The conversation begins with a discussion about a fan that kicks in when it's hot and how it affects a gaming rig. The speaker mentions a laptop-like device that is perfect for Skype calls, but it also comes with a high price tag. They express their excitement about the possibility of upgrading this device to make it more powerful.

The conversation takes a turn when the topic of contests is discussed. The host mentions that Hot Hardware has given away several prizes in the past, including tablets and graphics cards. They also mention that they are planning to give away another prize, which will be a small form factor liquid cooled rig built on Mini-ITX components. The winner of this contest will not be able to play games, but they will still receive some hardware.

The host expresses their gratitude for the opportunity to participate in the conversation and teases that the Samsung Galaxy S5 is being reviewed soon. They also mention that the show's audio can be improved, specifically asking listeners to "fix your audio" or "Batman."

To learn more about Hot Hardware, readers can find them on various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube. The website itself can be found at hothardware.com, where readers can access a wealth of information on the latest technology news and reviews.

The conversation concludes with the host thanking listeners for participating and teasing that they will be back next week with another episode of Two and a Half Geeks.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis episode of two and a half geeks is brought to you by sandisk for 25 years sandisk has been expanding the possibilities of storage delivering innovative products that companies and consumers count on to find out more about how you can be ready for the future visit sandisk.com storage today on two and a half geeks we're going to be talking about the amd radeon r9 295 x2 the nvidia geforce gtx 780 ti dave has a review of the lenovo thinkpad 8. mark is going to talk about the das keyboard 4 pro and the gigabyte bricks pro all this and more coming up it's rocking the benchmarks we're going to up the ante a little bit processing power i kind of understand this hey welcome back to two and a half geeks i am not is actually andrew zarian subbing in for ayaz of course i'm joined by marco chapetta and of course dave altavilla how you guys doing doing good doing good good all right with us i'm i'm hanging out today uh we got the the box shots is he's been traveling he's settling down he asked me if i would fill in for him i'm honored that you guys are going to have me here because a lot of the stuff we're going to be talking about is really exciting stuff i'm somewhat of a hardware junkie when it comes to you know building pcs i i built everything here in the studio it's a beautiful thing so let's go right into this because uh marco and dave you guys have been uh reviewing products for a while marco you recently reviewed the amd radeon r9 295 x2 um i consider myself a nvidia guy but a lot of these amd radeons have are doing phenomenal phenomenal in the benchmarks uh why don't you go into this and tell us how how you like it sure absolutely i'm going to try to get it on camera but it's it's kind of big so here it is this is the only 95 x2 so you can see the gigantic card here attached to the radiator and fan it's a two slot card but you do need to mount the radiator either to the back or the top of your case this puppy is capable of pulling 500 watts alone so you have dual 8 pin power connectors here it is one monster of a graphics card so you know for the last few generations amd has used a dual gpu card as their flagship as their top of the line card now when we reviewed the 290x a few months back amd didn't really talk about a dual gpu card then and the 290 consumed so much power relatively speaking that i didn't think they were going to pull off a a dual gpu card so what they really had to do was move to liquid cooling to dissipate all of the heat that these puppies are capable of pumping out but ultimately what you end up with is is radeon 290x crosswire so the most powerful single gpu card in amd's lineup you end up with two of them on a single card so 290x crossfire on a single card now that adds up to you know an insane amount of horsepower you have 5632 total stream processors eight gigs of memory on the card you know dual 512-bit memory interfaces for let me i forget what the total is but we're talking you know huge amounts of memory bandwidth up to 11.5 teraflops of compute performance it's it's right now it's the fastest single graphics card we have ever tested now with that said a few days before this article hit nvidia announced the titan z which is two titans on a single card um that may be faster but we haven't tested it yet so we'll know when we get our hands on that puppy now i i it is recommended that you have a big case for this for this card and a b there's a couple of things there's a few things you need to consider with this card first yeah you need to accommodate it so the cards a foot long two slots wide um you also have that radiator to mount so you need a case with a 120 millimeter mount at the rear or at the top basically within you know reach of the card and it also has some strict power supply requirements my graphics testbed for years i had been using a 1200 watt silverstone power supply in it and never had issues running multiple gpu setups you name it never had a problem this particular card requires each power feed to handle up to 28 amps wow so you basically if you have a multi-rail psu those 12 volt rails have to handle a minimum of 28 amps um i ended up switching the test bed to a single rail um power supply that you know had something like 103 watts on the rail so it wasn't an issue after that but yeah if you have a multi-rail psu and you're thinking of a card like this those rails have to be able to handle 28 amps it is a power hungry card now with that said it's way quieter than a pair of 290xs the the fan that's on the card itself is cooling all the surface mounted components the ram the vrm and the liquid cooler is cooling the gpus there's there's two micro channel heat plates on each of one on each gpu and you know the tubing runs to the radiator and the 120 millimeter fan just pumps all the heat out of the case um it's definitely you know shooting some warm air out of the system but the gpus themselves they they ran surprisingly cool under you know stress for hours and hours the gpus never broke 70 c and and performance is is just phenomenal let me just jump to the review here to give you an example of a number let's just use fire strike a 3d mark fire strike a a geforce gtx titan now it was a 780 ti overclocked so a high-end g4 780 ti that's factory overclocked will do about 50 200 52 70 3d marks this car did 87 16 so you know you're a huge percentage you know uh performance improvement and if you go to an actual game i'm just going to pick i'm going to pick crysis 3 just one of the games i tested a a g4 780 ti overclocked again at 2560 will do let's see so 31 frames per second on the g-force 4961 on here and then if you go even higher you know this single card did 27 frames per second in crisis maximum image quality with anti-aliasing at 4k so it's it's really a card you need a super high-res monitor to to beat this card up so marco what's the price on this card so the price is the right is is 15.99 yeah that is that is not cheap not cheap at all but if you were to go look at i'm not justifying the cost of this card if you're if you're buying on price you can't justify a card at 1500 bucks you just can't but if you were to go buy two 290x water plates and all the accessories necessary to water cool them you would easily get to 1500 territory so i see where amd is going and it's half the price of a titan z nvidia's titan z is 3 000 bucks so as i'm never going to use good value when you're talking about a card like this but in the competitive landscape you could see why amd chose that price point sure um and you know i was going to bring up if you were to do two let's say two gtx 780s uh you're still up there around 1400 bucks 1500 bucks and that kind of sure that kind of you know balances out the price and in a weird way to justify it right i mean you can't justify 1500 bucks but in a weird way it kind of does now dave you um you reviewed three different gtx 780 ti's um and i and i love it when you guys compare three different brands for the same card you guys did the evga the gigabyte and the msi and how did that go what were the results in that because i'm really fascinated because i'm actually looking for a 780 ti yeah actually um i didn't review it uh our editor paul lilly took a look at three cards one from evga one from gigabyte one from msi these are nvidia geforce gtx 788 ti the highest end gpu before the titan the the titan is the the top-end uh gpu for nvidia but geforce gtx 780 ti we did a round up and um yeah these cards are are blazing fast in their