XBox 360 PC Wireless Gaming Receiver

The Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows lets you take your quality, wireless gaming experiences that you enjoy on your console and experience them on your Windows gaming platform.

Product Features

• Works with current and futuer Xbox 360 wireless accessories.
  
• Connects to a powered USB 2.0 port on a computer
  
• Lets you use up to four wireless controllers and four wireless headsets together with one wireless gaming receiver
  
• Uses intgrated 2.4Gigahertz (GHz) High-performance wireless technology that lets you operate a wireless device from up to 30 feet away

Price: Click here to buy

The Kinect You Need to Know

Basic principle: to construct a peripheral that would allow users to control a video game using nothing but an advanced motion-detecting camera.

One team was comprised of Microsoft employees, the other, we're told, was run by Hidden Path, a studio made up of many former Microsoft employees (and who would go on to release the excellent Defense Grid).

These guys weren't working with "exotic gyroscopic and accelerometer-based controller prototypes". They were working on a proto-Kinect.

The internal team was looking at technology developed by 3DV, a company Microsoft would in 2009 actually purchase, the other tech from PrimeSense, who would eventually go on to provide the brains behind Kinect. But that's now.

Back then, the technologies went head-to-head, their teams given a brief to present a selection of tech demos to be presented to Moore, who would make the ultimate decision whether to show them at E3 2007 or not.

Some of the demos revealed to Kotaku included "air drumming", a game where you hit balls (similar to one of Kinect's earliest demonstrations), painting, basketball shooting, a lightsaber fighting game and a number of interface ideas and visualisation tricks, like a Minority Report-type menu system and a tool that could make the user look like they were in an iPod commercial.

Some demos performed well (the Minority Report stuff), others not so well (the drumming), but one concept in particular really stole the show. It came from the 3DV team, and had a working title of "Ghost Grid", because it was able to generate a 3D "mesh" of everything the camera could see and incorporate it into a virtual environment, with your real-world actions influencing the on-screen world via a modelled physics system.

Rendering the player as a "ghost" (described as being similar in on-screen appearance to the silhouette in Punch-Out, only capturing the outline of the actual player), this meant that the player could interact with virtual objects and environments in a manner that current Kinect hardware can only dream of.

To give you an idea of how this worked, imagine Kinect's ball-whacking demo. Only, instead of reacting to a single type of object flying at you along a pre-determined path, you could properly interact with a whole range of items at varying speeds and locations. Something pushed slowly would roll/move away slowly. A brick wall built around the player could be smashed down brick by brick. You could even "pick up" a virtual item, and either use it or throw it away, the speed at which you flung it being recreated in the game world.

This demo would work with a single player or, if somebody else joined in, would work just as well with two, the prototype hardware was - unlike the "neutered" Kinect shipping later this year - able to easily handle the physics of two players interacting with the game world.

While impressive, our sources tell us that though it was an amazing experience to take part in, it did not demo well for the bystander. Which considering it was vying for a chance to be shown off at a trade show with the world's media watching was a problem. With the remaining demo concepts all also plagued by technical problems (or the fact they just turned out a bit rubbish), it was decided that for 2007 the technology simply wasn't quite there, and so proto-Kinect was not shown off.

Peter Moore left the company shortly after E3 2007, and upon his leaving, the projects drifted apart as well, with Mattrick having to issue a "call to arms" to get things back on track once he'd taken over from Moore, a process that would eventually lead to Project Natal and the Kinect many of you are putting through its paces today.

We can only wonder, then, what would have happened had Moore stuck around a bit longer and these teams continued their research. Would Kinect have been out sooner, beating Sony's PlayStation Move to market?

It's also interesting to consider just what Kinect could have been capable of had internal hardware not been sacrificed for cost; a beefier Kinect may have been more expensive, but if it could have pulled off the kind of interactivity found in "Ghost Grid", would that have been worth it?

We've checked with Microsoft to see if they can provide any more details on these early prototypes, and will update if we hear back. Likewise, we reached out to Peter Moore for further information, but was told he could "not comment on non-public events that occurred while I was at Microsoft".

