Thread: Anandtech News

The Intel NUC category has been an interesting product line to analyze, as it provides us with insights into where the traditional casual / home use desktop market might end up. This year, we have already reviewed two different NUC systems, the Intel D54250WYK and the Logic Supply Core ML320. Today, we take a look at the D54250WYKH, which is fundamentally the same as the D54250WYK, except for the presence of a 2.5" drive slot. Given that we have already looked at the performance of the platform in great detail, this mini-review will provide us an opportunity to comment on the chassis redesign for the new requirement as well as the effect of different types of storage / memory on benchmark numbers.

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It’s the weekend, so I didn’t expect too much excitement from the Daily Humble Bundles going on. Today’s bundle gives you a single game, along with some artwork. The game in question is a hack and slash action game Hammerwatch (72%, 08/2013), which is sort of like the old Gauntlet game from the 80s but with somewhat updated graphics and cooperative gameplay available over the Internet. That’s a good start, but it seems a bit odd that the base bundle only gives you the artwork and soundtrack – no game for you unless you beat the average price (currently $7.77).
There’s a bonus order available at the $8 mark, so you might as well go whole-hog on this one. The bonus is nothing more and nothing less than three extra copies of the game that you can give to friends, so if you’re having trouble finding partners for your assault on Castle Hammerwatch, that should help. And you might want the help if you plan on completing the game, as it reportedly gets very difficult for solo players in the higher levels. The game has received okay reviews, though it’s not widely reviewed; the user reviews tend to rate the game slightly higher than the critic reviews, if that’s any help. The charity options for this bundle are Child’s Play Charity along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The game normally costs $9.99 on Steam, so for $8 you could get four copies which is a decent rebate. But if you’re not much into retro multi-player hack and slash games, you might give this one a pass.

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Three games are currently up for grabs with the daily update from Humble Bundle, and the emphasis this time is on fighting games. Unfortunately, finding reputable reviews for the three games is a bit difficult, so mostly you’re on your own with this bundle. The three games are:

• Guilty Gear Isuka (N/A, 01/2014): a 2D 1-on-1 or 2-on-2 fighting game with new characters and arenas compared to previous Guilty Gear releases
• Vanguard Princess (N/A, 10/2012): a manga-themed 2D fighting game with a female cast; beat the current average of $4.99 to unlock
• Blade Symphony (~50%, 05/2014): a 3d tactical sword fighting game with 1-on-1 or 2-on-2 battles; donate $10 or more to unlock

I’m not a fan of fighting games, so I’ll admit to passing on this one. Ratings for the games are also hard to come by – and in some cases rather poor – so I can’t personally find a reason to donate $10 for $30 worth of mediocre games, but others might find more to like. Considering my lack of interest in this bundle, I wanted to quickly list a few other games/bundles that might be more worthwhile.
First, the Humble Weekly has eight platforming games up for grabs for $10. Any donation gets you Shank 2, Blocks that Matter, and Bit.Trip Runner; $6 or more adds Bit.Trip Runner 2, Megabyte Punch, and Fly’n; $10 or more adds King Arthur’s Gold and Mark of the Ninja: Special Edition. IndieGala has several bundles up right now, including the latest Monday bundle that has Vanguard Princess, 99 Spirits, Human Tanks I, Ether Vapor Remaster, Duplicity, Heileen, Bionic Heart, and Eve Burst Error for just $1 right now – the Tiny Mix, Friday Special, and Last Dream bundles are also available, though I won’t detail the games here (note that the Last Dream and Friday Special bundles only have a few hours remaining). IndieRoyale has their $2.49 bundle consisting of Toxic Bunny HD, The Howler, Data Hacker: Initiation, Memories of a Vagabond, Age of Conquest III, One Day for Ched, and Radical Heroes: Crimson City Crisis running for a couple more days. Finally, BundleStars has their usual assortment of offerings available, which all run for several weeks; the Intense Bundle, Turbo Bundle, and Wild Bundle are currently running.
If that’s not enough, Humble has a two-day sale going in their store on a bunch of games, which includes some pretty big names (e.g. Batman: Arkham City is available for $8.99, which is a much better fighting game than the current bundle IMO, and several other AAA titles are also listed along with a bunch of indie games). Hopefully everyone can find something – or somethings – to like in that list, as there are definitely some good offerings.
Gallery: Humble Day 7 of 14 Plus Gaming Bundle Roundup

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At $260, today’s review of the MSI Z97 MPower Max AC is the odd one out of our initial Z97 reviews. The previous two reviews both use SATA Express to expand their storage however the Z97 MPower Max AC diverts this investment towards other features, such as an integrated power delivery water cooling system and more USB 3.0 ports. Given the lack of SATA Express drives on the market today, we examine the MSI motherboard to see if this means much for future-proof system building.

