**Hot Hardware's Thanksgiving Giveaways**

As we approach the holiday season, Hot Hardware is excited to announce two exciting giveaways that will bring joy and excitement to our readers. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the first giveaway and then preview what's coming next.

**PC Audio Labs' Review of the PC Audio Lab Machine**

Marco here, and I want to give you a quick rundown of the machine that PC Audio Labs sent us for review. As we all know, PC Audio Labs is a boutique builder out of California, and they've put together a truly impressive system. This machine is powered by an Intel Core i7 2600 K processor, paired with a Gigabyte Z68 motherboard, 16 GB of DDR3 RAM at 1333 MHz, and an AMD Radeon HD 5450 graphics card. Not exactly a powerhouse, but this thing is whisper quiet - we're talking almost silent. The machine also comes equipped with a 24x dual-layer burner, CD/DVD drive, an Intel 311 SSD for the OS, a 500 GB hard drive, and two terabytes of storage for audio and samples. To top it off, there's even a PCI Express FireWire card with three ports, as well as USB 3.0.

**How to Get a System Like This**

So, how can you get a system like this? Unfortunately, it won't be easy or affordable for most of us. PC Audio Labs is a boutique builder, and their systems are truly custom-built. However, we have some good news: the machine that PC Audio Labs sent us is being given away in our Hot Hardware Giving Thanks Sweepstakes! To enter, simply visit our website, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and share our content with your friends. We'll randomly select a winner from our commenters and social media followers.

**Hot Hardware's Giving Thanks Sweepstakes**

And now, for the main event: our Giving Thanks Sweepstakes! We're teaming up with Nvidia and a handful of their partners to give away five fully blown tablets based on Tegra. That's right - we're talking some serious mobile power in these devices. But that's not all - we'll also be giving away more tablets over the course of the next week, so stay tuned for those announcements.

**The Future of Hot Hardware**

We've already lined up our next sponsor, and let me tell you, it's going to be a wild ride. We're excited to announce that we'll have some exciting giveaways coming your way in the weeks ahead. Stay tuned for more information on those contests, but I can promise you they'll be just as exciting as this one.

**Stay Connected with Hot Hardware**

To stay up-to-date on all our giveaways and news, make sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and dig.com (our website). You can also use the hashtags #HotHardwareGivingThanks and #HotHardwareSweepstakes to keep track of our progress. Happy holidays from the entire Hot Hardware team!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: encoming up on Two and a Half Geeks Sandy Bridge gets extreme we talk about some more games and then there's going to be some fun about a contest you guys are going to love it coming up right now the bar has been set wicked fast it rocked in the benchmarks we're going to up the annnie a little bit processing power I kind of understand this welcome back to two and half Geeks I'm AA actar I haven't seen you guys in a while I'm I'm with two strangers known as Dave altavilla and Mark ch how you guys doing doing good I'm not a stranger though I don't know stranger danger how about Marco how you doing yeah I'm I'm doing great I'm doing really great that's always you can't complain I I like that that's a good positive attitude Let's uh let's get right to it you know I haven't talked about Hardware in a really long time but I am aware of Intel's last step before we finally get to ivybridge the Intel Core i7 3960 extreme Edition W this is fun to say uh uh now Marco could you first explain what makes this the last step to ivybridge I guess and uh tell us a little bit about the processor sure so uh this latest chip is based on the Sandy Bridge e or Sandy Bridge extreme microarchitecture now if you take everything that made Sandy Bridge great and just made it more extreme you have Sandy Bridge extreme so instead of quad cores on the die there's actually eight Cor on the sandybridge E die even even though only six are enabled um there's 20 Megs of cash on the die even though only 15 Megs are enabled on the current high-end chip uh there's 40 Lanes of PCI Express connectivity and although Intel's not saying it's PCI Express 3.0 it's capable of those speeds um once it's fully qualified they'll probably brand it pcie 3.0 as long as everything passes which is expected to do uh you have turbo core 2.0 a totally new socket totally new motherboard chipset to support it it is just new all around and it's not by far but it is the fastest platform we've tested yet now I I was very curious about the fact that there are two inactive cores on that thing and they're saying power consumption and that's part of the issue is there any way that uh Intel could figure out I don't know some kind of upgrade to the actual processor down the line or some kind of I don't know if this is even an applicable thing but like a firmware or something to make those things active or is those two are those two cores never going to be usable so on the current chips that are out right now they'll probably never be be usable um only because this this current spin of the chip it it does consume it consumes less power than Gul town but it consumes more than Intel would have liked so to stick into the 130 watt TDP that's been traditional across their high-end chips they had to fuse off these two cores um the base clock speed is 3.3 gigahertz which is actually lower than the the top-of-the-line Gulf town the 990x has a 3.46 clock speed um the Sandy Bridge e does turbo up to 3.9 so it is still faster in single core stuff um because of that but I don't think you'll see those cores become active in this version of the chip I'm fairly certain