Mid Ohio Comic Con 2012
- Details
- Category: Editorials
- Published: Monday, 01 October 2012 08:30
A whole room packed full of people who share similar interests, dress up in amazing Cosplay, and different artist and stars available to meet. For some of you Comic Con isn’t anything new. Those from large cities like LA are used to having a local Comic Con. Those of us in the middle of nowhere typically don’t have events like this. Lucky for me, a few hours away we do have the Mid-Ohio Comic Con once a year. Alex and I took the day and went down to check out what it was all about this weekend. As you can expect, we came back with lots of photos of the Cosplay and just maybe a few story’s as well.
Borderlands. While most people know what the game is now, not many had heard of it before its release in 2009. It quickly became a smash hit and a household name with its clever writing, enjoyable gameplay, and its bazillion guns. With the sequel launching on September 18th this year, I saw my entire Steam friends list switch to Borderlands 2 only moments after its launch. Gearbox has done it again, I h
Just over three years ago Cooler Master introduced their Storm product line with the Storm Sniper, soon after they introduced the Storm Scout. In those three years there has been one other case that I have seen more of around at different LAN partys. The combination of its built in handles, support for full ATX motherboards, and blacked out styling have made the Scout a huge success. After three years Cooler Master has decided to introduce a new version of the Scout. Considering the original’s success, this is an important launch. I really hope that they still manage to keep what made the original great while giving it a fresh look.
In the PC audio world, there is a major divide as far as people who find onboard audio more than enough and users who absolutely must run a sound card. In recent years, onboard sound has improved considerably. But no matter how much they improve it, it main flaw is being on the motherboard itself and not a separate circuit. When it comes to sound cards, there are just a few top manufactures with Asus being one. Asus recently introduced a new sound card focused on the gaming market under their ROG (Republic of Gaming) line called the ROG Xonar Phoebus. I’ve had it running in my gaming system, today we will talk about my experience thus far.
Yesterday I had the chance to publish my reviews and testing results from two different GTX 660’s one a reference designed card with and overclock from EVGA and the second another overclocked card with a unique thermal solution from MSI. Assuming you took a look at both reviews I’m sure you are very curious if I paired them up and did testing.. Of course I did! I put them through the same collection of tests that I tested the individual cards with. Today we are going to take a quick look at the results and see what just under $460 in GTX 660’s will get you.
As you guys may have noticed, today Nvidia introduced their GTX 660 and GTX 650 cards. We put an overclocked reference design to the test. Now it’s time to take a look at what MSI has to offer. Our last video card review from MSI had an interesting dual fan design that we had never seen before. This time around we are taking a look at the GTX 660 Twin Frozr 2GB OC edition. That may be a lot to say, but if our last experience with an MSI card is any indication this could be an interesting model to keep an eye out for. Let’s take a look at what MSI has done different from the base reference design.
It wasn’t that long ago that we had the chance to take a look at the GTX 660 Ti and check out its amazing performance at the $300 price point. Along with the copy of Borderlands 2 that was bundled with it at launch I was impressed with its price. Of course there are still people who can’t afford that price point. Because of this, Nvidia continues to fill in its Kepler lineup, today introducing both their GTX 660 and GTX 650. We will take a look at what the launch is all about and then put our EVGA GTX 660 Superclocked 2Gb to the test at both stock and overclocked speeds to show you the performance difference when you pick up an overclocked model like the one provided by EVGA today.
Sapphires selection of cards for the HD 7000 series has been impressive to say the least. On top of having stock and overclocked versions of every model, they also have a few different models like the 
You know typically being based out of Ohio doesn’t have a lot of upsides. We are normally extremely far away from just about anyone in the industry. There is one exception to this though. You guys may have heard of a company by the name of Systemax, if not you have heard of one of their subsidiaries, Tiger Direct. Systemax’s Ohio factory literally is a giant facility in the middle of cornfields and small towns. I don’t think you could get a more stereotypical representation of what Ohio is to most people. That being said, I jumped at the chance to finally get a peek inside of this random factory that I had come across in the past out in the country. 
Although a lot of us are mainly desktop gamers, there will always be a need for being able to compute on the go. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has gone on a trip and lost their power adapter for their laptop, or just had it damaged over time. Some laptops have fairly low power requirements, but a quick glance on the Asus website for example shows laptops having various power requirements from below 65 all the way up to 150 on their highest models. When looking for a replacement notebook power adapter, it’s always a plus when you are able to pick one up that you might be able to use on future devices as well as it having the power to charge your current laptop. Cooler Master has had their NA 65 and NA 90 models, but anything above 90 and you were out of luck. Today they are introducing their NA 120, their highest capacity to date. We are going to take a look and see what we think.
