**Xbox Kinect: A Power-Hungry Device?**

During the development of the Xbox Kinect, there were rumors that the device would consume up to 15% of the CPU performance of the Xbox. This was reportedly unauthorized code that had been added early on, but it has since been revealed that the actual CPU utilization is in the single digits. Microsoft representatives have also stated that many modern games are designed with efficient multi-threaded code, which means there is "headroom" in the CPUs to accommodate additional processing demands.

This headroom allows the Kinect to use a small amount of CPU power without affecting the performance of games on the Xbox. However, it's worth noting that this doesn't mean the Kinect is using all of its available resources, but rather that it's being utilized efficiently due to the clever design of modern games. This means that users don't need to worry about their gaming experience being impacted by the presence of the Kinect.

**Efficient Software: The Key to Kinect's Success**

The efficiency of software in the Xbox engine is crucial for ensuring smooth gameplay, even when accessories like the Kinect are connected. As we mentioned earlier, many modern games are designed with efficient multi-threaded code that takes advantage of all available CPU cores, leaving some room for other devices to use as well. This means that users can enjoy a wide range of features and functionalities on their Xbox without compromising performance.

The development team at Hot Hardware has also been working on improving the engine behind the scenes, adding new features and updates to ensure the best possible gaming experience. As geeks and enthusiasts, they're always tinkering with the code to make it more efficient and powerful.

**Community Engagement: Voting for Comments**

Hot Hardware is always looking for ways to engage with its community and encourage participation. Recently, we added a feature that allows users to vote on comments in the comments section of articles. This way, readers can have their say and receive feedback from others. The system works by assigning a voting score to each comment based on its quality and relevance.

Readers can now go to the thread section of any article and start commenting. They can then vote up or down on individual comments, creating a ranking system that highlights the best contributions. This feature is designed to encourage meaningful discussion and provide users with a sense of ownership over the content they're reading.

**The Great Name-That-Podcast Contest**

Hot Hardware is always looking for new ideas and ways to improve our content. Recently, we launched a contest where readers can submit their own suggestions for a name for our podcast. We want to hear from you! Whether you have a clever pun or a witty phrase that perfectly captures the essence of our show, we want to see it.

To enter, simply go to the Hot Hardware website and look for the contest page. You can also send an email with your suggestion to [podcast@hothardware.com](mailto:podcast@hothardware.com). Our team will review all entries and choose a winner based on creativity, originality, and overall awesomeness.

**Hardware Upgrade: What's New in the Gaming Rig?**

Hot Hardware has also been working behind the scenes to upgrade our gaming rig. We're excited to announce that we've added some new gear to the system, including an Xonar D2X sound card and a Suits Blu-ray drive. These upgrades will take our rig to the next level, making it one of the most powerful gaming systems on the market.

The Xonar D2X is a high-end sound card that's designed for immersive audio experiences. It's capable of delivering crystal-clear sound with accurate frequencies and dynamics, making it perfect for gamers who want to fully immerse themselves in their games.

The Suits Blu-ray drive is another exciting addition to the gaming rig. With its high-speed capabilities and advanced features like 3D playback and BD-Live, this drive will enable users to enjoy the latest movies and TV shows in stunning quality.