a respin will hit the desktop where all eight cores are active you are going to see eight core zons which are based on the same die so Intel does have the processors and will have more moving forward so I couldn't get them to comment definitively and say Yes an 8 core core i7 extreme is coming but it just makes sense that it will um the current six core was faster than their high-end why not launch it make some money off this Spin and when new ones come they can uh do another launch and carry them all the way to Ivy Bridge Is there is there any re real reason to upgrade if you have a Sandy Bridge processor now to the extreme when Ivy bridg is just around the corner tough question um the current platform the x79 platform and and the socket 2011 is going to support Ivy Bridge so if you want to get get in on the action now and eBay your CPU later to get an ivybridge CPU um all indicators are that you know an Enthusiast board that with a manufacturer that thought of Ivy Bridge it's going to work with that said the x79 chipset this current version it also has some features fused off um that just just due to yield supposed to have um more SATA ports SAS um and Intel couldn't get that all working at times where they just fused it off so even though these current motherboards will probably support ivybridge by the time Ivy Bridge comes I would think there's going to be a newer version of the chipset with all these features as well and people may want that now in terms of just strictly performance having that quad Channel memory on Sandy Bridge e equates to almost 40 gigs a second of bandwidth you also have tons of compute with those six cores 12 threads you know boosting up to you know 39 3.9 GHz in some scenarios so in terms of performance you know it's an upgrade over everything it's the fastest thing out there um it's clearly faster than the 2700k in anything multi- threaded that's going to leverage the CPU on single or dual threaded stuff a current Sandy Bridge uh 2700k is going to be just as fast they're the same two cores they hit similar clocks so it really is going to depend on your use case and what kind of apps that you're running um but if you want the top of the line This is clearly it um it's going to cost you it's 1,000 bucks almost 1,000 bucks for the chip two to 300 bucks for motherboards but you know it may carry you all the way to Ivory bridge and you can just pop in a new CPU if you want to stick with your board let's change there's a lower speed bin coming too right though that's in the $600 range yeah there's a lower speed bin six core lower speed b six core coming and a quad core coming in q1 let's change let's change gears and talk a bit about uh some games you know because I mean if you're going to have some fancy Hardware you should be playing some games on them eventually Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 dropped and uh you guys reviewed it you checked it out and of course it's going to have comparisons right off the bat to Battlefield 3 which which dropped weeks earlier uh Dave what was hot harare's impression of modern war Warfare 3 well you know it's interesting Joel uh took this uh assignment for us and uh you know we really expected to be wowed a lot more from from Modern Warfare 3 and it turns out that you know the single player uh aspect of the game and the multiplayer aspect of the game definitely you know lived up to expectations in terms of the the the play experience um you know the the whole um Modern Warfare Call of Duty I should say uh lineage just it's more of the same it's just more really good uh you know techniques and battle scenarios and and and different uh sorts of um just really good gameplay uh architect into the game but we were we were left wanting for more and one of the the big critiques we have obviously as PC Gamers is that the game engine hasn't been revamped in I don't know how many years and you're basically looking at the same game engine um we would have liked you know some some other um you know different sorts of of of nuances that kind of go along with that you know different sorts of physics effects and and and things like that where you can interact more with the world than the standard Call of Duty franchise has has given us all these years they didn't really change anything they they basically just revamped uh you know Call of Duty you know from previous uh versions and and added a few uh you know wrinkles in for multiplayer and single player experiences so you know left real flat there and and where they could have really hit a home run as if they took the approach that the folks at origin did with Battlefield 3 and now Battlefield 3 is sort of like what what we feel is the poster child if you will for PC gaming and and how impressive graphics and visuals can be uh and lighting and all that good stuff that that us pixel snobs on the PC platform have been used to and and have been enjoying all these years while console Gamers sit back and they have to deal with lackluster graphics and and and effects so you think the reason why um Call of Duty is so far behind is because they're trying to stick to the console based stuff I mean why why are they not taking advantage of the hardware that's out there now well I think for one thing you know clearly they were they were milking the the franchise everybody was was just you know waiting on you know you waiting with baited breath for this this new Modern Warfare 3 sequel to come out and you know they knew they were going to make scads of dollars off this thing and and it was just going to be a hit no matter what they had to they had to obviously bring out you know a new game and and and definitely engineered that uh to a certain extent but they didn't really reach for the gold and and do something Innovative and and different with the engine of the game with the graphics with the physics with with just the whole world in general uh we're given more the