Turkish site, Donanimharber, managed to get their hands on the first official photos of Nvidia’s upcoming high end DirectX 11 Fermi-based graphics card, the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470.

Specs and pricing of both cards have been revealed by VR-Zone. According to the publication, the cards are scheduled for March 26th release. The GTX 480 features a core clock of 700MHz, shader clock of 1401MHz, and a memory clock of 1848MHz. The memory interface will be 384-bit and the card will have 1536MB of RAM and a 250W TDP. The card will sell for $499, which is typical for a new high-end card.

The GTX 470 sports a core clock of 607MHz, shader clock of 1215MHz, and a memory clock of 1674MHz. The card will have a 320-bit memory interface and 1280MB of RAM. The TDP is said to be 225W and the card will sell for $349.

Initial benchmarks has shown that GTX 480 and GTX 470 are at least 5 to 10 percent faster than their ATI HD 5850 and ATI HD 5870 counterparts.

Then there are the hardware enthusiasts who want performance. For this user, card manufacturers offer their factory OC’ed 4890 boards.

Earlier this summer these cards tended to rely on the stock ATI cooler as well, but newer boards released in the last two months have offered significantly better cooling. These cards tend to reach for clock speeds approaching the 1GHz core clock frequency, and are priced appropriately.

The third camp wants the high-end cooling found on the aforementioned OC’ed 4890 cards; ATI’s stock cooler isn’t good enough. At the same time though these users don’t want to pay the $220+ many of the fastest Radeon 4890 cards sell for.

Basically, they want good GPU cooling, but they don’t want to be forced to donate an organ to afford it either.

Tapping into a different market: HTPCs

With their latest Radeon 4890 card, Gigabyte’s trying to entice a fourth category of users: the HTPC (home theater PC) crowd. Their GV-R489OC-1GD board ships with an aftermarket heatsink/fan solution from the cooling aficionados at Zalman, but at the same time the card is also affordable: it sells for $210 right now on Newegg. The card is also tailored for HTPC use thanks to its low noise cooler and diverse array of video outputs — the board ships with dual-link DVI, DisplayPort, and a gold-plated HDMI video output.

Gigabyte also touts the GV-R489OC-1GD as their latest Ultra Durable VGA card, but to be honest ATI’s reference design already incorporates many of Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable features and as such most of the board-level components on Gigabyte’s card are the same as the ATI 4890 reference board design. Gigabyte has sourced different capacitors than the reference board, but everything else is the same as the reference design including the 4.0Gbps GDDR5 memory modules from Qimonda (Ultra Durable VGA cards traditionally rely only on memory modules from Samsung or Hynix).

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It’s the dual-slot cooling you’ll probably be most interested in though. Gigabyte relies on Zalman’s VF1050 for cooling duties. The VF1050 is a bit of a hybrid in the sense that it isn’t quite a VF1000, nor is it a VF2000. It’s a ‘tweener that incorporates bits of both designs.

Its most important feature is its quad heatpipes. These heatpipes are responsible for drawing heat off the GPU, which is then distributed to a dual-slot aluminum heatsink. From there, heat is dispersed by a 75mm fan.

Unlike the retail Zalman coolers you can purchase online, the OEM Zalman cooler Gigabyte employs doesn’t ship with RAMsinks: the board’s memory modules are completely uncooled. Keep in mind that cooling isn’t necessary, as the modules are fully rated to run at 4890 speeds uncooled. In addition, another difference between Gigabyte’s cooler and a retail Zalman cooler is that the Gigabyte heatsink/fan unit also lacks Zalman’s Fanmate fan controller. Fanmate can be used to manually adjust the fan’s RPMs on-the-fly.

Zalman prefers to keep Fanmate exclusive to their retail cards: of the dozens of Zalman-equipped VGA cards we’ve tested over the years, none of them have ever shipped with Fanmate.

The Zalman cooler Gigabyte uses on the GV-R489OC-1GD is a terrific performer though. As you’ll see in the benchmarks, it outperformed the stock ATI Radeon 4890 cooler while delivering comparable noise output. What’s most notable is that it manages to do this while running at higher clock speeds than the stock 4890.

