Maximum PC - Reviews

Logitech Z323 Review

Michael Brown — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:20:24 +0000

2.1-Channel Speaker System offer cheap thrills

Logitech has built more computer speakers over the years than just about any manufacturer, and it’s learned a thing or two about building decent low-cost models. Take the 2.1-channel Logitech Z323 system: We could name any number of speaker systems that sound better, but few that are priced better.

The satellites tilt up to project sound at your ears.

You can literally see some of the ways that Logitech hit that low price point: The satellite cabinets are made from cheap ABS plastic with permanently attached cables that plug into the subwoofer. Each satellite has dual, 2-inch, concave-dome drivers (one is mounted in the front of the cabinet and the other in the back, to deliver what Logitech describes as “360-degree sound”). So the system performs best if there’s a wall behind the satellites for the sound waves to bounce off. Each satellite also has a front-facing port. There’s a volume control and power switch on the right-hand cabinet, plus one 1/8-inch headphone output and one 1/8-inch stereo input, to support a digital media player.

The compact subwoofer cabinet (it measures 8.7x5.9x7.2 inches) is fabricated from the typical medium-density fiberboard. It houses a small amp and a tiny (for a sub) 4-inch down-firing dome woofer. The amp delivers six watts (RMS) to each of the satellites and 18 watts (RMS) to the subwoofer. The sub has its own volume control, along with a pair of RCA jacks that serve as a second auxiliary input for a gaming console, DVD player, or what have you (handy features in a speaker system priced this low).

The Z323’s favorable price/performance ratio, however, applies to games much more than music. Playing games such as Borderlands 2, we were pleased with the Z323’s ability to render the sound of gunshots and explosions, and the conversations with friendly characters and the taunts of enemies alike were rendered crisp and clear (well, with the exception of those babbling psychos).

When we listened to music, on the other hand, the vocals sounded weirdly detached from the rest of the band—and it didn’t matter whether the singer was male or female or even what style of music was being played. We tried several singer/songwriters, including “Crossing Muddy Waters,” from the John Hiatt album of the same name, Marc Cohn’s “She’s Becoming Gold,” from The Rainy Season, and Nanci Griffith’s cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Techumseh Valley,” from her record Other Voices, Other Rooms (in all three cases, the tracks were ripped from CD and encoded as 16-bit, 44.1kHz FLAC files).

This sonic detachment wasn’t as much of a problem with instrumental selections, but that’s not to say the Z323 system delivered a stellar performance. When we played Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which the composer recently remastered for Bowers & Wilkins’s Society of Sound label, the album (available in both Apple Lossless and 24-bit FLAC formats), sounded somewhat lifeless and flat compared to what we heard on more expensive speakers (including Corsair’s stellar SP2500 system). But you could almost buy four Z323 setups for the cost of one SP2500, so that’s to be expected.

f you’re working with a tight budget and need speakers primarily for gaming, Logitech has a good set in the Z323. If listening to music is your core interest, on the other hand, you should keep looking.

$70, www.logitech.com

Velocity Micro Raptor MultiPlex XL Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:30:48 +0000

Is there still room for big a HTCP?

It’s hard to talk about the Velocity Micro MultiPlex machine without thinking back more than 15 years ago, to the earliest days of “PC-TVs” and “PC Theaters.”

Back in the late 1990s, vendors such as Compaq and Gateway were pushing Pentium II–based PCs capable of watching DVDs, displaying electronic programming guides, and browsing the Internet, along with other futuristic capabilities, on gigantic 36-inch CRT televisions (we say that both literally and sarcastically).

The MultiPlex is a traditional HTPC, but fully capable of playing Big Picture Steam games, too.

In comparison to those early pioneers of living room PCs, the Velocity Micro MultiPlex is like a starship dropping out of warp speed while you look on from a covered wagon trying to get over Donner Pass without having to eat your fellow travelers.

The MultiPlex chassis harkens back to those early PC-TVs, but rather than sporting a 266MHz Pentium II, a whopping 2GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, and an analog TV tuner, the MultiPlex is pretty much state-of-the-art: liquid-cooled Core i7-3770K clocked up to 4.3GHz, 16GB of DDR3/2000, a GeForce GTX 680, 240GB SSD, and 3.6TB of RAID 5 storage. Besides Gigabit and 802.11n, and the Blu-ray drive, Velocity Micro opted for a Ceton quad-channel CableCARD tuner to help fill that massive RAID 5 array.

That RAID array, for the record, is made up of three 2TB WD Caviar Black drives. If one drive fails, you won’t lose it all—we’re just not so sure we’d care if we lost it, though. Since the MultiPlex is intended to quietly sit in the living room sucking up television through the Ceton card, a drive failure wiping out, say, every episode of Glee or The Walking Dead, wouldn’t be as bad as losing 2TB of your family videos and pics. Frankly, we think that a straight 6TB JBOD array would be just fine on a PVR box, but if you do intend to store your memories on the machine, the RAID 5 is warranted.

Performance of the box was in line with our expectations. Obviously, up against our zero-point system’s hexa-core and dual-GPU setup, it’s no contest. But against HTPC/gaming boxes like Digital Storm’s Bolt and Falcon Northwest’s Tiki, it’s pretty much a tie, as all three feature overclocked 3770K parts and GeForce GTX 680 cards. Of course, you might wonder if it’s fair to compare the MultiPlex against those much smaller HTPC machines. That’s a good question. Both the Tiki and Bolt are more likely to be used as simple SFF gaming boxes in your office, or in your living room as “Steam Boxes” running Big Picture mode. Recording terabytes of TV isn’t likely to be high on the list of their usage scenarios.

That’s actually where the MultiPlex comes in. It’s far more traditional-HTPC shaped and sized for the PVR chores, yet has plenty of firepower to run games at 1080p resolutions. Our one complaint might be that it’s a tad loud for pure PVR duties. If you’re watching, say, a Michael Bay flick, you’d never hear the fan and drive noise, but if you’re trying to catch the nuanced acting in, um, Jane Eyre on Blu-ray, you could find those sounds distracting. This won’t be an issue in gaming, of course, but it’s worth noting.

Pricing for the rig is fair. At $3,200 it’s a full grand cheaper than the Falcon Tiki we reviewed last September. The Tiki did, however, pack a pair of 512GB SSDs, which adds up, but then the MultiPlex has three drives plus a CableCARD tuner.