own right these are single gpu cards um and they street price for starting uh at around 700 up to about 760 dollars so not cheap as well if you strapped a pair of these together i think it would give the 295 x2 a run for its money right marco uh the so with the latest nvidia driver so last week nvidia launched that new dx11 driver that was going to boost performance across the board i did all of my testing with that new driver and gtx 780 sli was slightly faster not across the board but was faster overall than the 295 x2 yeah the 780 tie right okay ti yep yep okay so yeah that's what you're talking about here this would be a situation where you would consume in in that case an sli um you know four slots of real estate because they're dual slot cards um they they consume that much real estate inside your chassis um and again you're going to need to provision some copious amounts of power from your psu in there uh make sure you've got a a pretty serious power supply recommended 600 watts one eight pin pc express power connector and one six pin pci express power connector per card uh but 280 uh cuda cores um and uh they are clocked at anywhere from 1020 megahertz to 285 megahertz uh in the gigabyte card evga and msi are 10 20 megahertz and um the the memory speed is 1085 and or 1150 in the case of the gigabyte card so the gigabyte card was goosed up a little bit more it has three fans on it um so it tended to be a little bit more of an of an aggressive card interesting sort of offering from gigabyte um very quiet um we noticed that it was also just on the hairy edge of stable unfortunately in a couple of spots we did notice a hiccup or two nothing major um nothing uh in terms of you know visual artifacts or something like that we did we did just have excuse me over a um extended period of testing and we stress test these things a lot paul you know we run it through a bench uh benchmark gauntlet um we did notice a couple of hiccups where it crashed actually um so something to be wary of there maybe you want to dial back the clocks and you certainly can do that with nvidia's drivers and with uh gigabytes bundled software as well and you know maybe tune that down a little bit more modestly the msi card was the most i guess conservatively clocked and the cheapest of the three uh comes in right now at let me see what the street price is i want to say it's just a little north of 700 actually no just a little self 696 currently yeah on amazon and so they're offering two versions of the card right yeah it depends what the msi msi card yeah there's there's a couple of different flavors of it um the one we looked at was the um the twin frozer gaming it's it's the oh it's factory overclocked version the 1020 megahertz core clock version so you know again that was of the three the the more conservatively um clocked uh card set up and it performed you know as a result you know slightly behind the other two but you're talking about a few frames per second here and there nothing crazy um not big percentages and then the evga card um was sort of it striked a sort of a unhappy happy balance in the middle um and that comes in terms of price as well as clock speed so we actually ended up picking the evga card as our favorite um believe it or not the evga dual classified with acx um geforce gtx 780 ti and but the other two were close runner ups it's it's really you know what what you um deem more important are you are you after price are you have to you know after the all-out highest clocks you can get in which case maybe the gigabyte card isn't is uh the alternative to look at um we sort of liked the happy balance that the evga struck um but these cards um you know marco alluded to 4k gaming and and in some cases they're capable of doing that now doing that you've got um a situation where you know at 2560 by 1600 revs for example these cards are breaking 80 frames per second you know fully dialed up dx11 in like batman arkham city um so you know not a not a slouch of a title by any stretch of imagination you know pretty strenuous um game title on um you know on uh on a modern graphics card take it up to 4k res 3840 by 2160 thereabouts 4k res roughly um and you're in 44 frames per second range so now 4k gaming with a title like batman on these cards um but you can find some titles like hitman absolution for example one of our benchmarks that we run just just couldn't quite get playable on that uh at 4k res um but but very powerful all three of these cards uh nonetheless very cool if you were to pick one what would you pick well again i think you know and i would have to agree with paul we sort of um liked the happy balance that evga struck um they they have sort of a a midland clock speed setup and you know they tend to have you know a fair price they don't they're not the cheapest they're not the most expensive but really you can't go wrong with any one of them uh they're all solid editions i happen to like um the evga set up just because of that just because it's you know right there on the sweet spot nice uh old factory overclock with uh a good street price could i can i jump in for one second and also explain why i like the evga card yes oh the dual bios the way the way is boost 2.0 works on these cards the cleaner the power the lower the temperature the higher they can sustain their boost clocks so with the evga card it's a really tall card it has this giant cooler with with two fans on it and even though it's really quiet that you know their acx cooling solution it's very quiet it does a great job keeping the gpu cool and evga also i forget the number of phases but you have dual eight pin connectors to supply more power and there's multiple phases to keep the power clean and stable so even though it had the same clocks as the gigabyte card you often found the evga card finish ahead of the gigabyte card and that's because it can sustain boost longer and in addition to helping average frame rates that also helps to keep the the fastest frame delivery as well so you end up with smoother animation overall it's just it's a really nice card all the cards are really nice so i'm not knocking any of the others i'm just i'm a fan of evga's acx cooling as well and dave you brought up uh dual bios yeah yeah absolutely um the the evga card comes with um this dual bio setup where basically you can configure a couple of different uh clock setups to your liking you know if you like to tune in tinker with that that's on board as well and you can actually switch on the fly you know pre-defined configurations for clock speeds it's it's pretty nice setup very cool uh i want i want to go into this thinkpad 8 uh when it's a windows 8.1 tablet uh we've seen many of these come to the market lenovo makes some phenomenal gear uh what do you think of this one dave uh there's many of these eight inch windows 8.1 tablets hitting the market is this one of them for people to be considering yeah i think i think it depends again on your requirements um eight inch slates you tend to have what i think probably two types of buyers folks that are looking for you know a cheap tablet techn that they can carry around it's it's a very portable convenient uh and they want something inexpensive to run with um it's not a work device um you know per se it's more of a consumption device um and we're we're going from like high-end graphics cards to tablets here we're talking about culture shock man right but um but the the lenovo thinkpad series is a little bit more uh targeted towards the average work user towards the business user who might need to do a little bit more uh with their tablet um as does the the think bad thinkpad brand over the years as lenovo has targeted that product so this is uh this is a little bit more decked out it's got a much higher resolution display 1920 by 1200 display um and it does have intel's um bait rail uh atom processor the z3770 quad core uh with burst up to 2.39 gigahertz 2.4 gigahertz um handled very well in the benchmarks um sort of a midland performer not one of the top end performers um but really you know the the hook here is if you want the full you know windows 8.1 pro experience this isn't um you know this isn't windows rt here this is this is windows full windows 8.1 pro 32-bit um you've got it you've got a two megapixel front-facing camera an 8-megapixel rear facing camera micro sd card slot micro usb 3. this is a little mini computer in an 8-inch form factor now it's it's it's retailed at 499 with the cover 399 without the cover i mean this this seems like it's a phenomenal deal for someone that wants the full windows experience but doesn't wanna uh doesn't want you know a laptop if this is a secondary device if he's on the go he wants to kind of have the windows experience i think this is a great little device yeah i mean you know it depends on on on your metric i mean you certainly can find for example some some cheaper slates out out there on the market certainly in the android space um for well under 300 um but yeah