We're excited to share these upgrades with our readers and can't wait to see what they think of our newly upgraded gaming system.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: encoming up on hot hardware over time by SSDs then you connect our contest and a whole lot more welcome to hot hardware's weekly video Sergeant Pepper podcast the the name is going to change I promise and one of you guys is going to win that we'll talk about that later oh my has a crowd long with Dave altavilla and Marco Chiappetta how you guys doing doing doing well are you doing I'm doing all right so we have here we're gonna check with dave first you know what are you been up to let me let me just guess what Dave's been doing this week he's probably playing around with SSDs am i right about that oh man you're clairvoyant it's like you got a crystal ball or something dude indeed I do do you actually have perhaps an ocz revodrive x2 I do i do I have one of those things and and and here it is here is it's a big slab of silicon a lots of flash going on flash nand memory yeah so the revo drive x2 is a pci express specie express excuse me know ed SSD solid state drive that is a follow on the x2 hence the X 2 version of the revo drive one and what it is is basically a double version or a double stacked version if you can take a quick look at these cards I know we can see that but there's a double stack version of basically a dual SSDs on each layer of the PCB so the top PCB has a pair of SSD controllers the bottom printed circuit board has a pair of SSD controls there's a bunch of flash on both so now you have you know for very fast enforce SSD controllers and raid 0 running on this thing connecting over a pci express slot or by force lot and wicked fast would describe it so what kind of speeds are you getting is it as good as the first gen double the speed or is it just a little bit better ah double the speed in rights in some cases and nearly double and reads it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 megahertz own a mega it somebody megabytes per second excuse me Reed performance and you know somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six hundred megabytes per second right and it's the one of the fastest PCI Express based SSDs we've ever tested we've tested the fusion io iow extreme cards you know with the custom fusion-io controller on board that everybody raved about and is so darn expensive well this thing goes for 619 dollars not cheap for 240 gig but a heck of a lot better than the fusion io card at 899 for 80 gig and you know it's it's going toe-to-toe with that thing so we're working on a full review of it right now we've got benchmarks from all corners of our test lab that I'm going to throw at this thing and the numbers are looking sweet that sounds pretty understandable let's move to the segment where we confuse me now Marco I know you guys did a graphics card showdown could you actually explained it to the point where I understand it yes this is actually the perfect article to unconfuse you so our man Matt Miranda took a trio of upper mainstream and video powered graphics cards we have a 2 gigabyte zotac geforce gtx 460 a overclocked msi hawks geforce gtx 460 and a overclocked gigabyte geforce gtx 470 so now it's not just a straight-up review of the cards what we wanted to find out is you know where's the best bang for the buck because all three of these cards are with them you know 70 100 bucks of each other so which is the really the best one to buy you know if you're concerned about your budget and you'd think ok just buy the fastest one and be done with it and if you don't care about money okay fine that's the way you know most gamers would go but you find that the one gigabyte gtx 460 when it's overclocked offers like you know eighty to ninety percent of the performance of the 470 but it's much cheaper and the extra memory on the zotac card didn't really help it at all so it turns out that the you know technically the lowest end card once you tweak and overclock ends up being the best buy it's it's an interesting article so what kind of tests you use you just use benchmarks that you try real world tests how did you get the performance you said is eighty to ninety percent of one of the more expensive ones how can you tell so well it really depends on the test so we use a combination of canned benchmarks like you know three mark Vantage or unigine heaven we use our custom game tests you know and because this was sort of a tweaker type article Matt also measured power consumption and overclocked each card individually to see how much extra performance we can pull from the cards so taking all things into consideration with price kind of came up with the conclusion that the MSI card was the way to go so it's like the best pound-for-pound fighter kind of standard basically yes interesting very interesting down I kinda understand this this is going to end on a quick side note I just have to give Matt Miranda props for taking the best pictures on the internet okay that's all I've rocks you can see those pictures of hot harbor calm go check that out let's talk about some point way easy to understand you can wrap your mind around this pretty easily a solar-powered keyboard it's wireless is from Logitech and you're not any batteries anymore Dave what do you know about this thing yeah you know it it blows me away that you know we've had solar-powered calculators before right and why haven't we done this yet you know it's kind of one of