FIFA 10

Creating a new game in an already successful series that lives up to the high expectations created by over a dozen of brilliant games is difficult but EA has managed to do just that.

Last year’s game was quite awesome except for a few minor problems. FIFA 10 has not only fixed these problems, but also thrown in some new features.

Though the game can be played on a keyboard, a gamepad is recommended because it is nearly impossible to pull off skill moves with keyboard controls (without pulling your hair out in frustration at least).

 

Player control has been overhauled and you can control your player with great fluidity thanks to the great 360 degree player control. This is only possible using a good gamepad. Those not having a gamepad can also control the movement using your mouse. The “Be a Pro” and "Manager Mode” are the highlights of this game. In Be a Pro, you control a player through his career, guiding him through the League matches and International matches. The manager mode has got a whole lot of improvements as well which includes a whole new transfer system, scouting reports and a few minor tweaks. Other new features include a Legendary difficulty mode (not for the faint hearted!). All these minor changes make the game a treat.

 

Gameplay has got its share of steroids too. The players now move more realistically. Players can now chest the ball instead of waiting for it to land on their feet. Goalkeepers animations have been improved significantly. Now they can move in a more life like manner rather than a few jumps and dives previous games offered.

The graphics are great, right from the lush green turf to the player models. Player faces are easily recognisable. This game shows that game character models  have come a long way from the cardboard cut outs that barely looked like creatures from the homo sapien race.

One of the annoying features of the game is the menu music which is primarily in Portuguese (or whichever language that is). What we have is a bunch of idiots mouthing totally annoying songs which are nothing less than a torture. The reason I chose to ignore this is that the thick of the action takes place in the stadium. The crowd sounds are excellent. Its great to hear the crowd go wild the moment the ball reaches in the vicinity of the goalpost.

Nothing on this earth is perfect and this game is no exception. Your mates in the Be a pro mode are really dumb. They rely too much on your orders. If you don’t make calls quickly, they just keep running towards the other end unless another equally  retarded teammate comes in their way. If you happen to call for a pass from a short range, your brain dead teammate will pass it so hard that it will bounce off you and land anywhere. The CPU AI is not really great either. Sometimes, you have players who let you get through without putting up a fight and sometimes, they can get so aggressive that keeping possession for more than a few micro seconds will be tougher than scoring goals. These problems, somehow vanish when you are playing on higher difficulty levels.

Overall, this game is great unless you’re playing “Be a Pro” mode on a Easy difficulty level. This game is probably the best football game ever made.

Dell Studio XPS 15

At a time when most laptop manufacturers are turning to netbooks, Dell seems to be the only brand not guilty of flooding the market with dozens of netbooks. Dell’s Studio XPS series brings a breath of fresh air by offering great value for money and a great configuration.

EXTERIOR

Dell studio 15 looks classy to say the least with a glossy lid (which is also a fingerprint magnet) that comes in a variety of colours and a few artist editions (which, by the way, look too eye catching for my liking). It has just 3 USB ports (one of them also doubles up as an eSATA port). It 2 audio out ports and 1 microphone jack. Apart from that, it comes with both D-Sub and HDMI ports, LAN port, eSATA and 4-in-1 card reader. A slot loading DVD writer is also thrown in.

OPENING THE LID

When you open the lid, you are greeted with a glossy, 16:9 15 inch screen. Above the screen, there is a barely noticeable webcam which can be used for face recognition as well. The speakers are present above the keyboard. The multimedia keys are integrated with the function keys.

TURNING IT ON

The notebook comes loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit which, thanks to the fast processor and ample RAM, runs quite smoothly. Being a multimedia notebook, it comes loaded with a copy of Power DVD DX. Watching HD videos on the 1366x768 screen is a good experience as the videos are free of framing issues. The keyboard is good with right sized and well spaced keys. The touchpad supports multi touch gestures like pinch to zoom. Sometimes, while typing, the palm of your hand can rest on the touchpad without you noticing it. When you try to use the touchpad, the zoom function gets activated. This can be quite irritating. Moreover, there is no button to turn off the touchpad. One minor problem with the laptop is that pressing the function keys executes the multimedia functions. To use the F1-F12 keys, they have to be pressed with the Fn key pressed. This can be inconvenient if you use shortcuts like Alt+F4, F5, etc.

