Here's today's gaming goodness roundup, starting with news on the Unreal tournament 3 titan Pack, Dawn of War II and Atlantica Online. Read more
Microsoft unveiled here at PDC 2005 the new 3D hardware acceleration dependencies of Windows Vista that will be realized even for ordinary 2D renderings. Tom's Hardware Guide learned that Microsoft intends to offer a "tiered" experience - the basics will run on an integrated chipset, but all the bells and whistles will call for a capable 256 MByte discrete graphics board. Read more
Every day, millions of people trade their real-life personas for virtual characters in World of Warcraft. Instead of spending countless hours controlling virtual counterparts to gain experience and power, some have started using bot programs to autonomously control their characters. We took a close look into one such 'bot" program and chatted with its developer. Read more
Microsoft’s back with episode 3 of the Laptop Hunters, where real-life similes shop for their ideal laptop, only to arrive at a PC. Read more
Hard drive capacities have increased in large increments over the last few years, while trends indicate reduced spindle speeds of 5,400 RPM instead of 7,200. We looked at three generations of Samsung hard drives to analyze the performance ramifications. Read more
This month, ATI's new Radeon HD 4770 is missing in action, since online stores are not only unable to keep it in stock, but also de-listing it completely. With violent movements in pricing, though, it'd have been taken off the recommended list anyway. Read more
Nvidia's Ion for the do-it-yourselfer launched last month in the form of Zotac's mini-ITX motherboard. Though sexy in principle, the platform had some teething pains right out of the gate. Chris Angelini revisits those issues and uses Ion as a real HTPC. Read more
Do you want a quick Core i7 system, but don’t feel confident sticking to Intel's spec and using the DDR3-1066 memory supported by the processor? We benchmark the most relevant memory speed and timing combinations to check the benefit of going faster. Read more