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It really is amazing what you might not see unless you have invested some money into your setup. I have never tried to hide the fact that I am a console gamer at heart. In fact, I have spent quite a lot of time in the last couple of weeks tearing some ass up on Halo: Reach and NHL 11 on Xbox Live. Up to this point, I had thought that making the transition from SD to HDTV was the biggest jump forward in my gaming that I had ever seen. Well, I was wrong. Read more…

Helllo Rawrcast readers…Cornelious here bringing you another installment of Under the Hood.

As I stated in my last post I continue to keep myself busy overclocking and benchmarking hardware for DogHouse Systems but I’ve (finally) been able to eliminate a number of stresses in my life and it should be much easier to schedule my time moving forward. This week I want to take a short while to bring up a few points involving the friendly household dust bunny. Dust (in bunny form or otherwise) builds up in our computers for a number of reasons, some of which are: a dusty home/room, smoking, pets and poor case airflow and filtering.

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Helllo Rawrcast readers, Cornelious here to bring you another installment of Under the Hood.

I figured it has been MORE than long enough since my last post and I might as well sit down and let everyone know where I’ve been and what’s going to be eating up the vast majority of my time over the coming weeks. As some of you may know I have been developing a relationship with DogHouse Systems for months now and it finally came time about two weeks ago that a 70lb box of toys arrived at my door. Over the coming weeks I’m going to be spending the vast majority of my time doing extremely thorough hardware testing using the new 875K Core i7 processor from Intel at varying clock speeds. The 875K will be matched up with a pair of HD5770 video cards as well as a beastly HD5970. All the numbers that are soon to come are going to be a great deal more than many people are going to take interest in so I don’t plan to bury you all in tech jargon, don’t worry.

Through different hardware configurations and increasing clock speeds I’ve got dozens and dozens of tests ahead of me (as well as a great deal of time spent sitting around doing about as much as Mr. Einstein up above) so it is very possible that I might be a little while between posts over the coming weeks. If you do find yourself curious about what’s going on the best thing to do would be to follow me on Twitter. I’m slowly working toward launching  my personal website dedicated to Under the Hood so until I get there the majority of my updates will be taking place via Twitter as to not split my time up in to many directions.

I owe a great deal to the Rawrcast community and our amazing hosts and I wanted to make sure that everyone knows that even during my absence I’m moving forward in a direction that couldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for that first E-mail to the HUGE SACK over 9 months ago.

Helllo Rawrcast readers, Cornelious here bringing you another edition of Under the Hood.

Overclocking is something that eludes many people, whether it be because of cost or potential dangers. I’m about to start a GREAT deal of component testing and overclocking documentation courtesy of DogHouse Systems. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be taking a variety of different hardware to its limits and documenting not only overclocking procedures but also performance scaling in order to show when it might be worth it to stop pushing your rig. How this ties into this weeks post is a simple heads up. I’m going to attempt to keep some content coming for you guys but until I rebalance my time following this addition I’m not sure what’ll happen. In case I slip in regularity at all I would strongly encourage everyone to follow me on Twitter and check out the DogHouse Systems forums, both of which I’ll be using to post up information as to my progress and when/if I actually have time to weave something else into my schedule.

You guys have been beyond great and I can’t wait to not only get started and share my results with the community.

Helllo Rawrcast readers, Cornelious here bringing you another installment of Under the Hood. After receiving some questions via Twitter lately I found it only fitting to cover this week’s topic. WoW players come from all walks of life and all levels of knowledge when it comes to computer hardware. What I’d like to do is give a number of different system configuration examples in different price ranges that I see to be the best bang for your buck…keeping WoW as the primary focus. The system prices will range from $500 to $2,500 in $500 increments (give or take) to ensure that most all bases are covered. All prices will be coming from Newegg.com and will be accurate as of the week of posting, I leave it up to you guys to keep up to date with changes and make decisions accordingly.

Some people may have had good or bad experiences with certain brands of components but I’m going to attempt to be as unbiased as possible and give you guys the raw information to use as a baseline when building a new gaming computer. To avoid drowning the information in explanations I’m going to keep the explanations of each system to a minimum and leave it up to you guys ‘n gals to leave a comment on the post or get a hold of me to get into specifics.

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Helllo Rawrcast readers, Cornelious here to bring you another installment of Under the Hood.

Over the past week or so I’ve been bitten by the case modding bug yet again and am pumped to spend a little bit of time going over some information on computer cases. I’ve got a really good idea that the vast majority of gamers today really don’t put a very large portion of their budget towards their case. While this isn’t always a deal breaker, your case can be a large contributor to system temperatures and stability, as well as what components fit in your system. There are definitely different schools of thought on the topic of cases, some people view it as nothing more than a box to hold their hardware whereas a decent number of people will willingly drop up to $300 on their chassis. Read more…

Helllo Rawrcast readers, Cornelious here bringing you another installment of Under the Hood.

Today I wanted to spend some time covering one of the most common issues people face when building or upgrading a computer, balance. There is more than one way that balance plays into all gaming computers but everything boils down to the same goal. Some hardware components are dependent on other parts of your system to send and/or receive information and if these pieces of hardware are not properly matched you could potentially be losing out on a lot of performance. Read more…

Helllo Rawrcast readers, Cornelious back again to bring you another edition of Under the Hood.

Today I’m gonna be taking a short break from the norm to fill you in on what’s happening with Under the Hood over the coming weeks. I’m aware that this may not prove to be interesting for some people but I have always held the value of communication above most things, and there’s no reason to leave you guys out of the loop. As many of you may know, Under the Hood existed awhile before I was ever involved with Rawrcast. It was the initial plan of Stomp and Haf to use this segment as a way to bring PC hardware info to the Rawrcast community in a very tangible way and I was more than humbled when I was able to “take the reins” of the segment and start recording for the show. Read more…