Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is a stand-alone expansion that does not require players to own a previous edition of Sins of a Solar Empire. It extends the ground-breaking gameplay that has made it one of the most popular PC strategy games of all time.

The first look at Max Payne 3 multiplayer. 

Presenting the first video in a special two-part series unveiling Max Payne 3 Multiplayer. In the video above, see how Max Payne 3 Multiplayer brings the franchise's combination of highly responsive and cinematic shooting action to the realm of online multiplayer across a range of game modes, the implementation of Max's signature Bullet Time

Ever wanted to go to the largest computer show in the world? You can in 2012

Grab the new AMD Catalyst Application Profile - 11.12 CAP3 January 18 release.

This release of ATI Catalyst delivers support for the latest ATI CrossFireX profiles in a separate executable file ensuring users have access to the absolute latest set of profiles installed on their PC.

Latest profiles added :

• Star Wars: The old republic : Improves CrossFire performance
• Need for Speed: The Run
  

Engadget compiled a list of things they learned about Windows 8's tablet hardware requirements:

• Controversially, ARM-based tablet users won't be able to deactivate secure booting and (therefore) install another operating system. Clearly that's not gone down well with people -- and a straw poll of our editors agreed
• Ctrl + Alt + Del for tablets without physical keyboards will be supplanted by Windows Key + Power.
  There's a mandatory five points of touch -- which we already knew thanks to our hands on with Synaptics at CES.
• If your gear has NFC, physical "touch marks" will be visible on the hardware so people know where to plonk their devices.
• All tablets must have Power, Rotation Lock, Windows Key, Volume Up and Volume Down buttons.
• After all operating system updates, there must be 10GB free space, all machines must run UFEI Firmware.
• All hardware must include one USB 2.0 port, a magnetometer, speakers, Bluetooth 4.0, WLAN, gyroscope and accelerometer.
• Any camera must have a minimum resolution of 720p.
• The minimum display for any tablet is 1366 x 768.
• You'll be able to update your graphics drivers without rebooting.

There you have it, many of the new changes are welcome and demonstrate Redmond's commitment to avoid fragmentation between PCs, Laptops and Slates. However, ensuring ease for the general consumer might come at too high a price if it alienates those who value the freedom of a PC.

Microsoft released their Security Bulletin Advance Notification for January 2012.

This is pre-release information about the Windows patches due to be rolled out on Microsoft Update on Tuesday 10th January. In it, there is one critical and six important updates. There are three remote code execution patches (one critical); two information disclosures and one privilege escalation. There is also one "security feature bypass", which is interesting, because it's not a description seen before. It's not hard to get an idea of what this fixes, but we await the release of the official bulletins for the full description of what security feature is fixed.

All versions of Windows have patches coming up, but some of those patches don't apply to particular versions of Windows and the notification lists which Windows version gets which bulletin/patch. At the same time, Microsoft is releasing an updated version of it's Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool. More details here.

It's Christmas day and that traditionally means we startup a little contest here at Guru3D.com

Yes it's time for the traditional logo hunt ! To keep things cool we teamed up with MSI and G.Skill as we'll be handing some of the latest and greatest hardware we know you guys love so much ! The competition is worldwide, meaning that anybody from whatever part of the world can join.

Click here to check out the competition.

haha, funny stuff.  Check out the HAF-X modded onto a bike. Easy transportation to your next LAN party.

• HAF-X Chassis including Pocket Bike:
• Cooler Master 700W Silent Pro Gold PSU
• Cooler Master Hyper 212Plus CPU cooler
• Intel Core i5 CPU
• Intel Mini-ITX Mainboard
• Intel 300GB SSD
• G.Skill Ripjaw Memory 2x 4GB
• GeForce GTX460 graphics

During our stay in Taiwan we had the unique opportunity to visit the ECS headquarters located in the Taipei Neihu Technology Park. We'll show awesome building photo's but then quickly move onwards towards the Research and Development department where the good stuff is designed from PCB CAD design stages, the BIOS team and actually research and development.

We have prepared some high-definition video footage as well, showing you SMT soldering, the cubicles, some test gear on the R&D floor like temperature probing and signal processing monitoring.

Check out the full article right here.

Computex 2011 in Taiwan has come to an end and we're back in Europe. This years Computex was a success but unfortunately not a lot of new tech was announced. We stumbled into some pretty interesting things as you've been able to notice.

A small message to Taitra, the internet quality in the press-rooms the first three days was pure horror, pretty much press could not do anything. And if that's the case next year again, press will drop off. Hopefully they'll take note of all the comments press made, as there was that MASSIVE capacity issue.

