Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

We can't blame TG Daily for reporting that the Core 2 Extreme-powered version of Dell's XPS 700 gaming desktop will ship with a factory overclocked processor; after all, the placard in front of that demo machine at the World Series of Video Games did indeed mention an overclocked Conroe, with the promise that "system specs like this [will be] available within the next 30 days at [Dell's website]." After Cnet received a review unit of the new configuration that had not been overclocked, however, they called up Dell to set the record straight once and for all. According to company spokesperson Liem Nguyen, although "Dell has unlocked the BIOS so that customers can overclock the processor themselves...at this time Dell is not factory overclocking the system." So there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth: Dell's not actually doing the dirty work here, but it is giving customers the opportunity to tweak and possibly fry their machines themselves.

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Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Reader Matt Z. spotted yet another PSP knockoff in the wild, this one at a computer show in Pittsburgh. C’mon, guys, if you’re gonna have the nerve to copy a product’s name along with its design, at least take the time to get the logo right.

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Apple rumor site Think Secret has been busy chatting it up with all those company insiders whom Misters Jobs and Gates would love to get their rich and powerful hands on, and turned those leaks into an article which dispels some of the recently-circulating iPod rumors, along with providing a few more tantalizing deets about Microsoft’s upcoming “iPod killer.” For starters, it looks like we shouldn’t be expecting the “true” video iPod until at least the annual MacWorld Expo in January — though larger capacity 5G ‘Pods may arrive in the interim — and apparently the long-rumored iPhone also won’t be coming anytime soon, as that project has reportedly been put on hold for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, when the 6G iPod is finally released, it will likely lack both the wireless capabilities and talking interface that some people have been anticipating; Apple is said to believe that the former feature would have too much of an impact on battery life, while the latter would only feed what’s seen as a marginal consumer demand. Finally, Microsoft’s so-called Zune — which is rumored to sport WiFi for communicating with MTV’s Urge service — may also come equipped with a powerful 400MHz processor suitable for gaming, as well as a built in tuner for receiving satellite radio broadcasts. Obviously all this info is just speculation from unnamed sources for now, but if the Zune does end up duping your iTunes tracks, playing high-quality games, and giving you access to Sirius or XM on the go, then Apple may be facing its first real marketplace battle in the iPod’s brief but influential existence.

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If you're worried your World of Warcraft habit might be getting a little out of hand, you might think about checking yourself into the Wild Horses Center in Amsterdam. Their video game rehab program, which was started by addiction specialists Smith and Jones, is designed to help you replace the excitement of the fantasy world with real world experiences such as therapy sessions and group interaction. The 16th century town house, in which the patients reside, has no access to gaming of any kind, making it the perfect place to take in the non-polygonal sights the real world has to offer. Unlike the novelty cellphone addiction program being implemented at a Chicago Hotel, Wild Horses is staffed with certified psychologists and addiction specialists that can offer legitimate help to those unwilling to leave their games to have a social life or even use the bathroom. With impressive next-generation consoles like the Wii and the PS3 promising an even more engrossing gaming experience in the near future, we can't help but think this kind of facility might start popping up in other parts of the world as well. Since there probably isn't one in your area yet, we suggest you follow these instructions for making your own game addiction patch. First, tear off two pieces of duct tape. Second, place one piece of the duct tape over the A/V inputs on your TV and the other over the ASDW keys on your keyboard. Then go outside already, would you?

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Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

Intel fanboys will be delighted — and AMD should be a little worried — to know that the fine folks at PC Mag have nothing but positive things to say about Falcon Northwest‘s new Core 2 Extreme (formerly named “Conroe“) toting Mach V. The specs are impressive all around, including two 10,000RPM 150GB SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration, 2GB RAM and two ATI X1900 3D cards, but the real news here is how much of an improvement they saw over the older, AMD-based systems. Many of PC Mag’s old benchmark records were crushed, with the Mach V suffering its only defeat at the hands of one of Polywell’s quad SLI machines in the Doom 3 test. If that wasn’t impressive enough, the addition of a liquid-cooling system also helps this gaming rig run cooler and much quieter than previous versions. As you probably could have guessed, all that performance doesn’t come cheap, so you’ll have to decide for yourself whether or not a fancy paintjob and the ability to run your favorite PC games at 2,560 x 1,600 is worth the $7,000 price. But hey, at least it’s not $10,000.