same and if you look at Battlefield 3 it's it's it's so impressive and uh you know my son's a big console gamer he's got an Xbox 360 and I play with him a little bit on that occasionally I'm a big PC Gamer obviously and I continue to wow him when I show him the versions of the PC games you know Battlefield 3 and and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 with all the graphics effects turned up dialed up up high and the anti-aliasing turned up and how much better it looks on the PC and I think it's time that these game developers turn it up a notch and and try and um you know maybe we need to a refreshing console Hardware but um you know it just makes a case for for us Die Hard PC Gamers that um you know you get real impressive stuff on our platform that you just can't get on a console Marco I'm kind of curious about your opinion on this whole console PC debate what's what's your opinion uh my opinion is that the old consoles we have now are are a Cancer um for PC Gamers I don't remember the exact numbers but I know I I had I heard this just recently that Battlefield 3's uh launch the number of sales of that game eclipsed the highest grossing movie in Hollywood already in one week so there's money to be made on a game developed with the PC in mind as their Premier gaming platform and scaled back for the consoles whereas the majority of developers are creating games for consoles which have 5-year-old Hardware in them you know the the Xbox has a chip I believe it's you know one generation ahead of the Radeon 2900 series and the PlayStation 3 has a chip that's a g47 class chip so they're developing for for that kind of hardware and you know adding some bells and whistles for the PC sometimes you end up with a great game if the if the graphics are okay and the story retelling is okay um and they do a a good job with Graphics as best they can but otherwise you just end up with another boring Port that doesn't get everybody excited you get somebody excited and uh something like Battlefield 3 comes and it's like wow this game looks great single player is not so so awesome but multiplayer you can have 64 player multiplayer going on in these you know insanely detailed worlds just looks awesome and blows away every other platform another reason why I think the PC is the Premier gaming platform but that's a whole another discussion so now I'm kind of curious I mean go go no Marco just touched on something that occurred to me and and and I'm thinking to myself wow there's there's opportunity here that the console manufacturers Just are taking advantage of as PC Gamers you know Marco you know this every time we we see a new graphics card launch you know you're looking at a a new generation of graphics cards Nvidia and AMD and these guys in and big GPU Graphics they're coming out you know multiple times a year with with new Chips new technology you're talking two2 to $500 graphics cards right in some cases the highend is you know $500 $600 when it first comes out the mid-range is $200 to $300 when it comes out why are the console guys that are that are selling these consoles for 200 to three you know $2 to $300 uh you know on the low end to the highend maybe 399 for you know a fully decked out system why are we not getting more iterations of consoles that support the old software just like the PC platform does right but why aren't we getting better Hardware on a more regular basis it's just taking too long for the for the Innovation cycle at the hardware level on the console side to um to compete you know and you would think they could do that like the graphics guys can uh with these new graphics cards it's it's not I mean certainly there's a lot more that goes into a console but I don't know it should be able to be done and and there you could you wouldn't have to sacrifice your graic quality uh if they did that to compete you know there's an interesting article up over hot Hardware you guys probably have seen it I'm sure I think Mar even wrote about it it was about the cor Corsair I can never say that right force uh GT2 240 wow I'm screwing up today I'm Rusty sorry guys let's talk about you're not Rusty let's talk about an SSD update this was actually surprising to me and I I mean this because I I never even think about uh firmware and hard drives but apparently an update to an SSD can make it way faster now Marco could you tell me about that yeah um yeah so I I I got that corsier Force gt240 info review um started testing it putting it through through its paces and while I was testing that uh the folks at crucial wrote and said oh you know hey we have a new firmware update for the M4 uh it increases performance 20% increases compatibility better reliability a whole bunch of improvements across the board so I said all right well let's let's test that again even though I had already covered it a few months earlier um and I'll slap them both into this this article and compare and contrast their performance so what I find with the Corsair force gt240 it was the fastest sand Force Drive I've tested basically right on par a hair faster than the ocz vertex 3 Max iops I tested but really within the margin of error on the benchmarks now with the crucial M4 the new firmware update really changed the drive altogether it was a good drive before and the uh the design of the Marvel controller um has it performing consistently with different data sets whether it's compressible or not um but reads and writs were way behind the sandforce drives now with this new firmware performance again remains consistent but reads are actually on par with sandforce you know the upper 400 Meg per second range rights improved slightly um but it really it changes the whole performance profile of the drive and it's for free you just Go download your new firmware and flash your drive so it it was a really cool test to say Hey you know if you bought this drive and you liked it you're going to like it a whole