Gadgetory

hey ron i'm steve from gamers nexus net and we're doing a recap of this week's news in the hardware and technology industries the biggest news starting off the top of the show is the WD acquisition of sandisk for 19 billion dollars making this one of the largest tech industry purchases in recent history but there are a couple of other big ones that we'll talk about in a moment so WD the hard drive manufacturer or western digital as you all know has had a long-standing foothold in their WD blues WD green Reds all those drives they've been in the hard drive sector for quite a while but they've attempted to enter the SSD and flash space with minimal success this purchase of sandisk which is an established and pretty well functioning SSD and flash device manufacturer the purchase should quoting western digital double the addressable market size by WDS current group so that's quite a big business growth opportunity for them and this follows on with WDS somewhat recent purchase of hgst which is a hitachi group hitachi GST it was called that purchase of hitachi's GST group allowed WD to acquire some of the highest rated drives when it comes to endurance this is something that hgst has always been good at so big news for the storage and flash industry other recent acquisitions in this industry would include the avago Seagate acquisition of lsi and sandforce other acquisitions include toshiba's by of ocz which was effectively a dead company and was resurrected by Toshiba granting the flash manufacturer toshiba actually makes its own and its own venture through which it can dispense storage devices and SSDs and things like that in the world of computer graphics the DirectX 12 update as everyone knows at this point has been long spoken about as potentially Herald in an era where tandem graphics solutions are possible meaning you could pair an AMD and an Nvidia device together in a single system for effectively an SLI or crossfire equivalent setup now this is made possible by the shift to Direct X 12 the new API dx11 does not allow this type of processing but the x12 theoretically does that doesn't however mean that it'll just work it still requires driver support developers support things like that to truly get the most out of such a technology but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't test it either so a non-tech just posted their tests using ashes of singularities Direct X 12 benchmark to approve the AFR or alternate frame rendering potential of tandem GPUs from two different GPU manufacturers the test showed somewhat surprisingly that when pairing and r9 fury X with an nvidia gtx 980 TI the performance delta was actually to the tune of fifty-four percent greater than a single gtx 980 I that is definitely measurable and something that's worth testing more in the future as more games come out with DirectX 12 fully enabled so very interesting news there and something worth following more closely as DirectX 12 continues to develop again it's really important to understand that just because DirectX 12 will theoretically support an asymmetrical GPU configuration does not mean you should go out and build something like that intentionally or with purpose if you're falling into that situation sure it's worth it but I wouldn't go by two different GPUs from different manufacturers just because AFR with asymmetrical setup is now theoretically possible and my reasoning for that is because you still require stable driver support and the game developers own optimizations and the engine optimizations all three things of which will likely not take into account the potential use case of asymmetrical GPU setup so there's going to be less optimization for those configurations in theory but it's absolutely worth doing more tests on and we'll be in that boat pretty soon with a couple of other DX 12 games next up is razors OS VR technology which is now shipping at three hundred dollars for the hacker dev kit this osv are set up or open-source virtual reality is as the name indicates an open source solution to virtual reality so all the schematics for the device are available online and you can actually download and three print your own OS vr headset should you like to do that if you have the electrical ability you could also assemble the boards do all the PCBs all that stuff because the schematics are fully available and it's all licensed under the apache two point O license this is available at three hundred dollars and that puts it pretty much around where the oculus rift is supposed to be when it's fully complete and available and that means that they are going to be head-to-head devices but at the end of the day razor has told us in meetings that Oh SVR hopes to differentiate itself by creating an ecosystem as they call it ecosystem of open source software and hardware for developers hackers users and communities to build around another news item this week that we've already covered is NZXT s hue plus which is an RGB LED lighting controller for use in cases or elsewhere and hardware configurations and this includes for sixty dollars for LED strips but you can expand to eight and those connect via magnet or adhesive tape to your enclosure or whatever else you want to attach them to and then plugging into that or being plugged into rather is the actual controller itself which is a 2.5 inch SSD ish form factor the issues there because it is slightly taller in this way then an SSD would be so you will have some restraints when it comes to mounting it say on top of a psu shroud where there might be a low PCIe expansion slot in use still the hue plus we reviewed it's on the channel and we liked it pretty well overall the sixty dollar price point is relatively fair and if you just want to bling out your PC with some LEDs it's worth a consideration check out the video for more information on that the final bit of news comes from logitech logitech just posted its best retail sales growth since 2010 and the company if you haven't been following too closely has had a couple of rough years at least in the gaming market on the gaming side of things Logitech and they'll admit this lost its way a little bit but they've done a very heavy redirection of marketing branding and engineering efforts to produce new headsets like the g 633 line up the g500 400 series mice like the Proteus core and things like that and the company overall is trying to correct its course as it pertains to the gaming audience but there's a lot more to Logitech than that and they just posted their best retail sales at 560 million of quarterly revenue in quarter 2 and the biggest growths were nine percent in North America seven percent in emea and a staggering twenty six percent sales growth in the asia-pacific region that's all for this news roundup we're going to do these weekly along with our new game news segment that was just posted yesterday and let us know what you think in the comments below if you have anything you want to talk about and ask GN or other video segments post that below and I will get to it check out our patreon link in the post roll video it'll be down here great support from all of you guys we've had a couple of new patrons just in the last few days here and as always very excited to see that supports well and we've even opened up a new skype channel for group chat for those of you who are backing us and would like to get in touch with the creators of gamers Nexus talk to some of our staff I have a couple of folks on staff writers and otherwise or very talented and we're all happy that answer your tech and hardware questions so that's all for this time I will see you all next time