you know lenovo does a nice job uh appointing this device um with just just some nice features uh you mentioned the cover um you know there's there's just a lot of um integration that's you know built into this you also get with it a a suite of software that you're not gonna find on um just any you know android tablet certainly but you know on a lot of tablets you get you get evernote you get microsoft office home and student which is you know uh you know a full office suite it's it's not it's not cheap and a few other odds and ends that uh lenovo bundles in which you might determine as bloatware or not um and so yeah the the quick shot tablet cover the the the bundle software it's it's a good setup all in all and um we liked it we uh we would recommend it um you know it's it's it's a choice out there it's it's not for everybody it's a little bit more of a premium slate again 1920x1200 display it's gorgeous if if that's important to you having that extra high resolution display capability then then this is a good tablet to look at now in comparison to the dell venue 8 uh 8 pro which came out a couple months ago i know this was a big holiday item i know a lot of people that bought this it the the dell is cheaper but how does it compare as far as performance and everyday use go to uh to the lenovo yeah it's it's right there i mean these are neck and neck they're built they're built on the same platform um you're really you're really looking at a situation where the dell venue 8 pro is is just built more modestly it has a lower res display 1280 by 1280x800 display for example um you know it's it's just set up a little bit more mainstream um and and again the lenovo tablet is um you know more focused towards a higher end user high resolution display um it's got it's got some bundled software on there the office apps and all that good stuff and so it just again it's targeted a different user again the dell 5 megapixel rear facing camera versus the 8 megapixel rear facing camera in the lenovo so a little bit higher end device on lenovo side um you know you can compare them but they're sort of they're going after different markets um if you're if you're not so concerned about uh getting all those pixels on an eight-inch screen then uh you know the the dell offers a really good value i mean you're talking about a 300 slate in the pro version with full windows 8 8.1 and then there's actually an android 4.2 version the dell venue 8 for like 179 you can find them as as cheap as that so good stuff all built on intel atom uh core technology uh interesting um interesting to see that you know uh intel is now making a you know significant dent in the in the tablet space yeah yeah it's unbelievable finally right it took them long enough now let's switch gears to something else right now mechanical keyboards i'm a big fan of mechanical keyboards a lot of my buddies that are gamers love them uh and marco you're going to talk about something cool here the dos keyboard 4 4 pro this is a mechanical keyboard it's it's a beautiful looking keyboard uh tell us a little bit about it sure yeah i i have been a long time proponent of mechanical keyboards you know i was writing about switch types uh you know way back in 09 before they went mainstream excuse me have a little cold here and you know i've been a fan forever they're they're just they're simply better products than the crappy keyboards that come with most systems the mechanical key switches they're more consistent they're more reliable they'll last much longer you know millions of keystrokes you can keep one of these keyboard mechanical keyboards forever and now this new dos keyboard 4 pro there's also an ultimate version is an update to the very popular dos keyboard the the previous gen had a very similar shape with that angular top but the the top cover of the keyboard was a shiny plastic this new model does away with that plastic for an anodized aluminum top it also adds multimedia function keys at the top in addition to an integrated usb 3 hub so we looked at the pro version with cherry mx blue switches the mx blue switches are clicky switches there's also an mx brown version that's a tactile switch but it is not clicky if anybody says a cherry brown keyboard is clicky don't read the rest of the review they're an idiot it's not clicky so the the dos 4 it's it's really a nice all-around keyboard for somebody looking to get into mechanical and doesn't want a plain cheap model like say like rosewill um has basic cherry mx blue keyboards you can get for under 100 bucks there the key switches are the same you'll get a similar feel for the key switches but you don't have any multimedia features you don't have any any metal in the design so the price is going to go you don't have the usb hub so the dos is not cheap the blue the cherry mx blue version is 169 bucks the cherry mx brown version i believe is like 174 just a couple of dollars more um but with this with this keyboard you get a device that will last you through multiple pc upgrades it's never going to wear out you have laser etched keycaps now that's like second from the best i prefer pbt keycaps because they don't get that shiny plastic look but these laser etched caps the letters will never well you really have to beat on it to wear off these leathers you're not likely to wear them off they might get a little shiny but you'll be able to read the keyboard forever the aluminum top is going to look great you know for a long time the integrated usb 3 hub is awesome having multimedia keys is a definite nice plus and das has been doing uh high-end mechanicals for a long time so you know you can trust the build quality and trust that the company is going to be around for a while we we really like this model we gave it a recommendation and if you're considering mechanical keyboards i know there's going to be tons of you watching this going 169 bucks for a keyboard are you crazy i can get a dell for five bucks yeah you can live though yeah exactly everybody that i've talked into trying almost everybody that i've talked into trying a mechanical keyboard within days you you understand why it's a superior product and not because i'm such a big proponent i wanted to talk about this keyboard and just wanted to get the uh the word out on mechanicals in general the dos is really nice mechanicals in general are a great upgrade in my opinion i think mechanical keyboards have made like a big comeback amongst gamers and and pc enthusiasts but if you do heavy word processing and typing i wouldn't go any i wouldn't do anything else other than a mechanical keyboard on the desktop i mean i agree so i wrote an article in 09 called mechanical keyboards demystified again before they went mainstream all right i talked about all this all the switch types available at the time and showed a bunch of keyboards on video just so people could hear them you know one of the real subtleties of a mechanical keyboard especially if you go with a cherry mx blue or a cherry mx brown so lots of the gamers like the linear switches the the cherry blacks or the cherry reds i personally don't like the linear switch because there's really there's no tactile bump there's nothing that tells your finger that switch just actuated you need to get used to it with the clickies or with the tactiles like the browns once you get trained to feel that bump so when you hit a key there's a spring inside the switch and it literally just bumps the key so as you're hitting it you feel it actuate you feel the key press and if you can get good and you're not mashing keys and bottoming out constantly you will become a better typist it's it's you literally will become faster at typing on a mechanical than you would on an inconsistent membrane board now there's you know drawbacks obviously price there's noise associated with most mechanicals because one either the switch is clicky or two when you bottom out the key the plastic hits the switch and you hear that little you know that noise like me but overall it's just a far superior product in my opinion yeah i know it's one of those things mark and i totally agree it's one of those things where you know people for so long have been getting these keyboards bundled with their system and you just they don't know what they're missing you're just you're just dealing with what you're given and it's this membrane switch keyboard that yeah it gets the job done if you if you need it um but if you try a mechanical keyboard i have a i have a deck keyboard marco you turned me on to one of those as well i have a deck keyboard it's clicky um and it's backlit and my god i i i fly in the thing all day and if i if i didn't have this you know i would i would my production would be hindered significantly guaranteed so um yeah it's like i don't know how to explain it it's like i don't know it's like having ac in your car when you know when you didn't have it when you were you know in college or whatever and you were driving around the beater and you finally