Intel Core i7-equipped Falcon Northwest Mach V gaming desktop hands-on

Benchmarks and reviews of Intel's Core i7 processors are pouring in, and while mere mortals must wait till later this month to get their hands on the hardware, we spent much of our weekend working overtime with Crysis, Fallout 3, and Age of Conan on an $8,238 Core i7 965-equipped Mach V gaming desktop from boutique PC manufacturer Falcon Northwest. It's got the works and then some: liquid cooling, dual ATI Radeon 4870X2 graphics cards with 2GB of RAM on-board, 12 GB of DDR3 RAM, Blu-ray, HD-DVD (yes, you read that right), and over a terabyte of storage. Based on our dozen or so hours of grueling, utterly boring hands-on tests, all three games were plenty playable maxed out at 1920 x 1080 resolution with 4x anti-aliasing -- only Crysis ever dipped below 40 frames per second, and we never saw Fallout 3 under 60. We sincerely hope you appreciate the backbreaking, soulcrushingly hard work we do for you -- more photos and benchmarks (including Crysis) in the gallery.

engadget.com

Onyx Online Could Turn iPhones Into Nifty Social Gaming Devices

Onyx Online, for the iPhone, is kind of like Xbox Live. Sort of. The ambitious service is the brainchild of Trism developer Steve Demeter, who hopes to add a slew of "social media" features to iPhone games, like leaderboards, achievements, forums, and the like. There's even a pissing contest feature, wherein Onyx-enabled games will allow players to view each other's profiles, scores, challenge friends, and see what games people are playing. Like we said, just add a headset and some 15-year-old boys screaming "your gay" and you have Xbox Live (and no, there's no typo there— even when they scream it, they use the wrong spelling, just like in the forums).

The thing is, Onxy was created more out of a sense of self-preservation amongst developers than it was keeping it real for people who game on the iPhone. As the App Store becomes cluttered with hundreds upon hundreds of throwaway games, Demeter told Wired the indie developer is in danger of being muscled out by big boys like Sega, who have the marketing budget to get their titles (for better or worse) to the top of the heap.

So by making games talk to one another, or by encouraging some competition among the players, a pack mentality begins to take shape with the smaller games. A rising tide raises all boats, or the saying goes.

"Right now games don't introduce the social aspect at all on the iPhone," Demeter told Wired. "If there is a social aspect it's an island. If these users are playing Trism, they're playing Trism; it's an island. How does that tie into other puzzle games? If players are still connected to a larger whole then they're more likely to keep playing other games."

Demter then claimed Onyx will "save" the App Store. For now, we'll agree that it could save something—Demeter's busines—but we'll be watching this one nevertheless. [Wired]

gizmodo.com

Rambus takes aim at NVIDIA over alleged ,patent infringement again

While there still doesn't seem to have been any developments in the lawsuit Rambus filed against NVIDIA earlier this year, that doesn't seem to be stopping the company from opening up another front against its would-be arch rival, and it's now taken its case to the International Trade Commission. As before, Rambus is alleging that NVIDIA and its partner companies are infringing on a whole slew of its memory-related patents, and it's asking for a ban on all imports and sales of NVIDIA products that include DDR, DDR2, DDR3, LPDDR, GDDR, GDDR2, and GDDR3 memory controllers -- or anything with an NVIDIA logo on it, basically. For its part, NVIDIA doesn't seem to be commenting on the matter just yet, but Rambus said in a statement that it believes the action was "necessary given NVIDIA's continued willful infringement of our patents." Look for the ITC to make a decision on whether to start an investigation into the matter or not within the next 30 days, and you can keep tabs on any future Rambus litigation on the Litigation Update section of its website which, yes, actually exists.

engadget.com

Read - Rambus Press Release, "Rambus Files Complaint Against International Trade Commission"
Read - Rambus Litigation Update

[Via The Inquirer]