Review: Digital Storm's Virtue delivers superior power in a midsize tower

Digital Storm Virtue $2,199.00 Powerful components and room to grow make the Virtue a great gaming desktop if the price tag doesn't manage to scare you away.

What’s in a name? HP goes for an emotion to describe its high-end computers: Envy. Acer conjures aggressiveness for its gaming PCs: Predator. And Dell uses a spelling-challenged acronym for its best PCs: XPS (Xtreme Performance System). What concept does Digital Storm seek to conjure with its pricey ($2200) Virtue midtower gaming rig—moral superiority?

The company’s actual goal isn’t quite that lofty. “We noticed there are not many PC manufacturers designing mid-tower gaming systems with the same ardor and attention that ultra-tower PCs receive,” Digital Storm’s director of product development, Rajeev Kuruppu, said when the Virtue was announced. “As its name suggests, Virtue represents a higher standard of PC gaming, both in terms of aesthetics and performance.”

Robert Cardin"Modest" might have been a better name for this PC, given its unassuming enclosure. 

To reach that standard, Digital Storm packed an unlocked Intel Core i7-4770K CPU from Intel’s new Haswell family of processors, 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory, and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 780 discrete graphics card into a compact steel-and-brushed-aluminum case. (The Virtue also comes with Windows 8.) The result is a compact gaming rig that delivered a very respectable Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 399. It fell just short of the cheaper Micro Express MicroFlex 47B’s score of 421, though the latter is a full-size tower and has a more powerful video card. Why? While neither manufacturer elected to overclock its system, Micro Express splurged with a 512GB SSD where Digital Storm provides just a 120GB SSD. As a result, the MicroFlex performed much better on our productivity benchmarks.

The Virtue looks much more interesting on the inside.
On the gaming front, the Virtue bested the MicroFlex 47B on both our synthetic and real-world benchmarks, delivering a 3DMark Cloud Gate score of 26214 versus the MicroFlex's 24864 at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. With real games and visual quality set to Ultra, the Virtue just missed reaching the coveted 60-frames-per-second mark with Dirt Showdown at 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution (it hit 57.3 fps, versus the MicroFlex 47B’s 41.4 fps). The same goes for BioShock Infinite at those settings: Digital Storm’s system reached an impressive 55.4 fps compared with the Micro Express tower’s frame rate of 46.9.

The Virtue can accommodate a second two-slot video card, but not more.
If you’re considering a midtower system, you probably don’t want a plus-size PC sucking up a lot of floor or desktop space. And if you want something small, you probably expect it to be quiet, too. Digital Storm accomplishes that goal in part with a Corsair H100i liquid-cooling system that consists of a CPU water block and a 240mm radiator mounted to the top of the case. This machine won’t keep you up at night or interfere with movie-watching or music-listening sessions.

Despite its smaller case dimensions (17.7 inches high by 17.7 inches long by 8.3 inches wide), the Virtue has plenty of room for expansion inside. If you want higher frame rates with games, throw in a second graphics card (you can configure the Asus Gryphon Z87 micro ATX motherboard to operate with one x16 PCIe 3.0 slot or two x8 PCIe 3.0 slots, and it supports both Nvidia’s SLI and AMD’s CrossFire multi-GPU standards). The system’s 1050-watt power supply, Corsair’s Pro Series HX1050, provides more than enough juice to support such a configuration.

Our test Virtue came with a 1TB, 7200-rpm WD Caviar Black hard drive in addition to a 120GB Corsair Neutron GTX SSD, leaving room for one additional 3.5-inch drive and three more SSDs. A Blu-ray player/DVD burner resides in one of the 5.25-inch drive bays (the second bay is mostly blocked by the radiator mounted on the top of the case).

Two USB 3.0 ports as well as microphone and headphone jacks are conveniently located on the front of the machine. Four additional USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, S/PDIF out, and the usual analog audio ports are around back. The video card’s mounting bracket has ports (one each) for dual-link DVI, single-link DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort.

The Virtue is jam-packed with quality components that enable it to deliver the performance of machines twice its physical size. Its dimensions and motherboard won’t let you go beyond two video cards, but it delivers solid performance on today’s games with the one card it has now. Gamers will love the Virtue, even if their wallets won't.

Microsoft delivers mobile app for SkyDrive Pro

Microsoft has released a SkyDrive Pro mobile application that gives SharePoint Online users access to the cloud storage service from iOS and Windows 8 devices.

 

The free application is available in the Windows Store and Apple’s iOS App Store for people who use SharePoint Online in the broader Office 365 cloud collaboration and communication suite.