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Filed under: Gaming, Networking

You think you're a hardcore gamer? Really? If you've been looking for the latest piece of hardware to give yourself the one-up, Bigfoot's got you covered. The aptly named Killer Network Interface card just might be the most unique gamer-centric component we've seen; this amped up gigabit NIC has its own 400Mhz network processing unit, 64MB of dedicated DDR RAM, a USB 2.0 port, and touts itself as one of the first consumer uses of Corporate Network Acceleration Technology. So these CAT6-melting specs have to amount to something, right? Gamers can supposedly expect to see noticeable improvements in first-person shooters as well as consistently lower ping times as the self-proclaimed "LLR Technology" offloads network tasks from the CPU to the Killer's NPU. Although pricing is currently unavailable, the tricked-out NIC will be available starting August 16th; for now we'll reserve judgment about how this thing just screams "overkill" on one of the more basic functions of any computer, and bask in its extravagant frivolity.

[Via Crowdedbrain]

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Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

If you’ve been waiting around for an easy way to play homebrew swag on your Nintendo DS or DS Lite, then prepare yourself for the stealthily-named Ninjapass. Like a handful of other solutions already on the market, this device lets you load up your games and play them directly from the DS cartridge slot — no flash cart required. There’s only 64MB of onboard memory, but you do get passcard functionality to boot content from the GameBoy Advance slot, along with a multi-game menu, convenient system for saving games, and bundled USB 2.0 adapter for hassle-free file transfer. The Ninjapass is currently available to pre-order — it will ship when “stock arrives” at an unspecified date — for $52, or a little less if you order in bulk.

[Via DS Fanboy]

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Filed under: Displays, Gaming

When it comes to gaming monitors, performance is everything, so Asus was off to a good start by endowing its new 19-inch PG191 LCD with a zippy 2-millisecond response time. However, we're not sure that it was also a good idea to build two speakers and a subwoofer into this unit; although they do lend the monitor a rather, um, distinctive look, it would seem that most consumers who are really into their gaming already own a set of dedicated speakers -- and probably a 5.1 or 6.1 setup -- which perform better than the ones Asus is offering here. Also, part of the package is a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera, which may indicate that the company is actually targeting wannabe-gamers with this model -- folks who envy the rockstar lifestyle portrayed by Fatal1ty and friends, but who have yet to begin accessorizing their own PCs. Rounding out the specs are your standard 1,280 x 1,024 resolution, 800:1 contrast ratio, and 320cd/m2 brightness, along with a DVI port, in-game video capture software, and special audio/video settings designed to enhance gameplay. No word yet on pricing or availability, but if the speakers and camera add too much loot to the bottom line, we can't imagine that many real gamers will be interested.

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Filed under: Digital Cameras, Gaming

We're all aware that a digital camera/webcam for the Sony PSP is right around the corner, but how many of you knew that you could also snap photos with your Nintendo DS? Don't feel bad; we didn't know it was possible either until we spotted modder Kako's handiwork on YouTube -- apparently he's taken a Treva CMOS chipset, done a bit of rewiring, and written software that allows the unit to output images directly to his DS Lite. We can't vouch for the picture quality, and the frame rates are positively sluggish, but at least this mod gives Nintendo fanboys one less missing feature to defend when the PSP crowd goes into one of those regular, tiresome diatribes listing the many reasons why their product totally "pwns" the little dual screen console -- in fact, you'll probably catch a few examples of said diatribes right here in the comments section of this very post.

[Via DS Fanboy]

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Filed under: Gaming, Laptops

Okay, so right off the bat: do they even know what it means to drop the f-bomb in Canada? We’ve seen a lot of ridiculously-named products around here — Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PooS come immediately to mind — but this Eurocom model, with its allusion to the most hardcore cuss word in the English language, is by far one of the worst. Besides the unfortunate branding, however, the company’s 17-inch D900K gaming notebook sounds like a pretty good performer, according to MobilityGuru, with the dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor and nVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX graphics card helping it to achieve pretty impressive benchmark results. You’re also getting a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, DVD burner, 802.11a/b/g, DVI out, and 4-in-1 card reader for the $3,500 pricetag, though the 5,200 RPM hard drive and 1GB of pokey 200MHz DDR RAM keep this rig from delivering the outstanding results you’d get from a machine like Dell’s XPS M1710. Still, if you can’t afford a Dell (we never thought we’d actually say that) and don’t mind lugging around 15 pounds of gear to get your mobile computing on, you may not find this particular F-bomb to be all that offensive.

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Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Is the $100 Gameboy Micro a little too rich for your blood? Why not pick up the similar-looking One Station (not to be confused with the POP Station, although it's entirely possible that they're related), which was recently spotted for under forty bucks at a Philippine electronics shop - it offers all the fun of your favorite 8-bit Nintendo games (on special knockoff cartridges, of course) without any of the bloated costs associated with those expensive licensing fees.