Overall, the MultiPlex brings a lot to the table if you’re still living in a cable world—we’re just not sure how many of us there are in today’s post-cable environment.

$3,200, www.velocitymicro.com

MiniX Neo X5 Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:14:04 +0000

Meet the android on TV box

We have some bad news for you and you’re not going to like it, as few parents ever want to hear anything negative about their baby. Well, here it is: Your so-called Smart TV really isn’t that smart.

The Android on TV box idea may be the future, but probably not this one.

Sure, the guy in the blue shirt said that your fab 60-inch plasma was top of its class and graduated cum laude, but the truth is, your TV spent most of its schooling playing beer pong and is a actually a class-A moron. The only reason it’s called “Smart” is because it was pledged as a legacy.

That’s where the MiniX Neo X5 comes in. Running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, this inexpensive black box gives your TV an actual browser and access to applications that aren’t coded in the language Ass++.

The Neo X5 sports a dual-core Rockchip RK3066 ARM processor with a quad-core Mali 400 graphics chip, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, Bluetooth, HDMI 1.4a, Fast Ethernet, and an optical S/PDIF out. For additional storage, the Neo X5 has an SD slot. MiniX even includes a short HDMI cable and USB OTG cable. For those of you who don’t subscribe to Obscure Ports Quarterly, OTG lets you use the box’s Micro USB port as a standard USB port, or—if we could figure it out—hook the Neo X5 to a PC’s USB port to use as a storage device. Think of it as a USB port that swings both ways.

As we said, we couldn’t figure it out and that’s perhaps one of the most vexing problems with the Neo X5. It’s pretty much stock Ice Cream Sandwich, but a lot of things were simply not intuitive or not working. We couldn’t, for example, figure out how to zoom in or out, and many apps that are intended for touch just didn’t work correctly for us. Granted, we were using it with a wireless keyboard and mouse, but that’s how the device would normally be used in a living room since the remote it ships with feels like it came out of a gumball machine.

The performance of the Neo X5 didn’t impress us, either. It felt sluggish in most instances, with a subpar user interface. Some benchmarks told us otherwise. We compared it to a Tegra 3–based Nexus 7 (admittedly not the most direct comparison, but a good measure of relative Android performance) and the X5 took most of the wins. The Nex7 certainly felt smoother but that’s likely due to Jelly Bean and its Project Butter improvements.

Overall, the Neo X5 feels underspec’d to us. Even the display at 1080p output looked so soft we had to double-check which mode it was in. Security is also an issue, as there is no way to secure the unit. Since you’d be logged into your Gmail account at all times on it, you’re leaving your email fly down for anyone on the device.

The Neo X5 is mainly marketed as a media player and it does fine there—to an extent. We could play various MP4 files, from GoPro cams to handycams to still images without hiccups, and there is an extensive set of codecs supported. Netflix was also fine but did exhibit more compression artifacts than we expected. YouTube videos were also pretty low-res despite being checked off as “HD.”

What we have here is essentially a work in progress. As is, it’s still far more usable and much faster than 95 percent of the “Smart” televisions on the market, but there’s much improvement to be had. MiniX is promising a Jelly Bean update at some point that may greatly change the experience—which it needs.

$110, www.polywell.com

Hitman Absolution review

Chris Zele — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:43:38 +0000

Hitman Absolution review: Equal parts frustration and fun

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything from IO Interactive’s popular stealth hero, Agent 47 (no pun intended). The star of the popular Hitman franchise is back for a fifth installment with Hitman: Absolution, and it’s about time, as the last game—Blood Money—was released way back in 2006. This time around, the agency employing Agent 47 is tired of paying for his benefits package, so they decide to assassinate him. This sets Agent 47 on a mission to dispose of his would-be disposers, taking him, and you, through 20 wide-ranging missions in an effort to stay alive while simultaneously sending the folks who are conspiring against him to the morgue. The premise is great, but we found the game’s execution—again, no pun intended—to be a mixture of awesome and awful.

You’ll need to use your environment well to effectively hide from your enemies.

Like the previous titles, the game consists of missions that require you to assassinate predetermined targets. To help you accomplish your objectives, you’re given a range of weaponry, intel, and abilities, and it’s up to you to put all three to good use. The most useful is a powerful stealth skill called Instinct, which helps you blend into your surroundings, see through walls, and sneak past guards. At the beginning of each mission, you’re given a small amount of this ability—your supply can be monitored on the HUD—which depletes as you use it, but is replenished by incapacitating foes and reaching checkpoints. Instinct’s X-ray vision comes in handy when planning assassinations, allowing you to gaze through a wall at a potential target from relative safety. It’s a really fun skill to use, especially when it lets you slow down time and kill multiple enemies quickly. We were disappointed, however, with how quickly it was depleted—the quick drain forced us to stray from our mission priorities and kill people randomly just to replenish our stores.

In addition to Instinct, there’s an array of weaponry lying around the levels that you can use to your advantage, ranging from a simple kitchen knife to a 50-caliber sniper rifle (both the kitchen knife and sniper rifle provide one-hit kills, whether up close or from a distance. Good times.). Our favorite killing tool was Agent 47’s signature weapon, the Fiber Wire, which we used to garrotte scumbags and then quickly drag them out of sight in order to remain undetected. We also enjoyed his other signature weapon, the Silenced Silver Baller. Its rapid fire-rate combined with the Instinct ability let us take down multiple targets quickly and with plenty of panache. While we preferred the game’s stealth weapons, they aren’t the only options by a long shot. Attention-getting weapons such as a shotgun or 45-caliber handgun are also available. Be warned, however, that using any of these loud hand cannons will almost always result in the arrival of a ridiculous amount of enemy backup—which we consider a flaw in the game’s design. In addition to the weapons provided, you can also use random objects lying around the environment, including a rusty screwdriver, a kitchen knife, and a doctor’s scalpel, to name just a few. We favored the knives because they are silent and reusable from one kill to the next.

In addition to the usual indoor environments, Absolution also has several huge outdoor missions, like this one in a sprawling refinery.

Easily our biggest complaint about Absolution is that it’s not just difficult, it seems unfairly difficult. We were frustrated by the sense that we were playing missions over and over—in what is billed as an “open environment”—just to get through the missions the way the developers apparently felt we should. There’s a tutorial, but it’s of little use once the game drops you into a “real” mission, where you have no idea where enemies or objectives are located. We found that it took almost six hours to really get the hang of the gameplay and the assassination moves necessary to be successful, and getting to that point was a mostly trial-and-error exercise that was simply monotonous. We had to play one of the game’s early missions around 20 times to make it to one of the checkpoints, and almost rage-quit the game many times because it was so aggravating.