Due to that capacity issue we also used a lower quality of photo's as it uploads faster (3-4 hours for 8MB ! that's how bad it was). Being back in the office we finalized the gallery and updated all photo's at a higher quality.

We have 28 sub-section is the photo-gallery covering over 500 photo's. Have a look at the entire (updated) gallery right here.

We hope you enjoyed our coverage, this year made possible by ECS. On that note, later this week I'll show you guys an article on our visit to the ECS HQ, we penetrated their R&D department and I have some photo's and High-def video footage for you guys to see what is going on in that 90 meters high building of theirs.

Anyway if you did not do so, here' the entire gallery.

As we do yearly, we end with a nice photo-gallery of the x-chromosome species at display on Computex. Please have a look at all the pretty girls of Computex. The gallery has a good number of photo's in it, click here to watch it.

Enjoy ;)

ECS is paving the way on Computex with a huge booth and lots of products on display, some know others all new. We already mention the Z79 based (PCIe 3.0 for the win !) motherboard, but also you'll spot the A990FXM motherboard, which we told you the specs about a little already. BTW when you enter the photo gallery, have a peek at the Southbridge chipset, see that logo on there ? When the chipset gets hotter, the logo will slowly turn red and this will be an indicator of heat.

Other motherboards in our photo gallery include the Z68 motherboard, A75 Llano motherboards, H61 motherboards and also some photo's on the new revision AMD E350 HDC-I2 motherboard, which is great for browsing and HTPC usage.

Be sure to check out the CDC-I, With Intel CedarView from which we heard that it won't be using Intel graphics, instead the company has extended its licensing with PowerVR and we'll be seeing an SGX545 graphics core in these new Atom processors. A significant step for Intel as it indicates a move away from its own graphics IP for the entire series of CPUs.

The gallery also entails some graphics cards, ebooks and for the ODM market, Touch PCs and Intel Oaktrail (Atom Lincroft Z670 processor) based pads, yes it is interesting is to see that ECS is working on some pretty nifty Tabs, all of them Intel Atom based running Android or Windows 7/8. In a session with Intel today we must note that a lot of progress is being made on their implementation versus software support. Some pretty interesting stuff is in the pipeline.

Anyway, check out the photo-gallery here there are roughly 30 photo's in there.

Its always good to meet up with the folks at Patriot. New on display they had a low profile G2 series memory for the AMD platforms available in 1333 Mhz up-to 1600 in 4GB and 8GB kits. On the somewhat more extreme side you'll see 'Devision 4' memory, which i feel is the coolest looking memory ever. The kits will be up-to 16GB at 4GB per dimm with a maximum clock frequency of 2133 MHz, unfortunately these was no info available on CAS latency just yet.

The Patriot Wildfire SATA 6G / SandForce 2200 256GB SSD was on display as well. With 500 MB/second read and writes this drive should not suck alright. There will also be a 128 and 64 GB version available.

One of the cooler things (and I realized by saying I now can truly be called a geek) is the 128GB size USB 3.0 flashdrive called the SuperSonic Magnum. Available in 128, 64 and 32 GB sized thus flash drive is based on 8-channel technology, and that means read speeds up-to 200 MB/sec and write perf can reach 120MB/sec. Go check out all the cute stuff in the photo gallery.

Thermaltake was present at the tradeshow as well and though we did have a chat with Dutch marketing we had very little time to cover everything as we had one last appointment and then needed to head out to the Airport. hence we can only show you some of the new chassis. Thermaltake is taking their chassis from top to bottom, meaning from now to Q3 you'll see some new announcements with very affordable chassis but also the successor to the level 10 GT design chassis. Go check out some of the new stuff, there are some excellent photo's in there covering all new and upcoming chassis. We had a good chat with Thermaltake and  we will bring you reviews on their products soon as well, as its about time we get that started.

You can check the photo gallery here. For now this is a our last report coming from Taipei. Tomorrow we'll start broadcasting from Europe again, with a lot better packet-loss free Internet.

Gigabyte had a massive booth over at the TWTC tradeshow hall, the real good stuff they where showing over at the 36th floor of the Taipei 101 (one of he highest buildings in thee world). Gigabyte is working on new gaming mouse's, yet also a mouse that has a touchpad embedded as well. So you can move the mouse or use the upper surface touchpad, a weird combination which can be considered similar to the shape of the mouse as it's square'ish.

VGA card wise ... well really we reviewed all their OC and SOC products of course and these where on display. New however is a WindForce 2 design cooler based on a bigger cooler and fans. The first product to carry the new cooler will be the GTX 560 SOC edition.

In the motherboard side you guys have seen and heard about it all I guess, A75, Z68 and X79 for Sandy Bridge-E processors are predominantly on display. Have a peek at the photo-booth.