The video card market in the past 8 months has been filled with lots of up and downs. Both AMD and Nvidia have been going back and forth as they introduce their new product lineups. Kepler specifically has been especially impressive in the efficiency and power side of things. Even still there are a lot of people who have been holding out from throwing down almost $400 on a GTX 670 because of its price. Today a lot of those people will finally get the chance to see what else Nvidia has to offer. The GTX 660 Ti is launching at a sup $300 price point and today we will be taking our first look at a Superclocked 2Gb model from our friends over at EVGA. I’m just as excited as you are to find out how it will perform. The price point puts it up against the HD 7870, but how will they compare in performance. 
Finding innovation and creativity in the case market today seems to get harder and harder as time goes by. It’s not that everything has been done, more that coming up with new and innovative ideas is getting tougher for all of the manufactures. We are starting to see more and more cases that look alike. A while back Raidmax sent over a case they wanted me to take a look at, something different they had been working on. Today I will be taking a look at the final version of that same case, the Agusta. With a few new ideas and a style that no other case has, it’s most likely for everyone, but I have a feeling we will see a few around at LAN’s in the future.
We recently had a chance to take a look at the 
Earlier this week I took a look at the K60 and K90 Vengeance keyboards from Corsair. I was impressed with their unique take on the mechanical keyboard. Prior to looking at their keyboards I also took a look at the Vengeance 2000 wireless headset. To round out our coverage we of course need to check out Corsairs Vengeance gaming mice. We know that Corsair always takes a different path with any product they introduce and I am excited to see what they did differently in the gaming mouse market, a market that has become fairly stagnant with higher DPI, more buttons, and more lighting be the focus from most manufactures.
Every once in a while you find a company that is able to take a normal product that everyone has and change it in a way that makes everyone wonder why it was never done before. As much as it pains me to say this, Apple was one of those companies. In the pc components business there are a few as well, but the company that stands out the most to me would be Corsair. Every time corsair enters a new market, I find myself impressed with what they have to offer. Even though it seems like they are always jumping into random markets, they take their time and research what everyone has to offer and what people would really want to see. This week we are going to take a look at their new Vengeance lineup of mice and keyboards to see if they have done the same in these new markets. Today we are going to start with their new keyboards, let’s dig in and see what they are all about.
We have spoken about it before, it seems like everyone and their mom jumped onto the mechanical keyboard market in the last few years. Because of this we have seen many designs with nothing to make them stand out, a few have had full LED backlighting for example like Cooler Master’s Storm Trigger. The problem with a full backlit keyboard of course is the cost. A few manufactures have introduced mechanical keyboard with just backlighting on WASD, but this has left non FPS gamers out in the cold. When I saw Cooler Master was introducing the QuickFire Pro with lighting expanded past the WASD, I was excited to check it out. We enjoyed both their Quickfire Rapid, and the Trigger. Today we are going to take a closer look at the QuickFire Pro to see if it’s an improvement over the other semi backlit keyboards on the market.
From a quick glance, the TPC 812 looks very similar to the Hyper 612 PMW from Cooler Master we reviewed recently, and given the similarities in their name, you'd be likely to accept that and move on. Cooler Master has engineered many subtle differences with the new cooler in hopes of improving functionality and performance, including vertical vapor chamber to pull the heat up into the heatsink away from the CPU. So take another look and read on as we put the latest air solution from Cooler Master to our tests.
We have taken a look at HD 7770’s from both Sapphire and XFX. But that only covers a small portion of the AMD GPU market, when I was given a chance to take a look at MSI’s offering, I jumped at the chance. I know what to expect as far as performance, but what I am especially interested in is how MSI does their cards differently. MSI has a unique design that allows you to add a second fan on top of the original fan; I am really curious how this will work out. Let’s take a look.
When SteelSeries introduced the Sensei, we were very excited about their latest flagship mouse. We have consistently had a SteelSeries mouse in use in the LanOC office all the way back to the introduction of the Xia. The Sensei was a nice progression from the Xia, but I did miss the rubber finish from the Xai. When I heard they would be introducing a Sensei with a rubber finish, I was very excited to check it out. When I heard about its price, I was even more excited. Without further introduction, let’s take a look at the SteelSeries Sensei [RAW].