Clock speeds

While ATI’s reference specifications call for an 850MHz core clock speed for the 4890 graphics core, Gigabyte ups the core clock to 900MHz on their GV-R489OC-1GD, an improvement of 6% over stock. The board’s memory is then clocked at 975MHz, the same speed as ATI’s reference speeds.

Bumping up the graphics core 50MHz will improve performance over the stock 4890. The OC is a little tamer than some of the other 4890 cards on the market, but those cards are more expensive too. A quick check of Newegg reveals that Gigabyte’s GV-R489OC-1GD is one of the cheapest 900MHz Radeon 4890 cards on the market with aftermarket cooling.

Accessories

One downside to many competing Radeon 4890 cards that ship with HDMI and DisplayPort outputs is that they lack a dual DVI output option. Instead you’re limited to just one DVI.

Considering the rise in popularity of dual display, this is a huge oversight on the part of card manufacturers.

Fortunately this isn’t a problem for the Gigabyte GV-R489OC-1GD. Gigabyte thoughtfully includes an HDMI-to-DVI adapter that you plug into the HDMI output on the backplate of the card to power a second DVI display. The card also ships with a DVI-to-VGA adapter for those of you still running VGA monitors.

Also included in the card’s packaging is the obligatory CrossFire cable and 6-pin PCIe power adapter.

Can it make an impression to raise Roccat into Logitech and Razer leagues? Let’s see.

About Roccat

ROCCAT™ is the snow storm to the gaming industry. Everything called gaming before needs to be redefined. You will enter a world in which three attributes will keep you on the right path: alliance, independence and truth.

“DO IT YOUR OWN WAY AND DON’T TALK S***”
– this is the statement ROCCAT follows.

The ROCCATEERS can be found all over the world. And it was a revelation which led them together to energize the crucial benefit. The lake Inari long kept the secret our ROCCAT scientists call “Aimo”. With every ROCCAT tool you will more and more internalize its Energy. Become part of our alliance.

Features

• 3200DPI Pro-AIM GAMING SENSOR: for maximum precision
• TCU – TRACKING CONTROL UNIT: for increased tracking performance and reduced Pick-Up-Flight syndrome
• INTEGRATED TURBOCORE (72MHZ): for enhanced processing power
• ONBOARD MEMORY  (128KB): for up to 5 Game Profiles – stored directly on the mouse
• CUSTOMIZABLE LIGHT SYSTEM: showing the full spectrum of colors
• 4 EASY TO CLIP IN WEIGHTS: for individual weight adjustment
• 10 MOUSE BUTTONS:
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  8 of them customizable + 4-way wheel

• ERGONOMIC HYBRID SHAPE: with optimum grip + comfort
• 16-BIT ARCHITECTURE: for accelerated data transfer
• MOUSE FEET: ultra-quiet and low-friction

Technical Specification

• True 3200dpi laser sensor
• TCU – Tracking Control Unit
• 1ms response time;  1000Hz polling rate
• 16-bit data channel; 7080fps; 6.4 megapixel, 20g acceleration
• 72MHz TurboCore processor unit
• 128kB memory, update-/flashable
• 1.65m/s(65ips)
• Extended USB cable, cable diameter: 3mm

Further Information

Mouse Size
Maximum width ca. 13cm x ca. 6.5cm maximum length

Mouse Weight

118g (133g incl. cable)+4 optional weights in 5g,10g,15g or 20g

System Requirements
Windows® XP/Vista
USB 2.0 Port
CD-ROM Drive

Processor manufacturers Intel and AMD have recently switched from producing single-core processors to multicore processors, and we’re still waiting for the software to catch up. The majority of the PC systems out there are still single-core; it’ll take a few years before the majority of the installation base becomes multicore.

Upgrading your CPU will improve game performance as well as overall system performance.

Processors for the most part aren’t the bottleneck in PC game performance. You’ll find that if you already have a processor that offers good performance, upgrading to a CPU with higher clock speeds or additional processing cores won’t improve game performance as much as upgrading your video card.

