port, you know just how tough that game was. For those who never dabbled with the MacVenture series, then you should definitely be aware that these games don’t mess around when it comes to constantly challenging you. The level of difficulty is such that you could be put off if you’re not familiar with exactly how this type of experience plays out. If you decide to jump into this dark (yet satirical) world, you should learn to celebrate your failures and deaths.

You will fail and die a whole lot in Shadowgate. Trial-and-error is a huge part of the Shadowgate experience, for better and for worse. You may grow frustrated when you repeatedly try to solve a puzzle in different ways, only to end up getting burnt to a crisp by a fire-breathing dragon or drowned by a water-dwelling beast. Again, it’s about celebrating the many times you meet your demise, and then feeling truly satisfied when you finally figure out the solution to a puzzle.

Thankfully, Shadowgate handles death quite creatively. While you’re certainly bound to come across the same types of death scenarios many times during your journey through the titular Castle Shadowgate, there are plenty of sequences that feel fresh and are fun to encounter. There’s something strangely rewarding about dying a certain way one moment and then dying in a completely different manner all within the span of five minutes.

Exploring Castle Shadowgate

Despite the puzzles being such a major part of Shadowgate, it should be noted that the real star here is the castle itself. It’s exciting wandering about the many rooms, discovering new and exciting artifacts, learning about the ancient setting’s lore, and reading scrolls with information about important characters. Quite frankly, if Zojoi were to have simply created a first-person castle exploration sim, it might have worked out. That said, the puzzles definitely add a nice wrinkle to all of the exploration.

There are seemingly countless rooms for you to enter. Most rooms have their own set of puzzles, while others simply offer a glimpse into the castle’s back story. You’ll come across creepy tombs, fascinating dungeons, flooded areas, and even rooms with friendly spirits. Shadowgate is constantly treating you to different scenarios, and it’s never shy about surprising you — either with a cool new item, some history, or a deadly sequence.

A Modern Day MacVenture

The essence of Shadowgate is beyond old school. This game plays like something you would’ve seen in the late ’80s on a Macintosh computer, right down to the clunky user interface. That classic design is not really a bad thing (except for the pesky UI), but it’s obvious that this is a very specific type of game for a very specific type of player. If you don’t dig retro first-person point-and-click adventure games, chances are you won’t find much to love about this game. Even if you do like some of the more modern adventure titles that have made the rounds in recent years, you’re not guaranteed to walk away from Shadowgate feeling overwhelmed with joy.

Of course, folks who dug the original, and those who just have a penchant for retro-styled experiences will undoubtedly discover a wonderfully crafted, absolutely mesmerizing castle filled to the brim with amazing things to discover, see, and do.

As an added bonus, Zojoi included some contemporary additions to Shadowgate. For starters, the hand-drawn look of the art is unlike anything you would’ve witnessed during the heyday of games like the original Shadowgate. Fret not, though, because if you’d rather play with retro graphics and sound, you can. There are also multiple difficulty settings, so you don’t necessarily have to play Shadowgate at its most grueling. If you do, you’ll be treated to every puzzle and room in the game. But for those who maybe don’t want to headbutt their computers out of sheer frustration, there are toned-down options.

My View

Here are the criteria I consider most important for judging Shadowgate:

Gameplay: 7/10

Shadowgate is a lot of fun if you go into it knowing exactly what to expect. While it’s still an adventure game, it’s not quite like the more recent titles brought to us by Telltale. Developer Zojoi wanted to go even more old school, presenting a first-person experience that relies heavily on experimentation and a sometimes-confusing user interface.

Setting and Lore: 8/10

Even more interesting and engaging than the actual gameplay, the setting of Shadowgate is equal parts intriguing and impressive. It’s a sheer joy traveling through the crumbling walls of the ancient castle looking for clues and learning about the structure’s history.

Retro Charm: 7/10

Zojoi may have gone a bit too old school here, but if you want something that reminds you of those days when you would plant yourself in front of your old Apple computer until the wee hours of the night, this game will remind you of those long-forgotten times.

Challenge: 7/10

Some players will appreciate the fact that this game is remorseless a lot of the time. Meanwhile others — even fans of this sort of punishing experience — may feel that the game is a bit too daunting at times.

Overall score: 7.3

Shadowgate is the very definition of niche. Only a specific crowd will want to play this game. And while it may pique the interest of others, not everyone who plays it out of pure curiosity will enjoy it. That said, you have to admire Zojoi for bringing back such a legendary series, and for doing quite a good job of it, too.

GameCrate reviews represent the opinions of the GameCrate writer who wrote them, and not necessarily those of Newegg. In most cases, GameCrate reviews are performed using products or samples provided by the manufacturer/producer of the product.

The post Review: Shadowgate is a treat for old-school fans appeared first on GameCrate.

Filed under: Fantasy, Game Mechanics, MMO Industry, News Items, Guild Wars 2, Buy-to-Play

ArenaNet has been hyping the heck out of Guild Wars 2's September Feature Pack, and today we get to see if it lives up to the advanced billing.

The firm's press release states that the pack "focuses exclusively on in-game features" including a new trading post, wardrobe tweaks, collection achievements, and a revised newb experience.

Guild Wars 2's September Feature Pack goes live today originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 09 Sep 2014 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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UPDATE: Added a quote from the Bitcoin.org FAQ section for clarification.

Bitcoin has been a controversial topic ever since it first rose to prominence about five years ago. Created by an unknown entity referred to as “Satoshi Nakamoto,” nobody knows for certain how or why the cryptocurrency came to be – it’s also very misunderstood.

The concept of anonymity is what first attracted people from all over the world to adopt Bitcoin as a form of payment. Many users believed their transactions couldn’t be traced and resulted in Bitcoin becoming the go-to payment method for tech-savvy criminals.

Black markets, money laundering, Ponzi schemes, and other illegal activities have all been linked to Bitcoin. And criminal activity involving Bitcoin is not going away anytime soon.

Notable People Accused of Using Bitcoin to Commit Crime:

• Ross William Ulbricht AKA “Dread Pirate Roberts”
• Charlie Shrem
• Trenton Shavers

If Bitcoin is Used for Evil, Why is It Still Good?

Cyber-criminals love using Bitcoin because of its anonymity. But in reality, Bitcoin is the most transparent payment network ever created. All Bitcoin transactions are stored publicly and permanently on the network and anyone can see the balance and transactions of any Bitcoin address. But because the only information that can be identified are Bitcoin addresses and not names, all a criminal has to do is get a new address for every crime they commit. It’s also very easy to mask a computer’s IP address, thus making it nearly impossible to be traced.

But even though Bitcoin has facilitated cyber-crime to a certain extent, many well-established merchants (including Newegg and Newegg Canada) have embraced it for one simple reason: Customers demand it.

Reasons Customers Enjoy Using Bitcoin:

• Mobile Payments are Easy

Bitcoin on mobiles allows you to pay with a simple two step scan-and-pay. No need to sign up, swipe your card, type a PIN, or sign anything. All you need to receive Bitcoin payments is to display the QR code in your Bitcoin wallet app and let your friend scan your mobile, or touch the two phones together (using NFC radio technology).

• Security and Control Over Money

Bitcoin transactions are secured by military grade cryptography. Nobody can charge you money or make a payment on your behalf. So long as you take the required steps to protect your wallet, Bitcoin can give you control over your money and a strong level of protection against many types of fraud.

• Works Everywhere, Anytime

Just like with email, you don’t need to ask your family to use the same software or the same service providers. Just let them stick to their own favorites. No problem there; they are all compatible as they use the same open technology. The Bitcoin network never sleeps, even on holidays.

• Fast International Payments

Bitcoin can be transferred from Africa to Canada in 10 minutes. There is no bank to slow down the process, level fees, or freeze the transfer. You can pay your neighbors the same way as you can pay a member of your family in another country.

• Zero or Low Fees

 Bitcoin allows you to send and receive payments at very low cost. Except for special cases like very small payments, there is no enforced fee. It is however recommended to pay a higher voluntary fee for faster confirmation of your transaction and to remunerate the people who operate the Bitcoin network.

