Haswell-E: The next big thing?

image courtesy of  vr-zone
(click to enlarge)

One of the more interesting news to reach us here at Technoprozium during this last New Year’s Eve is about Intel’s upcoming HEDT (High End Desktop) Haswell-E processors. Haswell-E is supposed to supplant Ivy Bridge-E at the highest end of Intel’s desktop spectrum. According to reports published by various hardware review sites, we are looking at a third quarter 2014 release which would put it somewhere between July and September. In recent times, Intel has been quite immaculate with its "Tick-tock" execution which dictates that the firm replaces an existing core-architecture with a new one within roughly a one year time frame. If you remember that Ivy Bridge-E was introduced around the same time last year, this news is not that much surprising. However, as always the devil lies in detail!

Enter the Dragon: A look at MSI gaming series motherboards

Here is a tough one for you – what is common between a hardware manufacturer, RPG developer and a Chinese calendar maker? The answer is, along with many other things that come with their respective trades, they all make good use of Dragons! The Dragon, as a mighty myth of mass-marketing, always has good commercial value and as such, seldom fails to inspire the extra bucks out of the pocked of an overwhelmed enthusiast, gamer or tourist! But as with every other creature of legend, they are not easy to work with and it surely takes a little more to tame a Dragon than, say, your average house-cat! MSI, however seems to have mastered this arcane art as this leading motherboard manufacturer now has a formidable line-up in form of it's latest gaming series!

No more Winamp: The llama's journey comes to an end

Remember Winamp? The mighty little program originally developed by Nullsoft, that used to be your favorite media player back in the days? If you ever wondered about what happened to Winamp after you ditched your Windows-XP system and bought into i-gadgets then we have news for you - both good and bad. For the good part, Winamp is still with us; you can download it, skin it and take it for a spin - just like the good old days. Bad news is, this could very well be the last spin for this venerable app! A small and inconspicuous looking message on their website tells you that there will be no more whipping the llama's ass after December 20, 2013 as that seems to be the end of line for Winamp.

Netbook market crumbles: Big OEMs are getting out

Last year, we asked the question! Earlier this year we were disappointed at what was going on! The clues were there and we anticipated bad things looking into the future. We told you 2012 wasn't going to be a good year for the Netbook segment, now it turns out to be the worst ever! In some very recent developments, it seems that ASUS, Acer and MSI are all set to pull out of the Netbook arena once and for all. According to news reports from DailyTech and Techreport, which seems to have originally generated from Digitimes, these manufacturers are about to resolve their existing inventory with no further plans to continue on future products!

Lucid's new DynamiX software: Striking a balance on the fly?

LucidLogix may not be one of those household names in the industry, but for those among us with a keen interest in computer graphics and gaming, it certainly has earned a reputation of being an innovative and improvising entity. It's not like that there is any shortage in the numbers of companies or outfits providing graphics solutions, on the contrary - it's a very competitive market. There is a good number of graphics chip designers and manufacturers, AIB partners, OEMs and system builders competing for market share; Lucid, however, doesn't fit to any of these categories and yet delivers novel and elegant (at least theoretically) solutions for practical problems. So, when I read about Lucid laying its Hydra engine to an untimely rest - it felt kind of disappointing and anticlimactic since the concept behind Hydra was quite revolutionary. But it seems like Lucid is back once again with another impressive concept, which, just like Hydra, has the potential to shake things up quite a bit. Lucid calls it DynamiX!

Intel's IGP evolution: Ticking and tocking its way to the mainstream

I can still remember the day when I came across the term "bottleneck" for the first time! It was not that long ago- I was stuck with my Pentium IV powered PC which won't run most of my favourite games of that time. Back then I was just a clueless student and thought my CPU was the culprit. But that was not the case as one of my better 'informed' friends rightfully indicated toward my iGPU (Integrated Graphics Processing Unit) which happened to be the lackluster (even by the standards of that time) Intel Extreme graphics. Even though my CPU wasn't the best in class, it still could run those games but my inbuilt graphics was the limiting factor or "bottleneck" as the term implies. Of-course I could've bypassed the whole scenario by simply switching to a separate video card or dGPU (Discrete Graphics Processing Unit) but that would require more space, more power, more hustle and surely more spending which I couldn't afford. This pretty much was the story with most systems back then and while the integrated graphics parts were sufficient to drive the 2D desktop components and images, 3D workloads were beyond both their purpose and capacity. Since then a lot of things have changed in the world of personal computing, but it is only recently that the IGP performance of mainstream PC's has reached a level which is more or less acceptable not only in terms of general computing but also gaming. Today, we'll have a quick look at how Intel's graphics solutions have evolved over time.