Today's episode of my 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 uh it's an
official NCIX communication and this particular one is going to be themed
around uh Starcraft 2 as well as the GTX
460. So, I've actually got a GTX 460 with me today. This is MSI's GeForce 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 MCX newsletter, and if you're not getting the PC newsletters about once or
twice a month, you should definitely subscribe. If you go to uh 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
uh 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 uh Brood War system specifications required by
Blizzard versus the Wings of Liberty recommended specs. And uh you know, if
you're not um if you haven't upgraded your PC since Brood War, you're probably
going to be looking at a bit of an upgrade here. And we just talk a little
bit about what the recommended configurations are for Starcraft 2. So
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 five 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 their 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 Connects 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
them 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 5-year-old card, in order to get the
most out of it, play 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 uh
Vesta 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 uh actually leads us to our recommendation, the GTX 461 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. Uh if you
buy a GTX 460 after the Starcraft launch, you actually get a coupon to try
Starcraft 2 for seven hours uh 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.