Via Gizmodo

Playseat Evolution Gaming Seat (Black with Silver)

The Playseat Evolution Gaming Chair places you behind the wheel of your favorite virtual race cars! Compatible with PCs, Playstation 2, Plastation 3, Xbox, Xbox 360, and Wii gaming consoles, the Evolution Gaming Chair is so much more than a standard gaming seat!
It features a high quality vinyl upholstered seat that provides the look and feel of real leather. It can also be used with most console and PC steering wheel and pedal sets on the market.

Product Features

• Compatible with PCs and the Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Xbox, Xbox 360, and Wii gaming consoles
• Can be used with most console and PC steering wheel and pedal sets on the market
• High quality vinyl upholstered seat provides the look and feel of real leather
• Features a patented folding design with a fully adjustable steel framework
• Bears the Playseat logo in the headrest and side panels

With its completely renewed design and double-stitched vinyl cover, the Evolution Gaming Seat from Playseats puts you smack dab in the middle of your favorite racing game. The seat works with almost all racing peripherals on the market and every game console, including the Xbox 360, GameCube, PlayStation2, PCs, and more. More importantly, the chair is notably comfortable while delivering the most realistic racing simulation around.

Enjoy the ultimate race gaming experience with Playseats.

Details include a reinforced steel tubular construction that adds stability and eliminates excess wobble, a non-flammable seat material, and an easy-to-assemble design. Just install a game steering wheel, such as the latest Logitech model, on the middle pole and attach a couple of pedals along the bottom (all sold separately). The setup is also easily adaptable, with multiple adjustment knobs letting you move the wheel and pedals closer or farther, depending on your height. Appropriate for ages 8 and older, the Evolution seat is the perfect accessory for gamers who want to boost their lap times in style.

Once assembled, it measures 52.1 x 19.7 x 38.6 inches (L x H x W). It's recommended for ages 8 years and older.

The Evolution also features a fully adjustable framework for easy driving position adjustment. When youre done playing, the Evolution folds into a compact unit for easy storage. Enjoy an authentic virtual gaming experience with the Playseat Evolution Gaming Chair!

Price: $399.99 Click here to buy

How to Build Your Ultimate Gaming PC, Step by Step

How do you know when it’s time to replace your gaming rig? When you’ve turned down all of the game settings to minimum and you still have to play at 1024x768. Or you’ve just completed the Steam hardware survey and Valve rejects your score because it’ll drag down the curve. Of course, if you’re asking the question in the first place....

In specting this year’s gaming build, we decided to restrict ourselves to a budget of approximately $1,400. This would provide a nice challenge, but would still give us enough cash to build a powerful and feature-filled machine. If you’ve ever tried to squeeze high-end performance into this price point, you already know that the road to our final configuration wasn’t clear, obvious, or easy.

The truth is that there are many ways to skin a Tribble, and there is no single right config for everyone. To give you some insight into how we arrived at our final destination, we’re going to walk you through our decision-making process.

Initially, we decided the foundation for our configuration should be an LGA1366 board with a Core i7-930. We reasoned this would give us the ability to run a quad-core now, and then upgrade to a hexa-core in the future.When we pondered this a little more, however, we reasoned that maybe the LGA1366/i7-930 route wasn’t the best choice for a balanced gaming system. The CPU costs nearly $300, and you have to pay for a third DIMM to keep its tri-channel memory stoked. Furthermore, LGA1366 boards tend to cost $50 to $100 more than LGA1156 mobos. The final blow? As much as we love six-core computing, it’s not essential for gaming. Not yet, at least.

With this in mind, we shifted our focus toward Intel’s LGA1156 platform, which permits a much wider range of processor choices that scale all the way down to $113 Core i3 CPUs. Our first inclination was Intel’s 2.93GHz Core i7-870 chip. Recent price cuts from $562 to $294 make this powerful quad-core with Hyper-Threading mighty appealing. In raw performance it actually comes surprisingly close to Intel’s original Extreme Edition chip, which sold for $999.

Cooler Master's special edition HAF 922 is a great DIY case, and it looks nice, too.

The more we considered the possibilities, however, the more we started to wonder: Given the gaming orientation of this rig, did we really need to pay for Hyper-Threading? Probably not. If you look at any survey of gaming hardware, the vast majority of users are still happily humming along with dual-cores. (We actually considered making this rig a dual-core at one point, but hey, even gamers like to occasionally transcode videos.)

In the end, we picked Intel’s new 2.8GHz Core i5-760. AT $205, the chip gives us four cores but lacks Hyper-Threading. We’re going to pull extra value out of the CPU by overclocking the crap out of it.