The game’s main campaign took us nearly 14 hours to complete, and once we had, there was little reason to return to it, unlike in Dishonored, where there are many ways to progress through the levels, as well as totally different endings according to our playing style. Hitman tries to add replayability by giving you a ranking at the end of each level based on how many people you killed and how many people spotted you, and it automatically uploads your score to a global leader board. This peer-pressure tactic could compel some people to redo levels to get a better score, but we had so much trouble finishing the levels the first time that we had zero desire to try them again. The game also climaxes early, which made the last half of the game drag on way too long.

In Absolution, you often have to use large crowds to conceal yourself.

Aside from the main campaign, there is also a Contracts mode that lets you play missions that you or other players create using the built-in mission editor. This mode is always available, and lets you participate in ranked assassination attempts, but in order to unlock all the necessary weaponry and gadgets, you’ll need to progress through the main campaign first. All in all, it’s an excellent addition to the game, as there are thousands of user-created missions available through the game’s online lobby, which lists them with descriptions and popularity rankings.

The graphics in Hitman are impressive, with sharp textures and a variety of well-made environments, ranging from a dirty inner city to the dusty deserts of the Deep South. The game also played very well on our overclocked Intel Sandy Bridge system with an Nvidia GTX 660 Ti video card, averaging 88fps with all settings maxed-out at 1080p.

In the end, Hitman: Absolution is a challenging stealth action game with impressive visuals, but it’s marred by a steep learning curve, too much trial and error, and a campaign that drags on too long. We liked the open-ended nature of the missions and the variety of options and weapons available to us, but ultimately found ourselves so frustrated we just wanted to finish the game and never play it again. We appreciate the added Contracts missions, but found the overall experience of this game to be underwhelming.

$60, www.hitman.com

Far Cry 3 Review

Josh Norem — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:30:51 +0000

Far Cry 3 review: The best Far Cry game yet—but it’s not without flaws

There we were, driving down a bumpy, pothole-ridden dirt road, when the onscreen indicator for enemies suddenly lit up like the muzzle flashes from the car we had just driven past. Several of the other car’s passengers fired some rounds into our beater car’s engine block, forcing us to bail out while the aggressors flipped a U-turn to come back and finish the job.

Tagging enemies shows their location and status, and planning these ambushes is the best part of the game.

We watched as the car full of enraged maniacs approached, and then giggled as it careened over the edge of the rocky path, its driver unable to control the car’s rapid acceleration on the narrow road. Curious about their fate, we sauntered over to the area where the vehicle swerved off the path and suddenly heard the engine of another car coming toward us from just up ahead, so we instinctively ducked into the bushes since we were low on ammo. As we watched the second car stop right next to our now-burning vehicle, we saw the bad guys dismount to have a look-see; then our car suddenly exploded, which caused their car to explode as well, killing all of them and creating a massive, bloody fireball. As we stared at the smoldering wreckage and bodies strewn everywhere, we were just about to congratulate ourselves for a well-executed skirmish when from out of nowhere a royally pissed-off Cassowary—think Big Bird, but blue—appeared and mistook us for a human scratching post. After putting him down as fast as we could, we took his pelt then leapt off the nearest cliff, gliding in our wingsuit to a camp down below to replenish our ammo.

Blowing up enemy vehicles with a grenade launcher is an orgy of explosive carnage.

Of course, none of this was scripted or even part of the game’s main story; it was just a random encounter we had while en route to an actual part of the game, and it’s what makes Far Cry 3 one of the most entertaining—and unpredictable—games we’ve played since Skyrim. This is one game that, like Skyrim, will be different for everyone who plays it, and the game excels at the times when it lets you do whatever the heck you want to do, which is about 90 percent of the time. Sadly, you can’t always do whatever you want, and are forced to jump through very specific hoops a lot of the time, or sit through cutscenes and boring dream sequences way too often throughout the game’s lackluster main storyline.

Once the main story cuts you loose, you get back to the real meat of the game—hunting wildlife and clearing enemy outposts. However, in order to unlock all of the game’s special skills, such as running faster, taking less falling damage, etc., you must progress through the game’s story, which by the end leaves you cold and ready to leave Rook Island, never to return. To put it bluntly, this is a game that starts out extremely strong, and slowly gets worse as you progress through it, though it is punctuated with some of the best first-person combat we’ve ever experienced on the PC.

The game begins with one of the best opening sequences in recent memory, as it shows you and your friends living it up on a tropical island, only to pan out to discover you’re watching a video of your exploits from the confines of a bamboo tiger cage, held captive by an extremely well-acted psychopath named Vaas. After a harrowing escape from the prison camp and some hand-holding by one of the locals, you’re set free to pursue the main quest, or just explore on your own. And explore you will, as you must climb radio towers to remove scrambling devices that obscure the island’s map, which also allows the local gun shops to receive new shipments. Pirates control local outposts, too, so you have to clear those in order to buy new weapons, replenish your ammo, configure your weapon loadouts, and fast-travel from base to base. Clearing outposts is easily the most thrilling part of the game, and you can clear them at your leisure, too, or not—the game doesn’t punish you either way, but creeping up on a base undetected, tagging all the enemies with your camera, then moving in stealthily to take them out one by one before any of them hits the alarm—or disabling the alarms first—is the highlight of this game. And each of the 34 outposts are a serious challenge and a thesis on open-world gameplay done right.

In addition to clearing outposts, climbing radio towers, and the main quest, you also must hunt wildlife in order to upgrade your ammo packs, wallet, holsters, arrow quiver, and syringe holder. Each lets you hold more ammo, health syringes, grenades, Molotovs, and more. This isn’t Deer Hunter, either, as hunting is a challenge—you have to bag leopards, Cassowarys, rabid dogs, tigers, bears, and lots more. Additionally, clearing outposts opens up Wanted Dead and Path of the Hunter quests that require you to kill certain animals with specific weapons and take down a nearby kingpin using only your knife, but sadly, once all the outposts are clear, not only is the world devoid of bad guys but there are no more of these quests, either.

Just like real wildlife, the animals in the game don’t take too kindly to strangers.