• Protects Your Identity

 With Bitcoin, there is no credit card number that some malicious actor can collect in order to impersonate you. In fact, it is even possible to send a payment without revealing your identity, almost just like with physical money. You should however take note that some effort can be required to protect your privacy.

With so many great reasons to use Bitcoin instead of cash or credit cards, merchants strongly believe that the good far outweighs the evil. Unfortunately, many people that own Bitcoin aren’t using it to complete transactions, but are instead hoarding the cryptocurrency as an investment.

This is a bad idea.

The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin: Spend it; Don’t Save it

It’s no secret that the value of Bitcoin is extremely volatile and unpredictable. Similar to the stock market, Bitcoin prices can increase or decrease over a short period of time. Because of its young economy, novel nature, and liquid markets; saving your Bitcoin is not recommended.

According to Bitcoin.org’s FAQ:

…keeping your savings with Bitcoin is not recommended at this point. Bitcoin should be seen like a high risk asset, and you should never store money that you cannot afford to lose with Bitcoin. If you receive payments with Bitcoin, many service providers can convert them to your local currency.

Currently, one Bitcoin is the equivalent of $486.99. This may seem like a lot of money but one year ago Bitcoin was priced at an all-time high and worth nearly $1000. One year before that, the price of Bitcoin was hovering around $10. These drastic increases and decreases in value prove that Bitcoin should be seen as a high-risk asset and never as an investment.

If you own Bitcoin, it’s much better to spend it than to save it for two reasons:

1. It could become worthless overnight.

2. Its future depends on it.

According to a recent article by USA TODAY, “Bitcoin’s future depends on public acceptance.” The article further states that because Bitcoin owners are mostly techies, it needs to become widely accepted by the masses in order for it to survive. And the only way to do that is by spending it any chance you get.

Fresh from attending a recent Bitcoin conference, Laura Baverman of USA TODAY made the following observations:

• The technology that powers Bitcoin paved the way for dozens of new digital currencies to be created around the world. In fact, a man named Christopher Franko in the small town of Washington, N.C., created the Frankocoin. Bitcoin levels the playing field.

• What it really means to be deregulated is that cryptocurrency businesses are unincorporated and often called “projects”. In some cases, they don’t pay taxes. Employees are paid in Bitcoin and pay capital gains taxes when they cash out.

• There is a thing called Bitcoin 2.0, and it actually makes sense. The technology that allows Bitcoin to be securely encrypted, tracked (in a universal public ledger) and transferred between people can also be used for the transfer of other documents. Think real estate documents, business contracts, even passport or citizenship documents if the government gets involved.

• Some high-profile people are excited about Bitcoin. Venture capitalist Tim Draper made headlines in July for buying at auction Bitcoin seized in the Silk Road shutdown. He’ll make the coins available to people in developing nations with volatile currencies.

• It’s important to know that Bitcoin’s value is too volatile to be worth much today. That’s why most retailers who accept it as payment immediately sell. This point is from Duke University finance professor Campbell Harvey, who hopes to offer a course in cryptofinance in 2015.

These observations demonstrate that there is indeed a future for Bitcoin, but we have a lot of work to do before it goes mainstream. Bitcoin (along with all cryptocurrency) is currently deregulated, risky and unpredictable. If owners choose to save it instead of spending it, the Bitcoin community is at risk of losing everything.

Newegg shoppers are among the first wave of Bitcoin users and we’re thrilled to accept the cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Just like you, we also believe Bitcoin can be the future of digital currency. But if you’ve been saving it and hoping it will make you rich one day, you’re better off spending it if you want it to succeed.

UPDATE: We've updated our Haswell- E story to include our video on Haswell-E (X99) motheboards

After three long years of going hungry with quad-cores, red meat is finally back on the menu for enthusiasts. And not just any gamey slab full of gristle with shared cores, either. With its new eight-core Haswell-E CPU, Intel may have served up the most mouth-watering, beautifully seared piece of red meat in a long time.

And it’s a good thing, too, because enthusiast’s stomachs have been growling. Devil’s Canyon? That puny quad-core was just an appetizer. And that dual-core highly overclockable Pentium K CPU? It’s the mint you grab on your way out of the steak house.

No, what enthusiasts have craved and wanted ever since Intel’s original clock-blocking job on the original Sandy Bridge-E was a true, overclockable enthusiast chip with eight cores. So if you’re ready for a belt loosening, belly full of enthusiast-level prime rib, pass the horse radish, get that damned salad off our table, and read on to see if Intel’s Haswell-E is everything we hoped it would be. 

Meet the Haswell-E parts

 

Despite its name, the LGA2011-v3 socket is not same as the older LGA2011 socket. Fortunately, the cooling offsets are exactly the same, so almost all older coolers and accessories should work just fine. 

Though they look the same, LGA2011’s socket has arms that are actually arranged differently than the new LGA2011-v3 that replaces it. And no, you can’t drop a newer Haswell-E into this socket and make it work.

Haswell-E

The first consumer Intel eight-core arrives at last

Being a card-carrying member of the PC enthusiast class is not an easy path to follow. Sure, you get the most cores and priciest parts, but it also means you get to wait a hell of a long time in between CPU upgrades. And with Intel’s cadence the last few years, it also means you get the leftovers. It’s been that way ever since Intel went with its two-socket strategy with the original LGA1366/LGA1156. Those who picked the big-boy socket and stuck to their guns on Pure PC performance always got the shaft. 

The original Ivy Bridge in LGA1156 socket, for example, hit the streets in April of 2012. As a reward for having the more efficient and faster CPU, Intel rewarded the small-socket crowd with its Haswell in June of 2013. It wasn’t until September of 2013 that big-boy socket users finally got Ivy Bridge-E for their LGA2011s. But with Haswell already out and tearing up the benchmarks, who the hell cared?

Well, that time has come with Haswell-E, Intel’s first replacement for the aging LGA2011 platform since 2011. This time though, Intel isn’t just shuffling new parts into its old stack. For the first since the original Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, paying the price premium actually nets you more: namely, the company’s first consumer eight-core CPU.

Meet the T-Rex of consumer CPUs: The Core i7-5960X

We were actually a little leery of Haswell when it first launched last year. It was, after all, a chip seemingly tuned for the increasingly mobile/laptoppy world we were told was our post PC-apocalyptic future. Despite this, we recognized the chip as the CPU to have for new system builders. Clock for clock, its 22nm process, tri-gate transistors put everything else to shame—even the six-core Core i7-3930K chip in many tasks. So it’s no surprise that when Intel took a quad-core Haswell, put it in the Xerox machine, and hit the copy x2 button , we’d be ecstatic. Eight cores are decidedly better than six cores or four cores when you need them. 

The cores don’t come without a cost though, and we don’t mean the usual painful price Intel asks for its highest-end CPUs. It’s no secret that more cores means more heat, which means lower clock speeds. That’s one of the rationales Intel used with the original six-core Core i7-3960X. Although sold as a six-core, the original Sandy Bridge-E was built using an eight-core die on which Intel had permanently switched off two cores. Intel said it wanted to balance the needs of the many versus the needs of the few—that is, by turning off two of the cores, the part could hit higher clock speeds. Indeed, the Core i7-3960X had a base clock of 3.3GHz and Turbo Boost of 3.9GHz, and most could overclock it to 5GHz. The same chip packaged as a Xeon with all eight cores working—the Xeon E5-2687W—was locked down at 3.1GHz and mostly buzzed along at 3.4GHz.

With the new Core i7-5960X—the only eight-core of the bunch—the chip starts at a seemingly pedestrian 3GHz with a Turbo Boost of one core up to 3.5GHz. Those subsonic clock speeds won’t impress against the Core i7-4790K, which starts at 4GHz. You’ll find more on how well Haswell-E performs against Haswell in our performance section, but that’s the price to be paid, apparently, to get a chip with this many cores under the heat spreader. Regarding thermals, in fact, Intel has increased the TDP rating to 140 watts versus 130 watts of Ivy Bridge-E and Sandy Bridge-E. 