Trimming the hundred bucks from our CPU cost and going with LGA1156, gave us more money to play with, which allowed us to do something we’ve never done in a budget gaming rig: add an SSD.

Why SSD? If you haven’t kept up with current events, the simple answer is that they absolutely kick ass. System builders and upgraders who make the leap are shocked at the speedy boot times, and SSDs are ideal for gaming because they shorten level load times to near-zero.

Corsair's Force F60 gives our rig the responsiveness of an SSD.

Of course, the $1,400 question is: How much SSD can you fit into a budget gaming rig? About 60GB. That’s what we got with Corsair’s Force F60 and it only set us back $160. The drive uses the much-beloved SandForce controller, which enables performance that pretty much tops out the SATA 3Gb/s interface. The SSD isn’t the only storage in the system, of course—we also include a 1TB Seagate 7200.12. It’s pretty fast itself, and is a perfect storage drive.As always, we double-checked our decision. Did SSD really make sense? After all, couldn’t we take that $160 from the SSD and put it toward the fattest GPU possible? Well… yes and no. A balanced system isn’t about one single component. We could have, say, poured a ton of the budget into the CPU or GPU. But that would have been a bit like putting a big-block motor into a Miata.

In the end, the GeForce GTX 470 fits our needs well. At $289 before a $20 mail-in rebate, Asus’s ENGTX470 is one hell of a deal. Why not a single GTX 460 1GB? As fantastic as that card is for the money, we’re getting a lot more videocard for just $50 more. We also considered two GTX 460s in SLI but that would have meant spending almost a third of our budget on graphics alone.

That doesn’t mean we weren’t biting our lips over our decisions. For example, we could have actually saved coinage by selecting the black Cooler Master HAF 922 and the bundled 600-watt PSU. On the street, this power supply sells for $160, but it lacks the juice to run SLI’d GTX 470 parts. In fact, it lacks the ability to even run SLI’d GTX 460 components. Better to pay for a quality PSU like Corsair’s TX750. This gets you approved SLI support for GTX 460 and GTX 470 cards.

Yes, we opted to pay more for a red case. That might seem a little frivolous after all our deliberating over parts. At the end of the day though, we decided that even though we were building a budget box, we still wanted a little panache. Something to let fellow gamers know that we didn’t just pick the lowest-price box and click “add to cart.” Call us reckless and irresponsible, but we went crazy and splurged $50 on the special edition red HAF 922. The case’s two-tone red and black design is a head turner, and it’s also a gem of a case to build in.

Budget and gaming go together like oil and water but we’re happy with our gaming rig. You get one of the most powerful DirectX 11 cards out today, an upgrade path that supports SLI (with a PSU to run it), and the responsiveness of a SandForce-based SSD.

Cooler Master's Hyper 212+ has long been a Maximum PC favorite for giving us cooling performance that rivals heatsinks twice its price. Even though our Core i5-760 CPU came with a cooler, we’re ditching it for the Hyper 212+ so we can achieve higher stable overclocks.

The Corsair TX750 can be easily found for less than $100 and is rated by Nvidia to run two GTX 470 cards in SLI. That gives us a solid upgrade path for a second GPU when prices drop. We oriented the TX750 so that its bottom-mounted fan sucks air in and vents it directly out the back.

Some P55 boards in multi-card mode are known to have issues with SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0, but Asus’s P7P55D-E Pro should be less problematic. That’s because the P7P55D-E Pro uses a chip to help alleviate congestion in the P55 chipset.

Tucked into the hard drive tray is Corsair’s F60, a SandForce-based SSD that makes you smile at drive access times.

The special-edition red Cooler Master HAF 922 case was an extra expense, but we decided that its striking two-tone look and spacious interior made it worth the stretch.

MSI GT663 Gaming Notebook

MSI has added another gaming notebook to their range with the launch of the MSI GT663, and it features a 15.6 inch Full HD LED backlit display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels.

Other specifications on the MSI GT663 include, an Intel Core i7 processor, up to 12GB of DDR3 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M graphics card with 1.5GB of video RAM.

There is also a DVD super multi/-Blu-ray combo drive, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0, eSATA, HDMI, and a HD web camera that can capture HD video in 720p.

There are no details on pricing or availability as yet.

via TPU