Nintendo's Hiroshi Yamauchi, father of console gaming, dead at 85

Nintendo fans, switch off your games and observe a moment of silence for Hiroshi Yamauchi, who died Thursday of pneumonia at a hospital in central Japan.

Yamauchi, who was 85, served as president of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002. He continued to serve as an adviser after his departure from the company, and was one of the richest men in Japan.

Under Yamauchi’s stewardship, Nintendo hired Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto and launched the Famicom, the video game console that jumpstarted the North American game market when it arrived in the U.S. as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Video games wouldn’t exist as we know them today without the NES, and the NES wouldn’t exist without Yamauchi.

Yamauchi transformed Nintendo into a gaming company, hired Miyamoto, and launched the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America, essentially resurrecting the video game console market.

The grandson of Nintendo founder Fusajiro Yamauchi, Hiroshi Yamauchi took the pivotal step of transforming Nintendo from a small-scale card manufacturer to a toy company, narrowly avoiding bankruptcy in the process. He led Nintendo into the growing American arcade market with Donkey Kong in 1981, then made Nintendo a U.S. household name by releasing the NES in 1985.

The NES was a smash hit that single-handedly revitalized the games business after the video game market crashed—hard—in 1983. Today the video game business is booming, and Yamauchi is credited for making a number of key decisions that helped the game industry—and Nintendo—prosper.

Yamauchi fostered creative talent at Nintendo, most notably Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Yamauchi fostered creative talents like Miyamoto because he believed video game developers could and should be artists, not just engineers. While Yamauchi was known for running Nintendo with a bit of an iron fist—every game published on the NES had to be approved by him first, for example—he had a proven knack for identifying successful ideas.

Under his leadership, Nintendo created some of the most beloved and long-running game franchises in the world, including Mario, Metroid, and the Legend of Zelda.

“[Yamauchi] was kind of a forerunner of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs—including the fact that he dropped out of prestigious university in Tokyo to pursue business interests,” says Lewis Ward, manager of gaming research at IDC.

“He was directly instrumental in getting Nintendo’s home console and handheld product lines on the map at a time when it was far from clear they would be popular and that their games could be profitable. His guidance will be missed, but not forgotten.”

Nintendo, led by Satoru Iwata, continues to be a dominant player in the video game industry.

Yamauchi stepped down as company president in 2002 and was succeeded by Satoru Iwata, who currently leads Nintendo as the company struggles with floundering Wii U sales and an evolving mobile game market.

In the interests of full disclosure, you should know that IDC is a sibling company to TechHive, both of which are subsidiaries of International Data Group (IDG).

Alex writes reviews, How-To Guides and features to help you work smarter and game harder.
More by Alex Wawro

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Intel's new Core i7 Extreme Edition series: Gaming power for those who can afford it

Most of us go about our daily computing tasks secure in the knowledge that something like our Intel Core i5 or AMD A6 will render our Web browser just fine. But then there are the “1 percent” of geeks who demand the best of the best for gaming and high-end computing.

Intel built its three new Extreme Edition chips, including the six-core Core i7-4960X, for members of this elite. The new processors appear atop Intel’s price list, and you can expect to pay up to $990 for the processor alone—not including a CPU cooler.

Nevertheless, if you’re interested in pulling maximum frame rates and detail levels from top-tier titles like Metro 2033 or the Crysis series, you’ll want to consider Intel’s new chips. And you’re hardly alone: Recent reports suggest that the gaming hardware market is alive and well, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent in preparing rigs for a single game.

Despite their 4000-series model numbers, the new Core i7 chips are based on Intel’s older Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, not on Haswell (the code name for the new Extreme Edition series is Ivy Bridge-E). That means it’s restricted to Socket 2011 motherboards running Intel’s X79 chipset. The good news for people looking to upgrade from a previous-gen Extreme Edition CPU is that the new chips are backward-compatible, though you’ll need to flash your board’s BIOS with new firmware. That option will save you a couple of hundred dollars, but enthusiast motherboard manufacturers will do their best to tempt you with brand-new models, too.