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Intel's Evansport NAS platform was meant to take on ARM's dominance in the low to mid-range consumer / SOHO NAS market. We covered it in detail while reviewing the 2-bay Thecus N2560 and 4-bay Asustor AS-304T. Neither of these solutions brought out the full capabilities of the Intel Evansport platform. How does Synology's Evansport offering - the DS214play - fare? Read on to find out.

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We are live from NYC at Microsoft's Surface Event. The live blog will begin at 11AM ET, check back soon!

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Earlier today Microsoft announced its 3rd generation Surface Pro device, aptly named the Surface Pro 3. This is the first Surface model to deviate from the 10.6" 16:9 form factor of all four previous devices (Surface Pro, Surface RT, Surface Pro 2, Surface 2) and instead standardizes on a 12" 3:2 form factor. The resulting device is also substantially thinner, now at 9.1mm (0.36"). Surface Pro 3 is now somewhere between the thickness of Surface 2 and Surface RT. Read on for our first hands on impressions, display and performance analysis.

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With the mobile world, people have come to expect instant-on, always connected devices. First it was smartphones, and then tablets based off of mobile operating systems which offered the ability to have the device in a deep sleep state, but still able to connect out to various services for notifications and app events.
With Windows 8, Microsoft brought this same always-on model to devices running Windows. It was a big change from the traditional ACPI Sleep states of S3 (Sleep) and S4 (Hibernate) which power down most of the system. Initially Connected Standby was only available on ARM based devices, but shortly after the launch of Windows 8 in October 2012, Clover Trail based tablets began to emerge which also supported this new sleep state. Connected Standby provides one big change over the traditional sleep and hibernate modes – it keeps networking devices powered on in a low power mode and allows apps and services to run in a restrained mode in order to run background tasks and process push notifications.
Clover Trail was a 32 bit CPU, so it wasn’t surprising that Connected Standby was limited to 32 bit installs of Windows, but since that launch a lot has happened in the x86 CPU landscape. First came Haswell, with a better efficiency than Ivy Bridge which it replaced, but more importantly for the tablet market, Bay Trail was launched. This was a big step up in performance for the Atom line, and Bay Trail is a 64 bit CPU. All tablets launched with Bay Trail came with a 32 bit install of Windows to enable Connected Standby. The 64 bit support was not there for any platform – Haswell or Bay Trail – and it has been a reason to hold tablets back with the 32 bit version of Windows.
In order to support Connected Standby, the entire system needs to be developed with the support in mind, as the following system requirements must be met:

Connected Standby System Requirements
	Requirements	Motivation	Responsibility
ACPI Flag	The system ACPI firmware must set the ACPI_S0_LOW_POWER_IDLE FADT flag.	Indicates the platform hardware supports the low-power idle mode for Connected Standby.	System firmware developer Core silicon / SoC must be capable of low-power idle.
ACPI namespace	The system ACPI firmware must not provide an S3 object in the root of the namespace.	Windows supports a platform that exposes either the S3 object or the ACPI_S0_LOW_POWER_IDLE FADT flag, but not both at the same time.	System firmware developer
SoC	The core silicon or SoC manufacturer must provide a Power Engine Plug-in (PEP).	The PEP coordinates device state and processor idle state dependencies. A minimal PEP is required to communicate to Windows when the device power state dependencies have been achieved for the lowest SoC idle power mode.	Core silicon / SoC provider Windows 8.1 includes the PEP for Intel-based platforms.
Hibernate	x86/x64-based Connected Standby PCs must also support Hibernate.	Hibernate is used to save the state of desktop / Win32 applications when critical-low battery capacity is reached.	System firmware developer
Network Stack	All Built-In Networking Devices must be compatible with NDIS 6.3, specifically WoL Patterns, Protocol Offloads, and D0 Packet Coalescing.	Enables the SoC to enter low-power modes while the networking device maintains connectivity.	System designer (OEM/ODM)
Storage	The primary storage volume must be solid-state and have a 0-millisecond seek penalty.	Ensures that Windows can safely access the storage device any time during Connected Standby.	System designer (OEM/ODM)

