PCWorld June 2016

NVIDIA’S LONG-AWAITEd GeForce GTX 1080 is real (geforce.com/hardware/10series/geforce-gtx-1080) and it’s spectacular—at least on paper. If you missed the big reveal, here are the 10 things you need to know about Nvidia’s ferocious, cutting-edge GeForce GTX 1080 and the just-as-impressive GeForce GTX 1070. 1. Ludicrous speed The most important thing to know: This thing is fast. Ridonkulously fast. “Faster than dual GeForce GTX 980s in SLI” fast, which handily beats Nvidia’s flagship Titan X (go.pcworld.com/ titanxreview), the most potent single- GPU graphics card ever released. During a demo, the new Doom topped out at roughly 200 frames per second at 1080p resolution, with all the graphics settings cranked. As I said in my initial coverage: Hot damn. 2. Ludicrous speed redux Remember how I said the Titan X is the most potent single GPU ever…

MICROSOFT SAYS THAT 300 million devices now run Windows 10. And if yours isn’t among them, time is running out. Recently, Microsoft began showing potential customers of Windows 10 the carrot as well as the stick, touting Windows 10’s success but also warning that the free upgrade offer would expire in a couple of months. If consumers don’t upgrade their PCs from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 by July 29, Microsoft will charge $119 for a copy of Windows 10 Home when they eventually do. First, however, Microsoft demonstrated the extent to which Windows 10 had already progressed. Windows 10 is now on 300 million active devices, according to Microsoft; Microsoft said in its April earnings call that Windows 10 was on 270 million devices, and in January executives said it was…

AMAZON IS TURNING the e-reader into a luxury item with the new Kindle Oasis (go.pcworld.com/oasispreorder). Starting at $280, the Kindle Oasis is Amazon’s most expensive e-reader since the Kindle DX (go.pcworld.com/kindledxrev) from 2010. Amazon says its mission with Kindle is to “make the device disappear so you can lose yourself in an author’s story,” and in this case, that means making the device more book-like. To wit: One side of the Kindle Oasis sports an extra-wide, extra-thick bezel, which seems like a nod to the spine of a paper book. Users can hold it in either hand, and the screen will flip around accordingly. Amazon is also including a leather cover with the Oasis. Aside from just making the package look classier, the cover includes its own battery, which combines with the e-reader…

ASROCK, THE HONEY badger of motherboard makers, flagrantly outed Intel’s most anticipated enthusiast chip of the year: a 10-core Core i7 CPU. Sure, we’ve seen dribs and drabs of leaks for months, including Intel’s own accidental disclosure (go.pcworld.com/intelleaks) of the Core i7-6950X recently, but no vendors had confirmed the actual core count until now. “The most unmissable part of Intel Broadwell-E is the flagship Core i7-6950X, which will be the first deca-core processor for the commercial market,” ASRock said in April in a press release (go.pcworld.com/asrockpressrelease) on its website. And yeah, there’s more—ASRock went on to confirm the rest of the lineup. ”While this new CPU boasts a compelling 10-cores-and-20-threads architecture, users require a BIOS update for their motherboards to handle it; this update applies to the rest of the Broadwell-E gang, including…

INTEL’S KEYNOTES CAN be fun, with robots parading on stage and drones zigzagging around the room. Now Intel’s making new hardware to help enthusiasts join the fun by building robots and drones at home. The Robotic Development Kit and Aero Kit (go.pcworld.com/ intelroboticdevkit) provide the necessary hardware and software tools to build robots and drones, respectively. The kits were announced at the Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China. A major element of the developer boards is the RealSense 3D camera, which will ship with the kits and help the robots and drones navigate and avoid obstacles. The depth-sensing camera can recognize items and determine the size, shape, and contours of objects. For robots, the camera provides computer vision, which is analogous to eyes in humans. The Robotic Development Kit is available for preorder…

“THIS IS PROBABLY the first time high-profile scientific journals are publishing screenshots from EVE Online,” said Attila Szantner, cofounder of Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) (mmos.ch). “This is going to be the next big revolution in citizen science.” Szantner was standing on stage at EVE Fanfest 2016 talking about Project Discovery (eveonline.com/discovery), a minigame in EVE Online that’s quite a bit more than it appears. In-game, Project Discovery is a “classified research program” run by the Sisters of Eve to analyze samples of the Drifters, a mysterious and threatening faction in New Eden lore. Players are told that these biological samples hold the key to Drifter technology. That’s in-game. But out-of-game, Project Discovery is actually a joint partnership between EVE developer CCP, MMOS, and the Sweden-based Human Protein Atlas (HPA) (proteinatlas.org). The goal? To…