If the low clocks annoy you, the good news is the part is fully unlocked, so the use of overclocking has been approved. For our test units, we had very early hardware and tight deadlines, so we didn’t get very far with our overclocking efforts. Talking with vendors, however, most seem very pleased with the clock speeds they were seeing. One vendor told us overclocks of all cores at 4.5GHz was already obtainable and newer microcode updates were expected to improve that. With even the vaunted Devil’s Canyon Core i7-4790K topping out at 4.7GHz to 4.8GHz, a 4.5GHz is actually a healthy overclock for an eight-core CPU.

When you dive down into the actual cores though, much is the same, of course. It’s based on a 22nm process. It has “3D” tri-gate transistors and integrated voltage regulation. Oh, and it’s also the first CPU to feature an integrated DDR4 memory controller.

Click the next page to read about DDR4

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DDR4 details

If you think Haswell-E has been a long wait, just think about DDR3, which made its debut as main memory in systems since 2007. Yes, 2007. The only component that has lasted seven years in most enthusiasts systems might be the PSU, but it’s even rare to find anyone kicking a 500-watt PSU from 2007 these days. 

DDR4 has been in gestation seemingly as long, so why the delay? From what we can tell, resistance to yet another new memory standard during a time when people thought the desktop PC and the PC in general were dying has been the root delay. It didn’t help that no one wanted to stick their head out first, either. RAM makers didn’t want to begin producing it DDR4 in volume until AMD or Intel made chipsets for it, and AMD and Intel didn’t want to support it because of the costs it would add to PCs at a time when people were trying to lower costs. The stalemate finally ends with Haswell-E, which integrates a quad-channel memory controller into its die.

Initial launch speeds of DDR4 clock in at DDR4/2133. For those already running DDR3 at 3GHz or higher, a 2,133 data rate is a snooze, but you should realize that anything over 2133 is overclocked RAM. With DDR4, the JEDEC speeds (the body that sets RAM standards) already has target data rates of 3200 on the map. RAM vendors we’ve talked to are already shopping DIMMS near that speed.

The best part of DDR4 may be its density message, though. For years, consumer DDR3 has topped out at 8GB on a DIMM. With DDR4, we should see 16B DIMMs almost immediately, and stacking of chips is built into the standard, so it’s possible we’ll see 32GB DIMMs over its lifetime. On a quad-channel, eight-DIMM motherboard, you should expect to be able to build systems with 128GB of RAM using non-ECC DIMMs almost immediately. DDR4 also brings power savings and other improvements, but the main highlights enthusiasts should expect are higher densities and higher clocks. Oh, and higher prices. RAM prices haven’t been fun for anyone of late, but DDR4 will definitely be a premium part for some time. In fact, we couldn’t even get exact pricing from memory vendors as we were going to press, so we’re bracing for some really bad news.

PCIe lanes: now a feature to be blocked

Over the years, we’ve come to expect Intel to clock-block core counts, clock speeds, Hyper-Threading, and even cache for “market segmentation” purposes. What that means is Intel has to find ways to differentiate one CPU from another. Sometimes that’s by turning off Hyper-Threading (witness Core i5 and Core i7) and sometimes its locking down clock speeds. With Haswell-E though, Intel has gone to new heights with its clock-blocking by actually turning off PCIe lanes on some Haswell-E parts to make them less desirable. At the top end, you have the 3GHz Core i7-5960X with eight cores. In the midrange you have the six-core 3.5GHz Core i7-5930K. And at the “low-end” you have the six-core 3.3GHz Core i7-5820K. The 5930K and the 5820K are virtually the same in specs except for one key difference: The PCIe lanes get blocked. Yes, while the Core i7-5960X and Core i7-5930K get 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0, the Core i7-5820K gets an odd 28 lanes of PCIe 3.0. That means those who had hoped to build “budget” Haswell-E boxes with multiple GPUs may have to think hard and fast about using the lowest-end Haswell-E chip. The good news is that for most people, it won’t matter. Plenty of people run Haswell systems with SLI or CrossFire, and those CPUs are limited to 16 lanes. Boards with PLX switches even support four-way GPU setups.

Still, it’s a brain bender to think that when you populate an X99 board with the lowest-end Haswell-E, the PCIe configuration will change. The good news is at least they’ll work, just more slowly. Intel says it worked with board vendors to make sure all the slots will function with the budget Haswell-E part. 

There have been clock-blocking rumors swirling around about the Haswell being a 12-core Xeon with four cores turned off. That’s not true and Intel says this die-shot proves it. 

Ivy Bridge-E’s main advantage over Sandy Bridge-E was a native six-core die and greatly reduced power consumption. And, unfortunately, like its Ivy Bridge counterpart, overclocking yields on Ivy Bridge-E were greatly reduced over its predecessor, too, with few chips hitting more than 4.7GHz at best.

Sandy Bridge-E and Sandy Bridge will long be remembered for its friendliness to overclocking and having two of its working cores killed Red Wedding–style by Intel.

Click the next page to read about X99.

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X99 

High-end enthusiasts finally get the chipset they want, sort of

Intel overcompensated in SATA on X99 but oddly left SATA Express on the cutting-room floor.

You know what we won’t miss? The X79 chipset. No offense to X79 owners, while the Core i7-4960X can stick around for a few more months, X79 can take its under-spec’ed butt out of our establishment. Think we’re being too harsh? We don’t.

X79 has no native USB 3.0 support. And its SATA 6Gb/s ports? Only two. It almost reads like a feature set from the last decade to us. Fortunately, in a move we wholly endorse, Intel has gone hog wild in over-compensating for the weaknesses of X79. 

X99 has eight USB 2.0 ports and six USB 3.0 ports baked into the peripheral controller hub in it. For SATA 6Gb/s, Intel adds 10 ports to X99. Yes, 10 ports of SATA 6Gb/s. That gazongo number of SATA ports, however, is balanced out by two glaring omission in X99: no official SATA Express or M.2 support that came with Z97. Intel didn’t say why it left off SATA Express or M.2 in the chipset, but it did say motherboard vendors were free to implement it using techniques they gleaned from doing it on Z97 motherboards. If we had to hazard a guess, we’d say Intel’s conservative nature led it to leave the feature off the chipset, as the company is a stickler for testing new interfaces before adding official support. At this point, SATA Express has been a no-show. After all, motherboards with SATA Express became available in May with Z97, yet we still have not seen any native SATA Express drives. We expect most motherboard vendors to simply add it through discrete controllers; even our early board sample had a SATA Express port. 

One potential weakness of X99 is Intel’s use of the DMI 2.0. That offers roughly 2.5GB/s of transfer speed between the CPU and the south bridge or PCH, but with the board hanging 10 SATA devices, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and 8 PCIe Gen 2.0 lanes off that link, there is the potential for massive congestion—but only in a worst-case scenario. You’d really have to a boat load of hardware lit up and sending and receiving data at once to cause the DMI 2.0 to bottleneck. Besides, Intel says, you can just hang the device off the plentiful PCIe Gen 3.0 from the CPU.

That does bring up our last point on X99: the PCIe lanes. As we mentioned earlier, there will be some confusion over the PCIe lane configuration on systems with Core i7-5820K parts. With only 28 lanes of PCIe lanes available from that one chip, there’s concern that whole slots on the motherboard will be turned off. That won’t happen, Intel says. Instead, if you go with the low-rent ride, you simply lose bandwidth. Take an X99 mobo and plug in the Core i7-5930K and you get two slots at x16 PCIe, and one x8 slot. Remove that CPU and install the Core i7-5820K, and the slots will now be configured as one x16, one x8 and one x4. It’s still more bandwidth than you can get from a normal LGA1150-based Core i7-4770K but it will be confusing nonetheless. We expect motherboard vendors to sort it out for their customers, though.