 

SkyDrive for iOS

 

The iOS version of the application works on iPads, iPhones and iPod touch devices. Microsoft already had a version of this application for Windows Phone 8 smartphones.

 

Users only need to sign in to their Office 365 account in order to access, view and upload documents via the SkyDrive Pro application, Mark Kashman, a Microsoft Senior Product Manager, wrote in a blog post.

 

"You can use the SkyDrive Pro apps to view documents in your SkyDrive Pro folder, select specific content to take offline when you are traveling or have low bandwidth, organize your content by creating new folders, and upload new content and share with others," he wrote.

 

According to the documentation available for the mobile application, it doesn't appear to work with versions of SharePoint 2013 server and SkyDrive Pro installed on customer premises.

 

Microsoft has also promised to release the Newsfeed mobile application for SharePoint, which gives users access to the people and documents they follow on their activity stream. That application is available now for Windows Phone and for iOS, and Microsoft has promised a version for Windows 8 before the end of this month, with an Android version to follow later.

 

Mobile access has been a weak spot for SharePoint, although Microsoft made improvements in this area in the new 2013 version of the product.

 

 

Review: Company of Heroes 2 delivers classic RTS gameplay on the Eastern Front

Company of Heroes 2 $60.00 Company of Heroes 2 is a sequel with a few new tricks that plays almost identically to its predecessor, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Note: This review focuses on the single-player portion of Company of Heroes 2 because there were very few multiplayer matches running on the actual release code during our review period. If there are any huge problems we encounter after release, we’ll update this review accordingly.

Company of Heroes 2, the long-awaited sequel to Relic Entertainment’s critically-acclaimed World War II real-time strategy game, belies its name. Playing as the Soviets in the game’s main campaign, there are very few times you’ll feel like a hero.

The trials you’ll face along the Eastern Front, from Stalingrad through to Germany, are a far cry from the original game’s D-Day inspired rah-rah-palooza. The campaign in Company of Heroes 2 is a series of morally ambiguous situations where the guys you’re fighting for appear just as bad as the enemy you’re fighting against.

Even our protagonist, former Soviet lieutenant Lev Abramovich Isakovich, doesn’t agree with his country’s actions. The story is related as a series of flashbacks from his comfy home in a Siberian jail cell, presumably for rebelling against the Motherland. It’s a gloomy set-up for a discomfiting game.

Relic definitely tries to capture what made the Eastern Front so horrific. No matter what obstacle you're facing, the primary solution is to throw more men at the front lines. Squaring off against the Nazis, you definitely come to understand this war involved a smaller, more powerful German force on one side and a meat grinder on the other

The Russian Army relies on conscripts backed up by heavy-duty firepower.

Your main special ability involves calling up conscripts—fodder troops forcefully drafted into the Soviet army that you can merge into other units to replenish their numbers or treat as disposable forces. These conscripts make poor soldiers, but there are certainly a lot of them to go around—a seemingly infinite number, in fact.

Who cares if the Germans have a tank? You have a hundred men, and a hundred more after that, and a hundred more after that—this is a war of attrition in its rawest form. Unfortunately, the emphasis on this “throw-more-men-at-the-problem” tactic removes any sense of real desperation from the campaign.

In one of the game’s first cutscenes you see a line of Soviet grunts, many unarmed, charging a Nazi position. One of the Russian front-liners gets shot, and you see the man behind him scrounge the weapon from the corpse and continue charging.

The bleak cutscenes interspersed throughout Company of Heroes 2 belie the game's rote strategic gameplay.

Yet that never happens whie you're actually playing Company of Heroes 2. You’ll scrounge equipment from the battlefield occasionally, sure, but you’re never leading a group of unarmed, terrified, underfed Soviets straight into a German machine gun until their bodies form a wall of cover for your remaining soldiers.

In fact, considering you’re supposedly scraping penal colonies and other “undesirables” to make up the majority of your army, your soldiers follow orders remarkably well. Every time you call up conscripts, the game enacts Order 227—a real-life (though short-lived) edict by Stalin whereby retreating troops were shot on sight. While Order 227 is in effect, any of your troops—not just the conscripts you called up—who panic and flee will be executed.

It's a neat idea, but in practice it rarely has any negative consequences; in my time with the game I never saw anyone executed because of 227. It’s just another timer to pay attention to, one more example that the horrific images conveyed in the game’s scripted sequences rarely affect how you actually play—they’re just set dressing. Given how linear most of the campaign missions are, Company of Heroes 2 ends up playing out like a weird Call of Duty or Medal of Honor strategy game where you aimlessly follow the game’s directions with no real sense of why. Maybe that’s meta-commentary on Soviet High Command during World War II, but I doubt it.