get a new car with ac you can't ever go back yeah it's like hd you can't once you've seen hd or even 4k that plymouth valiant means nothing to you now exactly dave let's uh let's go ahead first into this um you reviewed the gigabyte bricks pro and the intel iris pro these are little mini mini computers i mean what would you call them exactly what is the term form i i know the the next unit of computing as intel called it that they they were really behind this uh they the gigabyte looks really cool to me the intel too uh what can you tell us about these two little boxes yeah intel's knuck as they call it next unit of computing um is something that they uh really sort of a a reference platform that they seated the marketplace with and they sold a bunch of them themselves as well um and uh really it was you know to show you know the sort of features and capability and performance you could get into a tiny you know four to five inch square form factor and um so we took a look at um this is you know now a couple of years later and and we're we're now getting various iterations from manufacturers with the latest gen hardware we took a look at uh the gigabyte brix pro which is based on intel's uh core i7 haswell processor core i7 4770r um which is an integrated intel cpu it has uh a quad core cpu with um integrated intel iris pro graphics so the the graphics core is is an intel iris pro graphics 5200 uh graphics core and you know the first thing you're thinking is integrated intel graphics oh god you know it's not going to have much game and it's really good for for desktop work and that's about it and i would say wrong um because intel finally has some serious chops i'll actually hold this thing up here it is here this is the the brix pro by gigabyte it is built on intel's haswell core i7 4770r with iris pro graphics as you can see in the along the back there you've got uh usb 3 gigabit ethernet hdmi all that good stuff right in the back uh displayport as well and fits in the palm of your hand this thing with intel iris pro graphics actually can play you know pretty much any current directx 11 title on the market today we fired up bioshock infinite uh and it you know was able to handle even at you know fairly good resolution 1920 by 1080p resolution we're talking pretty close to playable frame rates you know 23 frames per second if you if you looked at something like batman which is a little less strenuous so there if you dial back the um the image quality a little bit you'd get you know into that 30 to 40 frames per second range fired up batman arkham origins and average frame rate at 1080p is in the 40s now again high quality anti-aliasing enabled this is something that intel hasn't been able to do before uh with their integrity graphics solution um so you know now you've got from from intel uh in this in this technology you've got really a situation where they're competing with low end discrete graphics um and actually we're able to edge out in a couple of spots amd integrated graphics we actually again um you know a beat it versus um amd's kaveri chip and in bioshock infinite intel beat em versus the integrated uh amd a8 the the latest with their graphics core next uh technology uh radeon r7 core in uh the amd a8 7600 that we tested so it was interesting to see intel finally you know bringing it around to where integrated graphics um you know are um are the real deal you can you actually do a little bit of gaming on them certainly you've got to you know temper those settings a little bit but 1080p is doable even in titles like batman dx11 titles like batman arkham origins so um really have to pat intel on the back for that gigabyte put together a really nice little box here the downside and i'll have to throw this out there is that it's loud there's a um there's a fairly uh high-speed um barrel fan in this sucker and when you start gaming it gets a little whiny unfortunately i really think you know honestly this could use another couple of inches one way or the other and a little bit larger sink and fan in there um and you probably would have got uh you know got the acoustic signature down a little bit but it's a lot of performance in a little box that's for sure yeah and i'm really surprised by the results of that until uh the graphics chip on that thing yeah i mean you know it's it's it's a case where intel clearly this is the fastest core in graphics core that intel's put put out in the market uh to date um their drivers are much better i didn't see any weird anomalies graphical anomalies or anything like that it handled pretty much any title i threw against it um i think you'll have a situation probably this is my guess where you'll have corner cases where there might be some older titles that intel hasn't checked out and you know tune their drivers on and stuff like that but on the latest sort of mainstream stuff that folks are playing certainly it's going to be very powerful in multimedia whether you're doing video you know transcode or what have you working with video this is a nice little machine for that you know again if you don't mind a little bit of noise it does spin up when it gets when you're working it hard other than that it's it's you know when you're like on the desktop and just general workload it's it's very quiet it's just that when you when you get on that graphic score you know that that fan kicks in so um a little uh little knock on gigabyte for that one but um you know maybe they'll maybe they'll work on that a little bit in future iterations very cool uh for me like like a laptop a a box like that for a skype machine would be perfect yeah i'm actually i actually have four full towers sitting here you know heating up this room so something like that would be absolutely perfect you just stack them and leave them on the side it definitely would have the juice it comes with uh this comes with a 128 gig mcada ssd on board it does have room for a two and a half inch ssd if you want to plug that in there you know internally get a little bit more storage so yeah it's cool it's um it's like it's a neat little machine it's amazing you know again in the palm of your hand the kind of horsepower you can get these days very cool hey marco i'm gonna i'm gonna shoot this to you uh you're gonna talk about a couple contests and possibly something coming up yeah so we we just wrapped up a contest last week where we gave away a tablet a day um for for new viewers i want to make sure that you know that we give this kind of stuff away all the time so we gave away five evga tegra note 7 tablets powered by nvidia's tegra 4 soc um we just randomly selected winners from our commenting system on the site gave away five of those babies last week and uh because you know readers that don't win typically are kind of bummed when they when they don't make out with some new hardware we try to keep the contest flowing and we are we're not ready to disclose all of the details yet but the next giveaway is going to be a small form factor liquid cooled rig i'm using mini itx stuff i'm going to build it on video it is going to be plenty capable of gaming uh we're going to partner with um somebody who makes really nice nice graphics cards and a really cool mini itx liquid cooled case perhaps you can figure it out perhaps not but keep coming by the site and we will uh disclose the details soon i wish i could win but i can't i can't play along but um by just talking with us but just talking just being here makes me a winner guys and i'm very excited that you guys selected me to fill in for is because there's no replacing is eyes is unbelievable is irreplaceable but but you're doing a pretty darn good job there i'm hanging on i'm trying uh we're at the end of the show but dave why don't you tell us where people get more information about hot hardware and two and a half geeks uh your facebook your twitter your google plus which is a little little tricky to remember right is plus.google.com plus hot hardware right there you go yeah google likes to mix it up and um they don't keep it simple unfortunately but yes you can find us on google plus you can follow us on twitter we are twitter.com hot hardware go figure facebook.com hot hardware as well and youtube hot hardware vids because you know we're putting video up there go figure but yeah we're all around the web come find us uh stop by the site check out our latest sweepstakes where you could well you could win some pretty hot gear and um and and also see previous episodes of two and a half geeks would love to have you absolutely uh marco anything to uh end the show with sure i'll actually mention this site's url which is hot hardware.com that's where all of the good stuff is published we try to straddle the line tons of technical detail but anybody can read it and figure out if a piece of hardware is cool and that's about it i actually i use the website i use the website i i use the website like i said at the beginning of the show and uh something that i did was after i read