lot more after this firmware update now this has me actually kind of curious about the idea of maybe coming up with your own custom firmware something you can do to what if you bought a little junky old SSD do you think is there is there not a market for this but is there a bunch of people out there making their own firmwares to see if they can get more juice out of their ssds or am I just creating something on the spot um I'm not I'm not aware of anybody doing their own custom firmwares but you bring up a good point because that should be possible you have drives like this M4 drives like Intel's uh first gen Drive um older indel linkx drives that all got faster with firmware updates over time and sometimes those firmware updates weren't offered for older drives it was only newer models based on the controller and sometimes there were technical issues for that but other times it was purely marketing let's just make the newer Drive nicer you know so you know it's kind of interesting I guess it would be possible um I don't know what kind of uh security mechanisms the manufacturers have in place to prevent somebody from mucking with the drives but I know some people um were able to flash Intel firmwares on Old Kingston drives to enable trim when Intel didn't give the option to Kingston when they were rebranding their drives so I don't know that's an interesting discussion there man I think ion is aaz is on to something here it's we'll be cooking up arms before you know it like the guys that uh uh what's the Android place I'm think yeah exactly XDA that's what I was trying to think of it should definitely happen over at the hot Hardware forums so if you guys are thinking and you want a project go to the forums make it happen I'd love to see something I don't know if I don't think hot Hardware is actually advocating anything like that but I'm I'm saying so well we would support that that's not a problem that'd be awesome yeah I advocate modding and making things better all the time what an idea absolutely wow I there's so many components you don't I never even thought about just making an SSD faster with firmware I mean that just of course but why not let's talk about just one last Quick One Last quick point before we move on um a number of the drive manufacturers have actually said that the controllers and the nan have gotten to the point that the firmware is the real differentiator right now so something to think about you know the fir custom firmware can can make or break a drive right now in terms of its competition Bo we're running long get cooking out there you coder freaks we are running long so I'm just going to say Dave tell us about the PC audio Labs Rockbox mc7 XS preview yeah baby so we got this machine in from the good Folks at PC audio Labs it is actually the grand prize for our giving thanks sweep Stakes that ends at the end of November Marco's going to tell you about our next series of contests coming up uh but yes I actually took a preview look at this machine um you know full disclosure it was obviously sponsored for our contest so we didn't give it the traditional review Gauntlet rundown critique if you will but it was interesting to look at what makes up uh what PC audio labs and what the industry that they serve the the music industry the video production industry uh what they call a a da a digital audio workstation and that's what this thing is uh core i7 2600 K processor uh gigabyte z68 motherboard 16 gig of of DDR3 1333 system memory and uh an AMD radon hd5450 graphics card so it's a low-end graphics card um it has a 24x dual layer burner uh CD DVD burner in there and an Intel uh 311 SSD a 20 gig SSD set up on a 500 gig Cate 7200 RPM hard drive a barracuda drive so the SSD is caching the OS on the 500 gig drive and then in addition to that this thing's got storage Galore a one terabyte drive 7200 RPM one terabyte drive for audio and a two terabyte drive for samples what they put a bunch of samples um there something like you know 30 gig of samples on this thing and so plunk in a a FireWire 400 card a PCI firewire card with another three ports it's got firewire on board as well as USB 3 and this thing is set up for Content creation and uh digital uh video and audio production very cool little system now now what if somebody wanted a system like that how could they get a system like that do they have to pay money could could there be possibly a contest involved around something like that or I don't know Marco do you have any idea what I'm talking about well yeah I do um so as Dave mentioned that's the machine we're giving away in the hot Hardware giving thanks sweep Stakes which is fitting this uh Thanksgiving is this week I hope everybody has a great Thanksgiving by the way yes um we're randomly going to select a winner um from commenters on our site and people who share our stuff all over the web uh specifically Facebook and Twitter will help um but since we have a full article on that machine I want to drop a hint about our next contest which is totally different but oh go ahead want to jump in one one little thing about this machine before you do move on because our next contest is cool too well first of all make sure you you like the PC audio lab's Facebook page these guys are trying to build a community on Facebook uh they're small company uh Boutique Builder out of California this machine is so whisper quiet it's easily the most quiet machine the most quiet it almost sounds like an oxymoron it's the quietest machine I've ever heard and so or not heard as the case may be so really cool little box now go ahead Marco sorry about that no no problem so what I was getting at though for our next contest um we are going to work with Nvidia and a handful of their Partners to give away five uh fully blown tablets based on uh Tegra so we're not going to tell you which ones yet not going to tell you how to win we are going to make it really easy and we are