According to Intel, the new Core i7-4960X will deliver a performance boost of just 7 percent in 3D gaming—based on the 3DMark benchmark—over its older Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition CPU. So we may not see a rush of consumers eager to upgrade from that part. Intel provided PCWorld with a sample of the new CPU for benchmarking, but the test motherboard we ordered didn’t arrive in time for our deadline. We’ll post a follow-up story as soon as we’ve had a chance to run our own benchmarks on it.

Intel claims the new Core i7-4960X is 36 percent faster with 3D games than the newer Haswell-based Core i7-4770K part that PCWorld tested in June. Put another way, the Core i7-4960X is a beefed-up, third-generation Core chip that Intel says will outperform its high-end fourth-generation chip.

IntelIntel's new Ivy Bridge-E die.

Don’t expect that advantage to be permanent. A Haswell-based Extreme Edition chip should arrive eventually. But for now, the Core i7-4960X appears to be the fastest chip you can buy from Intel.

For the true gaming aristocracy with money to burn, the Ivy Bridge/Haswell complication won’t matter. But socket issues are always a concern with PC builders. Midrange Ivy Bridge chips require Socket 1155 motherboards, Haswell chips need Socket 1150 boards, and these high-end Ivy Bridge chips need Socket 2011 boards. Each socket requires its own chipset architecture and motherboard, so upgrading from one microarchitecture to the next can be a pain. (If you’re interested in building a powerful, inexpensive Haswell system for less than $1000, check out our guide from June.)

AsusMotherboards such as the Asus Rampage IV Extreme have multiple PCIe slots to accommodate multiple graphics cards.

The X79 chipset that the LGA 2011 infrastructure supports includes 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes—enough to support several high-end graphics cards (using Nvidia’s SLI or AMD’s CrossFire X technology). That capability combined with a high-end CPU and lots of fast memory can make for one ferocious system.

DIYers will be able to buy Intel’s new chip through retail channels, and a number of boutique PC builders—including CyberPower, Digital Storm, Falcon Northwest, and Origin—will offer custom rigs based on the new chips.

Intel has launched three Ivy Bridge-E chips: The four-core/eight thread, 3.7GHz Core i7-4820K is priced at $310. The six-core/twelve-thread, 3.4GHz Core i7-4930K will cost $555. And the six-core/twelve-thread, 3.6GHz Core i7-4960X will go for $990.

Each of Intel’s Extreme Edition chips is an “unlocked” processor, so there are no hardware limitations for overclocking your chip (that is, making its clock run at a higher rate than stock in order to gain higher performance). In fact, these chips are designed to be overclocked. Sites such as HWBot.com publicize the accomplishments of enthusiasts who have pushed their CPUs to 5GHz and beyond, often relying on exotic cooling systems to avoid overheating. But before you consider joining their ranks, be aware that overclocking can put your entire computer at risk, and damage from overclocking is usually not covered by manufacturers’ warranties. I’ll go into more depth on overclocking shortly.

As you can see from the chart above, the new Extreme Edition processors have much higher thermal design power (TDP) than chips in the Haswell family, even though they don’t have integrated GPUs as Haswell processors do. Also, unlike Haswell processors sold in retail packaging, Ivy Bridge-E chips will lack a stock cooling system. To that end, Intel is introducing its own Liquid Cooling TS13X kit—a water block, radiator, and 120mm fan—to be sold separately for between $85 and $100. Third-party air- and liquid-cooling systems from vendors such as Antec, Corsair, and Thermaltake will also be available.

The existing X79 chipset that the Core i7-4960X relies on supports up to four channels of DDR3/1866MHz memory. In addition to the forty PCIe 3.0 lanes plumbed directly to the CPU, the X79 chipset provides eight PCIe 2.0 lanes, plus input/output architecture that includes fourteen USB 2.0 ports, six SATA ports (two of which are 6-gbps SATA (“SATA 6 Gbit/s”), eSATA, gigabit ethernet, Intel’s first-generation AVX instructions, and AES encryption acceleration.