Haswell-E does bring one more interesting PCIe configuration though: the ability to run five graphics cards in the PCIe slots at x8 speeds. Intel didn’t comment on the reasons for the option but there only a few apparent reasons. The first is mining configurations where miners are already running six GPUs. Mining, however, doesn’t seem to need the bandwidth a x8 slot would provide. The other possibility is a five-way graphics card configuration being planned by Nvidia or AMD. At this point it’s just conjecture, but one thing we know is that X99 is a welcome upgrade. Good riddance X79. 

Top Procs Compared

Core Competency 

How many cores do you really need?

It is indeed a glorious thing to see a task manager with this many threads, but not everyone needs them.

Like the great technology philosopher Sir Mix-A-Lot said, we like big cores and we cannot lie. We want as many cores as legally available. But we recognize that not everyone rolls as hard as we do with a posse of threads. With Intel’s first eight-core CPU, consumers can now pick from two cores all the way to eight on the Intel side of the aisle—and then there’s Hyper-Threading to confuse you even more. So, how many cores do you need? We’ll give you the quick-and-dirty lowdown.

Two cores

Normally, we’d completely skip dual-cores without Hyper-Threading because the parts tend to be the very bottom end of the pool Celerons. Our asterisk is the new Intel Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition, or “Pentium K,” which is a real hoot of a chip. It easily overclocks and is dead cheap. It’s not the fastest in content creation by a long shot, but if we were building an ultra-budget gaming rig and needed to steal from the CPU budget for a faster GPU, we’d recommend this one. Otherwise, we see dual-cores as purely ultra-budget parts today.

Two cores with Hyper-Threading

For your parents who need a reliable, solid PC without overclocking (you really don’t want to explain how to back down the core voltage in the BIOS to grandma, do you?), the dual-core Core i3 parts fulfill the needs of most people who only do content creation on occasion. Hyper-Threading adds value in multi-threaded and multi-tasking tasks. You can almost think of these chips with Hyper-Threading as three-core CPUs. 

Four cores

For anyone who does content creation such as video editing, encoding, or even photo editing with newer applications, a quad-core is usually our recommended part. Newer game consoles are also expected to push min specs for newer games to quad-cores or more as well, so for most people who carry an Enthusiast badge, a quad-core part is the place to start.

Four cores with Hyper-Threading

Hyper-Threading got a bad name early on from the Pentium 4 and existing software that actually saw it reduce performance when turned on. Those days are long behind us though, and Hyper-Threading offers a nice performance boost with its virtual cores. How much?  A 3.5GHz Core i7 quad-core with Hyper-Threading generally offers the same performance on multi-threaded tasks as a Core i5 running at 4.5GHz. The Hyper-Threading helps with content creation and we’d say, if content creation is 30 percent or less of your time, this is the place to be and really the best fit for 90 percent of enthusiasts.

Six cores with Hyper-Threading

Once you pass the quad-core mark, you are moving pixels professionally in video editing, 3D modeling, or other tasks that necessitate the costs of a six-core chip or more. We still think that for 90 percent of folks, a four-core CPU is plenty, but if losing time rendering a video costs you money (or you’re just ADD), pay for a six-core or more CPU. How do you decide if you need six or eight cores? Read on. 

Eight cores with Hyper-Threading

We recognize that not everyone needs an eight-core processor. In fact, one way to save cash is to buy the midrange six-core chip instead, but if time is money, an eight-core chip will pay for itself. For example, the eight-core Haswell-E is about 45 percent faster than the four-core Core i7-4790K chip. If your render job is three hours, that’s more time working on other paying projects. The gap gets smaller between the six-core and the eight-core of course, so it’s very much about how much your time is worth or how short your attention span is. But just to give you an idea, the 3.3GHz Core i7-5960X is about 20 percent faster than the Core i7-4960X running at 4GHz.

Click the next page to see how Haswell-E stacks up against Intel's other top CPUs.

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Intel’s Top Guns Compared

The LGA2011-based Core i7-4960X (left) and the LGA2011-v3-based Core i7-5960X (middle) dwarf the Core i7-4790K chip (right). Note the change in the heat spreader between the older 4960X and 5960X, which now has larger “wings” that make it easier to remove the CPU by hand. The breather hole, which allows for curing of the thermal interface material (solder in this case), has also been moved. Finally, while the chips are the same size, they are keyed differently to prevent you from installing a newer Haswell-E into an older Ivy Bridge-E board.

Benchmarks

Performance junkies, rejoice! Haswell-E hits it out of the ballpark

We used a Gigabyte X99 motherboard (without the final heatsinks for the voltage-regulation modules) for our testing.

For our testing, we set up three identical systems with the fastest available CPUs for each platform. Each system used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 with the same 340.52 drivers, Corsair 240GB Neutron GTX SSDs, and 64-bit Windows 8.1 Enterprise. Since we’ve had issues with clock speeds varying on cards that physically look the same, we also verified the clock speeds of each GPU manually and also recorded the multiplier, bclock, and speeds the parts run at under single-threaded and multi-threaded loads. So you know, the 3GHz Core i7-5960X’s would run at 3.5GHz on single-threaded tasks but usually sat at 3.33GHz on multi-threaded tasks. The 3.6GHz Core i7-4960X ran everything at 4GHz, including multi-threading tasks. The 4GHz Core i7-4790K part sat at 4.4GHz on both single- and multi-threaded loads.

For Z97, we used a Gigabyte Z97M-D3H mobo with a Core i7-4790K “Devil’s Canyon” chip aboard.  An Asus Sabertooth X79 did the duty for our Core i7-4960X “Ivy Bridge-E” chip. Finally, for our Core i7-5960X chip, we obtained an early Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5 motherboard. The board was pretty early but we feel comfortable with our performance numbers as Intel has claimed the Core i7-5960X was “45 percent” faster than a quad-core chip, and that’s what we saw in some of our tests. 

One thing to note: The RAM capacities were different but in the grand scheme of things and the tests we run, it has no impact. The Sabertooth X79  had 16GB of DDR3/2133 in quad-channel mode, the Z97M-D3H had 16GB of DDR3/2133 in dual-channel mode. Finally, the X99-Gaming 5 board had 32GB of Corsair DDR4/2133. All three CPUs will overclock, but we tested at stock speeds to get a good baseline feel. 

For our benchmarks, we selected from a pile of real-world games, synthetic tests, as well as real-world applications across a wide gamut of disciplines. Our gaming tests were also run at very low resolutions and low-quality settings to take the graphics card out of the equation. We also acknowledge that people want to know what they can expect from the different CPUs at realistic settings and resolutions, so we also ran all of the games at their highest settings at 1920x1080 resolution, which is still the norm in PC gaming. 

The results

We could get into a multi-sentence analysis of how it did and slowly break out with our verdict but in a society where people get impatient at the microwave, we’ll give you the goods up front: Holy Frakking Smokes, this chip is fast! The Core i7-5960X is simply everything high-end enthusiasts have been dreaming about. 

Just to give you an idea, we’ve been recording scores from $7,000 and $13,000 PCs in our custom Premiere Pro CS6 benchmark for a couple of years now. The fastest we’ve ever seen is the Digital Storm Aventum II that we reviewed in our January 2014 issue. The 3.3GHz Core i7-5960X was faster than the Aventum II’s Core i7-4960X running at 4.7GHz. Again, at stock speeds, the Haswell-E was faster than the fastest Ivy Bridge-E machine we’ve ever seen.

It wasn’t just Premiere Pro CS6 we saw that spread in either. In most of our tests that stress multi-threading, we saw roughly a 45 percent to 50 percent improvement going from the Haswell to the Haswell-E part. The scaling gets tighter when you’re comparing the six-core Core i7-4960X but it’s still a nice, big number. We generally saw a 20 percent to 25 percent improvement in multi-threaded tasks. 

That’s not even factoring in the clock differences between the parts. The Core i7-4790K buzzes along at 4.4GHz—1.1GHz faster than the Core i7-5960X in multi-threaded tasks—yet it still got stomped by 45 to 50 percent. The Core i7-4960X had a nearly 700MHz clock advantage as well over the eight-core chip.

