Month: June 2014

PC Gaming 101: Part 6: Cases

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PC gaming is quite big in India. As games become more intense and compelling, gamers find themselves wanting the latest and greatest hardware to run these games smoothly. That being said, the majority of gamers wanting to build or upgrade their machines don’t have much of a clue, and are often at the mercy of vendors and salesmen, due to which, more often than not, they end up making the wrong decisions. This is an attempt to address this lack of information, and help all PC gamers make the best of their resources. This is PC GAMING 101.

Getting the right case or cabinet for your gaming PC is an unnecessarily complicated thing to do. The way computer cases are classified has changed over time. Once upon a time, it depended upon how many 5.25 inch bays the case had. Then, the classification was based on the overall height of the case. These days, those classifications are like guidelines as opposed to actual standards. The traditional size categories are shown below: 

Source: Tom's Hardware

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Full Towers are like the SUVs of the computer case world. They can have 5 or more 5.25 inch external drive bays, they range in height from 22 to 27 inches and they always support full size ATX, almost always support EATX, and at times even the not-so-standard XL-ATX as well. The funny thing about full towers is that apart from accepting more drive expansion, providing better cooling for hot running, inefficient setups like running 4-way graphics configurations, and having extra space for superfluous stuff like custom liquid cooling loops, they don't bring much to the table in terms of performance over Mid Tower cases. But they do tend to be easier to work with if you've got big hands, and the top bays are easier to reach when the case is sitting on your floor. All in all, Full Tower cases are more like luxury items than must-haves.

Mid Towers are the most common cases for custom builders, have 3 to 4 external expansion bays, stand 17 to 21 inches tall, and almost always hold a full size ATX motherboard. But, they don't have a lot of extra space for drives and what not. Expect to find 6 to 8 Hard Drive mounts in a typical Mid Tower, and enough cooling and space to comfortably handle 2 graphics cards in crossfire/SLI.  

Computer Case form factors- Full Tower (Extreme right) Small Form Factor (Center), Horizontal Desktop (Bottom Center), Mid Tower (Extreme Left)

Computer Case form factors- Full Tower (Extreme right) Small Form Factor (Center), Horizontal Desktop (Bottom Center), Mid Tower (Extreme Left)

Mini Towers are a great compromise between size and expansion. They have 1 or 2 external bays, stand 14 to 16 inches tall, and can host an mATX motherboard usually. They are nearly as versatile as mid-towers in applications ranging from office workhorses to high-end liquid-cooled SLI-powered gaming monsters because of their less-imposing profile and easier transportability. Most Mini Towers are suitable for use with only a single graphics card with adequate cooling while some may be okay for two. 

Anything taller than 27 inches is called a Super/Ultra Tower , and a case whose size can be modified by stacking components on top of each other, for, say, cooling options or drive mounting, is called a Mod Tower. Desktop or Horizontal desktop cases are not exactly towers, they are slightly different, and they used to be the dominant case size once upon a time but now they are more of a niche, and they come in various sizes, from tiny ones that are so small they need an external power brick, to huge ones that can hold server class motherboards and large RAID arrays of hard drives. 

Small Form Factor or SFF can come in almost any shape, from cubes to equal sided desktops to normal towers, but the one thing that they generally have in common is the support for a mini ITX motherboard max, with minimal drive mounting options and only sometimes support a graphics card, only one of them max. Cube Cases are called so, because of their roughly cubical size, and are available in a wide variety of configurations. 

There's other stuff out there, but these are the main form factors available today. 

Prev>> Part 5: Gaming Monitors

Get personalized Sports Event Notifications with SlycedIn Sports

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These days, there's an app for every conceivable function, be it productivity or entertainment. Sports applications in particular, though, have been limited to providing general updates or notifications, and live news feeds from various websites. But what if you wanted an application that gives you real time contextual notifications of events happening in your immediate vicinity? What if you want an application that helps you schedule, organize events or even challenge other players? That was not possible- until now. 

SlycedIn Sports is an upcoming company working on Sports event notification/organization app which will help people to notify them about what's going on around them also help people to challenge each other in friendly environment. This app is still in development, and the devs are working on making this app highly customizable and optimized to suit the user's needs. So, go ahead and fill up this survey, to help them out. 

PC Gaming 101: Part 5: Gaming Monitor Buyer's guide

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PC gaming is quite big in India. As games become more intense and compelling, gamers find themselves wanting the latest and greatest hardware to run these games smoothly. That being said, the majority of gamers wanting to build or upgrade their machines don’t have much of a clue, and are often at the mercy of vendors and salesmen, due to which, more often than not, they end up making the wrong decisions. This is an attempt to address this lack of information, and help all PC gamers make the best of their resources. This is PC GAMING 101.