Today, we can confirm that Connected Standby is now available in 64 bit installs of Windows 8.1. Anand has confirmed that it is working in the new Surface Pro 3, and Intel has also confirmed to us that the drivers and firmware are complete to allow Connected Standby on Bay Trail-T processors. There has been some questions about the lack of support with some tablets such as the Lenovo ThinkPad 10 now offering a 64 bit install option, but assuming Lenovo has added all of the required pieces for Connected Standby, it should be available. The final result is still dependent on the OEM to choose the correct pieces, and ensure all necessary flags are set. Intel has confirmed that the HP ElitePad 1000 G2 is running Bay Trail-T x64 and has Connected Standby enabled.
With these developments, Intel based tablets can now offer the instant-on capabilities of smartphones, even with the 64 bit OS. AMD currently has no plans to support Connected Standby.
Source: Intel, Microsoft

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It's been a busy week for the Humble Bundle and their followers, with some good deals and others that didn't really pique my interest. Unfortunately, there has been more of the latter than the former, and with limited time I decided not to bite on many of the offerings. Today's bundle is in that category as well, as it's a bundle offering both Crusader Kings games along with all 21 DLC packs, but don't let that deter you, as the games have received some decent reviews -- particulary the second title in the series. Here's the customary links (and sorry for getting this up late, but the past couple of days have been a bit busy for me):

• Crusader Kings Complete (73%, 09/2004): a strategy game using the Europa Universalis engine focusing on the medieval ages (1066-1453 AD).
• Crusader Kings II (82%, 02/2012): Considered one of the best "grand strategy" games from Paradox, attempt to conquer Europe and the Holy Land; requires $8 or higher donation
• Crusader Kings II DLC (N/A): 21 DLC packs for the second game in the series should keep you occupied for some time; $20 or higher donation
• Besides the games, you also get an eBook, A Fall of Kings, set in the Crusader Kings II world.

The bundle has about 12 hours remaining, so if you've thought about buying the Crusader Kings games in the past but haven't gotten around to it, now's the time to act. The second game has a regular price of $40, so $20 for the entire bundle with all the DLC is still a good value, and the packs add the ability to play as numerous other countries/rulers.

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Despite the C2750 coming to market officially in Q3 2013, we have not seen many products that exploit the possibilities that the new 8-core Silvermont SoC provides. We reviewed the C2750D4I earlier this year, but now GIGABYTE wants to step up to the place with a version of its own, called the GA-9SISL. The focus of this motherboard, aside from the mini-ITX form factor, will be the 32GB ECC UDIMM DDR3 support and four Intel I354 Gigabit NICs alongside AST2400 management. The networking is the focus here rather than storage, although GIGABYTE does use the six on-board SATA ports and suggests that a RAID card is used in the full length PCIe 2.0 x16 slot. The system also features active cooling with a small heatsink and a TPM header, although no USB 3.0 controllers.

Next up is the GA-7PXSL1, dual processor motherboard for Ivy Bridge-E Xeons in a standard ATX form factor. Because of the large size of the LGA2011 socket area, along with the associated DRAM slots, the sockets are aligned one above the other and at 90º compared to what the consumer range is typically used to. This is so airflow can travel over the VRMs, then the CPU heatsink and finally out of the rear of the case. It also makes for some interesting PCIe placement, with a PCIe 3.0 x4 and two PCIe 2.0 x1 ports near the bottom of the board and a PCIe 3.0 x16 (wired at x8) right at the bottom. Despite the fact that each of these CPUs should be able to handle 40 PCIe lanes, most of them are unused in this motherboard as the focus is purely on density in an ATX chassis. Some of the PCIe lanes from the chipset are diverted into four Intel 82574L Gigabit NICs, as well as an AST2300 for server management. Due to size limitations there is only one DRAM slot per channel, making eight total, but they will support ECC and non-ECC UDIMM and RDIMM modules, with 1.5V modules supported up to 1866 MHz on E5-2600 V2 processors.

GIGABYTE Server is also releasing the GA-6PXSVL, a 1P LGA2011 ATX motherboard with a total of fourteen SATA ports (8x SATA 6Gbps from Marvell 88SE9230, others from chipset) and support for x16/x16 or x16/x8/x8 PCIe 3.0 lane allocation.

I have reached out to GIGABYTE for release dates and pricing. With Computex around the corner, we should see a couple of these in action then.
Gallery: GIGABYTE Server Launches New C2750 Mini-ITX and 2P ATX LGA2011

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