Cursed video Million Dollar Baby full movie However, that doesn’t mean you can go cheap on the CPU. You still need to have a good processor that’s powerful enough to run the game. Upgrading from an Intel Pentium 4 to an AMD Phenom or an Intel Core 2 processor will certainly increase frame-rate performance. You don’t have to get the top-of-the-line $1,000 CPU if you’re upgrading your processor or configuring a new system. A $200-$300 processor will perform almost as well in gaming applications.

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Game system requirements will specify baseline CPU speeds and model types.

The processor will become more important in the future when game developers start exploiting multicore processors. Those changes will definitely come because all the major gaming platforms have switched to multicore. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game consoles both use multicore processors, and recent product releases from Intel and AMD indicate that PC processors are going to improve through additional cores rather than increasing clock speeds on a single core.

We can’t forget that processors are useful for other applications besides gaming. Faster processors can accelerate computationally intensive tasks such as video encoding, and can improve the overall system feel by speeding up boot times and reducing how long we have to wait for applications to launch. Having multiple cores also increases system resources to improve multitasking performance.

Source [ GameSpot ]

The video card you have in your system will determine what games you can play, how good they’ll look, and how well they’ll run. We won’t call out specific video cards to buy in this section because cards stay relevant only for a year or so before they’re replaced by newer models. Instead, we’ll talk about how the video card can affect the quality of your gameplay experience and give you some tips on understanding game system requirements.

You can expect to upgrade your video card every two or three years to keep up performance levels and to maintain support for all the latest graphics-quality advancements. New games tend to take advantage of the features and extra processing power introduced by the latest video cards. Older cards that aren’t as powerful and have fewer features won’t perform as well or, in the case of extremely old cards, won’t even work with some new games. For example, many of today’s games now require video cards compatible with DirectX 9 or higher.

Choose a powerful video card to get the best graphics experience.

Having a powerful video card lets you increase screen resolution and graphics-quality settings while still maintaining playable frame rates (how quickly the game updates onscreen). Faster frame rates help games run smoothly, without any choppiness. Players often have to compromise on graphics quality with less-powerful video cards. You’ll have to reduce screen resolutions and disable some graphics effects to keep frame rates at an acceptable level on weaker video cards.

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Games offer video card guidelines in their minimum and recommended system specifications. These guidelines can specify video memory sizes, DirectX compatibility levels, and even GPU type. The video card requirements can vary widely from game to game, given that some games can be much more graphically demanding than others.

Always check the system requirements to make sure the game will work with your PC.

In general, you can expect video cards that barely meet the minimum specifications to run games at the lowest graphical settings, whereas cards that meet baseline specifications are good for medium graphics-quality settings. You’ll need a much more powerful card if you’re the type of person that plays on a big widescreen display with the highest graphics settings.

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The original Gears of War hit the Xbox 360 like a sledgehammer, going on to sell millions of copies and winning GameSpot’s Game of the Year award in 2006. When we reviewed the game, we called it an “amazing technical achievement,” emphasising that “games just don’t typically look this good.” True to our word, games in 2007 had a hard time matching up to Gears’ presentational quality, and even now, two years later, the original game is still a standard-bearer.

In early 2008, Epic attended the Game Developer’s Conference to show off the latest features of its Unreal Engine 3 technology, as well as to formally announce Gears of War 2. Deformable scenery, improved water, crowd generation, and soft tissue were all demoed to an eager crowd and gave an indication of what Gears fans could expect in the sequel. All of these effects and more made it into Gears 2 when it launched in November 2008, and we claimed that “the sequel maintains [its predecessor's] high technical and artistic quality.”

Given that Gears 2 contains many of the same characters, weapons, and locations as the first game, we decided to compare the two. Epic claims that the two-year interim allowed its designers to push the Xbox 360 to its limits, but were they really able to raise the bar any higher? Let’s find out.

Environments

When Epic shipped Gears 2, it remade five of the original game’s multiplayer maps and published them on Xbox Live. All of these maps are structurally identical, but they do feature substantial changes in certain areas, such as weather.