 

If you own and regularly use a PC, you know what a minitor is. However, when it comes to gaming, not all monitors are built equally. So, what makes a monitor "good for gaming" ? (Well for starters it should connect to a device that runs videogames.) Let's have a look at the things you should look out for, while choosing a monitor for your gaming setup: 

1. Inputs 

 

Most gaming monitors these days have DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI input ports, or a combination of the three. (You can read more about display technologies and standards in Part 4, here). If you're gaming on a PC, and you want to keep things as simple as possible, you should go with DVI and DisplayPort with confidence. HDMI will work fine, unless you want the resolution to be higher than 1080P, or a refresh rate over 60Hz. HDMI 2.0 is coming out soon to address these issues. Not that HDMI inputs are totally useless though, you can use them to connect secondary gaming devices such as gaming consoles and switch between your devices as you choose. 

2. Size Matters 

Yes, a monitor's size does matter, but not for the reasons most people think it does. A larger monitor just puts a larger image in front of you, and isn't any more difficult for your graphics card to power. So you should pick a size that's comfortable for you, for the distance you want to sit from it. The spec that determines how hard it is to power the monitor, is the resolution. A 24 inch 4K monitor will be about 4 times more difficult to drive than even an 80 inch 1080P "Full HD" TV, because of the sheer number of pixels. Higher resolution monitors deliver a clearer, more "retina-like" display so resolution isn't a problem, in and of itself. It's just a factor you need to consider in your overall build/upgrade budget. 

Now that we've gone through the basics of monitors and displays, let's look at what makes a monitor "good for gaming". 

Response Time  

The rendering process of pixels on an LCD/LED display is very different from the old, tube style CRT monitors, and when the image updates, the pixels gradually shift from one colour to another. So, the slower the pixels of the monitor, the more "motion blur" or ugly streaking that you'll see behind moving objects on the screen. 

So, while buying a monitor for gaming, look for a monitor with a "Grey to Grey" response time of

8-16 milliseconds for  casual use

1-2 ms for competitive use.  

Refresh Rate 

60Hz versus 144 Hz

Expressed in Hertz, the refresh rate is the number of times an image is sent to the display, every second. If your eyes are getting more updates per second, you're getting information slightly faster than your opponent. It's a definite advantage, and the fastest monitors these days can run at upto 144 Hz, at 1080P. That means you can get screen updates upto 10 milliseconds faster than your opponent using a 60 Hz display. 

Input Lag

Now, this is a spec that most manufacturerd don't report, but is really quite important. When the CPU sends signals to the monitor, the monotor needs to translate that information into a format that the panel can understand. This processing introduces a delay which means that you could be seeing an individial frame that is anywhere from a few milliseconds later than it was output by your graphics card, all the way upto 50 milliseconds later, or more. For competitive use, look for a monitor that has an input lag of less than 10 milliseconds. But don't just take the manufacturer's word for it, LCD manufacturers are notorious for inventing completely new specifications to suit their marketing purposes. So, be sure to check out sites like Blur Busters to get the latest info and specs on gaming displays. 

Other Features

Apart from the factirs mentioned above, there are other factors to look out for as well, such as 

Now, if this guide raised more questions than it answered, or you'd just like to go hands-on and choose which specs matter for you, just check out online forums, they might really help out. 

Prev>> Part 4: Display Technologies

Next>>Part 6: Computer Cases

 

Internal Monologues EP3: Merciless, Faceless, Rudderless

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Merciless captains, and faceless sailors, of rudderless ships.
The seas teeming with sharks,
Vultures in the skies above, eager,
To swoop down upon the dead.
(‘tis indeed a feast to be had)
Captains goad us onward,
The faceless figures simply do their bidding.
They promise us riches beyond measure,
They speak of wondrous lands,
Eternal joy, transient pain,
We shall have our fill and be merry.
They say the streets are paved with gold-
With gold!
All out efforts, towards the quest for riches,
(What is the use of wealth if we do not seek
to buy?)
A lonely(?) forlorn, faceless man,
Grew weary of tyranny, and decided
To brave the open seas on his own.
In his dreams he heard,
The song of a siren,
Voice clear as the purest ice,
Cold, thing of beauty.
The siren beckoned him
To come to her-and live
In a land where the grass
Was always green, the waters clear,
The sun shone radiant, the breeze-
It was all so mesmerizing.
Ans thus he set sail on his own,
Braving the fiercest storms,
As well as the worst
Of doldrums- the siren’s voice
Guiding him, giving him
Vigor and will.
As he came unto the siren at last,
He saw her face- the crystal voice,
The radiant aura, all that he had
Ever wished he would want.
But as he came closer and closer,
He felt suffocation, the golden voice,
Turning to vicious screams, curdled his blood,
He saw to his horror, piles of dead, faceless men,
Rotting, the vultures fed on their carcasses.
He knew he could do nothing,
But be drawn into, drawn to his
Slow and agonizing death,  that which he chose
On his own.
And thus we find ourselves, being lead, or on our own,
Into the inevitabilities of annihilation.
We may fill ourselves, keep running, or stop,
Nobody gets out of here alive.