going to give away tablets for an entire week really really cool stuff so after this uh PC Labs audio contest ends this PC lab system contest is over um stick around for some real exciting stuff W you guys are just the best giving away just super quiet machines and then a bunch of tablets that's you guys are very lucky Good Times yeah and and you know once we're done with those tablets we've already lined up our next sponsor so it's going to be a good year end for us all right wow it's Christmas is coming early from hot Hardware so if you want to know about any of the stories we talked about today you can check it out at H harbor.com or you can go around the web is everybody ready for me to go around the web like I do every time we do this go around let's try it this time facebook.com/ hardwar dig.com /ot Hardware twitter.com hardware and youtube.com/ hardwar vids for all your Motion Picture goodness from hot Hardware so there you go I added an extra hot Hardware because I wanted to see if I could say it without screwing it up there you go you're you're back in Action bro yeah well I get a little rusty in the middle there and I but uh I think I think we wrapped up well is there anything you guys would like to say to the folks at home maybe they're watching this instead of paying attention to their family on Thanksgiving happy holidays Happy Thanksgiving Happy Thanksgiving audience gobble gobble yescoming up on Two and a Half Geeks Sandy Bridge gets extreme we talk about some more games and then there's going to be some fun about a contest you guys are going to love it coming up right now the bar has been set wicked fast it rocked in the benchmarks we're going to up the annnie a little bit processing power I kind of understand this welcome back to two and half Geeks I'm AA actar I haven't seen you guys in a while I'm I'm with two strangers known as Dave altavilla and Mark ch how you guys doing doing good I'm not a stranger though I don't know stranger danger how about Marco how you doing yeah I'm I'm doing great I'm doing really great that's always you can't complain I I like that that's a good positive attitude Let's uh let's get right to it you know I haven't talked about Hardware in a really long time but I am aware of Intel's last step before we finally get to ivybridge the Intel Core i7 3960 extreme Edition W this is fun to say uh uh now Marco could you first explain what makes this the last step to ivybridge I guess and uh tell us a little bit about the processor sure so uh this latest chip is based on the Sandy Bridge e or Sandy Bridge extreme microarchitecture now if you take everything that made Sandy Bridge great and just made it more extreme you have Sandy Bridge extreme so instead of quad cores on the die there's actually eight Cor on the sandybridge E die even even though only six are enabled um there's 20 Megs of cash on the die even though only 15 Megs are enabled on the current high-end chip uh there's 40 Lanes of PCI Express connectivity and although Intel's not saying it's PCI Express 3.0 it's capable of those speeds um once it's fully qualified they'll probably brand it pcie 3.0 as long as everything passes which is expected to do uh you have turbo core 2.0 a totally new socket totally new motherboard chipset to support it it is just new all around and it's not by far but it is the fastest platform we've tested yet now I I was very curious about the fact that there are two inactive cores on that thing and they're saying power consumption and that's part of the issue is there any way that uh Intel could figure out I don't know some kind of upgrade to the actual processor down the line or some kind of I don't know if this is even an applicable thing but like a firmware or something to make those things active or is those two are those two cores never going to be usable so on the current chips that are out right now they'll probably never be be usable um only because this this current spin of the chip it it does consume it consumes less power than Gul town but it consumes more than Intel would have liked so to stick into the 130 watt TDP that's been traditional across their high-end chips they had to fuse off these two cores um the base clock speed is 3.3 gigahertz which is actually lower than the the top-of-the-line Gulf town the 990x has a 3.46 clock speed um the Sandy Bridge e does turbo up to 3.9 so it is still faster in single core stuff um because of that but I don't think you'll see those cores become active in this version of the chip I'm fairly certain a respin will hit the desktop where all eight cores are active you are going to see eight core zons which are based on the same die so Intel does have the processors and will have more moving forward so I couldn't get them to comment definitively and say Yes an 8 core core i7 extreme is coming but it just makes sense that it will um the current six core was faster than their high-end why not launch it make some money off this Spin and when new ones come they can uh do another launch and carry them all the way to Ivy Bridge Is there is there any re real reason to upgrade if you have a Sandy Bridge processor now to the extreme when Ivy bridg is just around the corner tough question um the current platform the x79 platform and and the socket 2011 is going to support Ivy Bridge so if you want to get get in on the action now and eBay your CPU later to get an ivybridge CPU um all indicators are that you know an Enthusiast board that with a manufacturer that thought of Ivy Bridge it's going to work with that said the x79 chipset this current version it also has some features fused off um that just just due to yield supposed to have um more SATA ports SAS um and Intel couldn't get that all working at times where they just fused it off so even though these current motherboards will probably support ivybridge by the time Ivy Bridge comes I would think there's going to be a newer version of the chipset with all