Gadgetory

today's episode of my mini video blog is actually going to be something I've never done before this is a sneak preview of an upcoming NCIX PC newsletter so our newsletter goes out to all of our subscribers and it's an official NCIX communication and this particular one is going to be themed around starcraft 2 as well as the GTX 460 so I've actually got a GTX 460 with me today this is MSI's g-force GTX 460 1-gig cyclone OC card that means it has an aftermarket cooler it is factory overclocked and it's a 460 with 1 gig of video memory and I just wanted to talk a little bit about Starcraft 2 in general so this article here actually if you're not subscribed to the MC ixi newsletter and if you're not getting the PC newsletter there's about once or twice a month you should definitely subscribe if you go to NCIX and you go to wow it's been so long oh yeah newsletters up at the top then you can actually subscribe to our weekly weekly specials and all of our other newsletters so make sure you do that anyway so this is going to be an upcoming PC newsletter as a bit of a joke we talk about the broodwar system specifications required by Blizzard versus the wings of Liberty recommended specs and you know if you're not if you haven't upgraded your PC since broodwar you're probably going to be looking at a bit of an upgrade here and we just talked a little bit about what the recommended configurations are for Starcraft 2 so but really that's the point of this video is what are the recommended configurations for Starcraft 2 well there's two levels from Blizzard and one of them is a fairly basic PC basically the graphics card they recommend is about 5 plus years old and they're saying that's what it takes to run the game and then they have kind of a recommended level and we've positioned a couple different pcs around there minimum spec as well as their recommended spec but really if you want to get the most out of it I turn to my friends at Hardware Canucks because they did a terrific GPU roundup you can see we've actually featured that here because it is a third-party site that really just took a whole bunch of cards from ATI as well as Nvidia put through the ringer on Starcraft 2 and they came up with a recommendation that makes a lot of sense and we're seeing echoed all over the place the GeForce GTX 460 it offers the best price to performance balance it has good power consumption if you get it with a good aftermarket cooler it's going to be very very quiet and it just kills in Starcraft 2 because even though Starcraft 2 will run on a five-year-old card in order to get the most out of it play an HD resolution turn up anti-aliasing you will need a GeForce GPU at this time to enable anti-aliasing by the way but you're going to want a fairly beefy graphics card in order to actually run it at full strength so here you can see the best i5 3200 sli is the recommended config it has a GTX 460 in it and then if you click here when you get this newsletter it'll actually take you to the Starcraft 2 GPU performance comparison that they do on hardware connects so this actually leads us to our recommendation the GTX 460 1 gig and and there's another piece of news that's pretty cool is that if you're like me and you missed out on the beta because I would have loved to do some testing on Starcraft 2 before release but I didn't have a chance if you buy a GTX 460 after the Starcraft launch you actually get a coupon to try Starcraft 2 for 7 hours with multiplayer so it'll have full support for the game for 7 hours so you can actually find out if you like it find out how well it runs on your new geforce card and then buy the game if you're not entirely sure thanks for checking out my video blog and don't forget to subscribe to the NCIX newsletter as well as to my Linus tech tips video blog