those things that yeah of course why not yeah it doesn't take a lot of power to I don't know what's in the keyboard these days I might you know 8-bit microcontroller 16 32-bit microcontroller it's there's nothing fancy for processing power in a keyboard and certainly can't take a lot of juice and logitech came up with the wireless solar keyboard k750 the thing is a third of an inch thick because you don't need battery slots anymore it's so it's super sleek and thin on your desktop and it the word is at least logitech claims that it will run up to three months in total darkness if it's fully charged you know once you get a light source to it and charge it fully it'll operate for up to three months in total darkness it's impressive I've also think I've read that it actually can handle artificial light as well you don't need to keep it by a window I one right dual monitors can keep it powered forever you know I run a 30 inch panel and that things you know cranking out some lumens dude it's so you would think there'd be a light source there and certainly overhead lighting you cut that in the office it actually comes with a solar app or logitech has available for download the the solar app that features a Lux meter and you know to make sure you have the necessary light gives you information at a glance or for battery levels and even alert you when of course you're you know get low on juice but it's a it's a sleek-looking keyboard you know why why we you know for wireless keyboards why are we wasting batteries and you know we're not green thrown you know if you're not using rechargeable batteries you're throwing away batteries it's a natural it's it's really you know why haven't we done it before Marco what do you think about it though you're the keyboard aficionado I know this thing's probably got a membrane key switch underneath and you're thinking and you know it's not it's not deluxe enough for you right for anything but my main rig where I have to get work done and write thousands of words a week I would probably be great I'm sure it would look great you know in a kitchen what have you for everyday work for for me probably not but it looks really cool well and you're not the average bear when it comes to keyboard you says for sure yeah I think you I think you nailed it this thing is perfect on the kitchen counter it's certainly perfect in you know sort of office applications whether it's some light duty 925 stuff but guys like Marco and I we we need these big you know behemoths so we can bang on and they're wired to our computer but other than that this is pretty cool I'm sure you could hack it into like an IBM type em you know if you really try yeah luckily don't happen mark we'll make it happen forget let's move to something different about video games let's get off our butts and play the microsoft xbox 360 kinect was that just got released now what do you guys know about this Marco what do you got so uh we know what you know basically everybody else knows it's been talked about forever since it was a project natal or no net natal and then how you want to pronounce that so it finally ship it's microsoft's you know move controller so you don't have to actually hold anything in your hand you place the kinect under your TV or you know 22 to 26 feet off the ground microsoft says plug it into your xbox 360 and with you know connect enabled games it's going to track your movements as long as you're with within range of the kinect really cool now the 360 came out a really long time ago so it's got some pretty old hardware in there how is the performance of the kinect when attached to an xbox 360 like is it is performance really getting bogged down by this cameras and mics trying to track you all the time so this is actually that's an interesting question during its development there were rumors that the device you know maybe it's going to SAP ten fifteen twenty percent of the CPU performance in the xbox and you know that was completely unauthorized code early code just as the thing was getting worked on and it's come out recently that cpu utilization is actually down in in the single digits and some reps from Microsoft have also said that many of the current games because it's really so difficult to create multi-threaded code that's going to tax all of the CPU cores in an Xbox that there is Headroom in those CPUs so the Kinect is really just using those unused CPU cycles and it shouldn't affect the performance of games so efficient so it's it's software that's been written efficiently to actually take advantage of all the hardware like well I wouldn't go that far what it what it is is you know if you if you run a game on a multi-core system it's not going to tax all of the cores all the time so there is available Headroom in the chips so plugging in a device like the Kinect as long as it's not killing the cpu performance if it's just using a little bit it shouldn't affect anything else because the Headroom is there you know doesn't take a lot of processor work voting there's some new feet at hardware Dave can tell the audience about it yeah simple stuff we're always working on the engine at hot hardware it's it's something that's near and dear to our heart we're geeks and so we're always tinkering under the hood and we certainly do that in terms of the site engine as well as our computer engines so yeah we added some additional features some new features to harbor calm we've got voting for comments in the comments section of the site so if you're in the