World of Warcraft: Cataclysm – Details

Here is some information about the upcoming World of Warcraft Expansion pack "Cataclysm". This information was made available at this year's Blizzcon convention. Much of this has been thrown around as possibilities, most notably the addition of Worgen and Goblins as playable races. It was discovered a couple months ago that they added Worgen and Goblin Halloween mask data to one of the patch loads.

What are the features of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm?

Two New Playable Races: Adventure as one of two new races--the cursed worgen with the Alliance or the resourceful goblins with the Horde.

Level Cap Increased to 85: Earn new abilities, tap into new talents, and progress through the path system, a new way for players to improve characters.

Classic Zones Remade: Familiar zones across the original continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms have been altered forever and updated with new content, from the devastated Badlands to the broken Barrens, which has been sundered in two.

New High-Level Zones: Explore newly opened parts of the world, including Uldum, Grim Batol, and the great Sunken City of Vashj'ir beneath the sea.

More Raid Content than Ever Before: Enjoy more high-level raid content than previous expansions, with optional more challenging versions of all encounters.

New Race and Class Combinations: Explore Azeroth as a gnome priest, blood elf warrior, or one of the other never-before-available race and class combinations.

Guild Advancement: Progress as a guild to earn guild levels and guild achievements.

New PvP Zone & Rated Battlegrounds: Take on PvP objectives and daily quests on Tol Barad Island, a new Wintergrasp-like zone, and wage war in all-new rated Battlegrounds.

Archaeology: Master a new secondary profession to unearth valuable artifacts and earn unique rewards.

Flying Mounts in Azeroth: Explore Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms like never before.

Alright, here is the new trailer for the upcoming expansion pack to Blizzard's hugely succesfull MMORPG "World of Warcraft". The expansion is titled "Cataclysm". This trailer was debuted today at Blizzcon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujjEhgEDA-c

Star Trek Online - Screen Shot Motherload

We have found a cache of new pictures from the upcoming Star Trek game over at Kotaku.com.

http://kotaku.com/5326397/all-the-star-trek-online-screens-youll-ever-need

The game has some pretty amazing visuals, bright and vivid.  It definitely looks like 'viewing' this game will be a treat (on a nice system, of course).  Hopefully the gameplay will be innovative and exciting.

Here are a couple, but go to the link above to check them all out!

Tags: Star+Trek, Star+Trek+Online, MMORPG, MMO, Online, Space

AMD Athlon II x2 250 Review - Part 2

Here is PART TWO of our look at the AMD Athlon II x2 250 CPU. We really wanted to take a look at this CPU and see how it performs in gaming situations. The chip is retailing for around $80 and is a great way to get into the AM3 socket.

Test System:

Gigabyte MA770T-UD3p AM3 Motherboard

4 Gigs Corsair Dominator GT 1600 Mhz DDR3

ATI Radeon 4870 1 Gig

PC Power and Cooling 610 Watt Silencer PSU

Antec 300 Case

Stock AMD HSF

Windows Vista Home Premium 64 Bit

3DMark Vantage - Performance Setting

Stock Speed - 3000 Mhz



13% OC - 3450 Mhz



17% OC - 3600 Mhz



As you can see, we were able to achieve a relatively high OC with this chip. And remember, this is with a stock AMD heatsink, so even more would probably be possible. We are actually going to see if we can hit the FSB to 250 and get 3750 Mhz next. But, even at 3600 Mhz, we see a pretty substantial increase in our 3DMark Vantage score.

Obviously, these are synthetic scores, so it doesn't mean it will translate to gaming in a sure fire manner. But, we can safely say that it will handle most gaming situations in a respectable manner. Even at stock speeds, this chip is able to produce scores that we like for this level of a system.

AMD Athlon II x2 250 Review - Part 1

Today we are looking at the new AMD Athlon II x2 250 CPU. It is part of their new line of low power, low budget 45 nm CPUs. It's bigger brother, the Phenom II x2 550 is the other in that line. In this review, though, we will be focusing on the Athlon II.

Our main focus is to see how this chip stands up to gaming purposes, since at CustomPCMAX, that is our main systems built. We want to see how it holds up to todays games and see if it is a viable solution to include in a moderately priced gaming system.

The Athlon II X2 250

Despite the use of the Athlon name, this chip is based off the Phenom II architecture. The old Athlon name was used to differentiate it from the x2 550 in that it uses a smaller cache system. The x2 550 gets 6 MB of L3 cache, where as the x2 250 has none. Where it makes up for it is more L2 cache than the x2 550. But, make no mistake, the lack of L3 cache is not a death sentence for this chip. It helps to keep the price of this chip below the $100 mark. In most cases, you can pick this chip up for $87 which is a great price for a AM3 chip with decent OCing potential. Even without OCing, this chip has a high clock rate (3.0 ghz). Because it is AM3 based, it will work in most AM2+ boards or (obviously) AM3 boards. This allows a nice upgrade path to those in an old AM2+ DDR2 based system. The onboard memory controllers in AM3 chips allows use of either DDR2 or DDR3 memory.

The motherboard we are using to test this chip is the Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P





This is a decent mid level board from Gigabyte's excellent "Ultra Durable" line. For all intents and purposes, this is a great starter board for just about any use. It lacks a few of the higher level features, like a second PCI-e slot for Crossfire-x. But at this price point, a dual GPU system is not usually what people are looking for.

No more Unreal Tournament games for "several years"

For all you Unreal Tournament fans out there, this may come as a somewhat sad revelation.

In an interview Founder and CEO of Epic Games Tim Sweeney said the company has other priorities besides their Unreal Tournament series.

"Unreal Tournament is certainly a major long-term priority but we're planning not to release a major retail game in the series for several years. So we have that effort somewhat on hold while we work on a few other initiatives.

The really interesting thing about Unreal Tournament is that once we've defined the game in this generation the community takes it and runs with it. So you've seen the community create this massive set of maps and mods that go far beyond anything we could ever do," Sweeney added.

"We almost solve the Unreal Tournament 4 and 5 problem ourselves by just making this toolset available because the community has done more than we could have ever hoped to do internally."

So, it sounds like the only thing we can hope for in the UT development is expected to come from development with in the gaming community. Who knows, maybe this is a good thing... it will allow time for Epic to really decide what the next step will be. Many feel that UT3 was lacking compared to it's predecesors.

Aliens Vs. Predator - New Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GljJpco0VZI

This game is shaping up very nicely. The atmosphere looks to be on point with the Alien and Predator franchises, 'dark and scary... not sure what is around each corner'. If the gameplay is as polished as the visuals are, we should have ourselves a pretty exciting game here.