the articles i read the comments because you guys have like legitimately really good comments on the site you know that actually that's we've been trying to cultivate that for a while now so yeah it's it's we get some good discussion going as well live people actually read us can you go figure that hey um i i'll i'll tease a little something for for the future here this is the samsung galaxy s5 it is now in the lab and soon to be reviewed within a week or so very good very cool and that wraps it up for today guys uh next week guys we'll be back and i'll be uh i'll be the the mystical voice that the guys only hear whenever i say hey is fix your audio or dave batman nobody else hears me but now you guys did so we'll see y'all next time on two and a half geeksthis episode of two and a half geeks is brought to you by sandisk for 25 years sandisk has been expanding the possibilities of storage delivering innovative products that companies and consumers count on to find out more about how you can be ready for the future visit sandisk.com storage today on two and a half geeks we're going to be talking about the amd radeon r9 295 x2 the nvidia geforce gtx 780 ti dave has a review of the lenovo thinkpad 8. mark is going to talk about the das keyboard 4 pro and the gigabyte bricks pro all this and more coming up it's rocking the benchmarks we're going to up the ante a little bit processing power i kind of understand this hey welcome back to two and a half geeks i am not is actually andrew zarian subbing in for ayaz of course i'm joined by marco chapetta and of course dave altavilla how you guys doing doing good doing good good all right with us i'm i'm hanging out today uh we got the the box shots is he's been traveling he's settling down he asked me if i would fill in for him i'm honored that you guys are going to have me here because a lot of the stuff we're going to be talking about is really exciting stuff i'm somewhat of a hardware junkie when it comes to you know building pcs i i built everything here in the studio it's a beautiful thing so let's go right into this because uh marco and dave you guys have been uh reviewing products for a while marco you recently reviewed the amd radeon r9 295 x2 um i consider myself a nvidia guy but a lot of these amd radeons have are doing phenomenal phenomenal in the benchmarks uh why don't you go into this and tell us how how you like it sure absolutely i'm going to try to get it on camera but it's it's kind of big so here it is this is the only 95 x2 so you can see the gigantic card here attached to the radiator and fan it's a two slot card but you do need to mount the radiator either to the back or the top of your case this puppy is capable of pulling 500 watts alone so you have dual 8 pin power connectors here it is one monster of a graphics card so you know for the last few generations amd has used a dual gpu card as their flagship as their top of the line card now when we reviewed the 290x a few months back amd didn't really talk about a dual gpu card then and the 290 consumed so much power relatively speaking that i didn't think they were going to pull off a a dual gpu card so what they really had to do was move to liquid cooling to dissipate all of the heat that these puppies are capable of pumping out but ultimately what you end up with is is radeon 290x crosswire so the most powerful single gpu card in amd's lineup you end up with two of them on a single card so 290x crossfire on a single card now that adds up to you know an insane amount of horsepower you have 5632 total stream processors eight gigs of memory on the card you know dual 512-bit memory interfaces for let me i forget what the total is but we're talking you know huge amounts of memory bandwidth up to 11.5 teraflops of compute performance it's it's right now it's the fastest single graphics card we have ever tested now with that said a few days before this article hit nvidia announced the titan z which is two titans on a single card um that may be faster but we haven't tested it yet so we'll know when we get our hands on that puppy now i i it is recommended that you have a big case for this for this card and a b there's a couple of things there's a few things you need to consider with this card first yeah you need to accommodate it so the cards a foot long two slots wide um you also have that radiator to mount so you need a case with a 120 millimeter mount at the rear or at the top basically within you know reach of the card and it also has some strict power supply requirements my graphics testbed for years i had been using a 1200 watt silverstone power supply in it and never had issues running multiple gpu setups you name it never had a problem this particular card requires each power feed to handle up to 28 amps wow so you basically if you have a multi-rail psu those 12 volt rails have to handle a minimum of 28 amps um i ended up switching the test bed to a single rail um power supply that you know had something like 103 watts on the rail so it wasn't an issue after that but yeah if you have a multi-rail psu and you're thinking of a card like this those rails have to be able to handle 28 amps it is a power hungry card now with that said it's way quieter than a pair of 290xs the the fan that's on the card itself is cooling all the surface mounted components the ram the vrm and the liquid cooler is cooling the gpus there's there's two micro channel heat plates on each of one on each gpu and you know the tubing runs to the radiator and the 120 millimeter fan just pumps all the heat out of the case um it's definitely you know shooting some warm air out of the system but the gpus themselves they they ran surprisingly cool under you know stress for hours and hours the gpus never broke 70 c and and performance is is just phenomenal let me just jump to the review here to give you an example of a number let's just use fire strike a 3d mark fire strike a a geforce gtx titan now it was a 780 ti overclocked so a high-end g4 780 ti that's factory overclocked will do about 50 200 52 70 3d marks this car did 87 16 so you know you're a huge percentage you know uh performance improvement and if you go to an actual game i'm just going to pick i'm going to pick crysis 3 just one of the games i tested a a g4 780 ti overclocked again at 2560 will do let's see so 31 frames per second on the g-force 4961 on here and then if you go even higher you know this single card did 27 frames per second in crisis maximum image quality with anti-aliasing at 4k so it's it's really a card you need a super high-res monitor to to beat this card up so marco what's the price on this card so the price is the right is is 15.99 yeah that is that is not cheap not cheap at all but if you were to go look at i'm not justifying the cost of this card if you're if you're buying on price you can't justify a card at 1500 bucks you just can't but if you were to go buy two 290x water plates and all the accessories necessary to water cool them you would easily get to 1500 territory so i see where amd is going and it's half the price of a titan z nvidia's titan z is 3 000 bucks so as i'm never going to use good value when you're talking about a card like this but in the competitive landscape you could see why amd chose that price point sure um and you know i was going to bring up if you were to do two let's say two gtx 780s uh you're still up there around 1400 bucks 1500 bucks and that kind of sure that kind of you know balances out the price and in a weird way to justify it right i mean you can't justify 1500 bucks but in a weird way it kind of does now dave you um you reviewed three different gtx 780 ti's um and i and i love it when you guys compare three different brands for the same card you guys did the evga the gigabyte and the msi and how did that go what were the results in that because i'm really fascinated because i'm actually looking for a 780 ti yeah actually um i didn't review it uh our editor paul lilly took a look at three cards one from evga one from gigabyte one from msi these are nvidia geforce gtx 788 ti the highest end gpu before the titan the the titan is the the top-end uh gpu for nvidia but geforce gtx 780 ti we did a round up and um yeah these cards are are blazing fast in their own right these are single gpu cards um and they street price for starting uh at around 700 up to about 760 dollars so not cheap as well if you strapped a pair of these together i think it would give the 295 x2 a run for its money right marco uh the so with the latest nvidia driver so last week nvidia launched that new dx11 driver that was going to boost performance across the board i did all of my testing with that new driver and gtx 780 sli was slightly faster not across the board but was faster overall than the 295 x2 yeah the 780 tie right okay ti yep yep okay so yeah that's what you're talking about here this would be a situation where you would consume in in that case an sli um you know four slots of real estate because they're dual slot cards um they