news and you have something to say and it's really good that people are going to vote you up and you're going to get you know a ranking amongst your peers for your contribution to the conversation and if you say something that's not favored well then you're gonna know that to you going to get feedback from your peers and they're going to vote you down and one of the things that you guys can vote on right now are the comments in the thread section of the name this show article you can go to this young maybe you can vote up the actual comments Marco could you explain the contest again for those of you who don't know what's going on and also how do people enter yes so just to put it simply we need a good name for the podcast so we're asking everybody out there to submit their best entries because we need a name so we want your ideas we want to use the best one and who's ever name we pick is going to win an awesome gaming system built by this guy now this guy I heard I heard that things have changed you actually have some new gear that is going into this box what new stuff is coming in to the gaming rig that you were baby so we're going to update Annie just a little bit a sous came through with a little bit of extra gear so in addition to all the hardware we've already mentioned that's going to be in the gaming rig we're going to be adding a xonar d2x sound card and a suits blu-ray drive so you're now looking at basically some of the best parts in every category going in this rig so now that we're putting it in all this extra stuff we want to really good submissions now okay so whatever you have been writing out of this stuff we already got give us the goods though let's step it up let's let's really get something really interesting original SEO friendly you can find it on itunes awesomeness that's Jerry you tell it's way too long don't don't actually submit that but try something out you can go put put it in the comments send an email do whatever just just get it to us amount will have a way actually I should probably explain that should not maybe you can either send an email to podcast at hot hardware calm or just come right to the site hit the the contest page and comment right there yeah hot hardware is radiant techno drip that's unique we they don't really know what you were on when you actually put that comment there but we would like some of it anyway real meal real meals the guy that contributed that and he's the man he's been a long time contribute to the site we love you Neil but that one was out there bro you were you were creative not so I'm locking anyway anyway you can find the hot hardware all over the web first and foremost you can find us at hardware calm or you can go to digg com / hardware you can go to twitter.com / hot hardware facebook.com / hot hardware youtube.com / hot hardware vids and that's itcoming up on hot hardware over time by SSDs then you connect our contest and a whole lot more welcome to hot hardware's weekly video Sergeant Pepper podcast the the name is going to change I promise and one of you guys is going to win that we'll talk about that later oh my has a crowd long with Dave altavilla and Marco Chiappetta how you guys doing doing doing well are you doing I'm doing all right so we have here we're gonna check with dave first you know what are you been up to let me let me just guess what Dave's been doing this week he's probably playing around with SSDs am i right about that oh man you're clairvoyant it's like you got a crystal ball or something dude indeed I do do you actually have perhaps an ocz revodrive x2 I do i do I have one of those things and and and here it is here is it's a big slab of silicon a lots of flash going on flash nand memory yeah so the revo drive x2 is a pci express specie express excuse me know ed SSD solid state drive that is a follow on the x2 hence the X 2 version of the revo drive one and what it is is basically a double version or a double stacked version if you can take a quick look at these cards I know we can see that but there's a double stack version of basically a dual SSDs on each layer of the PCB so the top PCB has a pair of SSD controllers the bottom printed circuit board has a pair of SSD controls there's a bunch of flash on both so now you have you know for very fast enforce SSD controllers and raid 0 running on this thing connecting over a pci express slot or by force lot and wicked fast would describe it so what kind of speeds are you getting is it as good as the first gen double the speed or is it just a little bit better ah double the speed in rights in some cases and nearly double and reads it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 megahertz own a mega it somebody megabytes per second excuse me Reed performance and you know somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six hundred megabytes per second right and it's the one of the fastest PCI Express based SSDs we've ever tested we've tested the fusion io iow extreme cards you know with the custom fusion-io controller on board that everybody raved about and is so darn expensive well this thing goes for 619 dollars not cheap for 240 gig but a heck of a lot better than the fusion io card at 899 for 80 gig and you know it's it's going toe-to-toe with that thing so we're working on a full review of it right now we've got benchmarks from all corners of our test lab that I'm going to throw at this thing and the numbers are looking sweet that sounds pretty understandable let's move to the segment where we