UNDER THE HOOD

This notebook comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 2.1 GHz processor, which is enough for most tasks coupled up with 4GB DDR2 RAM. The discreet graphics solution is ATi Mobility Radeon 4570 with 512 MB GDDR3 memory which can run HD videos and run most recent games on low to medium settings at decent resolutions. The roomy 320GB hard drive will be enough for most users. Connectivity options like WLAN 802.11n and Bluetooth are present.

ACCESSORIES

The notebook comes bundled with an AC adapter, a pair of Creative earphones and a laptop backpack. Driver CD and Windows reinstallation CDs are provided too.

VERDICT

This is a good multimedia notebook that offers great value for money.

Need for Speed: Shift

After a long chain of not so good games, NFS franchise is back with a new game Need for Speed: Shift which promises to do a lot of things that a thousand other games have already perfected.

Shift goes back to the ProStreet style organized and totally legal (damn!) racing. Like ProStreet, it’s not clear whether it is a simulation or an arcade game.

There are two game modes, Quick Race and Career. Quick race, lets you race on quite a few tracks with a car of your choice. In career mode, you start off with a tier 1 car and have to play through races to earn stars and upgrade your tier. After the race, you earn up to 3 stars for position, 2 for precision and aggression and 1 for bonus acts which can be anything from performing clean sections to reaching a particular speed. The star rating system adds a level of replay value to the races. Talking about replaying races, there will be moments when you need to replay 10 lap races all over again just because you hit that @#$%*^ wall just near the end of the race. The opponents are not very polite either as they don’t hesitate to slam you into walls or grind you off the track. The drift mode is a tad difficult for average gamers.

Car modification is not very different from previous games. Applying performance upgrades like new engine and transmission not only makes your car quicker, but also changes the engine sound which is a nice touch. Menu music (by the way, it’s a sin to call it music) starts getting on your nerves as soon as you hear it. Apart from that, morphing vinyls is so time consuming that you will be better off without vinyls altogether.

Graphics are not eye popping but they aren’t too bad either. It’s nice to see the environments blur when you are driving your car at 150 miles per hour. You can almost smell the asphalt in the heat of an intense race.

As I said, this game is neither a simulation, nor arcade so it won’t satisfy fans of any of these but casual gamers might like this game provided they can handle the steep learning curve.

Rating: 7.5/10

ATi Radeon HD 4790 vs Nvidia GeForce GTX 275

The battle between ATi and Nvidia seems to be getting fiercer everyday and each one of them is trying to gain the upper hand be releasing new, faster and better GPUs every now and then. Today, nvidia has released GTX 275 which is a lower variant of GTX 285 and ATi has thrown in HD 4890 which is a slightly faster HD 4870. Both are based on the same 55nm fabrication process and not 40nm and both are similarly priced.

HD 4890

4890 is slightly higher clocked than 4870 to start with. It also has 1 GB GDDR5 memory as opposed to 4870’s 512MB (though we did see some manufacturers releasing 1GB variants). Power consumption under full stress is about 30W higher than the 4870.

GTX 275

It is clocked slightly slower than GTX285, has 896 MB 448-bit memory. It needs two 6-pin power connectors. The temperature can be anywhere between 45 degrees in idle mode and about 80 degrees under full load.

Far Cry 2

Clear victory for team green.

Call of Duty : World at War

4890 leads up to 1929x1200 but both cards show equal performance at 2560x1600.

Crysis Warhead

Victory for Nvidia Here

Verdict

At nearly the same price and performance, the choice is pretty much yours. Mind you, none of them offers anything revolutionary compared to their predecessors. So a 4870 or GTX 260 SP216 will do just fine with even lower prices. ATi has an advantage of being DirectX 10.1 capable so expect a performance increase in compatible games.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

  We all love really fast graphics cards don't we? After launching two dual GPU cards (7950GX2 and 9800GX2), which were both pretty ill fated, Nvidia is brave enough to have another go! ATi was much more successful with their dual GPU cards (HD 3870 X2 and HD 4870 X2). Let's see if Nvidia is third time (un)lucky...