The whole world isn’t multi-threaded, though. Once we get to workloads that don’t push all eight cores, the higher clock speeds of the other parts predictably take over. ProShow Producer 5.0, for example, has never pushed more than four threads and we saw the Core i7-5960X lose by 17 percent. The same happened in our custom Stitch.Efx 2.0 benchmark, too. In fact, in general, the Core i7-4790K will be faster thanks to its clock speed advantage. If you overclocked the Core i7-5960X to 4GHz or 4.4GHz on just four cores, the two should be on par in pure performance on light-duty workloads.

In gaming, we saw some results from our tests that are a little bewildering to us. At low-resolution and low-quality settings, where the graphics card was not the bottleneck, the Core i7-4790K had the same 10 percent to 20 percent advantage. When we ran the same tests at ultra and 1080p resolution, the Core i7-5960X actually had a slight advantage in some of the runs against the Core i7-4790K chip. We think that may be from the bandwidth advantage the 5960X has. Remember, we ran all of the RAM at 2,133, so it’s not DDR4 vs. DDR3. It’s really quad-channel vs. dual-channel.

We actually put a full breakdown of each of the benchmarks and detailed analysis on MaximumPC.com if you really want to nerd out on the performance.

What you should buy

Let’s say it again: The Core i7-5960X stands as the single fastest CPU we’ve seen to date. It’s simply a monster in performance in multi-threaded tasks and we think once you’ve overclocked it, it’ll be as fast as all the others in tasks that aren’t thread-heavy workloads.

That, however, doesn’t mean everyone should start saving to buy a $1,000 CPU. No, for most people, the dynamic doesn’t change. For the 80 percent of you who fall into the average Joe or Jane nerd category, a four-core with Hyper-Threading still offers the best bang for the buck. It won’t be as fast as the eight-core, but unless you’re really working your rig for a living, made of money, or hate for your Handbrake encodes to take that extra 25 minutes, you can slum it with the Core i7-4790K chip. You don’t even have to heavily overclock it for the performance to be extremely peppy.

For the remaining 20 percent who actually do a lot of encoding, rendering, professional photo editing, or heavy multi-tasking, the Core i7-5960X stands as the must-have CPU. It’s the chip you’ve been waiting for Intel to release. Just know that at purely stock speeds, you do give up performance to the Core i7-4790K part. But again, the good news is that with minor overclocking tweaks, it’ll be the equal or better of the quad-core chip.

What’s really nice here is that for the first time, Intel is giving its “Extreme” SKU something truly extra for the $999 they spend. Previous Core i7 Extreme parts have always been good overclockers, but a lot of people bypassed them for the midrange chips such as the Core i7-4930K, which gave you the same core counts and overclocking to boot. The only true differentiation Extreme CPU buyers got was bragging rights. With Haswell-E, the Extreme buyers are the only ones with eight-core parts.

Bang-for-the-buck buyers also get a treat from the six-core Core i7-5820K chip. At $389, it’s slightly more expensive than the chip it replaces—the $323 Core i7-4820K—but the extra price nets you two more cores. Yes, you lose PCIe bandwidth but most people probably won’t notice the difference. We didn’t have a Core i7-5820K part to test, but we  believe on our testing with the Core i7-5960X that minor overclocking on the cheap Haswell-E would easily make it the equal of Intel’s previous six-core chips that could never be had for less than $580.

And that, of course, brings us to the last point of discussion: Should you upgrade from your Core i7-4960X part? The easy answer is no. In pure CPU-on-CPU  showdowns, the Core i7-4960X is about 20 percent slower in multi-threaded tasks, and in light-duty threads it’s about the same, thanks to the clock-speed advantage the Core i7-4960X has. There are two reasons we might want to toss aside the older chip, though. The first is the pathetic SATA 6Gb/s ports, which, frankly, you actually need on a heavy-duty work machine. The second reason would be the folks for whom a 20 percent reduction in rendering time would actually be worth paying for. 

Click the next page to check out our Haswell-E benchmarks.

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Haswell-E Benchmarks

Haswell-E benchmarks overview

 

 

 

Benchmark Breakdown

We like to give you the goods on a nice table but not everyone is familiar with what we use to test and what exactly the numbers means so let’s break down some of the more significant results for you. 

 

 

Cinebench 15 single-threaded performance

We used Maxon’s Cinebench 15 benchmark to see just how fast the trio of chips would run this 3D rendering test. Cinebench 15 allows you to restrict it from using all of the cores or just one core. For this test, we wanted to see how the Core i7-5960X “Haswell-E” would do against the others by measuring a single core. The winner here is the Core i7-4790K “Devil’s Canyon” chip. That’s no surprise—it uses the same microarchitecture as the big boy Haswell-E but it has a ton more clock speed on default. The Haswell-E is about 21 percent slower running at 3.5GHz. The Devil’s Canyon part is running about 900MHz faster at 4.4GHz. Remember, on default, the Haswell-E only hits 3.5GHz on single-core loads. The Haswell-E better microarchitecture also loses to the Core i7-4960X “Ivy Bridge-E,” but not by much and that’s with the Ivy Bridge-E’s clock speed advantage of 500MHz. Still, the clear winner in single-threaded performance is the higher-clocked Devil’s Canyon chip. 

Winner: Core i7-4790K

Cinebench 15 multi-threaded performance

You don’t buy an eight-core CPU and then throw only single-thread workloads at it, so we took the handcuffs off of Cinebench 15 and let it render with all available threads. On the Haswell-E part, that’s 16 threads of fun, on Ivy Bridge-E it’s 12-threads, and on Devil’s Canyon we’re looking at eight-threads. The winner by a clear margin is the Haswell-E part. Its performance is an astounding 49 percent faster than the Devil’s Canyon and about 22 percent faster than Ivy Bridge-E. We’ll just have to continue to remind you, too: this is with a severe clock penalty. That 49-percent-faster score is with all eight cores running at 3.3GHz vs all four of the Devil’s Canyon cores buzzing along at 4.4GHz. That’s an 1,100MHz clock speed advantage. Ivy Bridge-E also has a nice 700MHz clock advantage than Haswell-E. Chalk this up as a big, huge win for Haswell-E. 

Winner: Core i7-5960X

POV-Ray performance

We wanted a second opinion on rendering performance, so we ran POV-Ray, a freeware ray tracer that has roots that reach back to the Amiga. Again, Haswell-E wins big-time with a 47 percent performance advantage over Devil’s Canyon and a 25 percent advantage over Ivy Bridge-E. Yeah, and all that stuff we said about the clock speed advantage the quad-core and six-core had, that applies here, too. Blah, blah, blah.

Winner: Core i7-5960X

Premiere Pro CS6 performance

One sanity check (benchmark results Intel produces to let you know what kind of performance to expect) said Haswell-E would outperform quad-core Intel parts by 45 percent in Premiere Pro Creative Cloud when working with 4K content. Our benchmark, however, doesn’t use 4K content yet, so we wondered if our results would be similar. For our test, we render out a 1080p-resolution file using source material shot by us on a Canon EOS 5D Mk II using multiple timelines and transitions. We restrict it to the CPU rather than using the GPU as well. Our result? The 3.3GHz Haswell-E was about 45 percent faster than the 4.4GHz Devil’s Canyon chip. Bada-bing! The two extra cores also spit out the render about 19 percent faster than the six-core Ivy Bridge-E. That’s fairly consistent performance we’re seeing between the different workload disciplines of 3D rendering and video encoding so far, and again, big, big wins for the Haswell-E part. 