Intel's TS13X liquid-cooling system.

As noted earlier, Intel’s own comparisons between the new Core i7-4960X and the older i7-4770K show that the new CPU delivers a 36 percent boost in graphics, and a 37 percent boost in 3D modeling. Intel says that “everyday computing” tasks will run about 18 percent slower on the Core i7-4960X than on the Core i7-4770K (the unlocked Haswell CPU) because the newer chip lacks integrated graphics. But no one buying an Extreme Edition processor is likely to be concerned about that deficiency.

Here’s another angle to consider: improved overclocking. You can push the cores on these unlocked processors to a CPU/bus ratio of 63, versus 57 for prior chips. Assuming a 100MHz bus, that means the CPU should overclock up to 6.3GHz—though temperature, voltage, and speed-path hurdles must be surmounted along the way, an Intel spokesperson said. (Each of the chips has Intel’s Turbo Mode, which can automatically overclock a single core while running a single-threaded application, built in.)

Intel has also included a new feature: real-time core overclocking and turbo voltage control. “The previous generation Extreme Edition parts (Sandy Bridge-E) required that any change to individual per active core states, power limits or additional turbo voltage via CPU register controls required a reset to take effect,” Intel’s spokesperson explained in an email. “The new Intel Core i7 processors (Ivy Bridge-E) provide a new dimension of flexibility in that all three of these items can be controlled at the OS level without resetting the system. Therefore if an end user wants to easily toggle through overclocking states without ever leaving their application or work, it is achievable (using a tool like XTU or other ODM applications), where it was not as readily achievable in the previous generation.”

Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) has been upgraded to version 4.2, integrating HWbot.com support and adding an AppTune beta for application-specific tuning.

So is it worth it? Kelt Reeves, chief executive of boutique builder Falcon Northwest, weighed in.

”It’s a really nice step for the 6-core audience, with its lower power consumption and faster clock-per-clock performance,” Reeves said via email. “I don’t think it’ll blow the press away though, as the chipset remains unchanged, and the top overclock speeds are a bit lower than last gen. So the net result at the benchmark drag-races in the press are scores that are pretty similar to the last generation—not an exciting story. But for the normal professional buyer that buys their 6-core systems at standard speeds, [Ivy Bridge-E] is a win for them.”

Falcon Northwest is one of many boutique PC builders planning to offer systems based on Intel's new Extreme Edition processors.

Enthusiasts won’t need to buy a top-of-the-line i7-4960X to realize a healthy performance boost over Intel’s best Haswell processor. The “low-end,” $310 Core i7-4820K runs at a higher clock speed, has more onboard cache, and supports more memory channels—and faster memory—than a $350 Core i7-4770K (but it also requires a video card, since the Ivy Bridge-E series doesn’t have an integrated GPU).

Naysayers might turn up their nose at “just” six cores, and figure that the Ivy Bridge-E generation will close out the LGA 2011 infrastructure, forcing gamers to buy another motherboard—plus memory and a CPU—for next year’s revision. That could represent an investment of at least $1200 or so.

But for users who would consider spending more than $900 for a new CPU—the price of a midrange PC desktop with discrete graphics—the limitations probably won’t be deal-breakers. And then there’s the overclocking angle.

Gamers can also choose to buy a PC with practically all the bells and whistles they desire. According to Reeves, Falcon won’t charge a premium for the new part, and will simply swap in the Ivy Bridge-E chips for “existing 6-core offerings we have now.”

Intel’s Ivy Bridge-E processors do offer a range of pricing options for value-oriented enthusiasts. Popular X79 motherboards like the AsRock X79 Champion build in multiple PCIe slots, permitting “Frankenbuilds” that can reuse older graphics cards. Basically, if you’re a gamer who sees the need to invest several hundred dollars a year to feed your PC games habit, the new Ivy Bridge-E series should be right up your alley. And if you’re a gamer who doesn’t, there’s always a console.