these features as well and people may want that now in terms of just strictly performance having that quad Channel memory on Sandy Bridge e equates to almost 40 gigs a second of bandwidth you also have tons of compute with those six cores 12 threads you know boosting up to you know 39 3.9 GHz in some scenarios so in terms of performance you know it's an upgrade over everything it's the fastest thing out there um it's clearly faster than the 2700k in anything multi- threaded that's going to leverage the CPU on single or dual threaded stuff a current Sandy Bridge uh 2700k is going to be just as fast they're the same two cores they hit similar clocks so it really is going to depend on your use case and what kind of apps that you're running um but if you want the top of the line This is clearly it um it's going to cost you it's 1,000 bucks almost 1,000 bucks for the chip two to 300 bucks for motherboards but you know it may carry you all the way to Ivory bridge and you can just pop in a new CPU if you want to stick with your board let's change there's a lower speed bin coming too right though that's in the $600 range yeah there's a lower speed bin six core lower speed b six core coming and a quad core coming in q1 let's change let's change gears and talk a bit about uh some games you know because I mean if you're going to have some fancy Hardware you should be playing some games on them eventually Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 dropped and uh you guys reviewed it you checked it out and of course it's going to have comparisons right off the bat to Battlefield 3 which which dropped weeks earlier uh Dave what was hot harare's impression of modern war Warfare 3 well you know it's interesting Joel uh took this uh assignment for us and uh you know we really expected to be wowed a lot more from from Modern Warfare 3 and it turns out that you know the single player uh aspect of the game and the multiplayer aspect of the game definitely you know lived up to expectations in terms of the the the play experience um you know the the whole um Modern Warfare Call of Duty I should say uh lineage just it's more of the same it's just more really good uh you know techniques and battle scenarios and and and different uh sorts of um just really good gameplay uh architect into the game but we were we were left wanting for more and one of the the big critiques we have obviously as PC Gamers is that the game engine hasn't been revamped in I don't know how many years and you're basically looking at the same game engine um we would have liked you know some some other um you know different sorts of of of nuances that kind of go along with that you know different sorts of physics effects and and and things like that where you can interact more with the world than the standard Call of Duty franchise has has given us all these years they didn't really change anything they they basically just revamped uh you know Call of Duty you know from previous uh versions and and added a few uh you know wrinkles in for multiplayer and single player experiences so you know left real flat there and and where they could have really hit a home run as if they took the approach that the folks at origin did with Battlefield 3 and now Battlefield 3 is sort of like what what we feel is the poster child if you will for PC gaming and and how impressive graphics and visuals can be uh and lighting and all that good stuff that that us pixel snobs on the PC platform have been used to and and have been enjoying all these years while console Gamers sit back and they have to deal with lackluster graphics and and and effects so you think the reason why um Call of Duty is so far behind is because they're trying to stick to the console based stuff I mean why why are they not taking advantage of the hardware that's out there now well I think for one thing you know clearly they were they were milking the the franchise everybody was was just you know waiting on you know you waiting with baited breath for this this new Modern Warfare 3 sequel to come out and you know they knew they were going to make scads of dollars off this thing and and it was just going to be a hit no matter what they had to they had to obviously bring out you know a new game and and and definitely engineered that uh to a certain extent but they didn't really reach for the gold and and do something Innovative and and different with the engine of the game with the graphics with the physics with with just the whole world in general uh we're given more the same and if you look at Battlefield 3 it's it's it's so impressive and uh you know my son's a big console gamer he's got an Xbox 360 and I play with him a little bit on that occasionally I'm a big PC Gamer obviously and I continue to wow him when I show him the versions of the PC games you know Battlefield 3 and and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 with all the graphics effects turned up dialed up up high and the anti-aliasing turned up and how much better it looks on the PC and I think it's time that these game developers turn it up a notch and and try and um you know maybe we need to a refreshing console Hardware but um you know it just makes a case for for us Die Hard PC Gamers that um you know you get real impressive stuff on our platform that you just can't get on a console Marco I'm kind of curious about your opinion on this whole console PC debate what's what's your opinion uh my opinion is that the old consoles we have now are are a Cancer um for PC Gamers I don't remember the exact numbers but I know I I had I heard this just recently that Battlefield 3's uh launch the number of sales of that game eclipsed the highest grossing movie in Hollywood already in one week so there's money to be made on a game developed with the PC in mind as their Premier gaming platform and scaled back for the consoles whereas the majority of developers are creating games for consoles which have 