they consume that much real estate inside your chassis um and again you're going to need to provision some copious amounts of power from your psu in there uh make sure you've got a a pretty serious power supply recommended 600 watts one eight pin pc express power connector and one six pin pci express power connector per card uh but 280 uh cuda cores um and uh they are clocked at anywhere from 1020 megahertz to 285 megahertz uh in the gigabyte card evga and msi are 10 20 megahertz and um the the memory speed is 1085 and or 1150 in the case of the gigabyte card so the gigabyte card was goosed up a little bit more it has three fans on it um so it tended to be a little bit more of an of an aggressive card interesting sort of offering from gigabyte um very quiet um we noticed that it was also just on the hairy edge of stable unfortunately in a couple of spots we did notice a hiccup or two nothing major um nothing uh in terms of you know visual artifacts or something like that we did we did just have excuse me over a um extended period of testing and we stress test these things a lot paul you know we run it through a bench uh benchmark gauntlet um we did notice a couple of hiccups where it crashed actually um so something to be wary of there maybe you want to dial back the clocks and you certainly can do that with nvidia's drivers and with uh gigabytes bundled software as well and you know maybe tune that down a little bit more modestly the msi card was the most i guess conservatively clocked and the cheapest of the three uh comes in right now at let me see what the street price is i want to say it's just a little north of 700 actually no just a little self 696 currently yeah on amazon and so they're offering two versions of the card right yeah it depends what the msi msi card yeah there's there's a couple of different flavors of it um the one we looked at was the um the twin frozer gaming it's it's the oh it's factory overclocked version the 1020 megahertz core clock version so you know again that was of the three the the more conservatively um clocked uh card set up and it performed you know as a result you know slightly behind the other two but you're talking about a few frames per second here and there nothing crazy um not big percentages and then the evga card um was sort of it striked a sort of a unhappy happy balance in the middle um and that comes in terms of price as well as clock speed so we actually ended up picking the evga card as our favorite um believe it or not the evga dual classified with acx um geforce gtx 780 ti and but the other two were close runner ups it's it's really you know what what you um deem more important are you are you after price are you have to you know after the all-out highest clocks you can get in which case maybe the gigabyte card isn't is uh the alternative to look at um we sort of liked the happy balance that the evga struck um but these cards um you know marco alluded to 4k gaming and and in some cases they're capable of doing that now doing that you've got um a situation where you know at 2560 by 1600 revs for example these cards are breaking 80 frames per second you know fully dialed up dx11 in like batman arkham city um so you know not a not a slouch of a title by any stretch of imagination you know pretty strenuous um game title on um you know on uh on a modern graphics card take it up to 4k res 3840 by 2160 thereabouts 4k res roughly um and you're in 44 frames per second range so now 4k gaming with a title like batman on these cards um but you can find some titles like hitman absolution for example one of our benchmarks that we run just just couldn't quite get playable on that uh at 4k res um but but very powerful all three of these cards uh nonetheless very cool if you were to pick one what would you pick well again i think you know and i would have to agree with paul we sort of um liked the happy balance that evga struck um they they have sort of a a midland clock speed setup and you know they tend to have you know a fair price they don't they're not the cheapest they're not the most expensive but really you can't go wrong with any one of them uh they're all solid editions i happen to like um the evga set up just because of that just because it's you know right there on the sweet spot nice uh old factory overclock with uh a good street price could i can i jump in for one second and also explain why i like the evga card yes oh the dual bios the way the way is boost 2.0 works on these cards the cleaner the power the lower the temperature the higher they can sustain their boost clocks so with the evga card it's a really tall card it has this giant cooler with with two fans on it and even though it's really quiet that you know their acx cooling solution it's very quiet it does a great job keeping the gpu cool and evga also i forget the number of phases but you have dual eight pin connectors to supply more power and there's multiple phases to keep the power clean and stable so even though it had the same clocks as the gigabyte card you often found the evga card finish ahead of the gigabyte card and that's because it can sustain boost longer and in addition to helping average frame rates that also helps to keep the the fastest frame delivery as well so you end up with smoother animation overall it's just it's a really nice card all the cards are really nice so i'm not knocking any of the others i'm just i'm a fan of evga's acx cooling as well and dave you brought up uh dual bios yeah yeah absolutely um the the evga card comes with um this dual bio setup where basically you can configure a couple of different uh clock setups to your liking you know if you like to tune in tinker with that that's on board as well and you can actually switch on the fly you know pre-defined configurations for clock speeds it's it's pretty nice setup very cool uh i want i want to go into this thinkpad 8 uh when it's a windows 8.1 tablet uh we've seen many of these come to the market lenovo makes some phenomenal gear uh what do you think of this one dave uh there's many of these eight inch windows 8.1 tablets hitting the market is this one of them for people to be considering yeah i think i think it depends again on your requirements um eight inch slates you tend to have what i think probably two types of buyers folks that are looking for you know a cheap tablet techn that they can carry around it's it's a very portable convenient uh and they want something inexpensive to run with um it's not a work device um you know per se it's more of a consumption device um and we're we're going from like high-end graphics cards to tablets here we're talking about culture shock man right but um but the the lenovo thinkpad series is a little bit more uh targeted towards the average work user towards the business user who might need to do a little bit more uh with their tablet um as does the the think bad thinkpad brand over the years as lenovo has targeted that product so this is uh this is a little bit more decked out it's got a much higher resolution display 1920 by 1200 display um and it does have intel's um bait rail uh atom processor the z3770 quad core uh with burst up to 2.39 gigahertz 2.4 gigahertz um handled very well in the benchmarks um sort of a midland performer not one of the top end performers um but really you know the the hook here is if you want the full you know windows 8.1 pro experience this isn't um you know this isn't windows rt here this is this is windows full windows 8.1 pro 32-bit um you've got it you've got a two megapixel front-facing camera an 8-megapixel rear facing camera micro sd card slot micro usb 3. this is a little mini computer in an 8-inch form factor now it's it's it's retailed at 499 with the cover 399 without the cover i mean this this seems like it's a phenomenal deal for someone that wants the full windows experience but doesn't wanna uh doesn't want you know a laptop if this is a secondary device if he's on the go he wants to kind of have the windows experience i think this is a great little device yeah i mean you know it depends on on on your metric i mean you certainly can find for example some some cheaper slates out out there on the market certainly in the android space um for well under 300 um but yeah you know lenovo does a nice job uh appointing this device um with just just some nice features uh you mentioned the cover um you know there's there's just a lot of um integration that's you know built into this you also get with it a a suite of software that you're not gonna find on um just any you know android tablet certainly but you know on a lot of tablets you get you get evernote you get microsoft office home and student which is you know uh you know a full office suite it's it's not it's not cheap and a few other odds and ends that uh lenovo bundles in which you might determine as bloatware or not um and so yeah the the quick shot tablet cover the the the bundle software it's it's a good setup all in all and um we liked it we uh we would recommend it um