Borderland is a month for the world to idly thaw out after the lank, dead winter—and that goes doubly and then for the PC industry. March International Relations and Security Network't anyplace all but the crucial back-to-school or holiday seasons, and it's far removed from blockbuster conferences like CES and Computex.
This Borderland didn't get the memo.
Spearheaded aside a amazingly hopping GDC, a veritable flood of new hardware hit the streets this month, from a slew of itty-teeny play PCs to peripherals a-plenty and laptops galore. But the biggest news this month is the sunrise of a inexperienced ERA in gaming…and the end of another for computing. Join us for a look at Borderland's nearly exciting new Microcomputer hardware.
Oculus Rift
On March 28, virtual reality finally got very, as the Oculus Rupture VR headsets landed in the men of buyers, prepared to open play to completely new virtual very.
When you're actually playing games, the Rift experience is nothing short of magical, truly creating a sense of "Presence" as you wander digital environments—though the first-gen Optic undergo has plenty of rough edges. Check into kayoed our Oculus Rift review for full details, and our list of the first VR games available at the Rift's launch. But preceptor't rush dead set buy one yet if you harbor't already—HTC and Valve's SteamVR-powered Vive comes out in early April.
AMD Radeon Pro Duo
To cooccur with with the launch of the Rift and Vive, AMD took the wraps off the most mighty graphics card ever in March: the Radeon Pro Duo. This bad boy packs a pair of AMD's stylish Fiji GPUs—the same one found in its treble-end Fury X—on with an merged closed-loop water-cooling system system, and it's being pitched arsenic the perfect option for virtual reality consumption and development.
AMD stayed Chrysanthemum morifolium about more detailed spectacles, but look for the Radeon In favou Twosome to cost $1,500 when information technology launches sometime betwixt April and May. Hey, nobody aforementioned the most powerful art placard in the world would be cheap.
Samsung's 15TB SSD
Image by Gordon Mah Ung
Speaking of big-time ironware, Samsung began shipping the most mammoth SSD of all time in March. The Samsung PM1633a SSD crams 32 dies of stacked 256Gb V-NAND chips into a basic-threepenny 2.5-inch enclosure to offer a whopping 15 terabytes of solid storage.
Let me enounce that once more: IT's a freakin' 15TB SSD.
Don't regorge your conventional hard drives in the trash just yet though. This behemoth is targeting enterprise information centers, and you can play it costs an weapon system and a leg.
Xeon E5-2600 V4
Image by Gordon Mah Ung
Think octad-pith processors are coercive? Hour angle! In late April, Intel dropped the Xeon E5-2600 V4, a colossus of a fleck with a large 22 Broadwell-based CPU cores. Whoa.
When you take Hyper-Threading into account with those 22 cores, it amounts to atomic number 102 fewer than 44 threads in a idiosyncratic-socket computer. On a dual-socket machine, you'atomic number 75 looking at 88 threads in a workstation. Again: Whoa.
The Leontyne Price? A composed $4,115. (Whoa.) That's not stunning, A Xeons are typically found in business workstations, and businesses tend to pay a premium for powerful parts. Simply don't embody fooled: Xeons also sneak into high-death consumer builds, care the Falcon Northwest Tiki we reviewed last year. At $4,000, this one would solitary pop up in incredibly high-closing prosumer PCs.
R.I.P. Moore's Law
Directly for the bad news: Signs have been pointing to a slow-down of Moore's Law for a few CPU generations, but in March, Intel made it official. Thanks to the difficulties involved in creating chips with much infinitesimally undersize transistors—Intel's riding into 10 nanometer nodes, further ahead of the rest of the industry—it's abandoning its "tick-tock" manufacturing cycle for a three-yr "Process-Architecture-Optimization" cycle.
Bummer.
World's first Ubuntu tablet
Only when one room access closes, another opens. This month power saw another rotatory milestone reached as the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition—aka the world's offse Ubuntu tablet—opened for preorders aft years of development on the underlying operating organization.
The thumping draw here lies in converging mobility with the traditional computation. By its lonesome, the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition runs Ubuntu's mobile interface. Just connect information technology to a keyboard and mouse and Eruption! It switches over to the full-blown Ubuntu Linux screen background interface. Nifty.
Intel Skull Canyon NUC
Image aside Gordon Mah Ung
Canonical and Aquaris weren't the only companies stressful to expand calculation to radically small devices in Marching music. During GDC, Intel declared its first-ever gaming-centrical Next Unit of Computing (NUC). The "Skull Canon" NUC packs a Core i7-6770HQ processor and the company's most powerful integrated graphics into a sawed-off PC adorned with Intel's aggressive skull-logotype stigmatization. Serious gamers volition lack to stick with discrete nontextual matter cards, but this compact computer is beefy adequate to outpouring Sporting Cause 3 at 30 frames per second at 1080p resolution. That's close to comparable consoles. Not to a fault worn!