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Plantronics' new Rig gaming headset lets you take phone calls without pausing the action

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Razer's new Tartarus gaming keypad is built for control freaks

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The tech behind EVE Online's 'Battle of 6VDT,' the biggest brouhaha in gaming history

The battle of 6VDT, as it's now known, was a historic moment for video games. Four thousand players, representing two of the biggest power blocs in the popular space MMORPG Eve Online, slugged it out Sunday in a gigantic virtual Cannae that resulted in the destruction of more than 2,500 ships and effectively ended a long and bitter conflict.

Just another day at the office for Iceland-based CCP Games, creators of Eve Online, despite the enormous demands placed upon the company's infrastructure as a result of the clash.

Eve, which launched to minimal fanfare in 2003, is known both for its unforgiving difficulty curve and wide range of available gameplay experiences thanks to an in-game economy driven almost entirely by player activity, everything from industry to finance to exploration to combat is part and parcel of the Eve experience.

Players are even allowed to govern parts of the game world itself which, unlike most other MMOs, is contained within a single instance, meaning that all players are occupying the same virtual realm and coalitions of space-holding players like the CFC (Cluster-[rude word] Coalition) and Test Alliance Please Ignore are among the most powerful entities in the game.

CCPA view of the Battle for 6VDT from afar. The blue spheres are warp bubbles, which prevent pilots from warping out of the area.

CCP told PC Gamer last month that the hardware for Tranquility, as the central game server is known, includes almost 4,000GB of RAM and 2,574GHz of processing power. Tranquility resides in London.

Even with all that computing muscle, however, the thousands-vs-thousands battles impose a great strain on Tranquility, particularly given that the rest of the game has to continue to work properly. So CCP came up with a three-tiered hardware architecture that allows them to manage load as efficiently as possible, and implemented a "time dilation" system that slows down gameplay to help compensate.

Individual star systems can be moved to more or less powerful hardware, depending on demand, according to CCP software director Erlender Thorsteinsson.

"The hardware hosting solar systems / servicing location nodes is of three different types. The most powerful type is used for Jita [the game's main commercial hub] and fleet fights, and the second most powerful services for smaller trade hubs like the Amarr Solar System and the rest of the universe," he told Network World.

Software engineer Brian Bosse said that the top-tier hardware was used for the 6VDT fight, as well as the systems used by each side to stage their massive fleets. He also noted that a key factor in the CCP team's timely preparations was a manual notification tool that the company asks players to use in advance of a major fleet action.

CCP

"We have automated systems in place to service requests that come in from the aforementioned form.  On the day indicated on the requests, it properly reacted to them and put the target system - 6VDT-H and the two staging systems that pilots use to prepare for action on the server that we have in place for heavy load situations," Bosse said.

Two earlier clashes between the CFC and TEST weren't flagged to CCP using the notification form, however. While one such battle was fought without any hiccups, another resulted in a server crash that disconnected the combatants and likely spared TEST a serious defeat.

"Sometimes in such situations we'll move other systems that are on the same server as a large fight away in order to ease things up, but that comes at the cost of disconnecting players that are in those other systems. In the case of Z9PP, human error struck and the fight system itself was moved which was, to put it bluntly, unfortunate," said Bosse.

"It is fairly likely that Asakai and Z9PP-H were both running on our 3rd tier hardware. Most certainly not on the 1st tier and probably not on the 2nd tier either," agreed Thorsteinsson.

[Now read: Into the wormhole: An afternoon with EVE Online's least understood demographic]

In the case of 6VDT, however, the company was able to bring its most powerful nodes to bear, and the battle went off more or less without a hitch, though with extensive time dilation in place.