Combat in Company of Heroes 2 oscillates between wonderfully challenging and disconcertingly easy.

The AI difficulty is also frustratingly inconsistent. Playing on “Captain” difficulty (the game’s equivalent to Normal) I alternatively felt like I was squaring off against General George S. Patton himself and a lukewarm cup of tap water. At best the missions are an exciting push-and-pull of tactics; at worst, your Soviet squads will frolic down the road right next to a bunch of Nazi soldiers, neither group acknowledging the other exists.

All this aside, the campaign isn’t bad. There are a few stand-out missions, including an excellent scenario midway through the game where your small squad of infantry plays hide-and-seek with a German Tiger tank in a sleepy village, ineffectively chipping away at its armor with limited armaments. But that's the exception—most of the campaign is underwhelming.

There are very few set up a base, build troops, manage resources, attack scenarios in the main storyline; in fact, the extremely scripted and linear Company of Heroes 2 campaign gives you almost no idea how to jump into multiplayer with the exception of a few missions at the end.

Luckily, the Theater of War mode rectifies that shortcoming. Here you’ll find co-op scenarios, solo challenges, and regular battles against the AI. As far as I could tell, all scenarios are based off actual events during World War II, lending the battles a nice veneer of authenticity. Theater of War is also the only place you’ll be able to try out the German forces in single-player.

Theater of War mode is where Company of Heroes 2 shines, at least as far as single-player is concerned. multiplayer formula is essentially an adapted version of the system in Battlefield: each team has a certain number of tickets when the game starts, and various command points are scattered across the map. Control more of these areas than the enemy and their ticket count gradually decreases. When you run out of tickets, you lose.

It's a tried-and-true formula that still makes for great games—battles evolve into a literal arms race as you counter the enemy’s tanks with AT guns and build bunkers encircling your favorite regions, trying desperately to take one more point and expand your supply lines. Throw men in cover and wait for the enemy to fall into your trap, or funnel their tanks into your deftly placed minefield. Theater of War mode encourages the sort of tactical decision-making that isn't really required to complete the campaign.

Sure, capturing and holding points is a classic RTS trope, but it creates plenty of opportunities for challenging tactical decision-making.

And that's a shame, because it’s in those moments when you're quickly making difficult decisions that you really feel like a wartime commander. Battles are frantic and very deep, though newcomers may find it overwhelming to manage all this information at once.

Right now Theater of War mode contains 18 missions—nine Soviet, nine German—though Relic plans to expand this content later (through paid DLC). It looks like packs will be organized by year; the game ships with scenarios from 1941.

Relic adds a few new features to Company of Heroes with this sequel. Most touted is the new ColdTech system, which fits well with the Russian setting. Here's how it works: during certain matches troops fight in blizzard conditions. Your units will get cold over time, courtesy of “General Winter,” eventually dying from exposure if you don’t huddle near a bonfire or sequester them in a building.

Huddle your troops near bonfires to keep them from freezing to death during a blizzard.

Deep snow slows down your troops while also leaving tracks for the enemy to know where you’re headed. Frozen rivers and lakes can be blown open with mortars or mines, turning unlucky units into unwitting Titanic reenactors.

Relic also does an excellent job with its sound design, rivaling DICE (Battlefield series) for wartime audio. Everything sounds crisp here, from the tank rumbling through the silent, snowy village as your troops lie in ambush to the Stuka planes dive-bombing the battlefield.

A note on performance: the game runs fairly well on my PC—an i5 machine with 8 GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 7850 GPU— though I experienced some slowdown during especially busy or explosive sections of the game. I also had odd frame rate hitching during the game’s pre-rendered cutscenes. I’ll keep experimenting with my settings to see if I can find a solution.

The best and worst thing I can say about Company of Heroes 2 is it feels like more Company of Heroes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it’s a testament to how ahead-of-its-time the original Company of Heroes was—or perhaps an indicator of the glacial pace with which the RTS genre evolves.

However, this is a sequel to a seven-year-old game that plays almost identically to its predecessor. Oh sure, it’s pretty and it sounds great, and the winter effects add a new tactical layer, but it’s essentially a big expansion pack.

If you’re a diehard fan and you’ve been waiting years for this game, great. I want to stress, Company of Heroes 2 is still objectively one of the best RTS games out there, and I certainly enjoyed my time with it. The formula was nearly perfect last time, and it’s just as good this time around.

It just feels kind of like the original Company of Heroes died, dropped its gun, and the sequel picked it up and kept running in the same direction.