The main problem with the game is that you spend the first half of it going on epic adventures to upgrade your packs, open the map, and increase your skills, but by the time the game is half over, we found ourselves almost maxed out completely in every area possible. We had a huge wallet that was constantly full, all the weapons that were available, and almost every skill on the three separate trees, giving us little motivation to keep exploring. You can also find 120 scattered relics and 20 randomly located letters from WWII-era Japanese soldiers, and compete in contests such as knife-throwing, shooting, and driving, but they provide little benefit aside from a test of skill and extra money, which is usually unnecessary. The game also provides a dozen side missions that are so boring a lot of them left us wondering why the developers even bothered including them.

We absolutely loved this game for the first 15 hours or so, and were even considering it as the Game of the Year. But after plodding through the second half of the game, repeating a lot of the same tasks over and over, and suffering through the game’s hackneyed story and deplorable ending, our opinion changed. We still highly recommend it; just savor your time on the first island—it’s one of the best FPS experiences we’ve ever had.

$60, ubi.com

Computer Cases Roundup

David Murphy — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:39:27 +0000

7 computer cases reviewed: Cooler Master HAF XB,Thermaltake Soprano, Corsair Carbide 200R, and more!

If you thought that the only innovation in modern chassis design was the (long-awaited) switch from USB 2.0 ports to USB 3.0 ports at all price levels, you haven’t seen anything yet. The cases in our roundup this time around really run the gamut of features: From inexpensive cases that attempt to deliver a lot of functionality without fattening up the price tag, to simple-looking chassis that hide a wealth of must-haves, to some of the most eye-opening cases we’ve seen – that don’t quite stack up once you look beyond their crazy offerings. In other words, it’s a typical computer cases roundup.

Just to lay out our criteria a bit, here are some of the elements we’re typically looking for when we run the magnifying glass over a computer case: Features that take time and effort out of the installation or upgrade process, like screwless drive bays. Minimal annoyances – like having to snap off a case’s entire front panel just to remove its drive bay covers. Adequate cooling, ideally positioned such that one’s hard drives, video cards, and general motherboard area all receive a steady stream of air. And, of course, strong cable management: Nobody likes to open up a case and find a Medusa.

Beyond that, the great computer case race is anyone’s to win. As for how each manufacturer balances “cool” with “functional,” you’ll have to read on for all the gory details!

Cooler Master HAF XB

Don’t call this case “stumpy.” It bites.

Cooler Master’s HAF XB computer case is a hybrid design that attempts to kill two PC birds with one stone: An open-air design for system builders who want to be able to swap out their components like a pit stop, and a standard, covered chassis for those who like having four walls and a roof around their system’s precious parts from time to time. For the most part, it works—but we would have love to have seen a few tweaks to make the system even easier to use for the frequent parts-swapper.

The cube-like case leaves little room for error. Its 17.5x13x16.5-inch size split into a top and bottom half on the inside: Your ATX, Micro-ATX, or Mini-ITX motherboard rests up-top—pray you don’t have a huge cooler overtop your CPU, as you get just under six and a half inches of vertical space (from the silicon on your motherboard) to play with if you have any intention of attaching a 20-centimeter fan to the case’s top. The bottom portion of the HAF XB is where you’ll precariously thread your 7-inch-or-shorter power supply; connect up the case’s two front hot-swap bays; stuff your optical drive in one of the case’s two, tool-free 5.25-inch bays; or slap some SSDs in the four additional 2.5-inch bays provided.

It’s not very often you see a manufacturer going for the fabled, “cube design,” but this is not your standard case by any stretch of the imagination.

As for the hybrid bit we previously mentioned, Cooler Master has designed the open-air case to work just like that, with the case’s sides and top bare to the world. However, when you want to transform the chassis into a normal, box-like enclosure, you just need to reattach the case’s sides and top with the provided thumbscrews.

While the process is certainly easy for those who have ever screwed in a side panel before (that’s most of you reading this), we wish that Cooler Master could have used the kind of thumbscrews that remain attached to the case (or panel) after you’ve loosened them. Losing those at a LAN party would be a real nightmare. That, or Cooler Master could have used quick-snap latches instead – an even stronger match for this Transformer of a computer case.

The beauty of Cooler Master’s split-insides concept is that you only have the annoyance of stringing cables around the lower half once. Most of the parts you’ll likely manipulate sit up top.

The case gives you a lot of expandability for its size— including room for seven PCIe devices in all and videocards up to 13.1 inches in length—as well as two USB 3.0 ports on the front and two beefy, 1,800-RPM, 12-centimeter fans directly behind that for air intake. If you’re crazy enough to try water-cooling given the tight confines of this chassis, it does support a single 24-centimeter radiator on the front if you first remove these fans in addition to a single 12-centimeter radiator on the case’s rear. While indentations on the rear of the chassis indicated a place where tubing could have been threaded, Cooler Master oddly omits any rubberized holes for doing so.

The Cooler Master HAF XB isn’t for beginners. You’re going to get to pretend you’re a surgeon when you try to thread wires around the inside of this tight chassis, even given the HAF XB’s system-builder focus. It’s still a compelling case for tinkerers that comes with plenty of useful features, and one that’s worth looking into for those afraid to (or uninterested in) making the switch to a fully open-air design. Just don’t try to water-cool it.

Cooler Master HAF XB

Hot-swap drive bays, easy-to-access motherboard maintenance, excellent cooling

Removable panels need more than thumbscrews, tight chassis for huge CPU coolers and basic PSU installation

$99, www.coolermaster.com

CoolerMaster Scout 2

Cooler Master makes it easy to carry this case around.

There’s no doubt in our minds that the design of Cooler Master’s Storm Scout 2 chassis is going to draw eyeballs. On the outside, it’s a beautiful case – punctuated ever-so-slightly by red LED fan viewable through the case’s windowed side panel and ever-so-dramatically by the case’s unique, rubber-coated steel handle up top.

Looks can be deceiving. From the outside, this case is a winner. But from the inside, we’re a bit skeptical.

The case’s inside is less eye-catching. We love the three screwless 5.25-inch drive bays that merely require you to flick a switch from “open” to “lock” to secure your components in place. However, we’re a little turned off by the flimsier rails that Cooler Master delivers to secure up to seven, 3.5-inch hard drives in place; drive trays would have been better. Additionally, four of the drive bays have to go if you’re using a video card that’s larger than 28.7 centimeters in length – and there’s no easy way to just pull them out sans screwdriver.