Besides carefully monitoring for anomalous system behavior, Thorsteinsson said, there wasn't much extra work for the CCP team."I spent most of my time on Twitter, and digging through historical population data," he said.

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Review: Razer's Naga 2014 gaming mouse makes 17 buttons look good

The 17-button mouse feels like a punchline, something you’d flip past with a chuckle in a yellowed issue of MAD magazine. And yet here we are: third or so in its line, the Razer Naga 2014 brushes off any pretense of restraint and serves up a twelve-button number pad, coupled with a pair of buttons on the spine and the requisite scroll-wheel. It is, at a glance, the exact same mouse as later year’s model. But grip it in your hands after installing Razer's Synapse software, and you’re in for a bit of a surprise.

Razer claims that the Naga is the best-selling MMO gaming mouse in the world, and while I’d take issue with drafting such a narrow category to claim top honors in, credit should be given where it’s due. The new Naga feels fantastic, eschewing the complimentary set of ergonomic grips that came with last year’s model in favor of a one-size-fits-all mold that I found rather comfortable in my—admittedly large—mitts.

The latest version of the Razer Naga has mechanical switches built into the buttons that provide very satisfying, very clicky feedback.

It’s a mouse, and does its job amicably. You can tweak the sensitivity—all the way up to 8200 DPI, which I find ludicrous—and even calibrate the mouse laser’s ability to track your particular mouse pad or surface. The twelve side buttons are mechanical now, which ostensibly offers improved accuracy. I do love the clicky sound of mechanical keys—hence my preference for mechanical keyboards—and the mouse’s tactile and audible feedback should help you know exactly when buttons are being clicked. It’s a marked improvement from the squishy buttons of Nagas past—you can check out PCWorld’s guide to mechanical keyboards for the lowdown on why mechanical keys are, in general, pretty neat.

That’s all well and good, but of far greater importance is the fact that each of those twelve buttons is arrayed in a seemingly haphazard but actually brilliant angled pattern, which makes it easy to find each and every button. This is crucial, as keeping track of twelve buttons can be a colossal pain—earlier Nagas featured buttons that were all uniform, which made firing off that critical spell or ability a confusing mess.

Razer’s Synapse software has also stepped its game up, an attempt to evolve from onerous gewgaw to potentially useful tool. The Naga works out of the box, but you’ll need to sign up for a Razer account (and thus, have Internet access) to customize any of the mouse’s features.

If you're willing to create a free Razer account, you can use the Synapse software to customize the Naga and save those settings to your profile.

This has always felt a little ridiculous. The general idea is that by requiring Internet access to use Synapse you're able to save your settings into the cloud and have access to your keybinds, macros and the like should you travel with your gear, replace something, or purchase a new PC. I’m sure this would be of use to professional gamers who frequent LAN parties, but many a connectivity headache could be avoided if this cloud-sync functionality were just made optional.

Gripes aside, Synapse’s robust key-mapping functionality is as powerful and welcome as ever. This mouse can be programmed to do just about anything you can imagine, including firing off complex keyboard macros with a single button press. Better still, Razer has introduced an all new in-game configurator, a compact overlay that lets you tweak the Naga 2014’s settings while you’re playing a game. This is huge—being able to add new functionality or get DPI settings just right without ducking out of a fight or what have you is nigh indispensable—provided you’re into that sort of thing.

That brings us back to square one: does anyone need a 17-button mouse? Pragmatists will dismiss this monstrosity as a fool’s bauble, a toy for folks with more money than sense. But the rest of us are unabashed MMO-junkies, and have already mentally mapped important abilities to the first three or six buttons, debating which abilities could be shunted from keyboard down onto the rest of the 12-button number pad and wondering if we’re dextrous enough to hit everything on the fly.

Angled buttons make it easy to find the right command without looking at your hand during tense gaming sessions.