Mansion

One of the most iconic maps from the first Gears, Mansion has a considerably different look in the sequel. The darkness and the rain have been swapped for what appears to be morning sunshine, allowing you to appreciate more of the finer details in the environments. Check out the plant pots and the mansion itself–they’re much more detailed than they were previously. Inside the building, the same holes in the ceiling exist, but instead of letting in trickling rain, they’re filtering the sunshine.

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Gridlock

One of the biggest improvements to Gears 2 is that there’s much more greenery in the environments. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in Gridlock, where the derelict buildings are now covered with vines, and the trees have been left to grow over the years. Despite the neglect that appears to have aged the rest of the map, someone at Epic has been in and redecorated–a new bell has been added to the tower at the center of the level, and the statue opposite the tower has been removed.

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Subway

Epic must have gotten bored with all the rain in its multiplayer maps, because Subway is a lot drier than in the first game. It has a scorched-earth feel to it now, with black dust swirling around the exterior environments. The deserted vehicles have a lot more detail, as you can see from our screens, but we miss the light that used to pour into the subway.

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Tyro Station

The most unchanged of the remastered Gears maps is Tyro Station. The color palette is less red and more green in Gears 2, but the features, architecture, and weather remain pretty much the same. A huge train periodically bursts through the middle of the level, taking anyone who’s on the track with it. Taking the trip is still worth the risk, though, thanks to the Torque Bow and the Hammer of Dawn weapons that await you in the middle of the track. The vans underneath the track, meanwhile, have mysteriously turned into storage containers.

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Canals

Canals received a winter makeover for Gears 2, giving the map a much lighter look than before. The water on the ground level has now turned to ice, the few plants and trees have disappeared, and the walls have a nice-looking icy finish. You can also notice some of the extra details that have been put into the backgrounds, especially on the buildings in the final shot.

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Weapons

Lancer

As Gears of War’s signature weapon, the lancer was sure to make a return in the sequel. As a rifle, it’s still equally effective at short and long distances, although we noticed the weapon had a lot more kick in the second game. Compare these two shots–we’ve unloaded an entire ammo clip at the same pillar from the same distance. Not only is the line much longer in the sequel, but it even curves slightly at the end when we’re running out of bullets.

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Chainsaw Melee

The lancer is all about the chainsaw though, and this particular finishing move has actually been toned down for the sequel. The blood definitely has more viscosity in Gears 2. It used to spray out in different directions like a fountain in the original Gears, but it now just pours out of the unfortunate chainsaw recipient. The result: It’s less gratuitous, if that’s even possible for a move where you chainsaw someone in half.

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Sniper Rifle

The original sniper rifle was deadly in multiplayer, able to take a player’s head clean off with the right shot. Thankfully, the same rules apply in the sequel, only this time the sniper scope is substantially different. Gone are the angular edges of the targeting reticle; they’ve been replaced with a much rounder, more traditional bull’s-eye shape. A horizontal line across the middle of the HUD is another subtle but helpful addition, allowing you to line up headshots with greater efficiency.

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Smoke Grenade

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The smoke grenade was given a substantial upgrade for Gears 2, with a minor explosive punch that can knock players off their feet. That said, this has a detrimental effect on the grenade’s smoke capacity. The original Gears’ smoke grenade lasted for 12 seconds and produced a much darker cloud, whereas the one in the second game fades out in half the time. Thankfully, you can stick grenades to walls in the second game, which then explode when shot or when an enemy comes in close proximity.

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The Good Son

Characters

Marcus Fenix & Dom Santiago

If there’s one thing that the Gears engine excelled in, it was drawing big armour-clad dudes that looked like they’d been through some wars. The faces of Marcus and Dom remain unchanged in Gears 2, but there are some minor changes to their suits. Those mysterious blue lights on Marcus’ collarbone look more inset, and they’re also brighter than before. In general, the bumps and ridges in the suits are more noticeable in Gears 2, perhaps owing to a better engine and/or more artistic license for the designers.

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Anya Stroud

While the Unreal Engine had no trouble drawing the rough, angular heads of the members of Delta Squad, it definitely struggled with female characters. Anya, the command contact for Delta Squad, had straight features and flat hair in the first game, but she has become much softer in the sequel and has more-realistic hair. Her outfit also has more detail, especially the badges on her right arm and the embroidered name on her jacket.