Thumbscrews are your new friends for the case’s seven PCIe expansion slots, and you’ll have to install both standoffs and screws for your motherboard. That said, the Storm Scout 2 makes cable management easier with the five holes (three rubberized) Cooler Master cuts right into the motherboard tray–though they could have been a little bigger.

Our biggest problem with the Storm Scout 2 is its cooling—not due to its potential, as the case supports up to nine fans in total (a mix of 12- and 14-centimeter fans, but mostly 12-centimeter). Rather the case ships with just one fan preinstalled: The aforementioned 12-centimeter LED fan on the case’s rear. You can toggle the light on and off, as the flames shooting out from your hot components will be all the dramatic lighting you really need.

Two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports adorn the case’s front, which you can hide with a little pull-down cover if you so desire. It’s another one of the many tricks Cooler Master stuffs into the Storm Scout 2’s hat; we just wish we could have some more fans, too.

CoolerMaster Scout 2

Super-mobile case, easy cable management and good connectivity

Poor prebuilt cooling (one fan!), requires sacrifice of drive bays for larger videocards, flimsier rails for hard drive installation

$99, www.coolermaster.com

MSI Stealth

You’ll love this case’s color scheme, we promise

Were there an award for “best case color scheme,” MSI’s Stealth computer case wins by a mile from its lovely black and light-blue-accented aesthetic. As for the case’s design, however, MSI packs in a few problems to balance out the good bits.

Just wait until you pop off the side of this chassis: a pretty world of black and blue awaits you.

We never thought we’d have to struggle so much with this case just to get a simple optical drive secured into one of its three free bays. That involves popping off the front panel just so you can remove the 5.25-inch bay covers–annoyance number one–and then somehow use the case’s big, blue locking mechanisms of fail to roughly secure your drive in place. Spoiler: They not very secure.

MSI does provide full trays for the four hard drives the case supports, which alleviates our frustration somewhat. It also packs two graphics card stabilizers right above that–a fun and quasi-useful addition that allows the case to support video cards up to 31 centimeters in length, but some extra 2.5-inch bays might have been more useful in general.

What the case lacks in big, fat cable routing holes (you get four small, thin ones), it makes up for in the ludicrous amount of space between the rear of the motherboard tray and the case’s right side panel. You could hide a garden hose in this case, not just your power supply cables.

A single 12-centimeter fan in the front balances out a similarly sized blue LED fan in the front, positioned directly next to the hard drive bays. On the top of the case’s front are two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and a special USB port that dovetails with your MSI motherboard’s “SuperCharger” functionality for speedy device charging. If you haven’t drunk MSI’s Flavor Aid, however, it’s just a standard USB 2.0 connection. Great looks, polarizing design: The MSI Stealth chassis leaves us feeling a little blue.

MSI Stealth

Lovely aesthetic, plenty of room for huge videocards, front-panel connectivity with an MSI-themed bonus

Videocard stabilizers seem silly, horrible 5.25-inch bay locking mechanism (and installation process)

$99, us.msi.com

Click the next page to check out our new kick-ass best-of-the-best case!

ThermalTake New Soprano

A soprano could sing inside of this case and you’d never hear it.

Find a chassis that successfully combines practical noise dampening, useful features, and cooling can be a bit of a needle in the haystack sometimes—but in this case (pardon the pun), that’s Thermaltake’s New Soprano. The solid construction of this chassis creates an upgrading or installation experience that’s free of frustration. Our only complaint with the case, if you could really call it that, is that it lacks pizazz.

This case might look fairly simple on the outside, but it has just about everything you’d ever want or need. Trust us.

That said, give us function over pretty lights any day.

The jet-black exterior of the case uses a front-panel door to create a sleek, uncluttered aesthetic by allowing you to hide your components when you aren’t specifically using them. The door doubles as an excellent noise-dampener and, we argue, a heavier-than-you-might-expect blunt object for use when squaring off against midnight intruders or zombie hordes.

Two USB 3.0 ports sit alongside two USB 2.0 ports on the top-front of the case; we’re even more enthusiastic about the built-in hot-swap hard drive docking station for 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives that Thermaltake’s constructed on the top of the chassis itself. It’s a delightful and unexpected addition to the case that brings a lot of additional connectivity without harming the case’s overall look or feel.

On the inside, Thermaltake uses four simple locking mechanisms to keep your 5.25-inch device held tightly. Installing an optical drive requires you to remove the drive bay’s front panels— easily done without having to rip off any part of the case’s front. Four screwless hard drive trays rest behind the case’s secret weapon: A huge, blue-LED, 20-centimeter fan that delivers plenty of air over your drives without blowing out your eardrums to do so. Above the primary 3.5-inch bays rests a single additional 3.5-inch drive bay and a single 2.5-inch bay for your solid-state needs (both not screwless). Thermaltake positions the thumbscrews for the case’s seven expansion slots on the exterior of the case. While that saves you a little room on the inside—giving the case space for a video card up to 12.2-inches in length—it also means that it’s really hard to actually use your fingers to tighten or loosen the screws.

Thermaltake pulls out all the stops to make it as easy as possible for you to install or upgrade parts—minus the expansion slots, which will require a screwdriver.

Motherboard standoffs are built directly into the case–an excellent touch that saves would-be system builders a bit of time and hassle. A huge hole on the upper half of the motherboard tray exposes your CPU area for easier installation of aftermarket coolers, and that’s joined by five other holes on the tray itself (four rubberized) for cable management. There’s plenty of room between the rear of the tray and the case’s right side panel, even including the acoustical foam that Thermaltake’s attached to the panel to give your ears a respite.

The only other fan in the case is a single, 12-centimeter exhaust fan attached to its rear, and the only other fan you can install beyond that would be an optional 12-centimeter intake fan on the case’s bottom. That’s the trade-off of having a “sound-proof” rig: more potential for heat. However, Thermaltake’s done a masterful job of addressing this issue while building out a case that’s packed with just about everything you’d want to have—assuming you care more about function than flash.

Thermaltake New Soprano VO900M1N2N

Good cooling, great soundproofing, mostly easy installation, slick aesthetics

Expansion slots a little fussy with thumbscrews, case isn’t extraordinarily “flashy”

$119, www.thermaltakeusa.com

Xclio Touch 787

Meet the future, and the past, of cases.

