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Star Citizen Benchmark: Arena Commander v0.8

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The long-awaited dogfighting module for Star Citizen, dubbed Arena Commander, has been released to backers of the game in its pre-beta form. It only has a few ships, a pair of maps, and a handful of game modes at this point… but is it the first part of the Star Citizen game to really be playable. It is also the first chance we have to fly ships, seeing how the physics handle and how they look in their natural environment. A lot of people have been waiting many months for this, and many will be looking at performance of this module as a gauge to see whether their computers can handle Star Citizen.

NVIDIA GPU Starter DevKit with OpenACC

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NVIDIA Tesla K20 plus PGI Accelerator compilers with OpenACC in a package deal with a system. Yes, it’s official. If you’ve wanted to do some development work with OpenACC on Tesla, this is a nice way to get started with a heavily discounted K20 and PGI compiler package pre loaded on a Peak Mini.

Buy an NVIDIA GPU Starter DevKit with OpenACC

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The GPU Starter DevKit with OpenACC is a personal supercomputer built for developers looking to supercharge the performance of your C/C++/Fortran-based application with GPUs. Powered by an NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU Accelerator and PGI OpenACC compiler, this kit has everything you need for a fast and easy on-ramp to GPU computing-all for under $5,000.

Our Favorite Games: Star Citizen / Arena Commander

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There is a game in development I have been following for almost a year now, and which I am extremely excited about. For anyone who was into PC gaming back in the 90s, the genius behind the Wing Commander series of games and Freelancer has returned to the game scene, to create the ‘best darn space simulator ever’: Star Citizen. It is a very ambitious project, entirely crowd-funded, with almost $44 million raised so far from its fanbase. Because this game is being crowd funded, the development team has opened up to the game’s backers – giving information out in a consistent stream, and details that would normally only be delivered to a publisher that was funding the game. We are the publisher, in a sense, and getting to be this involved in the process of making a game is fascinating and engrossing to me.

ECC and REG ECC Memory Performance

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Recently, a workstation PC was reviewed on a well-known review site that included a Quadro video card, but no ECC memory. In the comment section of that review, a heated discussion occurred with some readers stating that ECC was bad for workstations since it is slower than standard RAM. In this article, we will be running a series of benchmarks on different types of RAM to see if ECC RAM is indeed slower than standard RAM.

My brief affair with the tablet

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I recently returned from Las Vegas where I attended an Intel partner event. Over the course of three days, I was able to listen to many speakers give us their predictions for the future of computing. We were presented with demos of fancy all-in-one PCs, sleek new laptops as well as beefy workstations powered by quad Xeons. If Intel was building chips for it, we saw it or heard about it.

Z97 vs H97 – What is the Difference?

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The Z97 and H97 chipset have recently been added to Intel’s line of chipsets, replacing the previous Z87 and H87 chipsets. In this article we will take a look at the specifications for the Z97 and H97 chipsets to see what differences there are between them.

What is new in Z97 and H97

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The Z97 and H97 chipset have recently been added to Intel’s line of chipsets, replacing the previous Z87 and H87 chipsets. These new chipsets are really more of an incremental update, but still add a little bit in terms of new features.

Video Card Failure Rates by Generation

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Recently, a question came up in one of our department meetings: are video cards getting more or less reliable? There are times when it feels like video cards are failing left and right and we start to pine for the “good old days”. Then, we remember how hot Fermi cards used to run. To get a more accurate answer this question, we decided to examine our GPU failure logs and break down the numbers by generation.