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Locust

These close-ups really show how the Locust have color-coordinated themselves for their Gears 2 appearance. Their lancer now features red lights, presumably to remind you which side you’re fighting for. It’s also worth noting that holding the left trigger in the first game brought a tighter close-up shot than it does in the sequel. In the normal view, the standard Locust grunt looks remarkably similar between the two games, but there are more detailed calluses on his right shoulder in Gears 2.

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Source [ GameSpot ]

The wireless GeForce 3D Vision glasses look much better than 3D glasses we’ve seen in the past.

Stereoscopic 3D gaming actually took a step backward when PC manufacturers switched from CRT monitors to LCD monitors. The original 3D shutter glasses released years ago worked well with CRT monitors because the old displays had superior refresh rates that could handle stereoscopic gaming, but current LCD monitors don’t work as well because they are locked at 60Hz. Fortunately, LCD-monitor manufacturers including Samsung and Viewsonic are preparing to release 120Hz displays that are able to supply the refresh rates necessary for flicker-free stereoscopic playback.

Stereoscopic 3D gaming may not be new to the PC, but Nvidia believes that the underlying technologies have matured to the point where the 3D experience is ready to break through to the mainstream. Nvidia has leveraged its relationships with game developers to ensure wide game support, and display technology has advanced enough to make stereoscopic 3D gaming possible again. We spent a week testing the glasses here at the GameSpot offices, and we can say that, yes, they work!

You won’t find any hard edges on the glasses (until you fold them).

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Left 4 Dead played wonderfully in 3D. It is difficult to describe how much better the game looks without screenshots, but the extra depth gave an added sense of realism while we moved through the game, peering into subway trains and stumbling through forest environments. The first reactions from all of the GameSpot staffers that tried the system was generally something along the lines of, “Whoa, this is cool!” followed shortly by “How much does this cost?” We even caught one of our graphic designers pawing at the screen during his gameplay session. Most of the shooters we tested looked pretty nice; you end up paying extra attention to your environments because the graphics stand out. Seeing a corpse float by in Call of Duty: World at War is jarring enough to distract you from the enemy the first time you see one. The spatial awareness hits you in racing games such as GRID, where you get a heightened sense of everything around you, sort of like having an enhanced cockpit view. Getting the games to work was remarkably easy. We needed only to install the GeForce 3D Vision software and a set of ForceWare graphics drivers to get the games working in stereoscopic 3D. None of the games we tested required any software patches. They worked right out of the box (and freshly downloaded from Steam in some cases).

We noticed that a few of the games that we tested had small graphical issues that sometimes broke the 3D experience with rendered objects that didn’t look correct onscreen. Nvidia provides recommendations on graphics settings that you can disable to improve image quality in stereoscopic mode within each game, but some glitches seemed to be unavoidable. For example, Fallout 3 looked great most of the time, but the clouds seemed to be rendered forward on the screen instead of sitting in the background, which created a weird effect. World of Warcraft looked pretty nice, with the action bars and other user-interface options rendered in the top layer and the gameworld rendered in the background, but the onscreen cursor appears at screen level, which makes it difficult to target mobs in the gameworld. That said, when the stereoscopic 3D effect is working, the view is often impressive enough for us to forgive a few glitches for now.

The infrared emitter can synchronize with multiple glasses, so several people can watch the same display. The Good Son buy

The GeForce 3D Vision package consists of a set of wireless shutter glasses and an infrared emitter. We tested the system with a 120Hz Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ LCD monitor. There aren’t many true 120Hz LCD monitors available right now, but you can also use the 3D Vision with other display types, including select DLP HDTVs and 100Hz+ CRT monitors. Lightspeed Design also has a DepthQ HD 3D Projector that supports stereoscopic 3D output for the early adopters out there.

Pokémon 3: The Movie rip The IR emitter syncs the shutter glasses with the game display to sync up the frames with the glasses. The emitter also has a scroll wheel that lets you adjust the onscreen 3D depth in real time. Scrolling the wheel shifts the alternating images closer together or farther apart to increase or reduce object depth onscreen. We tended to favor less depth at the start of our testing sessions, but eventually moved on to the more extreme depth settings as our eyes adjusted to the stereoscopic view.