This kills us—it absolutely kills us. The Xclio Touch 787 has one of the most innovative, fun-to-use, Star-Trekian features we’ve ever seen on a case. And the substantial air-cooling on this case feels just a few miles per hour short of a category four. It looks good; it’s one of the few cases that we actually really enjoy interacting with on a daily basis.

Words fail us. The touchscreen controls on this case must be seen to be believed.

But why, oh why, does Xclio have no idea how to build hard drive mounts?

Allow us to explain. The single most noteworthy and compelling feature of the Touch 787 is—as the name alludes—the giant touch-sensitive panel on front of the case’s top. It looks as if it was ripped out of a standard Star Trek: TNG episode, and it functions about as well. After wiring up the panel with a standard Molex connection, you can tap its huge, circular buttons to turn the case’s fans on and off; adjust their speeds to low, medium, or high; turn the fans’ lights on and off; or lock and unlock the panel itself (to prevent accidental bumping).

Call it gimmicky if you want, but the responsiveness of the controls – and pretty blue lighting when you’ve activated an option – is just downright cool. Unfortunately, Xclio seems to have spent most of its R&D on this case on just that— the panel. Or perhaps the fans, as this system comes with no fewer than ten 12-centimeter fans in total: One on the case’s rear, two on the top, one in the front, and six (!) on the case’s side panel. Cooling overkill? Yes. We appreciate the enthusiasm, but one large fan on the side panel (for example) could have pushed plenty of air at a lower RPM and noise level.

All the standard features on this case are the same as what you’d expect to find in this price range: Cable mounting holes, motherboard tray cutouts behind the CPU, locking mechanisms for the case’s three free 5.25-inch bays, et cetera. We’re not going to waste words going over these, simply because the design of the case’s 3.5-inch bays—or lack thereof— presents a critical flaw in any user’s enjoyment of this wind tunnel of a chassis.

It’s too bad that Xclio didn't put some more thought into this case’s internals. As is, they’re not very good.

To access the case’s two actual hard drive bays, you have to unscrew and take apart a stupid bar of-sorts that runs vertically from the case’s bottom to just under its 5.25-inch bays. Upon further inspection, however, Xclio actually wants you to mount your drives to this bar as well, just floating out there in mid-air. Presumably, Xclio wants to put nothing between the intake fan and your system’s motherboard, but it’s a bad design concept that’s ugly for cable management, annoying to work with, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever: It’s the very definition of, “If it ain’t broke…”

If it wasn’t for Xclio’s choices in designing its mounting “system” for hard drives, we’d consider this case–loud and over-the-top as it might be–to actually be something worth considering if for nothing else than its uniqueness. The more we think about it, however, the more Xclio’s design decisions tease the idea that they don’t actually know how to build a functional case, just a really cool-looking one.

Xclio Touch 787

Amazing touch-panel controls, good cable management, more cooling than you’ll ever need.

Very loud, horrible design for hard drive mounting, plenty of wiring to manage even before you put any parts into the case.

$149, www.xclio.com

Click the next page to read reviews on the budget computer cases.

The Battle of the Inexpensive Cases

Want a case on the cheap? Be sure you don’t get what you’re paying for…

Here we go—a descent into the budget barrel. It’s understandable that you might be a little concerned about the quality of offerings you’re going to see in the sub-$100 case market. You have every right to be: Just go to your local geeky retailer of choice and check out some of the horrible cases on the shelves that get offered up at rock-bottom prices. We wouldn’t want to put our worst enemy’s motherboard into those; why should you install yours?

Of course, you can find some real diamonds in the rough, but you’re definitely going to have to do a little digging to uncover quality, inexpensive cases – especially given the sacrifices manufacturers typically have to make in order to hit these low price targets. We’ve dragged up two of these budget cases to show you just what we mean by the differences you’ll find at this end of the spectrum: Take a look!

Antec One

This case might be inexpensive, but there’s so much more Antec could have done

One… singular sensation is not this chassis. The mid-tower Antec One feels a little flimsy in a few areas, which otherwise detracts from some of the better elements in this ultra-inexpensive case.

The Antec One comes with three 5.25-inch bays that use pre-attached locking mechanisms to keep your devices all snug and attached. However, this is the kind of case that requires you to pop off the entire front panel in order to remove the grilled covers over the empty bays— be careful with that, as we definitely broke off some of the tabs on these covers when trying to remove them ourselves.

The Antec is light enough that you could probably balance it on your fingers and spin it like a basketball. (You-Tube that, if you try).

Antec positions the entrance for the case’s five 3.5-inch bays on the opposite side of the chassis–the right of the case, if you’re looking at it from the front, rather than the left. This decision boggled us at first, but the more we thought about it, it makes sense: You would have to pop off both sides of the case anyway were you to install the drives from the left side of the chassis (using the provided rails) and this method allows Antec manages to build in some additional space for much-needed cable management. It’s just a little weird at first.

The case’s seven expansion card brackets don’t come with screws pre-installed into the case; a bit of an annoyance for those looking to ensure that the flimsy tabs stay on at all times. We do, however, like the recessed side pane that sits behind a huge hold cut out for the top half of one’s motherboard: Cable-management and CPU cooler installations are a breeze.

Antec slaps two 12-centimeter fans in the top-rear corner of the case; none over the hard drives. You get two USB 3.0 ports on the case’s front; that’s it. That’s the Antec One: A price-conscious chassis that’s good in a pinch, but could be a lot better.

Antec One

Hard drive bay design is odd at first, but functional; screwless 5.25-inch bays; good cable management

Lacks screws on PCI brackets, no cooling on hard drives, frustrating 5.25-inch device installation

$49, www.antec.com

Corsair Carbide 200R

It’s not “super” inexpensive, but it’s worth saving pennies for

Delightful. Truly delightful. That’s the best way to sum up Corsair’s sub-$100 Carbide 200R mid-tower chassis. It’s roomy, it’s well-designed, and—most importantly— it doesn’t invite any annoying features or ill-designed elements along for its inexpensive ride.

The Carbide 200R doesn't win huge points for its looks, but there's a lot going on inside this chassis for its low price.

All of the Carbide 200R’s drive bays are completely screwless, a wonderful touch for those looking to make modifications to their system without busting out the tool kit. Popping off the flat, solid panels covering the case’s three 5.25-inch bays is easy and destruction-free— almost as easy as it is to slide and lock up to four 3.5-inch hard drives into the case’s left-facing bays. You can use screws to attach up to four 2.5-inch drives into a provided internal enclosure if you really don’t want your solid-state-drives to jiggle.