For what its worth the new Naga’s updated design makes keeping track of individual buttons easy, and after a few hours slogging through my MMOs du jour (Guild Wars 2 and Firefall, if you’re keeping track) I had no trouble at all. And all of this customizability will let you mold the mouse to suit your needs, instead of requiring you to change countless keybinds and the like to fit some finicky tool. That’s always been the strength of pricey gaming hardware, and—despite my issues with Synapse’s account requirements—Razer has always excelled at this sort of thing.

The Razer Naga 2014 will set you back $80 at the time of this review, and if you’re a dedicated MMO player who spends time setting up keybinds and the like you will not be disappointed.  There are other options: Mad Catz’s $99 R.A..T. 7 comes to mind, an ergonomical dream that’s equal parts conversation starter and gaming gear. That said, it’s marginally pricier and once you’ve molded it to fit your hand all of the fiddly bits start to feel a little comical. If spending this much on a mouse feels dumb, then you’ll probably be set with two buttons and a scrollwheel and can look right past these. But trust me on this one; the new Naga feels fantastic in the hand, with buttons are far more functional than its predecessors. It’s arguably only going to make sense for folks who need a lot of abilities and functions at their disposal, and excels in every way.

17 unique mechanical buttons and an in-game configuration utility make the Naga an excellent mouse for MMO gaming.

One more thing: Razer has pledged to offer a version of the new Naga for lefties. As a southpaw I’ve begrudgingly grown acclimated to mousing with my wrong (read: right) hand, so as to avoid missing out on all the bells and whistles my gaming peers are afforded. This is good news to say the least, if only because Razer is pretty much the only peripheral maker left willing to take a loss and cater to that forgotten segment of the gaming population. I’m loathe to replace my functional mouse, but as a lefty who’s also an MMO junkie, I’ll be putting some cash under my pillow and waiting for a lefty Naga to hit Razer's site.

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Skullcandy PLYR 1 Gaming Headset

Pros Excellent sound quality. Strong bass. Optical audio passthrough. Charging base doubles as a stand for the headset when not in use.

Cons Can't offer true surround sound. Headset can feel slightly cheap compared to more high-end gaming headsets. Bottom Line The Skullcandy PLYR 1 gaming headset combines wireless performance, simulated surround sound, and flexible connectivity into a single attractive package.

By Will Greenwald

You can't get true surround sound in headphones. This makes designing gaming headsets tricky, when directionality can offer an edge. Fortunately, while true surround sound isn't possible in a headset, you can get a passable facsimile with stereo drivers and sophisticated audio processing. The Skullcandy PLYR 1 is the high-end upgrade to the mediocre PLYR 2 headset, sharing its design but adding 7.1-channel surround sound processing, optical passthrough, and a very handy charging base and receiver that doubles as a stand. While the surround effect can't be seen as "genuine," it comes close enough to make it compare favorably to the Razer Tiamat 7.1, last year's Editors' Choice wired headset. At $179.99 (direct) it costs as much as the Tiamat 7.1, but is completely wireless with a handful of tricks and design elements from the $300 Editors' Choice Astro Gaming A50. Astro Gaming and Skullcandy are the same company, and while the Skullcandy PLYR headsets don't quite have the same brand recognition among dedicated gamers, the PLYR 2 proves that Skullcandy is heading in the right direction while balancing affordability.

Design
The PLYR 1 headset itself is nearly identical to the PLYR 2's headset, but made with seemingly better materials. Instead of the glossy, smooth plastic covering the earcups and headband, the PLYR 1 uses a sturdier-feeling matte plastic that doesn't feel quite as cheap. A flip-down boom mic that can bend left or right sits on the left earcup. A four-direction switch that can adjust volume and balance between game and voice audio with a round power button next to it sit on the right earcup, and a small switch for choosing between Bass Mode (bass emphasis), Supreme Mode (flat balance), and Precision Mode (mid-high emphasis) sit on the edge of the cup. The headset feels very comfortable, fitting my large head well and covering my ears without crushing them.