5-year-old Hardware in them you know the the Xbox has a chip I believe it's you know one generation ahead of the Radeon 2900 series and the PlayStation 3 has a chip that's a g47 class chip so they're developing for for that kind of hardware and you know adding some bells and whistles for the PC sometimes you end up with a great game if the if the graphics are okay and the story retelling is okay um and they do a a good job with Graphics as best they can but otherwise you just end up with another boring Port that doesn't get everybody excited you get somebody excited and uh something like Battlefield 3 comes and it's like wow this game looks great single player is not so so awesome but multiplayer you can have 64 player multiplayer going on in these you know insanely detailed worlds just looks awesome and blows away every other platform another reason why I think the PC is the Premier gaming platform but that's a whole another discussion so now I'm kind of curious I mean go go no Marco just touched on something that occurred to me and and and I'm thinking to myself wow there's there's opportunity here that the console manufacturers Just are taking advantage of as PC Gamers you know Marco you know this every time we we see a new graphics card launch you know you're looking at a a new generation of graphics cards Nvidia and AMD and these guys in and big GPU Graphics they're coming out you know multiple times a year with with new Chips new technology you're talking two2 to $500 graphics cards right in some cases the highend is you know $500 $600 when it first comes out the mid-range is $200 to $300 when it comes out why are the console guys that are that are selling these consoles for 200 to three you know $2 to $300 uh you know on the low end to the highend maybe 399 for you know a fully decked out system why are we not getting more iterations of consoles that support the old software just like the PC platform does right but why aren't we getting better Hardware on a more regular basis it's just taking too long for the for the Innovation cycle at the hardware level on the console side to um to compete you know and you would think they could do that like the graphics guys can uh with these new graphics cards it's it's not I mean certainly there's a lot more that goes into a console but I don't know it should be able to be done and and there you could you wouldn't have to sacrifice your graic quality uh if they did that to compete you know there's an interesting article up over hot Hardware you guys probably have seen it I'm sure I think Mar even wrote about it it was about the cor Corsair I can never say that right force uh GT2 240 wow I'm screwing up today I'm Rusty sorry guys let's talk about you're not Rusty let's talk about an SSD update this was actually surprising to me and I I mean this because I I never even think about uh firmware and hard drives but apparently an update to an SSD can make it way faster now Marco could you tell me about that yeah um yeah so I I I got that corsier Force gt240 info review um started testing it putting it through through its paces and while I was testing that uh the folks at crucial wrote and said oh you know hey we have a new firmware update for the M4 uh it increases performance 20% increases compatibility better reliability a whole bunch of improvements across the board so I said all right well let's let's test that again even though I had already covered it a few months earlier um and I'll slap them both into this this article and compare and contrast their performance so what I find with the Corsair force gt240 it was the fastest sand Force Drive I've tested basically right on par a hair faster than the ocz vertex 3 Max iops I tested but really within the margin of error on the benchmarks now with the crucial M4 the new firmware update really changed the drive altogether it was a good drive before and the uh the design of the Marvel controller um has it performing consistently with different data sets whether it's compressible or not um but reads and writs were way behind the sandforce drives now with this new firmware performance again remains consistent but reads are actually on par with sandforce you know the upper 400 Meg per second range rights improved slightly um but it really it changes the whole performance profile of the drive and it's for free you just Go download your new firmware and flash your drive so it it was a really cool test to say Hey you know if you bought this drive and you liked it you're going to like it a whole lot more after this firmware update now this has me actually kind of curious about the idea of maybe coming up with your own custom firmware something you can do to what if you bought a little junky old SSD do you think is there is there not a market for this but is there a bunch of people out there making their own firmwares to see if they can get more juice out of their ssds or am I just creating something on the spot um I'm not I'm not aware of anybody doing their own custom firmwares but you bring up a good point because that should be possible you have drives like this M4 drives like Intel's uh first gen Drive um older indel linkx drives that all got faster with firmware updates over time and sometimes those firmware updates weren't offered for older drives it was only newer models based on the controller and sometimes there were technical issues for that but other times it was purely marketing let's just make the newer Drive nicer you know so you know it's kind of interesting I guess it would be possible um I don't know what kind of uh security mechanisms the manufacturers have in place to prevent somebody from mucking with the drives but I know some people um were able to flash Intel firmwares on Old Kingston drives to enable trim when Intel didn't give the option to Kingston when they were rebranding their drives so I don't know that's an interesting discussion there man I think ion is aaz