Motherboard standoffs are built directly into the Carbide 200R: Just slap down your board, grab a few screws, and you’re set. Five different cable routing holes cut directly into the tray make it easy for you to hide your ugly wires, and a large area cut out behind the top of the motherboard tray speeds along the (often agonizing) process of aftermarket CPU cooler installation.

The case comes with a single 12-centimeter fan in the rear and the front. While we would have preferred that the front fan was placed to push some air over your hard drives, at least it’s able to direct much-need cooling on your video card (up to 11.8-inches long). You can also stick up to five additional 12- or 14-centimeter fans around the case’s top, side, and bottom, as well as one more 12-centimeter fan in the front (covering your hard drives).

The case comes with two USB 3.0 ports on the front—more importantly, popping off the front panel to do any modifications to the Carbide 200R doesn’t result in a tangle of wires coming with it. It’s these little touches, and more, that make this case such an inexpensive delight.

Corsair Carbide 200R

Plenty of drive bays, lots of options for additional cooling, a great emphasis on reducing the amount of screwdriver time needed

Front preinstalled fan could have pushed more air over the hard drives directly, 2.5-inch bays still require screws

$60, www.corsair.com

Ceton Echo Windows Media Center Extender Review

Michael Brown — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:45:01 +0000

Xbox? We don’t need no stinkin’ Xbox!

Until the Echo hit the street, the Xbox 360 was pretty much the only Windows Media Center Extender still on the market. Companies such as D-Link and Linksys discontinued their extenders years ago—probably because they couldn’t compete with the subsidized price of Microsoft’s gaming console.

You’re looking at the best Windows Media Center Extender we’ve tested.

In case you’ve forgotten what a Windows Media Center Extender is, here’s a quick refresher: Plug one of these networked devices into your TV, pair it with a Windows computer on the same network, and the Windows Media Center user interface from that PC—along with all the movies, photos, and music that PC can access—will stream though the extender to the TV.

If the paired PC is outfitted with a TV tuner, you can also stream live TV. We tested the Echo with an over-the-air USB ATSC tuner (AVerMedia’s model H826SK) connected to an outdoor antenna and got great results. If you subscribe to cable TV and equip your Media Center PC with a CableCARD tuner (from Ceton or any other manufacturer), you can stream any channel you subscribe to, including premium channels such as HBO and Showtime (but not on-demand programming). On top of that, you can record live TV onto the PC’s hard drive, much like a TiVo or other brand of DVR that you might rent from your cable company.

The Echo sells for $180—about the same street price as a 4GB Xbox 360. But being about the size of a paperback book, the Echo is a fraction of the Xbox 360’s bulk, and Ceton claims that it draws about 90 percent less power.

The Echo connects to your TV via HDMI, and it draws power from a supplied USB power adapter. It requires a hardwired Ethernet connection, and the company recommends that the host PC also be hardwired to your network. If you don’t have CAT5 cable in your walls, the company recommends deploying either a powerline or MoCA (Multimedia over Coax) network.

The Echo user experience is pretty much identical to using a DVR, with a couple of exceptions: Ceton’s remote control is craptastically generic. More importantly, you can fast-forward and rewind recorded TV; but unlike a DVR, you can’t rewind live TV unless you’re also recording it. You can cure the first problem by purchasing Ceton’s Companion app for Android or iOS devices ($5 each) to turn your phone or tablet into a remote.

As with those “whole-home DVR” systems you see advertised on TV, you can pause playback on the TV that’s connected to your PC in one room, go to a TV connected to an Echo in another room, and pick up where you left off. Up to five Echo devices can be linked to a single PC running Windows Media Center, and if that PC is equipped with multiple tuners, each Echo can tune to a different channel.

If you want to stream Internet video and media stored on your network, something like Western Digital’s WDTV Live is a better choice; out of the box, the Echo supports only the media formats that Windows Media Center supports. That list includes codecs such as MPEG-2, H.264, and MP3, but not container formats such as MKV or lossless audio codecs such as FLAC. If you want to tune into and record cable or broadcast TV, and you don’t care about Xbox games, the Echo is the way to go.

$180, www.cetoncorp.com

Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 Review

Jimmy Thang — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:56:58 +0000

A good idea and a great value

What’s not to like about the Lenovo IdeaPad Y500? Imagine a 2.4GHz Core i7-3630QM CPU notebook armed with two GeForce GT 650Ms, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive with a 16GB caching SSD, all for $1,250!

If the impressive specs weren’t enough, the Y500 is also quite handsome with its sharp angles, rounded corners, and brushed aluminum finish. It eschews the “extreme” gaming laptop design in favor of a simple and clean aesthetic, but a flaming-red, LED-backlit keyboard adds just enough flare to keep things interesting. Its 15.2x10.2x1.4-inch chassis also makes it much smaller and more portable than our 15.6-inch MSI GT60 zero-point laptop, and the Y500 weighs in at just six pounds, 6.8 ounces. Although it may not be Ultrabook-light, it’s lighter than the very-slim Razer Blade gaming laptop (reviewed Holiday 2012), but it’s much heftier power brick does increase its carry weight by more than a pound.

One unique design feature is the Y500’s modular ultrabay underneath the notebook, which allows you to swap in different components. Our unit came with a second 650M GPU, but you can easily unlock this and swap it out with Lenovo’s expanded 750GB HDD tray ($190), a DVD burner ($70), or cooling fan ($30). The extra flexibility is appreciated, as it allows you to transform the gaming laptop into a workstation or entertainment system.

You’ll be able to enjoy each configuration with the Y500’s excellent JBL speakers and sharp 15.6-inch display. Even though the 1920x1080-resolution screen is a TN panel, it offers very good viewing angles all around, and the audio is loud and crisp, partially thanks to Dolby’s Home Theatre V4 software. While it can’t quite compare to a dedicated 2.1 setup, laptop speakers don’t get much better than this.

We also really liked the chiclet keyboard and found the keys to be quiet and responsive. Unfortunately, the trackpad was a big letdown. It supports all of Windows 8 multitouch gestures, like swiping in the Charms bar and pinch-to-zoom, but we often found ourselves triggering these gestures on accident. Though we were able to disable these features, which largely fixed the annoyances, but there were still occasions where the trackpad proved unresponsive. In addition, because both click buttons are clunkily integrated beneath the trackpad rather than being separate buttons, we often found ourselves unintentionally sliding the cursor when clicking.

