Two new gaming consoles. Both very powerful. Both very ambitious. Both about to meet head to head... and do battle for your time, money and attention, as well as the fate of the universe! Two weeks ago we reviewed the PlayStation 4. Last week we reviewed the Xbox One. Now that we've had a decent chunk of time with both consoles, let's bang them together and pretend they're fighting.
As if it wasn't already fast enough, Gigabyte has armed its GTX 780 Ti with a massive air cooler that allows its variant of Nvidia's newcomer with a 17% overclock. The company has also been working on other overclocked GTX 780s, including a "GHz Edition" allowing a core clock of 1.02GHz or 18% higher than the standard version of the card.
AMD surprised everyone last month by delivering Titan-like performance for nearly half the price with the R9 290X. However before Nvidia can strike back, it'll have to eat another blow in the form of the new Radeon R9 290. At $400, the R9 290 offers fantastic value when you consider it still packs much of what made the R9 290X a GeForce killer.
Building a Hackintosh has definitely gotten easier over the years but there's still plenty of tinkering involved for the uninitiated. Earlier this year a company known as Quo launched a Kickstarter to fund a motherboard designed to run "any operating system". Though they don't explicitly market it as a Hackintosh board, it's clearly one of the board's key selling points. For the past few weeks we've been experimenting with the Quo motherboard (and the office's brand new hackintosh), here's how it all went...
The GeForce GTX Titan blew us all away eight months ago with its mindblowingly fast GPU. The catch, of course, was that Nvidia wanted $1,000 for it. In a sense, the Radeon R9 290X could be considered AMD's Titan, as it takes the Tahiti architecture and stuffs with nearly 2000 million more transistors. It's the most complex GPU AMD has created and by no coincidence, it's also one of the most expensive, but before you click away, that's "only" $550, which is substantially cheaper than Nvidia's solution.
Despite the fact that a single-year turnaround for any kind of Windows iteration is quick for the folks at Redmond, we're not sure if it's enough to please detractors. Before installing the free upgrade next Thursday, let's review what's been improved and what's still missing.