is on to something here it's we'll be cooking up arms before you know it like the guys that uh uh what's the Android place I'm think yeah exactly XDA that's what I was trying to think of it should definitely happen over at the hot Hardware forums so if you guys are thinking and you want a project go to the forums make it happen I'd love to see something I don't know if I don't think hot Hardware is actually advocating anything like that but I'm I'm saying so well we would support that that's not a problem that'd be awesome yeah I advocate modding and making things better all the time what an idea absolutely wow I there's so many components you don't I never even thought about just making an SSD faster with firmware I mean that just of course but why not let's talk about just one last Quick One Last quick point before we move on um a number of the drive manufacturers have actually said that the controllers and the nan have gotten to the point that the firmware is the real differentiator right now so something to think about you know the fir custom firmware can can make or break a drive right now in terms of its competition Bo we're running long get cooking out there you coder freaks we are running long so I'm just going to say Dave tell us about the PC audio Labs Rockbox mc7 XS preview yeah baby so we got this machine in from the good Folks at PC audio Labs it is actually the grand prize for our giving thanks sweep Stakes that ends at the end of November Marco's going to tell you about our next series of contests coming up uh but yes I actually took a preview look at this machine um you know full disclosure it was obviously sponsored for our contest so we didn't give it the traditional review Gauntlet rundown critique if you will but it was interesting to look at what makes up uh what PC audio labs and what the industry that they serve the the music industry the video production industry uh what they call a a da a digital audio workstation and that's what this thing is uh core i7 2600 K processor uh gigabyte z68 motherboard 16 gig of of DDR3 1333 system memory and uh an AMD radon hd5450 graphics card so it's a low-end graphics card um it has a 24x dual layer burner uh CD DVD burner in there and an Intel uh 311 SSD a 20 gig SSD set up on a 500 gig Cate 7200 RPM hard drive a barracuda drive so the SSD is caching the OS on the 500 gig drive and then in addition to that this thing's got storage Galore a one terabyte drive 7200 RPM one terabyte drive for audio and a two terabyte drive for samples what they put a bunch of samples um there something like you know 30 gig of samples on this thing and so plunk in a a FireWire 400 card a PCI firewire card with another three ports it's got firewire on board as well as USB 3 and this thing is set up for Content creation and uh digital uh video and audio production very cool little system now now what if somebody wanted a system like that how could they get a system like that do they have to pay money could could there be possibly a contest involved around something like that or I don't know Marco do you have any idea what I'm talking about well yeah I do um so as Dave mentioned that's the machine we're giving away in the hot Hardware giving thanks sweep Stakes which is fitting this uh Thanksgiving is this week I hope everybody has a great Thanksgiving by the way yes um we're randomly going to select a winner um from commenters on our site and people who share our stuff all over the web uh specifically Facebook and Twitter will help um but since we have a full article on that machine I want to drop a hint about our next contest which is totally different but oh go ahead want to jump in one one little thing about this machine before you do move on because our next contest is cool too well first of all make sure you you like the PC audio lab's Facebook page these guys are trying to build a community on Facebook uh they're small company uh Boutique Builder out of California this machine is so whisper quiet it's easily the most quiet machine the most quiet it almost sounds like an oxymoron it's the quietest machine I've ever heard and so or not heard as the case may be so really cool little box now go ahead Marco sorry about that no no problem so what I was getting at though for our next contest um we are going to work with Nvidia and a handful of their Partners to give away five uh fully blown tablets based on uh Tegra so we're not going to tell you which ones yet not going to tell you how to win we are going to make it really easy and we are going to give away tablets for an entire week really really cool stuff so after this uh PC Labs audio contest ends this PC lab system contest is over um stick around for some real exciting stuff W you guys are just the best giving away just super quiet machines and then a bunch of tablets that's you guys are very lucky Good Times yeah and and you know once we're done with those tablets we've already lined up our next sponsor so it's going to be a good year end for us all right wow it's Christmas is coming early from hot Hardware so if you want to know about any of the stories we talked about today you can check it out at H harbor.com or you can go around the web is everybody ready for me to go around the web like I do every time we do this go around let's try it this time facebook.com/ hardwar dig.com /ot Hardware twitter.com hardware and youtube.com/ hardwar vids for all your Motion Picture goodness from hot Hardware so there you go I added an extra hot Hardware because I wanted to see if I could say it without screwing it up there you go you're you're back in Action bro yeah well I get a little rusty in the middle there and I but uh I think I think we wrapped up well is there anything you guys would like to say to the folks at home maybe they're watching this instead of paying attention to their family on Thanksgiving happy holidays Happy Thanksgiving Happy Thanksgiving audience gobble gobble yes\n"