Fortunately, the internal components performed quite well—beyond what we’d expect given the Y500’s affordability. This is the first time we’ve reviewed a laptop with two 650M GPUs in SLI and we’re happy to say it had no problems blowing away our zero-point’s single GeForce 670M. In both our STALKER and 3DMark 11 graphics benchmarks, it smoked the zero-point by more than 20 percent. The only issue we experienced was that we had to enable SLI in the Nvidia control panel, as it was disabled by default. The Y500’s Core i7-3630QM’s100MHz advantage over the GT60’s Core i7-3610QM gave the former a marginal advantage—Lenovo’s biggest lead here was 2.5 percent in the multithread-hungry x264 benchmark.

In our experiential gameplay tests, the Y500 handled Portal 2 like a piece of cake, as it were, and achieved average frame rates in the 130 range. On the much more graphically formidable Far Cry 3, it achieved a 40fps average at 1080p on the default medium settings, which we consider to be in the realm of playable. But the laptop does falter when it comes to battery life, as it only lasted 163 minutes in our test—24 minutes less than the GT60.

While we’re withholding a Kick Ass rating on account of the lackluster battery and frustrating trackpad, those issues can be mitigated if you carry a mouse and charger with you. In general, this is a handsome, portable notebook that can compete in performance with laptops that cost hundreds more. True to its name, the IdeaPad sounds like a great idea to us.

$1,250, www.lenovo.com

Column: Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition is a Disappointment

Thomas McDonald — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:25:35 +0000

If only it were as good as the XCOM remake

For the second time in as many months the Ghost of Games Past has visited my PC to remind me of classic games... and how much better they are now.

The Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate doesn't enhance much of anything

This time, the ghostly visitor in the night is Baldur’s Gate, the game that put BioWare on the map and brought the classic D&D experience from the Gold Box age into a whole new epoch of awesome. Unfortunately, the new Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition couldn’t repeat the magic that turned X-Com (one of the best PC games ever, and now almost wholly unplayable for anyone but nostalgia-sadists) into the brilliant XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

In fairness to the makers of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, they didn’t have the deep pockets and vast resources of 2K/ Firaxis. Beamdog/Overhaul just doesn’t bring that much stick to the table. Rather than getting a reinvented Baldur’s Gate, or even a heavily upgraded one, we get something significantly less impressive.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a great example of what a remake should look like

I say that with the understanding that “significantly less impressive” is relative. Baldur’s Gate is still one of the best RPGs ever. It’s also still on my shelf, and available online for about $10. Nothing in the Enhanced Edition diminishes the original game, but it doesn’t enhance it that much, either.

This is Baldur’s Gate with Baldur’s Gate II improvements, a graphics bump, a better journal, and a tedious arena mode. They say they fixed or added 400 things to this version, but pathfinding is not among them. Also, it’s buggy and crashy as all hell. You can save your money, load up the original game, install the Tutu mod and a few others, and get a fine BG experience.

The bigger problem is that Baldur’s Gate is an old-school game that just hasn’t aged all that well, and remains little more than a nostalgia act. The fussy combat and bland narrative is something for a younger, more tolerant era of computer gaming. The most bizarre part is that you can trace a straight line from the concepts of BG right through all of BioWare’s products. Dragon Age and Mass Effect are Baldur’s Gate, done better. Why would we want it done worse?

EVGA GeForce GTX Titan Review

Josh Norem — Fri, 03 May 2013 00:15:26 +0000

Fastest single-GPU card? Yep. Fastest GPU? Nope

If aliens ever land and say, “Take us to your single-GPU leader,” you’ll have to find a GTX Titan that’s available for a viewing. The Titan is without a doubt the fastest single-GPU card available today, but it’s not the fastest single video card, as that distinction still belongs to dual-GPU behemoths such as the Asus Ares II and the Nvidia GTX 690. A lot of people don’t enjoy messing with SLI and CrossFireX, though, and for them the Titan offers the highest level of performance possible at this time without any dual-card shenanigans. It also brings some new technology to the table, has a smaller form factor and lower TDP than the GTX 690, and includes heavily revamped tuning software designed for quiet operation, making it one of the most well-rounded and impressive GPU packages we’ve encountered in recent memory.

As with the GTX 690, both EVGA and Asus offer Titans that are 100 percent Nvidia's design inside and out.

The Titan has existed for more than a year in the supercomputer world in the form of the Telsa K20X, which costs around $5,000. It's Nvidia's Big Kepler GPU, meaning it’s the most powerful implementation of the company’s current architecture, and for context it's almost double everything compared to a GTX 680 GPU. It has twice the transistors, almost double the CUDA cores, triple the frame buffer, a wider memory bus, better double-precision performance for compute, and totally revamped tuning software. Given its massive parallelism and size the card runs at a much slower clock speed than a GTX 680, however, moving along at 836MHz compared to the 680's 1,006MHz clock speed. It's a half-inch longer than the GTX 680, but is a worthy successor to the flagship cards we tested last year, as it offers a sizable performance increase over all of them, dual-GPU cards excluded, of course.

In terms of new technology, its tuning software now lets you dictate a maximum temperature for the card, which helps keep it totally silent at all times. Out of the box it’s set to 80 C but you can nudge it up to 95 C if you're feeling saucy; the card can handle it. You can also over-volt the Titan, which is a first for a "stock" card from Nvidia. The GeForce GTX logo is now controlled by software, too, so you can make it breathe and tweak its brightness level. It will supposedly also let you "overclock" your display's refresh rate, allowing you to bypass VSync to achieve higher frame rates.

In testing, we saw the Titan reign supreme over its single-GPU competitors, but it could not topple the Ares II, Radeon 7990 Devil 13, or GTX 690 cards. It's also not as fast as dual-card SLI and CrossFireX configurations, which isn't surprising, but the Titan is close to them despite using only one GPU, which is quite impressive. It also requires exactly half the power requirements, needing just one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCIe connector. Overall it's a good 10-15 percent faster than the GTX 680, which is great and all, but not for double the price.

In the end, the main goal of the Titan is twofold: to provide a kick-ass GPU to fit inside the increasingly popular SFF rigs, and to convincingly take the single-GPU crown back from AMD's HD 7970 GHz edition. On both of these fronts it's definitely Mission Accomplished, which can mean only one thing: It’s your move, AMD!

Price $1,000, www.evga.com