you know it's it's it's a choice out there it's it's not for everybody it's a little bit more of a premium slate again 1920x1200 display it's gorgeous if if that's important to you having that extra high resolution display capability then then this is a good tablet to look at now in comparison to the dell venue 8 uh 8 pro which came out a couple months ago i know this was a big holiday item i know a lot of people that bought this it the the dell is cheaper but how does it compare as far as performance and everyday use go to uh to the lenovo yeah it's it's right there i mean these are neck and neck they're built they're built on the same platform um you're really you're really looking at a situation where the dell venue 8 pro is is just built more modestly it has a lower res display 1280 by 1280x800 display for example um you know it's it's just set up a little bit more mainstream um and and again the lenovo tablet is um you know more focused towards a higher end user high resolution display um it's got it's got some bundled software on there the office apps and all that good stuff and so it just again it's targeted a different user again the dell 5 megapixel rear facing camera versus the 8 megapixel rear facing camera in the lenovo so a little bit higher end device on lenovo side um you know you can compare them but they're sort of they're going after different markets um if you're if you're not so concerned about uh getting all those pixels on an eight-inch screen then uh you know the the dell offers a really good value i mean you're talking about a 300 slate in the pro version with full windows 8 8.1 and then there's actually an android 4.2 version the dell venue 8 for like 179 you can find them as as cheap as that so good stuff all built on intel atom uh core technology uh interesting um interesting to see that you know uh intel is now making a you know significant dent in the in the tablet space yeah yeah it's unbelievable finally right it took them long enough now let's switch gears to something else right now mechanical keyboards i'm a big fan of mechanical keyboards a lot of my buddies that are gamers love them uh and marco you're going to talk about something cool here the dos keyboard 4 4 pro this is a mechanical keyboard it's it's a beautiful looking keyboard uh tell us a little bit about it sure yeah i i have been a long time proponent of mechanical keyboards you know i was writing about switch types uh you know way back in 09 before they went mainstream excuse me have a little cold here and you know i've been a fan forever they're they're just they're simply better products than the crappy keyboards that come with most systems the mechanical key switches they're more consistent they're more reliable they'll last much longer you know millions of keystrokes you can keep one of these keyboard mechanical keyboards forever and now this new dos keyboard 4 pro there's also an ultimate version is an update to the very popular dos keyboard the the previous gen had a very similar shape with that angular top but the the top cover of the keyboard was a shiny plastic this new model does away with that plastic for an anodized aluminum top it also adds multimedia function keys at the top in addition to an integrated usb 3 hub so we looked at the pro version with cherry mx blue switches the mx blue switches are clicky switches there's also an mx brown version that's a tactile switch but it is not clicky if anybody says a cherry brown keyboard is clicky don't read the rest of the review they're an idiot it's not clicky so the the dos 4 it's it's really a nice all-around keyboard for somebody looking to get into mechanical and doesn't want a plain cheap model like say like rosewill um has basic cherry mx blue keyboards you can get for under 100 bucks there the key switches are the same you'll get a similar feel for the key switches but you don't have any multimedia features you don't have any any metal in the design so the price is going to go you don't have the usb hub so the dos is not cheap the blue the cherry mx blue version is 169 bucks the cherry mx brown version i believe is like 174 just a couple of dollars more um but with this with this keyboard you get a device that will last you through multiple pc upgrades it's never going to wear out you have laser etched keycaps now that's like second from the best i prefer pbt keycaps because they don't get that shiny plastic look but these laser etched caps the letters will never well you really have to beat on it to wear off these leathers you're not likely to wear them off they might get a little shiny but you'll be able to read the keyboard forever the aluminum top is going to look great you know for a long time the integrated usb 3 hub is awesome having multimedia keys is a definite nice plus and das has been doing uh high-end mechanicals for a long time so you know you can trust the build quality and trust that the company is going to be around for a while we we really like this model we gave it a recommendation and if you're considering mechanical keyboards i know there's going to be tons of you watching this going 169 bucks for a keyboard are you crazy i can get a dell for five bucks yeah you can live though yeah exactly everybody that i've talked into trying almost everybody that i've talked into trying a mechanical keyboard within days you you understand why it's a superior product and not because i'm such a big proponent i wanted to talk about this keyboard and just wanted to get the uh the word out on mechanicals in general the dos is really nice mechanicals in general are a great upgrade in my opinion i think mechanical keyboards have made like a big comeback amongst gamers and and pc enthusiasts but if you do heavy word processing and typing i wouldn't go any i wouldn't do anything else other than a mechanical keyboard on the desktop i mean i agree so i wrote an article in 09 called mechanical keyboards demystified again before they went mainstream all right i talked about all this all the switch types available at the time and showed a bunch of keyboards on video just so people could hear them you know one of the real subtleties of a mechanical keyboard especially if you go with a cherry mx blue or a cherry mx brown so lots of the gamers like the linear switches the the cherry blacks or the cherry reds i personally don't like the linear switch because there's really there's no tactile bump there's nothing that tells your finger that switch just actuated you need to get used to it with the clickies or with the tactiles like the browns once you get trained to feel that bump so when you hit a key there's a spring inside the switch and it literally just bumps the key so as you're hitting it you feel it actuate you feel the key press and if you can get good and you're not mashing keys and bottoming out constantly you will become a better typist it's it's you literally will become faster at typing on a mechanical than you would on an inconsistent membrane board now there's you know drawbacks obviously price there's noise associated with most mechanicals because one either the switch is clicky or two when you bottom out the key the plastic hits the switch and you hear that little you know that noise like me but overall it's just a far superior product in my opinion yeah i know it's one of those things mark and i totally agree it's one of those things where you know people for so long have been getting these keyboards bundled with their system and you just they don't know what they're missing you're just you're just dealing with what you're given and it's this membrane switch keyboard that yeah it gets the job done if you if you need it um but if you try a mechanical keyboard i have a i have a deck keyboard marco you turned me on to one of those as well i have a deck keyboard it's clicky um and it's backlit and my god i i i fly in the thing all day and if i if i didn't have this you know i would i would my production would be hindered significantly guaranteed so um yeah it's like i don't know how to explain it it's like i don't know it's like having ac in your car when you know when you didn't have it when you were you know in college or whatever and you were driving around the beater and you finally get a new car with ac you can't ever go back yeah it's like hd you can't once you've seen hd or even 4k that plymouth valiant means nothing to you now exactly dave let's uh let's go ahead first into this um you reviewed the gigabyte bricks pro and the intel iris pro these are little mini mini computers i mean what would you call them exactly what is the term form i i know the the next unit of computing as intel called it that they they were really behind this uh they the gigabyte looks really cool to me the intel too uh what can you tell us about these two little boxes yeah intel's knuck as they call it next unit of computing um is something that they uh really sort of a a reference platform that they seated the marketplace with and they sold a bunch of them