By now, it should come as no surprise that the NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 970 memory specifications controversy (or as we call it, MemoryGate) has recently blown up to become one of the hottest topics in the tech community with even a change.org petition for refunds now reaching almost 10,000 supporters.

Despite its popularity however, NVIDIA employees have been relatively quiet over the past month. Although NVIDIA employees responded to customers in their official boards when the issue was first discovered, there has been relatively little communication with customers over NVIDIA’s plan of action to remedy the situation.

Until now. NVIDIA has finally [...]

Over the past few weeks, users across various websites, Reddit, and the official NVIDIA forums have been posting non-stop about a potential flaw in the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. Perceptive users discovered that although the GTX 970 has 4GB of VRAM, when VRAM usage is pushed to beyond 3.5 GB, VRAM bandwidth suddenly takes a pretty serious nosedive.

A screenshot (above) from Lazy Gamer shows users running VRAM benchmarking software on a GeForce GTX 970 and a GeForce GTX 980 side by side. While the GTX 980 VRAM bandwidth is a consistent 178GB/s no matter how much VRAM is used, the GeForce GTX 970 shows VRAM performance dropping from ~150GB/s drops down to a sad, sad [...]

Although Nvidia and AMD had no major GPU announcements here at CES 2015, Nvidia did make a subtle GPU debut with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M GPU. Meeting with several notebook vendors, we spotted new gaming laptops such as MSI’s new GE62 Apache-002 and Gigbayte’s Aorus X5 gaming laptops advertised as using the GeForce GTX 965M. The GeForce GTX 965M has also made an appearance as a configurable option in Sager’s custom laptops on their website.

Since this is a relatively new release, no benchmark results or official specifications have officially been made available however we do know that the GeForce GTX 965M is using a Maxwell GPU with a projected [...]

It looks like the GeForce GTX Titan can no longer claim to be the only single Nvidia GPU carrying 6GB of VRAM any longer. EVGA has recently announced the arrival of a couple new GeForce GTX 780 variants carrying 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM. The 6GB variants will launch with either Nvidia’s reference cooler design (GeForce GTX 780 SC) or EVGA’s own ACX cooler design (GeForce GTX 780 ACX). Like all GeForce GTX 780s, the GPUs come with 2,304 CUDA cores and a 384-bit memory bus however, the new 6GB GeForce GTX 780 SC 6GB with the reference design cooler will come in clocked at 941 MHz core (993MHz boost) while the 6GB GeForce GTX 780 ACX edition will be clocked at 967MHz [...]

It looks like there’s a new super GPU solution in town as Nvidia recently announced the GeForce GTX Titan Z at their annual GPU Developer’s Conference in San Jose. The GeForce GTX Titan Z is a dual GPU solution equipped with 12GB 7Gbps GDDR5 memory, 5760 CUDA cores, and 8 Teraflops of pure processing power. Essentially, it’s like having twin Titans optimized to run with the same clock speed with dynamic power balancing for some supremely amazing graphics processing performance.

Of course with great performance does come great price and the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z will be priced at around $3000 when it launches sometime in April. Nvidia is aiming [...]

It’s been what seems like an eternity since DirectX 11 was released a little over three years ago and it looks like it’s finally time for a major update. According to a new tweet by the official DirectX 12 Twitter account and an announcement on Microsoft’s MSDN blog, Microsoft recently announced that they will be unveiling DirectX 12 at GDC 2014 which will take place on March 17-21 (in roughly two weeks).

“Come learn how future changes to Direct3D will enable next generation games to run faster than ever before!

In this session we will discuss future improvements in Direct3D that will allow developers an unprecedented level of hardware [...]

According to various reports online, Intel may be ahead of schedule with the refresh of their Haswell CPUs and are planning to shift the “Haswell Refresh” desktop CPUs along with the 9 series chipsets to April rather than May, as originally planned.

Around 20 Haswell Refresh processors will be available by April along with the new H97 and Z97 chipsets. Haswell Refresh models will be denoted with a +0020 on the model number compared to the current Haswell processor lineup (for example Intel Core i7 4770’s refresh counterpart is the Intel Core i7 4790) and most processors will come with a clock speed increase of 100MHz [...]

Arriving without any noticeable fanfare, AMD recently launched their new Radeon R7 250X GPU which is expected to come in at a very attractive $99 price tag.

The AMD Radeon R7 250X, which is essentially a rebranded AMD Radeon HD 7770 GHz edition, is expected to fill the gap between the Oland based R7 250 and the new Bonaire based R7 260/R7 260X. As far as specs go, the Radeon R7 250X is quite competitive against the current Radeon R7 series lineup sporting a 1GHz clock speed, 2GB GDDR5 VRAM, 640 stream processors, 40TUs and 16 ROPs.

Manufacturer AMD AMD AMD AMD AMD Model Radeon R7 240 Radeon R7 250 Radeon R7 250X Radeon R7 260 Radeon R7 260X GPU Oland Pro Oland [...]

The trend of Bitcoins becoming widely accepted as a form of currency are quickly becoming reality as another major PC hardware retailer, Scan Computers, from the United Kingdom announced that they’re now accepting Bitcoins as a method of payment. This follows a number of high profile companies such as Overstock.com and TigerDirect who’ve recently began accepting Bitcoins as a method of payment as well.

If you’ve been saving up on those Bitcoins in hopes of one day trading them in for computer hardware, this could be time to start cashing in!

We are happy to officially announce that you can now pay at @scancomputers with [...]