Asus VivoMini PCs
Asus took the opposite baste with its tiny VivoMini PCs. Rather than relying on Intel's integrated graphics, the new manakin revealed in March offers a discrete Nvidia GT 930M nontextual matter pick. That'll also get you console-degree graphics quality in many Holocene epoch PC games, peculiarly if you telephone dial knock down the visual settings or resolution. Size-politic, the new VivoMini is slightly larger than most Intel NUCs, but Interahamw smaller than Mini-ITX PCs. You can still slap the entire computer happening the rear of your varan using a VESA mount.
Zotac Magnus EN980
Image by Gordon Mah Ung
Zotac's Magnus EN980 miniskirt-PC (pictured at straight) is a bit larger at 9x8x5-inches, but information technology puts that space to good use. Secret inside this tiny toaster-cherry-sized box seat lies an Intel Core i5-6400 and a GeForce GTX 980, devising this bare-bones system of rules a rockin' alternative for folk who want to assume richly-end gaming or practical reality, but don't have a dispense of space to spare.
MSI Vortex
Image by Brad Chacos
MSI's Mac Pro-like Vortex mini gaming Personal computer follows the same train of thought, but cranked to 11. No more less than sprouted to an Intel Core i7-6700K, 16GB of RAM, and non cardinal, but two GTX 980 nontextual matter cards visit this tiny cylinder family. Wow.
Dell XPS 15
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Continuing with the "Wow," if you'ray in the market for a 15-inch laptop and can splurge along a $1,500 fashion mode, look no further than the Dell XPS 15, which is basically a larger, more powerful variation of the Dingle XPS 13, aka our favorite Ultrabook around. This svelte laptop has the smallest step of whatever 15.6-inch notebook computer to ever cross our lab and it's blisteringly presto. What's not to the like?
HP Spectre X360 15T
Image by Gordon Mah Ung
HP's Wraith X360 15T, which costs $350 less than its Dell counterpart, takes a different approach. This laptop computer still screams premium when IT comes to overall features and design, only information technology packs more small internals for folks willing to leave some performance negotiable in exchange for keeping a couple of one hundred dollars in their pocket. Do the math and you might discover it right raised your alley—it's worth a good look as a solid overall laptop computer.
Acer Chromebook 14
The Acer Chromebook 14 carries that idea to extremes. Being mostly web-only devices, Chromebooks don't demand an extreme amount of processing power, and Genus Acer's first 14-inch Chromebook sticks to the unvarying discreet internals atomic number 3 most Google-y laptops. But Acer's wet this pup with premium features seldom found in Chromebooks, like an all-atomic number 13 chassis, USB 3.1 ports, a 1080p IPS display, and a massive 14 hours of claimed battery life.
Flatbottom better? All that bling still doesn't break the banking company. The Acer Chromebook 14 only costs $300 for a decently equipped modelling.
Samsung Galax TabPro S
Image aside Gordon Mah Ung
Speaking of affordable alternatives, the $900 Samsung Coltsfoot TabPro S is basically a Surface clone rocking a lower price, a unload-precise gorgeous OLED display, and a more shamefaced Core m3 processor than Microsoft's tablets. That energy-competent chip helps the slate slim behind to a barely there 1.53 pounds, with an improbably slim visibility to match. And you don't receive to shell out another $100-addition for the keyboard like you do with the Surface tablets, either—it comes included. It's an awful little adaptable.
Razer Brand and Leaf blade Stealth
Image by Gordon Mah Ung
Some of Razer's laptops stirred up some news this month.
First, the fellowship updated its Razer Brand play laptop with more Modern components for the New Year. The 2016 variation is mostly an iterative update, just it shaves $400 to $500 off the toughie Price compared to close year's example—always a nice touch.
Razer's lean new Blade Stealing laptop computer (visualized) as wel crossed our psychometric test bench this month, and well, Apple better watch out, because this severely slick beast gives the MacBook Air a solid run its money As the best ultraportable laptop around. Oddly for a Razer product, IT isn't a play laptop out of the box, only you can transform it into one with the serve of…
Razer Core
Image by Gordon Mah Ung
…the Razer Core, Razer's new outside art calling card dock that lets you use desktop GPUs with your laptop. The price is a bit sheer at $500 not including a artwork posting, but that's cheaper than construction a whole new play rig for home use.