Winner: Core i7-5960X

Handbrake Encoding performance

For our encoding test, we took a 1080p-resolution video file and used Handbrake 0.9.9 to transcode it into a file using the Android tablet profile. Handbrake is very multi-threaded and leverages the CPU for its encoding and transcoding. Our results were still fairly stellar, with Haswell-E CPU performing about 38 percent faster than the Devil’s Canyon part. Things were uncomfortably close with the Ivy Bridge-E part though, with the eight-core chip coming in only about 13 percent faster than the six-core chip. Since the Ivy Bridge-E cores are slower than Haswell cores clock-for-clock, we were a bit surprised at how close they were. In the past, we have seen memory bandwidth play a role in encoding, but not necessarily Handbrake. Interestingly, despite locking all three parts down at 2,133MHz, the Ivy Bridge-E does provide more bandwidth than the Haswell-E part. One other thing we should mention: Intel’s “sanity check” numbers to let the media know what to expect for Handbrake performance showed a tremendous advantage for the Haswell-E. Against a Devil’s Canyon chip, Haswell-E was 69 percent faster and 34 percent faster than the Ivy Bridge-E chip. Why the difference? The workload. Intel uses a 4K-resolution file and transcodes it down to 1080p. We haven’t tried it at 4K, but we may, as Intel has provided the 4K-resolution sample files to the media. If true, and we have no reason to doubt it, it’s a good message for those who actually work at Ultra HD resolutions that the eight-cores can pay off. Overall, we’re declaring Haswell-E the winner here.

Winner: Core i7-5960X

X264 HD 5.01 Pass 1 performance

We’ve been using TechArp.com’s X264 HD 5.0.1 benchmark to measure performance on new PCs. The test does two passes using the freeware x264 encoding library. The first pass is seemingly a little more sensitive to clock speeds and memory bandwidth rather than just pure core count. A higher frame rate is better. The first pass isn’t as core-sensitive, and memory bandwidth clock speed have more dividends here. Haswell still gives you a nice 36 percent boost over the Devil’s Canyon but that Ivy Bridge-E chip, despite its older core microarchitecture, comes is only beaten by 12 percent—too close for comfort. Of course, we’d throw in the usual caveat about the very large clock differences between the chips, but we’ve already said that three times. Oh, and yes, we did actually plagiarize by lifting two sentences from a previous CPU review for our description. That’s OK, we gave ourselves permission. 

Winner: Core i7-5960X but not by much

X264 HD 5.01 Pass 2 performance

Pass two of the X264 HD 5.01 benchmark is more sensitive to core and thread counts, and we see the Haswell-E come in with a nice 46 percent performance advantage against the Devil’s Canyon chip. The Ivy Bridge-E, though, still represents well. The Haswell-E chip is “only” 22 percent faster than it. Still, this is a solid win for the Haswell-E chip. We also like how we’re seeing very similar scaling in multiple encoding tests of roughly 45 percent. With Intel saying it’s seeing 69 percent in 4K resolution content in Handbrake, we’re wondering if the Haswell-E would offer similar scaling if we just moved all of our tests up to 4K.

Winner: Core i7-5960X

Click the next page for even more Haswell-E benchmarks.

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Stitch.EFx 2.0 Performance 

Again, we like to mix up our workloads to stress different tasks that aren’t always multi-threaded to take advantage of a 12-core Xeon chip. For this test, we shot about 200 images with a Canon EOS 7D using a GigaPan motorized head. That’s roughly 1.9GB in images to make our gigapixel image using Stitch.EFx 2.0. The first third of the render is single-threaded as it stitches together the images. The final third is multi-threaded as it does the blending, perspective correction, and other intensive image processing. It’s a good blend of single-threaded performance and multi-threaded, but we expected the higher clocked parts to take the lead. No surprise, the Devil’s Canyon 4.4GHz advantage puts it in front, and the Haswell-E comes in about 14 percent slower with its 1.1GHz clock disadvantage. The clock speed advantage of the 4GHz Ivy Bridge-E also pays dividends, and we see the Haswell-E losing by about 10 percent. The good news? A dual-core Pentium K running at 4.7GHz coughed up a score of 1,029 seconds (not represented on the chart) and is roughly 22 percent slower than the CPU that costs about 11 times more. 

Winner: Core i7-4790K

7-Zip Performance

The popular and free zip utility, 7-Zip, has a nifty built-in benchmark that tells you the theoretical file-compression performance a CPU. You can pick the workload size and the number of threads. For our test, we maxed it out at 16-threads using an 8MB workload. That gives the Haswell-E familiar advantage in performance—about 45 percent—over the Devil’s Canyon part. Against that Ivy Bridge-E part though, it’s another uncomfortably close one at 8 percent. Still, a win is a win even if we have to say that if you have a shiny Core i7-4960X CPU in your system, you’re still doing fine.

Winner: Core i7-5960X

Sisoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth (GB/s)

Since this is the first time we’re seeing DDR4 in a desktop part, we wanted to see how it stacked up in benchmarks. But, before you get too excited, remember that we set all three systems to 2133 data rates. The Devil’s Canyon part is dual-channel and the Ivy Bridge-E and Haswell-E are both quad-channel. With the memory set at 2133, we expected Haswell-E to be on par with the Ivy Bridge-E chip, but oddly, it was slower, putting out about 40GB/s of bandwidth. It’s still more than the 27GB/s the Devil’s Canyon could hit, but we expected it to be closer to double of what the Ivy Bridge-E was producing. For what it’s worth, we did double-check that we were operating in quad-channel mode and the clock speeds of our DIMMs. It’s possible this may change as the hardware we see becomes more final. We’ll also note that even at the same clock, DDR4 does suffer a latency penalty over DDR3. That would also be missing the point of DDR4, though. The new memory should give us larger modules and hit higher frequencies far easier, too, which will nullify that latency issue. Still, the winner is Ivy Bridge-E.

Winner: Core i7-4960X

3DMark Firestrike Overall Performance

Even though 3DMark Firestrike is primarily a graphics benchmark, not having a 3DMark Firestrike score is like not having coffee in the morning. Basically, it’s a tie between all three chips, and 3DMark Firestrike is working exactly as you expect it to: as a GPU benchmark.

Winner: Tie

3DMark Firestrike Physics Performance

3DMark does factor in the CPU performance for its physics tests. It’s certainly not weighted for multi-core counts as other tests are, but we see the Haswell-E with a decent 29 percent bump over the Devil’s Canyon chip. But, breathing down the neck of the Haswell-E is the Ivy Bridge-E chip. To us, that’s damned near a tie. Overall, the Haswell-E wins, but in gaming tasks—at stock clocks—paying for an 8-core monster is unnecessary except for those running multi-GPU setups.

Winner: Core i7-5960X

Valve Particle Benchmark Performance

Valve’s Particle test was originally developed to show off quad-core performance to the world. It uses the company’s own physics magic, so it should give some indication of how well a chip will run. We’ve long suspected the test is cache and RAM latency happy. That seems to be backed by the numbers because despite the 1.1GHz advantage the Devil’s Canyon chip has, the Haswell-E is in front to the tune of 15 percent. The Ivy Bridge-E chip though, with its large cache, lower latency DDR3, and assloads of memory bandwidth actually comes out on top by about 3 percent. We’ll again note the Ivy Bridge-E part has a 700MHz advantage, so this is a very nice showing for the Haswell-E part. 

Winner: Core i7-4960X

Dirt Showdown low-resolution performance

For our gaming tests, we decided to run the games at 1366x768 resolution and at very low settings to take the graphics card out of the equation. In one way, you imagine this as what it would look like if you had infinitely powerful graphics cards in your system. As most games are not multi-threaded and are perfectly fine with a quad-core with Hyper-Threading, we fully expected the parts with the highest clock speeds to win all of our low-resolution, low-quality tests. No surprise, the Devil’s Canyon part at 4.4GHz private schools the 3.3GHz Haswell-E chip. And, no surprise, the 4GHz Ivy Bridge-E also eats the Haswell-E’s lunch and drinks its milk, too.

Winner: Core i7-4790K

Dirt Showdown 1080p, ultra performance

To make sure we put everything in the right context, we also ran the Dirt Showdown at 1920x1080 resolution at Ultra settings. This puts most of the load on the single GeForce GTX 780 we used for our tests. Interestingly, we saw the Haswell-E with a slight edge over the Devil’s Canyon and Ivy Bridge-E parts. We’re not sure, but we don’t think it’s a very significant difference, but it’s still technically a win for Haswell-E.

