Asus ares

When you name your graphics card after the God of War, you’d better hope it brings some heat, but judging by early reviews, that’s just what ASUS has done. The three slot monstrosity above is the ARES, a $1200 limited edition, fully custom board, sporting twin Radeon HD 5870 GPUs, four gigabytes of GDDR5 memory and practically enough raw copper to smelt a sword. We’re not joking: the thing weighs nearly five pounds and requires a 750 watt power supply with three power connectors (two 8-pin, one 6-pin) to even run. Of course, you’re getting a graphical behemoth for that kind of price, steamrolling every other GPU on the planet — paired with even a 3.8GHz Core i7-930 CPU in 3DMark Vantage (on Extreme settings), Overclock 3D racked up a fairly ludicrous 15,000 score, and the card ripped past 25,000 with a Core i7-980X and a second ARES in CrossFire. The card was less impressive in actual gameplay, merely spanking the (much cheaper) Radeon 5970 and GeForce GTX 480 by a modest amount, and several reviewers complained it was fairly loud… but as the old adage goes, nobody needs a Ferrari to drive the speed limit, but we’ll all drool over them anyhow. Bring on the liquid nitrogen, folks.

Source: Engadget

onlive3 controller

Speaking with OnLive company head Steve Perlman at E3 2010, he revealed to Joystiq that the TV-based version of OnLive should be widely available by the end of 2010. “When we get to what we call ‘cruising altitude’ — this is the bumpy takeoff — we can introduce the Microconsole. It’s a walk before you run sorta thing. Frankly, this is the quietest — well, it’s not the quietest, but it’s one of the quieter times of the year for gaming — the fourth quarter is the really big ramp up.” It’s his hope that the service will have a chance to become completely stable before going live with the home console.

Now that OnLive’s beta is (kind of) out the door — a “bumpy takeoff” as coined by founder Steve Perlman — the company is talking about its future plans. One of those happens to be a piece of hardware dubbed the MicroConsole  that’ll serve as the link from the service to your TV. Talking with Joystiq at E3, Perlman said it expects to push the device out “by the end of 2010″ and that beta users are already using it. So, when can we get in on that beta?

Source:Joystiq

Nitendo 3ds red rm eng

Here’s an interesting little tidbit from Japan’s financial newspaper Nikkei. According to an article translated by andriasang — who also provided information this morning on a wireless ebook reader — Nintendo’s 3DS will be able to copy multiple games to internal memory and selected from the menu. Now, that can be interpreted in many ways. It could mean 3DS carts installing fully on the system à la Xbox 360’s game install. Another — and we think more likely — interpretation is that games can be downloaded via some store and saved internally. At this point, however, we don’t have any details on a 3DS online marketplace, and in an interview with Joystiq, the company’s in-house legend Shigeru Miyamoto wouldn’t comment on compatibility with current DSiWare. As for theoretic storage capacity, Nintendo still isn’t saying how much internal memory is in the device, but we do know the SD card slot is still there. All this discussion, of course, is assuming the translation is correct, and since we’re currently unable to verify for ourselves, consider all this a rumor right now.

Source: andriasang

PlayStation -nyko-

it looks like the PlayStation Move accessories are starting to trickle in. While we’re still lusting after the shooting attachment, we do realize the need for more modest hardware such as that supplied by Nyko. The Charge Station is a pretty straightforward affair: it features four ports for powering up as many Motion Controllers and / or Navigation Controllers, and can be pre-ordered from Amazon for $20. On a related note, we can’t wait to see what CTA comes up with for its Move accessories. We hope there are some Sony-compatible wings  in our future!

Source1: Nyko

Source2:  Engadget