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Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Is the $100 Gameboy Micro a little too rich for your blood? Why not pick up the similar-looking One Station (not to be confused with the POP Station, although it's entirely possible that they're related), which was recently spotted for under forty bucks at a Philippine electronics shop - it offers all the fun of your favorite 8-bit Nintendo games (on special knockoff cartridges, of course) without any of the bloated costs associated with those expensive licensing fees.

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Filed under: Gaming

Just like you’re not supposed to tug on Superman’s cape, it’s probably not the best idea to send the most powerful man in the world a gag gift on his birthday, so we’ve got to give props to our good friends at Nintendo for risking an ugly international incident to break President Bush off with a DS Lite in honor of his sixtieth — and bundling in a copy of Brain Age to presumably help ward off his impending dementia. According to our sources inside the White House, after muttering under his breath about how “this doesn’t work like my iPod,” Mr. Bush decided to move onto more important matters like national security and regift the console to his Scottish Terrier Barney — who was able to have a game of Nintendogs up and running within minutes.

[Via Joystiq]

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Filed under: Gaming

You may remember us passing along a rumor last month from Cubed3 which claimed that Nintendo would be launching the Wii on November 6th; as usual, we took the info with no small amount of skepticism, but now that date actually seems to have been confirmed, and in the most unlikely of places: this month's issue of Sports Illustrated for Kids (Disclaimer: Engadget and SI for Kids are part of the same loving corporate family). Generally not known for getting the inside scoop on the video game industry, the magazine nonetheless seems confident enough in its sources to have published the supposed release date as fact without even the hint of a disclaimer, which combined with the Cubed3 info, makes us think that they might be onto something here. Obviously any deets related to the launch and pricing of this console are up in the air until the official word comes down from Japan, but with Xbox 360 already firmly entrenched and the PS3 scheduled to roll out a little later in the month, it certainly makes sense that Nintendo would be looking to leverage even the tiniest advantage.

[Via Joystiq]

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Filed under: Culture, Games, Studies

Cellphones seem to have a way of busting gender stereotypes. First we hear that men are more likely than women to buy a phone as a fashion accessory (Nokia probably wishes they’d caught wind of that before showing the decidedly feminine L’Amour Collection), and now we’re being told that some 59% of all mobile gamers represent the fairer sex — at least that’s what research firm Parks Associates has concluded in surveying some 2,000 Internet-connected gamers. “Women are the foundation of the gaming market, and as an industry, we need to cater to their preferences,” says Parks Associates’ director of research John Barrett. Of course, if this means more games like Spore dropping on our phones, us boys say, “bring it on.”

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Filed under: Gaming, Laptops

Yo, Rock just dropped two new low-to-mid range gamer laptops into the mix with their Pegasus 660 and Quaddra TX2 (pictured left-to-right, we think). The 6.8-pound Pegasus model brings a 15.4-inch, 1280 x 768 display, Intel Core Duo, nVidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics with 256MB onboard memory, 120GB disk, 2GB RAM, and even a silent mode which kills the fan and throttles back the CPU to a cool runnin' 1GHz. Not big enough, Jack? Then try on the Quaddra TX2 which packs in a 17-inch, 1680 x 1050 pixel, X-Glass anti-reflective screen, AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core proc, Bluetooth, WiFi, 1.3 megapixel cam, and the same GeForce Go 7600 graphics card, disk and RAM squeezed into a 7.7-pound, 1.4-inch thick slab. The Pegasus 660 should pull £1,060/$1,924 while the TX2 will demand just a bit more at £1,175/$2,133. Both should begin shipping in the next few weeks.

[Via Stuff]

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Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Good news for GP2X owners: Gamepark Holdings (not to be confused with Gamepark, makers of the similarly-named XGP) has just released a breakout board that will turn your handheld console into a fully-functional, albeit underpowered, home PC. The board plugs into the EXT port on your device and features audio and video outs for hooking up an external monitor and sound system, four USB ports for attaching keyboards, mice, and joysticks, and RS232 and Jtag connectors for reflashing your firmware or running a debugging script on software you've developed. Although the kit -- available now for just $46 -- can be employed to create a home DivX or digital audio system, it will probably be most widely used in building emulation cabinets around the open-source, Linux-powered player.

