Here we test the CM 690 II Advanced Case. The new version enhances the original CM 690 striking features with a seductive all-black interior, additional capacity, superb cooling system and user-friendly design. And though looks can deceive, the Cooler Master CM 690 II indeed does very similar to the original, make no mistake internally there have been a good number of changes. The original CM 690 was the building block of something better and they improved on it.

32 Megapixels (!)  That

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Designer Soon Mo Kang has taken a simple thing as a power strip, and has turned it into something much more versatile.  It

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PCG Hardware interviewed Anders Gyllenberg of DICE talking about the Frostbite engine and support for DirectX 11 features used in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Here's an excerpt:

PCGH: Are there any differences between the Console and the PC Version as far as technical or visual aspects are concerned (we know, BC2 is running with 720p and no AA on consoles)?

Anders Gyllenberg: We have added several PC specific features. Changing resolution & changing the graphical fidelity are the two obvious ones. We also have proper support for multiple aspect ratios like 4:3 and 16:10. The player has the option of activating the advanced control panel where you can set several settings such as detail levels, the AA, MSAA and HBAO. We support Dx9, Dx10 & Dx11.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - New pictures of the DX 11 game. (9)
 
PCGH: We also know that Bad Company 2 is featured by Frostbite Engine 1.x. Can you tell us the technical highlights of Frostbite Engine (for example SSAO, Depth of Field, Deferred Lighting or Global Illumination)? If yes can you please give examples how this rendering techniques are utilized in Battlefield Bad Company 2 (DoF while aiming for example)?

 Anders Gyllenberg: The base renderer is a forward renderer. Some feature highlights would be an advanced SSAO technique called HBAO (Horizon-based Ambient Occlusion), DOF during cutscenes, particle systems optimized for huge amounts of particles, soft particle blending, and soft shadowmap filtering (DX11 only).

PCGH: Can you confirm that the PC version utilizes DirectX 11 (at GDC 2009, Johan Andersson showed some cool rendering features)? If yes, what were the deciding technical advantages of the DX11 API? In what way does it allow you to optimize or simplify the rendering process (we

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Too weird ... Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but on top of the fact that you need to connected online at all times while playing, Command & Conquer 4 won't have LAN or dedicated server support.

The reason being, as lead designer Sam Bass put it, is because of the global player progression system. This system is "across single-player, multiplayer and skirmish and all the information is stored in a server. So if you go to another machine -- friend

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G.Skill Falcon II 128GB SSD test

Today we test a product from G.Skill. Their newly released SSD is called the Falcon II which is a follow up of the original Falcon Solid State Disk series. But make no mistake, it still comes with Indilinx controller, 64MB cache memory and packs a read speed of 220 MB/sec and a write speed of 150MB sec -- which makes the word 'slower' a bit of a paradox. The SSD comes with firmware revision 1819 which has full support for the TRIM-command in Windows 7.

And by using that 34nm Micron NAND memory G.Skill should be able to lower the price on their Falcon product series a little as well.

Check out this Guru3D review right here.

 

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Today I wanted to write a little 'opinionated' editorial. Typically we do not address rumors and gossip. But an accumulation of things that have been going on over at camp NVIDIA and the Internet leading us to believe things are not as they should be. The rumors are creating a rather negative stigma for NVIDIA. Here's our take on the pending GeForce 470 and 480.

Today we test a product from G.Skill. Their newly released SSD is called the Falcon II which is a follow up of the original Falcon Solid State Disk series. But make no mistake, it still comes with Indilinx controller, 64MB cache memory and packs a read speed of 220 MB/sec and a write speed of 150MB sec -- which makes the word 'slower' a bit of a paradox. The SSD comes with firmware revision 1819 which has full support for the TRIM-command in Windows 7. And by using that 34nm Micron NAND memory G.Skill should be able to lower the price on their Falcon product series a little as well.

An interesting development, though I feel it's safe to say we can expect a launch of high-end GF100 based graphics cards somewhere next month Jen-Hsun Huang in his quarterly financial reports mentioned that the Fermi architecture aka GF100 aka NV60 aka G300 aka GT300 aka GeForce Series 400 will start playing a role in Q2 of this year. That means for NVIDIA that volume availability of a series of new products would be released at the end of April or early May, and not March as earlier expected.

It seems that the 40nm Fermi architecture keeps fighting NVIDIA somehow, likely due to yield related issues at the TSMC 40nm node. The good news is that Jen-Hsun Huang implies multiple product, and that covers the mid and high-end range but also professional products like Quadro and Tegra. So in the Q2 timeframe we certainly can expect a lot of new products being pushed out real fast.

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