The name that popped out of nowhere a year and a half ago is Fractal design. With some impressive chassis like the R2 and R3 taking a good position in the high-end segment they did feel a need to release products in the entry level and mid-range segment. New chassis like the Core 1000, 2000 and 3000 serve a budget to mid-range segment, and the new ARC series target the mid-range segment. We have a couple of photo's in the gallery waiting for you to looked at. We actuaally have a core 3000 review coming up next week.

Small sidenote, the photo of the huge Icecube with the chassis inside ... that's real, the froze it in in a Nordic country, flew it over to taiwan, and 15K later ... that's lighting and refreshening up the booth as enry point. Have a peek, and you'll know what I mean.

Adata the company know for their storage technologies best had a massive booth at Computex this year. On demo where a lot off products, the hot stuff amongst it where the S511 Sate 6G SSD drives. These puppies run incredible speeds in the 500MB/sec range thanks to SandForce 2200 series controllers.

They where showing their PSU line, traditional their memory line with for example the Plus series revsision 2.0 1600 MHz DDR3 DIMM modules but also a new XPG series of quad DIMM memory kit of modules at 1333 MHZ at 8GB a piece, that's 24 gigs my man, check out the photo's on that, very cool stuff.

Extremely impressive it the USB 3.0 FLASH N005 PRO storage unit with multiple data channels, the little 64Gb stick runs 100 to 130MB/sec, not bad for a USB 3.0 storage unit alright. You'll also notice some HDD enclosures. Last but not least, Gigabyte has announced a full line-up of future Z68-based motherboards that will include an onboard mSATA connection, enabling you to plug a small SSD directly into the motherboard.

ADATA is going to sell these cute little storage cache SSDs that you can use as Intel Smart response technology (please read our Z68 review on that). The XM13 SSD Cache units should be priced aggressively on the market, perhaps even bundled with Gigabyte's motherboard. The storage unit will get SLC based memory so its fast and very durable. Have a peek at the photo's we took over here.

Hello all and a very warm welcome to Guru3D's visit to Taipei in Taiwan, where we'll visit the Computex 2011 exhibition.

You can find the landing page for all Computex 2011 related content right here. Guru3D will be attending the Computex in Taiwan. In collaboration with ECS Elitegroup we'll travel half way around the globe. The Computex in Taipei is a computer expo held annually at the Taipei World Trade Center in Taipei, Taiwan. The first Computex expo held in 1981 started out as a place where small and medium sized businesses in Taiwan's nascent computer industry could display their products.

As Taiwan's information technology industry took off in the early 1990s, Computex has since rapidly expanded and become an important showcase for IT industry. Now it has become the second largest computer expo in the world (after CeBIT) and the largest in Asia, with participation from major manufacturers such as Intel, AMD, ATI, NVIDIA, and others.

Because of the large number of companies involved in the production of computer hardware in Taiwan, COMPUTEX has become a favorite location for observers hoping to get a preview of new hardware and trends in that field.

Today is day 0 - the before the event starts, we've already browsed the primary tradeshow grounds at the Nangang facility and we've been able to catch a thing or two on camera already.

Being our sponsor, first dibs go to ECS. This is day 0 as mentioned, everybody is still building their booths. In the middle, oh yes .. Intel's X79 chipset is on display. Meet the X79R-A, Intel's next platform for enthusiasts will get a 2011-pin LGA socket, the Sandy Bridge-E (enthusiast) processor that features a massive quad-channel DDR3 memory controller and 32+ lane PCI-Express 2.0 hub, and the X79 chipset. 

All the way to the right, AMD Llano, That's the A75F-M for AMD's A series APUs based on socket FM1. This dual-channel 1866 MHz compatible Micro ATX motherboard has four dimm slots, six SATA 6G ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel Realtek audio and obviously will have Radeon DX11 graphics embedded into the processor, it will have two USB 3.0 ports, DSUB, DVI and HDMI.

Obviously we will not forget about the x-chromosome species this year, as it seems ... as important as the actual hardware :) The coming hours we'll have some more photo's and kit to show you, yes Computex 2011 kicks off.

I have to cut this one short as my bus to the airport leaves in 30 minutes, but eVGA was in a suite in the Hyatt hotel in Taipei. On display the latest liquid cooled GTX 580 cards, the somewhat late to market P67 motherboard, in the works are Z68 and upcoming Sandy-Bridge E processor supporting motherboards. eVGA let us know that after the sudden leave of many mobo employees, the team has been built up again ensuring a strong share in the motherboard market with enthusiast class products.

Also some photo's of the latest graphics cards are in there. Have a peek right here.