The wireless receiver is no longer a simple plastic puck with only a few ports. Instead, it is a full headset stand with much more connectivity built into the neck and base. In addition to a mini-USB port for connecting to a computer, a USB port for connecting to the headset (it comes with two USB-to-mini-USB cables of different lengths for connecting both), and a 3.5mm audio port, the receiver features optical audio input and output so you can pass audio through to a soundbar or another device. The stand is very handy, since you can hang the headset against the receiver while it's charging and not in use. The optical audio connections are some of the biggest upgrades over the PLYR 2, since they allow a much higher fidelity audio connection to your computer or game system through one cable, can pass the audio through to your speakers so you don't have to juggle audio connections, and lets the receiver decode Dolby Digital 7.1-channel surround sound.

Surround Sound-Like
Like nearly all headphones that claim to offer surround sound, the PLYR 1 uses clever signal routing with its two drivers (one in each ear) to produce the impression of surround based on Dolby Digital 7.1 surround sound. It also uses Dolby Pro Logic IIx audio processing for non-digital sound (through the 3.5mm connection) to produce a similar surround-like impression, albeit from a stereo source. While this can produce a decent general sense of imaging and make the sound seem bigger and wider than the headphones appear to allow, they can't produce a true sense of directionality provided by a dedicated surround system.

Even for headsets that have discrete drivers for each surround channel, there simply isn't enough room in the earcups for surround sound to acoustically function, so you're left with a simulated version of surround regardless of what surround-equipped headset you use. The 7.1-channel decoding and headphone drivers can produce decent left, right, and center directionality with the PLYR 1, but you won't get a sense of anything "behind" you beyond some clever mixing to give that impression.

Performance
I played a few rounds of Team Fortress 2 with the PLYR 1, and it performed admirably. While the surround sound effect wasn't "genuine," it provided the slightest illusion that the Heavy firing his mini-gun behind me was actually behind me, thanks to a clever volume balancing effect that mixed the mini-gun sound more softly into the action of the front channels (produced by both cups firing simultaneously). The action was clear, loud, and powerful, and my grenades as a Demoman and rockets as a Soldier both had a satisfying thump to their explosions.

Gaming headsets aren't designed with music in mind. But they should be able to handle non-game audio at least somewhat capably, and the PLYR 1 satisfies on that account. With our bass test track, The Knife's "Silent Shout," the low synth notes got very loud without distorting, to the point that my ears began to vibrate uncomfortably at maximum volume without any noticeable crackle. The headset also worked very well for listening to television through my computer, and the latest episode of Dexter delivered crystal-clear dialogue through the PLYR 1, not to mention the visceral, creepy sound effects of the opening sequence I've come to appreciate.

The Skullcandy PLYR 1 headset is the significant performance and connectivity upgrade the PLYR 2 headset needed. It shares the same design, but it sounds better, supports optical audio passthrough, and even offers a passable faux-surround sound processing effect. Its $180 price tag is a bit hefty, but considering how much closer it comes to the Editors' Choice Astro A50 (made by the same company) in form and features at less than two-thirds the price, it stands as a great gaming headset if you're willing to spend the cash. If you don't want to pay nearly as much and can forego the wireless features in favor of a direct computer connection (and no console support), the Razer Kraken Pro is a much more economical choice.

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V3 Gaming Devastator

Pros Powerful processing with overclocked 4th-gen Intel Core i5 processor. Two-way SLI Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 graphics provide smooth graphics as any detail level.

Cons No room for expansion or upgrades. Side/top panel video is awkward to remove. Bottom Line The V3 Gaming Devastator is a small form-factor (SFF) desktop that competes with elite systems thanks to a 4th-Gen Intel Core i5 processor and two Nvidia GPUs.

By Brian Westover

Don't discount a gaming desktop just because it's small. V3 Gaming's new small form-factor (SFF) Devastator packs a new fourth-generation Intel Core i5 processor and two Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 graphics cards, letting it punch above its weight-class and take on more expensive SFF gaming systems. It's not the fastest compact gaming PC out there, but for $2,499 it can run with the best.