confuse me now Marco I know you guys did a graphics card showdown could you actually explained it to the point where I understand it yes this is actually the perfect article to unconfuse you so our man Matt Miranda took a trio of upper mainstream and video powered graphics cards we have a 2 gigabyte zotac geforce gtx 460 a overclocked msi hawks geforce gtx 460 and a overclocked gigabyte geforce gtx 470 so now it's not just a straight-up review of the cards what we wanted to find out is you know where's the best bang for the buck because all three of these cards are with them you know 70 100 bucks of each other so which is the really the best one to buy you know if you're concerned about your budget and you'd think ok just buy the fastest one and be done with it and if you don't care about money okay fine that's the way you know most gamers would go but you find that the one gigabyte gtx 460 when it's overclocked offers like you know eighty to ninety percent of the performance of the 470 but it's much cheaper and the extra memory on the zotac card didn't really help it at all so it turns out that the you know technically the lowest end card once you tweak and overclock ends up being the best buy it's it's an interesting article so what kind of tests you use you just use benchmarks that you try real world tests how did you get the performance you said is eighty to ninety percent of one of the more expensive ones how can you tell so well it really depends on the test so we use a combination of canned benchmarks like you know three mark Vantage or unigine heaven we use our custom game tests you know and because this was sort of a tweaker type article Matt also measured power consumption and overclocked each card individually to see how much extra performance we can pull from the cards so taking all things into consideration with price kind of came up with the conclusion that the MSI card was the way to go so it's like the best pound-for-pound fighter kind of standard basically yes interesting very interesting down I kinda understand this this is going to end on a quick side note I just have to give Matt Miranda props for taking the best pictures on the internet okay that's all I've rocks you can see those pictures of hot harbor calm go check that out let's talk about some point way easy to understand you can wrap your mind around this pretty easily a solar-powered keyboard it's wireless is from Logitech and you're not any batteries anymore Dave what do you know about this thing yeah you know it it blows me away that you know we've had solar-powered calculators before right and why haven't we done this yet you know it's kind of one of those things that yeah of course why not yeah it doesn't take a lot of power to I don't know what's in the keyboard these days I might you know 8-bit microcontroller 16 32-bit microcontroller it's there's nothing fancy for processing power in a keyboard and certainly can't take a lot of juice and logitech came up with the wireless solar keyboard k750 the thing is a third of an inch thick because you don't need battery slots anymore it's so it's super sleek and thin on your desktop and it the word is at least logitech claims that it will run up to three months in total darkness if it's fully charged you know once you get a light source to it and charge it fully it'll operate for up to three months in total darkness it's impressive I've also think I've read that it actually can handle artificial light as well you don't need to keep it by a window I one right dual monitors can keep it powered forever you know I run a 30 inch panel and that things you know cranking out some lumens dude it's so you would think there'd be a light source there and certainly overhead lighting you cut that in the office it actually comes with a solar app or logitech has available for download the the solar app that features a Lux meter and you know to make sure you have the necessary light gives you information at a glance or for battery levels and even alert you when of course you're you know get low on juice but it's a it's a sleek-looking keyboard you know why why we you know for wireless keyboards why are we wasting batteries and you know we're not green thrown you know if you're not using rechargeable batteries you're throwing away batteries it's a natural it's it's really you know why haven't we done it before Marco what do you think about it though you're the keyboard aficionado I know this thing's probably got a membrane key switch underneath and you're thinking and you know it's not it's not deluxe enough for you right for anything but my main rig where I have to get work done and write thousands of words a week I would probably be great I'm sure it would look great you know in a kitchen what have you for everyday work for for me probably not but it looks really cool well and you're not the average bear when it comes to keyboard you says for sure yeah I think you I think you nailed it this thing is perfect on the kitchen counter it's certainly perfect in you know sort of office applications whether it's some light duty 925 stuff but guys like Marco and I we we need these big you know behemoths so we can bang on and they're wired to our computer but other than that this is pretty cool I'm sure you could hack it into like an IBM type em you know if you really try yeah luckily don't happen mark we'll make it happen forget let's move to something different about video games let's get off our butts and play the microsoft xbox 360 kinect was