themselves as well um and uh really it was you know to show you know the sort of features and capability and performance you could get into a tiny you know four to five inch square form factor and um so we took a look at um this is you know now a couple of years later and and we're we're now getting various iterations from manufacturers with the latest gen hardware we took a look at uh the gigabyte brix pro which is based on intel's uh core i7 haswell processor core i7 4770r um which is an integrated intel cpu it has uh a quad core cpu with um integrated intel iris pro graphics so the the graphics core is is an intel iris pro graphics 5200 uh graphics core and you know the first thing you're thinking is integrated intel graphics oh god you know it's not going to have much game and it's really good for for desktop work and that's about it and i would say wrong um because intel finally has some serious chops i'll actually hold this thing up here it is here this is the the brix pro by gigabyte it is built on intel's haswell core i7 4770r with iris pro graphics as you can see in the along the back there you've got uh usb 3 gigabit ethernet hdmi all that good stuff right in the back uh displayport as well and fits in the palm of your hand this thing with intel iris pro graphics actually can play you know pretty much any current directx 11 title on the market today we fired up bioshock infinite uh and it you know was able to handle even at you know fairly good resolution 1920 by 1080p resolution we're talking pretty close to playable frame rates you know 23 frames per second if you if you looked at something like batman which is a little less strenuous so there if you dial back the um the image quality a little bit you'd get you know into that 30 to 40 frames per second range fired up batman arkham origins and average frame rate at 1080p is in the 40s now again high quality anti-aliasing enabled this is something that intel hasn't been able to do before uh with their integrity graphics solution um so you know now you've got from from intel uh in this in this technology you've got really a situation where they're competing with low end discrete graphics um and actually we're able to edge out in a couple of spots amd integrated graphics we actually again um you know a beat it versus um amd's kaveri chip and in bioshock infinite intel beat em versus the integrated uh amd a8 the the latest with their graphics core next uh technology uh radeon r7 core in uh the amd a8 7600 that we tested so it was interesting to see intel finally you know bringing it around to where integrated graphics um you know are um are the real deal you can you actually do a little bit of gaming on them certainly you've got to you know temper those settings a little bit but 1080p is doable even in titles like batman dx11 titles like batman arkham origins so um really have to pat intel on the back for that gigabyte put together a really nice little box here the downside and i'll have to throw this out there is that it's loud there's a um there's a fairly uh high-speed um barrel fan in this sucker and when you start gaming it gets a little whiny unfortunately i really think you know honestly this could use another couple of inches one way or the other and a little bit larger sink and fan in there um and you probably would have got uh you know got the acoustic signature down a little bit but it's a lot of performance in a little box that's for sure yeah and i'm really surprised by the results of that until uh the graphics chip on that thing yeah i mean you know it's it's it's a case where intel clearly this is the fastest core in graphics core that intel's put put out in the market uh to date um their drivers are much better i didn't see any weird anomalies graphical anomalies or anything like that it handled pretty much any title i threw against it um i think you'll have a situation probably this is my guess where you'll have corner cases where there might be some older titles that intel hasn't checked out and you know tune their drivers on and stuff like that but on the latest sort of mainstream stuff that folks are playing certainly it's going to be very powerful in multimedia whether you're doing video you know transcode or what have you working with video this is a nice little machine for that you know again if you don't mind a little bit of noise it does spin up when it gets when you're working it hard other than that it's it's you know when you're like on the desktop and just general workload it's it's very quiet it's just that when you when you get on that graphic score you know that that fan kicks in so um a little uh little knock on gigabyte for that one but um you know maybe they'll maybe they'll work on that a little bit in future iterations very cool uh for me like like a laptop a a box like that for a skype machine would be perfect yeah i'm actually i actually have four full towers sitting here you know heating up this room so something like that would be absolutely perfect you just stack them and leave them on the side it definitely would have the juice it comes with uh this comes with a 128 gig mcada ssd on board it does have room for a two and a half inch ssd if you want to plug that in there you know internally get a little bit more storage so yeah it's cool it's um it's like it's a neat little machine it's amazing you know again in the palm of your hand the kind of horsepower you can get these days very cool hey marco i'm gonna i'm gonna shoot this to you uh you're gonna talk about a couple contests and possibly something coming up yeah so we we just wrapped up a contest last week where we gave away a tablet a day um for for new viewers i want to make sure that you know that we give this kind of stuff away all the time so we gave away five evga tegra note 7 tablets powered by nvidia's tegra 4 soc um we just randomly selected winners from our commenting system on the site gave away five of those babies last week and uh because you know readers that don't win typically are kind of bummed when they when they don't make out with some new hardware we try to keep the contest flowing and we are we're not ready to disclose all of the details yet but the next giveaway is going to be a small form factor liquid cooled rig i'm using mini itx stuff i'm going to build it on video it is going to be plenty capable of gaming uh we're going to partner with um somebody who makes really nice nice graphics cards and a really cool mini itx liquid cooled case perhaps you can figure it out perhaps not but keep coming by the site and we will uh disclose the details soon i wish i could win but i can't i can't play along but um by just talking with us but just talking just being here makes me a winner guys and i'm very excited that you guys selected me to fill in for is because there's no replacing is eyes is unbelievable is irreplaceable but but you're doing a pretty darn good job there i'm hanging on i'm trying uh we're at the end of the show but dave why don't you tell us where people get more information about hot hardware and two and a half geeks uh your facebook your twitter your google plus which is a little little tricky to remember right is plus.google.com plus hot hardware right there you go yeah google likes to mix it up and um they don't keep it simple unfortunately but yes you can find us on google plus you can follow us on twitter we are twitter.com hot hardware go figure facebook.com hot hardware as well and youtube hot hardware vids because you know we're putting video up there go figure but yeah we're all around the web come find us uh stop by the site check out our latest sweepstakes where you could well you could win some pretty hot gear and um and and also see previous episodes of two and a half geeks would love to have you absolutely uh marco anything to uh end the show with sure i'll actually mention this site's url which is hot hardware.com that's where all of the good stuff is published we try to straddle the line tons of technical detail but anybody can read it and figure out if a piece of hardware is cool and that's about it i actually i use the website i use the website i i use the website like i said at the beginning of the show and uh something that i did was after i read the articles i read the comments because you guys have like legitimately really good comments on the site you know that actually that's we've been trying to cultivate that for a while now so yeah it's it's we get some good discussion going as well live people actually read us can you go figure that hey um i i'll i'll tease a little something for for the future here this is the samsung galaxy s5 it is now in the lab and soon to be reviewed within a week or so very good very cool and that wraps it up for today guys uh next week guys we'll be back and i'll be uh i'll be the the mystical voice that the guys only hear whenever i say hey is fix your audio or dave batman nobody else hears me but now you guys did so we'll see y'all next time on two and a half geeks\n"