Winner: Core i7-5960X

Hitman: Absolution, low quality, low performance 

We did the same with Hitman: Absolution, running it at low resolution and its lowest settings. The Haswell-E came in about 12 percent slower the Devil’s Canyon part and 13 percent slower than the Ivy Bridge-E. 

Winner: Core i7-4960X

Hitman: Absolution, 1080p, ultra quality

Again, we tick the settings to an actual resolution and quality at which people actually play. Once we do that, the gap closes slightly, with the Haswell-E trailing the Devil’s Canyon by about 8 percent and the Ivy Bridge-E by 9 percent. Still, these are all very playable frame rates and few could tell the difference. 

Winner: Core i7-4960X

Tomb Raider, low quality, low resolution.

We did the same low quality, low resolution trick with Tomb Raider and while need to see 500 frames per second, it’s pretty much a wash here. 

Winner: Tie

Tomb Raider, 1080p, Ultimate

At normal resolutions and settings we were a little surprised, as the Haswell-E actually had a 15 percent advantage over the Devil’s Canyon CPU. We’re not exactly sure why, as the only real advantage we can see is memory bandwidth and large caches on the Haswell-E part. We seriously doubt it’s due to the number of CPU cores. The Haswell-E also has a very, very slight lead against the Ivy Bridge-E part, too. That’s not bad considering the clock penalty it’s running at.

Winner: Core i7-5960X

Metro Last Light, low resolution, low quality

In Metro Last light, at low settings it’s a wash between all of them.

Winner: Tie

Metro Last Light, 1080p, Very High quality

Metro at high-quality settings mirrors that of Hitman: Absolution, and we think favors the parts with higher clock speeds. We should also note that none of the chips with the $500 graphics card could run Metro at 1080p at high-quality settings. That is, of course, you consider 30 to 40 fps to be “smooth.” We don’t. Interestingly, the Core i7-4690X was the overall winner.

Winner: Core i7-4960X

Conclusion: If you skipped to the very last page to read the conclusion, you’re in the wrong place. You need to go back to page 4 to read our conclusions and what you should buy. And no, we didn’t do this to generate just one more click either though that would be very clever of us wouldn’t it?

This month, we find out what it takes to run games at 4K, and do so using a sweet open-air test bench

The computer world loves it when specs double from one generation to the next. We’ve gone from 16-bit to 32-bit, and finally 64-bit computing. We had 2GB RAM sticks, then 4GB, then 8GB. With monitor resolutions, 1920x1080 has been the standard for a while, but we never quite doubled it, as 2560x1600 was a half-step, but now that 4K resolution has arrived, it’s effectively been exactly doubled, with the panels released so far being 3840x2160. We know it’s not actually 4,000 pixels, but everyone is still calling it “4K.” Though resolution is doubled over 1080p, it’s the equivalent number of pixels as four 1080p monitors, so it takes a lot of horsepower to play games smoothly. For example, our 2013 Dream Machine used four Nvidia GeForce GTX Titans and a CPU overclocked to 5GHz to handle it. Those cards cost $4,000 altogether though, so it wasn’t a scenario for mere mortals. This month, we wanted to see what 4K gaming is like with more-affordable parts. We also wanted to try a distinctive-looking open test bench from DimasTech. This type of case is perfect for SLI testing, too, since it makes component installation and swapping much quicker.

Triple Threat

Instead of GTX Titans, we’re stepping it down a couple of notches to Nvidia GTX 780s. They provide similar gaming performance, but at half the cost. We’re also using “only” three cards instead of four, so the price difference from Dream Machine to this rig is a whopping $2500 (even more if you count the fact that the Dream Machine cards were water-cooled). These cards still need a lot of bandwidth, though, so we’re sticking with an Intel LGA 2011 motherboard, this time an Asus X79 Deluxe. It’s feature-packed and can overclock a CPU like nobody’s business. The X79 Deluxe is running Intel’s Core i7-4960X CPU, which has six cores and twelve processing threads. It’s kind of a beast. We’re cooling it with a Cooler Master Glacer 240L water cooler, which comes with a 240mm radiator.

We’ll also need a boatload of power, so we grabbed a Corsair AX1200 PSU which, as its name suggests, supplies up to 1200 watts. It’s also fully modular, meaning that its cables are all detachable. Since we’re only using one storage device in this build, we can keep a lot of spare cables tucked away in a bag, instead of cluttering up the lower tray.

All of this is being assembled on a DimasTech Easy V3 test bench, which is a laser-cut steel, hand-welded beauty made in Italy and painted glossy red. It can handle either a 360mm or 280mm radiator as well, and it comes with an articulating arm to move a case fan around to specific areas. It seems like the ultimate open-air test bench, so we’re eager to see what we can do with it.   \

1. Case Working

The DimasTech Easy V3 comes in separate parts, but the bulk of it is an upper and lower tray. You slide the lower one in and secure it with a bundled set of six aluminum screws. The case’s fasteners come in a handy plastic container with a screw-on lid. Shown in the photo are the two chromed power and reset buttons, which are the last pieces to be attached. They have pre-attached hexagonal washers, which can be a bit tricky to remove. We had to use pliers on one of them. You’ll need to wire them up yourself, but there’s a diagram included. Then, connect the other head to the motherboard’s front panel header, which has its own diagram printed on the board.

2. Getting Testy

Unfortunately, the Easy V3 does not ship with a 2.5-inch drive bay, nor do standard 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch adapters fit inside the bays. If you want to install a solid-state drive, you need to purchase the correctly sized bay or adapter separately from DimasTech. Since this is an open test bench, which is designed for swapping parts quickly, we chose to just leave the drive unsecured. It has no moving parts, so it doesn’t need to be screwed down or even laid flat to work properly. We also moved the 5.25-inch drive bay from the front to the back, to leave as much room as possible to work with our bundle of PSU cables. The lower tray has a number of pre-drilled holes to customize drive bay placement. Meanwhile, our power supply must be oriented just like this to properly attach to the case’s specified bracket. It’s not bad, though, because this positions the power switch higher up, where it’s less likely to get bumped accidentally.

3. Able Cables

The best way to install a modular power supply is to attach your required cables first. This time, we got a kit from Corsair that has individually sleeved wires. It costs $40, and also comes in red, white, or blue. Each of these kits is designed to work with a specific Corsair power supply. They look fancier than the stock un-sleeved cables, and the ones for motherboard and CPU power are a lot more flexible than the stock versions. All of the connectors are keyed, so you can’t accidentally plug them into the wrong socket. We used a few black twist ties to gather in the PCI Express cables.

4. Taking a Stand(off)

The Easy V3 comes with an unusually tall set of metal motherboard standoffs. These widgets prevent the motherboard from touching the tray below and possibly creating a short circuit. You can screw these in by hand, optionally tightening them up with a pair of pliers. Once those were in, we actually used some thumbscrews bundled with the case to screw the board down on the standoffs. You can use more standard screws, but we had plenty to spare, and we liked the look. The tall standoffs also work nicely with custom liquid cooling loops, because there is enough clearance to send thick tubing underneath (and we’ve seen lots of photos on the Internet of such setups). For us, it provided enough room to install a right-angle SATA cable and send it through the oval cut-out in the tray and down to the SSD below.

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5. Triple Play

This bench has a black bracket that holds your PCIe cards and can be slid parallel to the motherboard to accommodate different board layouts. It will take up to four two-slot cards, and DimasTech sells a longer 10-slot bracket on its website for workstation boards. We had to use the provided aluminum thumbscrews to secure the cards, since all of the screws we had in The Lab were either too coarsely threaded or not the right diameter, which is unusual. Installing cards is easy, because your view of the board slot is not blocked by a case. The video cards will end up sandwiched right next to each other, though, so you’ll need a tool to release the slot-locking mechanism on two of them (we used a PCI slot cover). The upper two cards can get quite toasty, so we moved the bench’s built-in flexible fan arm right in front of their rear intake area, and we told the motherboard to max out its RPM. We saw an immediate FPS boost in our tests, because by default these cards will throttle once they get to about 83 C.