that just got released now what do you guys know about this Marco what do you got so uh we know what you know basically everybody else knows it's been talked about forever since it was a project natal or no net natal and then how you want to pronounce that so it finally ship it's microsoft's you know move controller so you don't have to actually hold anything in your hand you place the kinect under your TV or you know 22 to 26 feet off the ground microsoft says plug it into your xbox 360 and with you know connect enabled games it's going to track your movements as long as you're with within range of the kinect really cool now the 360 came out a really long time ago so it's got some pretty old hardware in there how is the performance of the kinect when attached to an xbox 360 like is it is performance really getting bogged down by this cameras and mics trying to track you all the time so this is actually that's an interesting question during its development there were rumors that the device you know maybe it's going to SAP ten fifteen twenty percent of the CPU performance in the xbox and you know that was completely unauthorized code early code just as the thing was getting worked on and it's come out recently that cpu utilization is actually down in in the single digits and some reps from Microsoft have also said that many of the current games because it's really so difficult to create multi-threaded code that's going to tax all of the CPU cores in an Xbox that there is Headroom in those CPUs so the Kinect is really just using those unused CPU cycles and it shouldn't affect the performance of games so efficient so it's it's software that's been written efficiently to actually take advantage of all the hardware like well I wouldn't go that far what it what it is is you know if you if you run a game on a multi-core system it's not going to tax all of the cores all the time so there is available Headroom in the chips so plugging in a device like the Kinect as long as it's not killing the cpu performance if it's just using a little bit it shouldn't affect anything else because the Headroom is there you know doesn't take a lot of processor work voting there's some new feet at hardware Dave can tell the audience about it yeah simple stuff we're always working on the engine at hot hardware it's it's something that's near and dear to our heart we're geeks and so we're always tinkering under the hood and we certainly do that in terms of the site engine as well as our computer engines so yeah we added some additional features some new features to harbor calm we've got voting for comments in the comments section of the site so if you're in the news and you have something to say and it's really good that people are going to vote you up and you're going to get you know a ranking amongst your peers for your contribution to the conversation and if you say something that's not favored well then you're gonna know that to you going to get feedback from your peers and they're going to vote you down and one of the things that you guys can vote on right now are the comments in the thread section of the name this show article you can go to this young maybe you can vote up the actual comments Marco could you explain the contest again for those of you who don't know what's going on and also how do people enter yes so just to put it simply we need a good name for the podcast so we're asking everybody out there to submit their best entries because we need a name so we want your ideas we want to use the best one and who's ever name we pick is going to win an awesome gaming system built by this guy now this guy I heard I heard that things have changed you actually have some new gear that is going into this box what new stuff is coming in to the gaming rig that you were baby so we're going to update Annie just a little bit a sous came through with a little bit of extra gear so in addition to all the hardware we've already mentioned that's going to be in the gaming rig we're going to be adding a xonar d2x sound card and a suits blu-ray drive so you're now looking at basically some of the best parts in every category going in this rig so now that we're putting it in all this extra stuff we want to really good submissions now okay so whatever you have been writing out of this stuff we already got give us the goods though let's step it up let's let's really get something really interesting original SEO friendly you can find it on itunes awesomeness that's Jerry you tell it's way too long don't don't actually submit that but try something out you can go put put it in the comments send an email do whatever just just get it to us amount will have a way actually I should probably explain that should not maybe you can either send an email to podcast at hot hardware calm or just come right to the site hit the the contest page and comment right there yeah hot hardware is radiant techno drip that's unique we they don't really know what you were on when you actually put that comment there but we would like some of it anyway real meal real meals the guy that contributed that and he's the man he's been a long time contribute to the site we love you Neil but that one was out there bro you were you were creative not so I'm locking anyway anyway you can find the hot hardware all over the web first and foremost you can find us at hardware calm or you can go to digg com / hardware you can go to twitter.com / hot hardware facebook.com / hot hardware youtube.com / hot hardware vids and that's it\n"