The Card

You can say that GTX295 is basically two GTX 280s glued together but wait there's more. GTX 295 has the core of GTX 280 and amount of memory and memory speed of GTX 260. GTX 295 is built of the 55nm fabrication process and has 480 shader processors. GDDR3 Memory is used in the card just because the chipset doesn't support GDDR5 memory. For a GTX 295 in your system, you need to have at least 700W PSU and if you want to go for two of then, then you will have to have a 1000W PSU.

Power Consumption

Our test system  consumed about 220W in idle and with full GPU stress, it draws about 420W. For a quad GPU set up, add another 300W to that. Sorry mother nature, crysis is the first priority. Caution : Get a quad GPU solution only if you don't mind environmentalists harassing you and a big dent in your pocket.

Test System

We used the following components                                  Motherboard : Asus x58 Rampage II extreme                Processor : Core i7 965 3.7GHz                                        Memory : 3x1GB DDR3 1800MHz                                               OS : Windows Vista 32 Bit SP1

 

Far Cry 2

As you see, GTX 295 shows quite some power by thumping HD 4870 X2.

Call of Duty 5

Scaling issues here, nvidia is has not been able to optimize their drivers to make use of the pull potential of two GTX 295 in quad SLi. Crossfire X fails miserably here. ATi has got a lot of driver issues to fix.

Crysis Warhead

At 2560x1600, all cards run out of memory which spoils the show. The game doesn't quite scale well with multiple GPUs. Again, two 4870 X2 are rendering with only two GPUs instead of four.

Verdict

GTX 295 is a great product it is definitely worth considering. Quad GPUs don't quite scale well with some games but if you've got a cabinet with good ventilation and a huge pocket, then you can go for if for bragging rights. 4870 X2 is still a good product to buy if you are an ATi fan.

AMD Phenom II X4

After being thrashed by Intel ever since the introduction of their Core 2 Duo lineup in 2006, AMD was never able to get back on its feet. The infamous TLB bug gave the Phenom nightmares. Things started to improve with the B3 revision of Phenom. But the top end AMD processors still competed with Intel's mid range processors. Now, finally, AMD has released the Phenom II 45nm based processors. Along with Phenom II, AMD has launched its codename "Dragon" platforn, the successor to the Spider platform, which basically is a combination of an AMD chipset and processor and a ATi graphics card.

The Processors

Two new processors released under the Phenom II lineup are Phenom II X4 920 and Phenom II X4 940 which clock at 2.8 and 3.0 GHz respectively. They have 128 KB and 512 KB L1 and L2 cache respectively for each core and 6 MB L3 cache shared between all the cores.

Compatibility

The new Phenom II processors use socket AM3 which has 938 pins as opposed to 940 of socket AM2+. Wait! don't throw away your old AM2+ based motherboard yet! Unlike Intel's core i7, Phenom II is backward compatible with AM2+ socket. But AM2+ processors can't be used in AM3 based boards. The two extra pins in the former makes it impossible for you to pop a AM2+ processor in AM3 board. The first AM3 chipset, AMD 790 is yet to be released. Why? Because AM2+ boards don't support DDR3 memory. That's the reason you can't plug in an AM2+ processor in an AM3 board because of the lack of DDR3 memory controller.

Queen's CPU Test

At stock speed, QX9770 takes the cake because of large L2 cache and 1600MHz FSB. Overclocking X4 940 to 3.8GHz instantly shows a jump in scores.

Memory Test

Here, core i7 obviously wins due to DDR3 memory. We tested Phenom II with DDR2 memory because AMD 790 chipset is not released yet.

3DMark Vantage CPU Test

 

Here, Core i7 sails ahead of the phenom II.

Verdict

Phenom II takes on Core i7 valiantly and does well too. It is a great product and has plenty of headroom for overclocking. Don't be fooled by the numbers though, the AMD 790 chipset will definitely improve things for AMD and maybe, the X4 940 will surpass even Core i7 920.