6. Cool Under Pressure

Since the Glacer 240L cooler has integrated tubing that’s relatively short, the orientation pictured was our only option. We could have put the fans on the other side of the radiator, but since performance was already superb, we decided we liked the looked of them with the grills on top. To mount the radiator, we used the bundled screws, which became the right length when we added some rubber gaskets, also included.  The radiator actually doesn’t give off much heat, even when the CPU is overclocked and firing on all cylinders, so we didn’t have to worry about the nearby power supply fan pulling in a lot of hot intake. In fact, the CPU never crossed 65C in all of our benchmarks, even when overclocked to 4.5GHz. We even threw Prime95 at it, and it didn’t break a sweat. Temperatures are also affected by ambient temperatures, though. With our open-air layout, heat coming out of the GPUs doesn’t get anywhere near the radiator, and The Lab’s air conditioning helps keep temperatures low, so it’s pretty much an ideal environment, short of being installed in a refrigerator. Your mileage may vary.

A Golden Triangle

Despite our penchant for extreme performance, we rarely build triple-GPU systems, so we weren’t sure how well they’d handle 4K, but we figured they’d kick ass. Thankfully, they handled UHD quite well. So well, in fact, that we also tested the system with “only” two GTX 780s and still got respectable gaming performance. For example, with two cards, the Bioshock Infinite benchmark reported an average of a little over 60 FPS on its highest settings. In Tomb Raider, we disabled anti-aliasing and TressFX, maxing out all the other settings, and we still averaged 62 FPS. We benchmarked the opening sequence of Assassin’s Creed 4 with AA and PhysX disabled and everything else maxed out, and we averaged 47 FPS. The Metro: Last Light benchmark, however, averaged 25FPS on max settings, even with PhysX disabled.

Unfortunately, we had trouble getting Hitman: Absolution and Metro: Last Light to recognize the third card. This issue is not unheard of, and made us think: If you stick with two GPUs, you no longer need the PCI Express bandwidth of expensive LGA 2011 CPUs, or their equally expensive motherboards, or a huge power supply. That potentially cuts the cost of this system in half, from around $4200 to roughly $2100. You could also save money by going with, say, a Core i7-4930K instead, and a less expensive LGA 2011 motherboard and a smaller SSD. But it’s still a pretty steep climb in price when going from two cards to three.

The test bench itself feels sturdy and looks sweet, but we wish that it accepted standard computer-type screws, and that it came with a 2.5-inch drive bay or could at least fit a standard 3.5-to-2.5 adapter. We’d also recommend getting a second articulating fan arm if you’re liquid-cooling, so that one could provide airflow to the voltage regulators around the CPU, and the other could blow directly on your video cards. With the fan aimed at our cards, we instantly gained another 10 FPS in the Tomb Raider benchmark.

The Seagate 600 SSD was nice and speedy, although unzipping compressed files seemed to take longer than usual. The X79 Deluxe motherboard gave us no trouble, and the bundled “Asus AI Suite III” software has lots of fine-grained options for performance tuning and monitoring, and it looks nice. Overall, this build was not only successful but educational, too.

The zero-point machine compared here consists of a 3.2GHz Core i7-3930K and 16GB of Corsair DDR3/1600 on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard. It has a GeForce GTX 690, a Corsair Neutron GTX SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.

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Expanding on its commitment of providing DRM-free PC games for Mac, Linux and Windows to the masses, GOG.com has announced that it has begun offering DRM-free movies today. At launch the site is offering 22 DRM-free movies - all currently under $10.

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Two of the PlayStation-era Mega Man X platformers are blasting their way onto PS3 and Vita in the next couple of weeks. The first mighty number to land is X4, which hits PSN in North America on September 2. X5 follows a week later on September 9....

Is it a proper throwback or a game to throw out?

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Filed under: Sci-Fi, Events (Real-World), Endgame, News Items, WildStar, Dungeons, Subscription, Buy-to-Play

WildStar is on the ground at Gamescom 2014, and it's got something new for players to explore. Specifically, it's got the game's newest dungeons. The Protostar Academy and the Ultimate Protogames are intended for level 10 and level 50, respectively; the former is meant to help introduce players to mechanics found throughout group content, whilst the latter will provide a new top-level experience with heretofore unseen mechanics and content. And, of course, plenty of bosses that tested very well in marketing, because this is Protostar we're talking about. You can see the dungeon in action on this archived Twitch stream, starting at 4:45:00.

But what about players looking into getting into the raiding scene? Will this help bridge the gap? According to the latest dispatch from the developers via the Nexus Report, while there are no content nerfs incoming, attunement processes are being eased. Silver medal requirements are being lowered to bronze, rune slots are being added as definite additions to both crafted and dungeon gear, and attunement item requirements are being tuned down as well to make life just a little bit easier.

[Thanks to Syphaed for the tip!]

Gamescom 2014: WildStar reveals new dungeons and raid tweaks originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 15 Aug 2014 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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• Source: Twitch (Gamescom), Twitch (Nexus Report)

Back in the 80′s, there was one game that truly defined the Nintendo Entertainment System as a must-have console for the “hardcore” gamers out there – and that game was Contra.

Originally released in the arcades, Contra didn’t become a noteworthy success until Konami produced the home version, which allowed millions of players to take on the roles of Bill and Lance as they battled against the evil Red Falcon, using whatever weapons they could get their hands on.

Each of the game’s multiple stages had players facing off against insurmountable odds and incredible bosses, including strange octopus-like statues, large defense-laden bases and, best of all, the beating heart of Red Falcon itself. To subdue them, Bill and Lance would need some great weapons, including the Spread Gun, the Fireball Gun, the rapid-fire enhancer and the Laser.

Contra was easily one of the best NES games around, because it was one you could play with a friend. Sure, it got difficult, but with the help of the classic Konami code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A and Start on the title screen), you could have up to 30 men to play with, whether shooting in the side-scrolling segments or making your way through danger-filled tunnels.

The original game is still a triumph today, mentioned among the classic gaming elite and considered one of Konami’s all-time greats. Which leads to wonder…why didn’t it get that much love on current consoles?

Sure, there is an Xbox Live Arcade version, but it’s closer more to the original arcade game than the NES release, although it’s still a fun title. What doesn’t make sense is that Konami went all out to re-release Super C and Contra III: The Alien Wars for both Wii and Wii U, but when it comes to the original Contra, it’s a no-show.

Why? Was Konami worried that the original game is inferior to the sequels? Because that isn’t the case. While Super C and Contra III: The Alien Wars are exceptional follow-ups in their own way – and certainly far better than the cruddy Contra games we ended up getting on the original PlayStation – Contra is still an essential NES experience that many players should check out, if only because that’s a title that so many of us grew up with.

Plus, the Konami code just makes it seem that much more possible to beat. Without the 30 men, you could make it a good way through the game, sure. But eventually, you’d succumb and have to continue, in the hopes of reaching the end before running out of continues. With the code, however, the game is far more fun.

Konami really needs to give the original Contra some love in the form of a re-release. Before you say, “Well, they’re not fond of origin titles”, keep in mind that both Castlevania and the troublesome Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ended up in Virtual Console release at one point or another. There’s no reason why Konami can’t get this game to join the ranks.

Ah, well, maybe someday we’ll get a version of Contra that the fans can truly appreciate. Not that we haven’t gotten some great games over the past few years. Contra 4 was a knockout on the DS front, Hard Corps: Uprising was outstanding for PS3 and 360, and Contra Rebirth for the Wii eShop was pretty good in its own right, albeit a little short. But Contra deserves to shine again in its original form.

 

Editor’s note: As an added bonus, check out Percee P ft. Diamond D – “2 Brothers From the Gutter” rapping over Contra theme music:

 

 

 

The post Throwback Thursday: Where’s the love for the original Contra? appeared first on GameCrate.

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