The GeForce 3D Vision glasses fit over prescription eyewear.

The wireless glasses look fantastic compared to shutter glasses from years past. They’re too large to be mistaken for regular plastic eyeglass frames, but the lines are clean and the build quality feels solid. The glasses have extra room in front and around the temples to fit over prescription eyeglasses, and the package includes interchangeable nose pieces for additional customization. The glasses will work for 40 hours on a single charge, and there’s a small USB connector beneath the left side of the glasses for recharging. A built-in battery-indicator light will flash red when there’s less than two hours of battery life remaining.

In addition to the special display requirements, you’ll also need Windows Vista; an Intel Core 2, AMD Athlon X2, or more powerful CPU; and a fairly recent GeForce GPU to get your system to work with GeForce 3D Vision. Supported GPUs include the GeForce GTX 295, GeForce GTX 285, GeForce GTX 280, GeForce GTX 260, GeForce 9800 GX2, GeForce 9800 GTX+, GeForce 9800 GTX, GeForce 9800 GT, GeForce 9600 GT, GeForce 8800 Ultra, GeForce 8800 GTX, GeForce 8800 GTS, and the GeForce 8800 GT.

The GeForce 3D Vision will be available this month for $199. Competitive shooter players may not want to sacrifice the framerates or adapt to a new 3D world, but PC game enthusiasts interested in a completely new way to play their games should give the GeForce 3D Vision a try. Nvidia has confirmed that more than 350 games will be compatible at launch, but the real question is how well and for how long will the company work with developers to ensure that future games are optimized for the GeForce 3D Vision. We enjoyed our time using the 3D Vision glasses, but we’ll feel a lot better about investing in a set after we see how well games coming out this year work with the system. We’re willing to forgive minor bugs in existing games, but for $199 and another $399 for a new 120Hz monitor, all of the big games coming out this year must work perfectly.

Source [ GameSpot ]

This year AMD will ship two new quad-core Phenom II X4 processors, the 940 Black Edition and the 920, clocked at 3.0GHz and 2.8GHz, respectively. Black Edition processors come with an unlocked multiplier setting to make overclocking easier for PC enthusiasts. The processors differ only in clock speed, and have identical specifications otherwise. The Phenom II X4 processors will come with 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (512KB total L1 per processor), and 512KB of L2 data cache per core (2MB total L2 per processor). The processors will also have a shared 6MB L3 cache and will feature an onboard DDR2 memory controller with 17.1 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Built on a 45nm manufacturing process, the processors will have a relatively cool maximum thermal-dissipation value of 125 watts. Cool ‘n’ Quiet 3.0, AMD’s power-management solution, keeps the Phenom II X4 chilly during periods of inactivity. AMD states that the CPU will now use 50 percent less energy while idle in comparison to Cool ‘n’ Quiet 2.0.

In a move sure to make existing Phenom owners happy, Phenom II X4 processors will be backward compatible with existing AM2+ motherboards. Motherboard manufacturers will release BIOS updates to ensure compatibility. As a follow-up in early 2009, AMD will release AM3 socket-based Phenom II X4 and X3 processors. Both will also be backward compatible with current AM2+ motherboards and will support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory.

AMD also bundles the Fusion and Overdrive utilities with the processors. Fusion helps to improve gaming performance by disabling scores of Windows services and slightly overclocking the entire system. AMD’s Overdrive utility helps to automatically overclock the system and lets users apply those settings on an application-specific level. Overdrive helped bumped our Black Edition up to a final speed of 3333MHz when we tried it out.

The new Phenom II X4 processors will be available immediately in quantity. Expect to find the Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition retailing for $275, and the Phenom II X4 920 at $235.

From the pricing angle, the best direct competitor to the Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition is Intel’s 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q9400, a quad-core processor with 6MB of L2 cache. Intel’s Core i7 920 sits at a similar price point, but the total cost of ownership is much higher for the i7 after you factor in the cost of the motherboard and memory. The i7 processor requires DDR3 memory and a motherboard with an LGA 1366 socket. DDR3 memory costs roughly twice as much as DDR2. AM2+-based motherboards start in the $50 range and cap off at $200, whereas LGA socket 1366 boards start at $200 and can run as high as $400.

