Thursday News, October 27th 2011

Media PCs and media centres are becoming more and more common, especially with people losing a little faith in their stalwart desktop system. Today I'm looking at a rig from Cryo PC that looks to bridge the gap between traditional desktop and media centre, offering decent performance in a lounge setting, with some media features thrown in for good measure. I give you the Alto. Because testing a system can take quite a while, this review is being split into two parts. This first one will focus on raw performance and synthetic testing, while Part 2 will be more gaming and subjective in nature.

And here is

Yesterday we took a look at the raw performance of the Cryo PC Alto HTPC. Today it's more about the usage experience. I won't lie to you, it's going to get subjective and opinionated, but that's what makes these types of reviews that much more fun.


AMD's 900 series chipsets preceded the introduction of their Bulldozer processors by several months. While this chipsets offers no additional functionality to non-Bulldozer CPUs, manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon anyway, perhaps because Bulldozer was expected a little sooner than it was actually released, and MSI was one of the first. Benchmark Reviews takes a look at how MSI's 990FX-GD80 motherboard works, and we even use a Bulldozer CPU.


Intel have had a hell of a year, with little competition offered in the enthusiast sector. AMD’s Bulldozer chip looked promising, but sadly fell short of the mark, even with double the physical cores. The Core i7 2500k and 2600k have remained the enthusiast number 1 choice, and today we are looking at the 2600k update, the aptly named 2700k.


ByteSized









Yesterday AMD sent us a benchmarking guide for Battlefield 3 written by Antal Tungler, AMD's PR Manager. In the guide, Antal recommends using Nvidia's FXAA instead of MSAA.


With October almost over and the weather starting to get really cold we thought it would be nice to heat up things by launching yet another contest so today up for grabs we have three Sandberg StreetBlaster headsets for three lucky winners so they can listen to their favorite Christmas tunes even while on the go and not a second too soon.


At Kitguru we know a portion of our audience won’t want to read 30-40 page reviews on the latest technology. With this in mind we are starting a new series of videos which demystify all the tech talk and lay out the cold hard facts. Kitguru Lite is tech without the full fat cream on top.