[Via DCEmu]

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Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Never one to rest on his laurels,the great Ben Heckendorn has taken his already-stylin’ nPod portable 8-bit Nintendo console and reworked it around a smaller “NES on a chip” to come up with a unit  that’s even more polished and compact than the original. Like the nPod 1.0, this new version is only slightly bigger than those bulky plastic cartridges it plays, yet still manages to include a headphone jack and convenient sliding battery pack powered by four regular AAs. As usual, the talented Mr. Heckendorn is happy to part with the prototype (for the right price), but this time around he’s also seeking feedback to gauge the market for a potential limited production run of these devices. If the NES emulator on your smartphone just isn’t doing it for you anymore, then head over to Ben’s site and let him know how much you’d be willing to throw down for one of these — he may even equip them with such niceties as a system link and TV out if that’s what his adoring public demands. Keep reading if you want to catch a tantalizing glimpse of the nPod 2.0 from behind…

[Via Make]

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Filed under: Gaming

What, you thought Best Buy liked Nintendo better than Sony? Never one to play favorites (except to customers who buy those shady warranties), the big-box retail giant has also put some tantalizing PS3 titles up for pre-order to join the Wii games we saw the other day. Like the Wii listings, the PS3 titles also cite December 1st as a release date — probably just a placeholder — although the $60 prices are more in line with Xbox 360 games than the $50 Nintendo will be charging for its discs. Among the nine titles online are classic franchise sequels such as Resident Evil 5, Tekken 6, and Devil May Cry 4, along with Indiana Jones, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, and Smackdown Vs. Raw 2007, but the lack of details or screenshots on Best Buy’s site means you’re better off skipping the Read link and heading straight over to Joystiq if you have any interest in these games.

[Thanks, khrokon]

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Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

If you're looking to give your fingers a break but don't want to replace your regular keyboard with one of Ideazon's fairly large and generally graphics-laden Zboards, you might be interested in adding their compact new Zfang to your repertoire. Extremetech's review is generally positive, complimenting its ergonomic design and extensive customizability, citing only minor negatives like plastic construction and the $35 price tag. Other features, like buttons on each side to accommodate lefties, multimedia controls, and 11 weapon-specific keys, make the Zfang seem like just the thing to help us in our transition from FPS-player to real-life killing machines.

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Filed under: Gaming, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Media PCs

Although home theater PCs are great for watching and listening to your digital content from the comfort of your couch, most lack the graphics horsepower for playing your favorite games on your 60-inch plasma and eight speaker setup. Not so with Okoro‘s new OMS-GX300, which besides sporting a dual-core Athlon64 FX-60 processor from AMD, also packs in that tasty SLI goodness in the form of nVidia’s GeForce 7950 GX2 card featuring a full gig of video RAM. As if that weren’t enough to get you excited, the GX300 also comes with 1TB of storage standard — upgradable to a whopping 3TB thanks to four open SATA bays — three TV tuners (2 analog and one OTA digital), an HDA Digital X-Mystique 7.1 sound card, and just about every input and output that you could ask for — except, curiously, HDMI. Best of all, this model features a 7-inch front panel touchscreen for displaying tons of infoswag, at a price that’s at least four hundred bucks less than the $5,000-and-up screen-less Denali series from Niveus.

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Filed under: Games, Multimedia

Nvidia has taken the wraps of its MobileMedia platform for Windows Mobile 5.0-based devices at Taiwan’s big Computex trade show, promising to bring high-quality digital TV and video, 3D graphics, and high fidelity audio to PDAs and smartphones. At the heart of the MobileMedia platform is Nvidia’s GeForce 5500 chip, which supposedly delivers “console-class 3D gaming,” although they convienently don’t specify which console — we’re guessing it falls somewhere below an Xbox 360 but above a Sega Genesis. As it turns out, we’ve actually already seen a couple of the smartphones based on the Nvidia platform, although no one was spilling deets at the time. Modeo’s DVB-H smartphone (seen here) is just one of the devices already announced that has Nvidia tech on the inside, as is Samsung’s i310 smartphone, as well as an unnamed device from ReignCom. Nvidia also announced that they’ve hooked up with Intel and Freescale to develop reference designs for Windows Mobile 5.0 devices currently in development that should be unveiled later this year.

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Filed under: Gaming

Making it perfectly clear that even the mightiest CEOs sit up at night fretting over their competitors’ products, his highness Sir Howard Stringer recently confessed to having an “obsession” with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 after inadvertently mentioning the PS3-rival in an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. Stringer’s admission followed what can only be described as a classic Freudian slip, in which he substituted the words “Xbox 360″ for “X-Men III” when bragging about the success of Sony Pictures’ The Da Vinci Code. After some prodding from Mossberg, Stringer even went on to pay Microsoft founder Bill Gates something of a backhanded compliment, admiring Gates’ ability to put a positive spin on setbacks like the constantly-slipping Vista release date while still managing to take shots at the PS3 for its own delayed arrival. So, the obvious question that now presents itself is: who would win in a fight, Gates or Stringer? Comments are on and awaiting your thoughtful analysis.

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Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

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Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

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