We didn’t have Intel’s 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q9400 processor on hand for our comparison. Instead, we clocked our Core 2 Extreme QX6800 with 8MB of L2 cache down to 2.66GHz and put it up against the Phenom II X4 940 to see how the chips stack up.

AMD’s newest processor competes favorably against processors in its class. If we could fill in the spot where Intel’s Q9400 sits, we’re sure that the Phenom II X4 940 would outperform it. In 3DMark Vantage, the Phenom II X4 940 handily beat our down-clocked QX6800 with 8MB of cache by nearly 1,000 points. The Phenom II X4 940 tied the QX6800 in Crysis and Valve’s particle test. On our simultaneous encode and Crysis test, the Phenom II X4 940 outperformed the Intel chip in Crysis by a handful of frames, but it stumbled in the encode time.

Overall, the Phenom II X4 looks to be a great purchase if you’re upgrading. It keeps up gaming-wise with Intel’s Core lineup and holds its own in intense processing situations. Backward compatibility with AM2+ motherboards gives existing users an easy and affordable upgrade path. The promise of future backward compatibility only sweetens the deal.

System Setup: AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition, AMD Phenom X4 9600, Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 @ 2.66GHz. MSI DKA790GX, eVGA 780i, 750GB, Corsair 2GB DDR2 RAM, Seagate 7200.10 SATA Hard Disk Drive. Windows Vista 32-bit SP1. Radeon HD 4800. Video card driver: beta Catalyst 8.561.3.081217a.73702.

Source [ GameSpot]

We just met with Mad Catz’s Alex Verrey here in our San Francisco offices to get hands-on with the Mad Catz Street Fighter IV product line-up and to find out what makes them special.

First off, forget everything that you might remember about the cheap Mad Catz accessories from the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube days. All of Mad Catz’s new Street Fighter IV controllers have tremendous build quality and feel terrific in hand. The company worked with Capcom and expert players to make sure that the sticks meet the standards of serious Street Fighter enthusiasts. Mad Catz also had to get the approval of Capcom Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono on aesthetics and controls, and he wasn’t afraid to send the joysticks back for more work if the button layout wasn’t correct or if the controls didn’t feel right.

Playing with the Mad Catz Street Fighter IV FightStick Tournament Edition is as close to the arcade experience as you’re going to get. The stick uses the exact same Sanwa joystick and buttons found in the actual Street Fighter IV arcade cabinets in Japan. You used to have to build your own stick or get someone in a fighting game forum to make one for you if you wanted a controller that used genuine arcade parts. The FightStick is also very easy to mod in case you wanted to change out the artwork or even swap in an American-style joystick and convex buttons.

Experienced players will appreciate several features on the stick. The designers placed the start and select buttons on the front part of the box well out of the way of the joystick and buttons to prevent any inadvertent mid-game pauses. The controller also has a lock switch that disables the turbo and, depending on platform, the Xbox Guide or PlayStation Home buttons. A lot of players like to bring their sticks with them when visiting friends or traveling to competitions so the Tournament Edition stick has a small compartment for cable storage.

The Tournament Edition stick will be available for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in the US on Feb. 17 for $149. The sticks aren’t cross-console compatible but they will both work with the PC. Pre-orders have already sold out for the initial 3,000 unit launch allocation, but another shipment will arrive in late February according to Alex.

Mad Catz will also ship a regular Street Fighter IV Arcade FightStick for players looking for a more affordable joystick. The standard stick is smaller than the Tournament Edition and doesn’t feature Sanwa hardware, but the joystick and buttons still feel great and you can’t argue with the price. The PS3 version will retail for $69 and the Xbox 360 will sell for slightly more, $79, due to higher console licensing fees. The standard stick is as easy to mod as the Tournament Edition, so modders might want to pick up this model as a starter kit.

Ricardo sat down with Capcom’s Seth Killian at CES last week to find out about the new Street Fighter IV sticks Mad Catz put together with the help of Capcom.

Source [ GameSpot ]