Design & Features
The V3 Devastator is a small form-factor gaming desktop, with a SilverStone SG10 case that measures 11.75 by 6.6 by 15.0 inches (HWD). This compact case features a large variable speed fan on the top, ventilation on all four sides of the case, and liquid cooling inside. The front panel features a slot-loading DVD+-RW drive, two USB 3.0 ports, and separate jacks for headphone and mic. On the rear of the system are another eight USB ports (four USB 2.0, four USB 3.0) along with Gigabit Ethernet, 8-channel audio, and an array of video outputs—three HDMI ports, three DVI-D ports, and two DisplayPorts.

The compact case opens by removing a panel that covers the entire right and top sides and half of the left side of the tower. The panel is a bit more difficult to open that others we've seen—on the back of the system the panel is secured with thumb screws, but the left hand side is also secured by a single Phillips-head screw, negating the tools-free appeal of thumb screws.

Once inside the case, you'll find the V3 Devastator is equipped with an Asus Gryphon Z87 motherboard, sporting a fourth-generation Intel Core i5-4670K, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz memory. A 750-watt power supply (Corsair TX750) provides power for the motherboard, two Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 graphics cards in an SLI configuration, a 256GB solid-state boot drive and 1TB 7,200rpm storage drive. There's not a lot of rom in the case for expansion, and no available PCI slots or drive bays, but there are two open DIMM slots for additional RAM.

The system comes with Windows 8 (64-bit) preinstalled, but otherwise the system is immaculate, with only Nvidia drivers and a couple of system monitoring utilities (CPUID CPU-Z and HWMonitor) installed. V3 Gaming covers the Devastator with a three-year warranty on parts, and a lifetime warranty on labor.

Performance
The V3 Devastator comes overclocked, so the Haswell Intel Core i5-4670K is boosted up to 4.0GHz, up from the base speed of 3.4GHz. With the new processor it completed PCMark 7 with a score of 7,013 points, and a Cinebench score of 7.44 points. The hardware also equates to powerful performance in processor-intensive tasks, finishing Handbrake in 31 seconds and Photoshop in 2 minutes 40 seconds. Though it couldn't match the performance of a system boasting a new Haswell Core i7 CPU—like the Falcon Northwest Fragbox (GeForce GTX 780 SLI) (which scored 7,322 points in PCMark 7 and a 9.91 in Cinebench) or the Digital Storm Virtue (which scored 7,042 points in PCMark 7 and a 9.59 in Cinebench)—the new processor is on par with the top Core i7 CPUs from the previous generation (Ivy Bridge). For example, the Maingear Potenza Super Stock scored 5,356 points in PCMark 7, and 9.57 points in Cinebench, while the affordable Editors' Choice HP Envy Phoenix h9-1320t scored 4,033 points (PCMark 7) and 7.49 points (Cinebench).

The V3 Devastator's two Nvidia GPUs also go a long way toward helping the system achieve top performance, scoring 12,439 points in 3DMark 11 (at Entry settings), and 3,547 points (Extreme). Even at high resolution and detail settings, the V3 Devastator cranked through our gaming tests with solid performance, pumping out 63 frames per second (Alien vs. Predator) and 60 fps (Heaven 3.0). The result is smooth gameplay with no stuttering and no lag, even with all the eye-candy on high.

The small form-factor V3 Devastator offers up the performance of an elite gaming PC with the price tag of mid-range system, trouncing most similarly priced competitors and keeping up with more expensive compact gaming rigs. It's significantly more expensive than the Editors' Choice HP Envy Phoenix h9-1320t, but you get dramatically better performance for your money, with the trade-off of losing expandability. With an overclocked fourth generation Core i5 processor and two Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 GPUs, the V3 Gaming Devastator doesn't top the similarly priced (but better equipped) Digital Storm Virtue, but it's still a smart pick, so long as future upgrades are optional.

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