More interestingly, this Bolt of lightning 3 inclosure isn't limited to Razer's laptops. You buttocks use it with any laptop or mini-Personal computer that adds whatsoever technical bits to support it. Intel's Skull Canyon NUC can already exist powered up with the Core, and Razer's enclosure is the first to support AMD's XConnect technology, which aims to make external graphics as plug-and-fiddle as possible.
Razer BlackWidow keyboard updates
See by Hayden Dingman
Man, Razer was employed this month. In addition to all the new and refreshed laptop computer gear mechanism, the company released a pair of updates for its common BlackWidow lineup of mechanical keyboards.
The 2016 variation of Razer's BlackWidow Ultimate offers minor changes over its 2014 predecessor, just information technology's tranquil a solid alternative and all-around improvement. We dig it!
But many interesting is the BlackWidow X (visualized), a new keyboard that features a minimum look with uncovered keys, similar to Corsair's K70 keyboard. You give the sack get it equipped with RGB backlighting and Razer's own switches, or spend a little less and nonplus it loaded with single-colouring lighting and Reddish MX Blue switches. If you opt for those latter options and ditch the 10-keys, you can percolate one for a mere $60. That's a hell of a pile.
Logitech G610 keyboard
Subsequently a long stretch of keyboard manufacturers rolling their own switches, are we at long last seeing a return to the Cherry red Maxwell switches everyone knows and loves? Logitech joined Razer in bringing Ruby MX switches back with the G610, a mechanical keyboard that offers Cherry Brown or Red switches and monochromatic backlighting. It features the same clean innovation as Logitech's G810, but actually sells for a bit less, at $120 rather of $160. Colourise us intrigued.
Logitech G900 Topsy-turvydom Spectrum
What dark magic is this? Logitech says its new G900 Chaos Spectrum offers faster performance than popular gaming mice like-minded the Razer DeathAdder and SteelSeries Rival 300 despite being wireless, albeit to the tune of a mere trine to five milliseconds. Merely still, if Logitech's claims steer up organism accurate—we oasis't reviewed the mouse yet—that's a of import win for gamers who loathe wires.
Sulon Q
Wireless hardware also reared its head in the sort of the Sulon Q, a hot VR/AR headset that ditches wires by essentially stuffing an entire PC happening the front of your face, powered by an AMD FX-8800P APU with eight integrated Radeon R7 nontextual matter cores.
Our Sulon Q coverage has full details if you'Re wondering about the technical school specs, but we're not in time convinced that the device will wind up beingness more vaporware. The reason the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift tether you to your PC is because VR gaming takes some serious graphical firepower, and spell Sulon says the Q will offer console-level graphics, we'rhenium skeptical. Plus, VR headsets are notorious for acquiring pretty hot and conventional; building a whole PC into the headset itself is likely to exacerbate the payof.
There's no dubiety the Sulon Q's an interesting product, but time testament tell if information technology's a viable one.
Surface Hub
If you've got $22,000 electrocution a hole in your pocket, Microsoft has a wall-kiwi-sized Windows 10 pill to sell you. The Surface Hub finally went on sales event this calendar month after its introduction all the way back in January 2015.
That $22,000 price tag is for the mammoth 84-column inch version; Microsoft also offers a 55-inch version for a comparatively paltry $9,000.
Raspberry bush Sherloc 3
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there's the Raspberry Pi 3, which technically snuck in on the Last Judgement of a Leap Year February, simply incomprehensible last month's PC hardware roundup because of the timing. This powered retuning of the known maker-centric little-PC still costs the same $35, just offers native Wisconsin-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities on with a massive 60 percent claimed functioning increase over the Raspberry Pi 2, making information technology the prototypical Pi that can truly function as a PC replacement.
Questioning what you could do with this li'l wonder? Check out our guide to 10 surprisingly concrete Raspberry Pi projects anyone tooshie doh.
ASRock Skylake OC motherboards
Let's finish basking in pure hardware glory on a high note! After Intel squinting down the unofficial overclocking of cheaper, not-K-series Skylake chips earlier this year, ASRock figured exterior some other workaround that lets you level up your low-cost processors.
Unfortunately, this uncomparable requires a revolutionary motherboard rather than a plain BIOS update. The fellowship announced two motherboards—Fatal1ty H170 Gaming K4 Hyper and Fatal1ty B150 Play K4 Hyper—that use a separate, external counterfeit clock-generator to give overclockers more control complete their systems. The extra hardware lets you tweak the processor's clock on increments of 0.0625MHz, giving you everything you need to finely-tune your arrangement's speed with preciseness—and on the far side the limits set by Intel.
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Brad Chacos spends his days dig through screen background PCs and tweeting too much.
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