Innehållsförteckning för Issue 251 från PC Powerplay

DANGEROUS GOLF DEVELOPER THREE FIELDS ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER THREE FIELDS ENTERTAINMENT DUE SOON www.threefieldsentertainment.com/dangerous-golf/ Dangerous Golf lets you play golf in the most unlikely places, such as inside a china shop, hotel kitchen and medieval castle. The developers worked closely with Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 team and NVIDIA to push the boundaries of their PhysX, Apex Destruction and Flex, physics technologies. And, it certainly shows with the amount of senseless destruction you can wreak with a simple golf ball. You can smash priceless heirlooms, set fire to things and much more. HEROES OF ISSACHAR DEVELOPER BLUE MANA ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER BLUE MANA ENTERTAINMENT DUE MID 2016 www.bluemanaentertainment.com Build a thriving city and defend it with your crossbow skills in this city builder FPS hybrid, set in an eerie fantasy world. The game…

“teamwork is key to success and going it alone is a sure way to wind up real dead, real fast” OVERWATCH DEVELOPER BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT DUE MAY 24 battle.net/overwatch/game Blizzard is a master of melding the best bits of established games and creating a coherent, accessible and thoroughly enjoyable title. Overwatch doesn’t stray too far from this design strategy and from what we’ve played is all the better for it. One aside from a pleasant feeling of familiarity – even though the characters and maps are absolutely unique to Overwatch – the main thing that stood out whilst playing a number of different matches was the fact that teamwork is key to success and going it alone is a sure way to wind up real dead, real fast.…

Great deals, a big range and some extra cool products! For over 25 years PLE has been the go to PC store for West Australian consumers, and now they’re located in Melbourne providing fast freight to the entire eastern side of Australia. They sell a huge range of products and have no hidden fees such as parcel protection, credit card or PayPal surcharges. With four stores, over 50 friendly staff members and 25 years experience, this family owned business has definitely earned its reputation as one of Australia’s top IT retailers. CUSTOM BUILT COMPUTERS Undoubtedly one of the most impressive aspects of PLE is their extensive range of Custom Built Computers. On their website you will find one of the most flexible Custom Build configurators around. You can either start…

When it comes to affordable, reliable and high performance hard drives for 1-8 Bay NAS systems, the WD Red is the optimal choice. WD Red were the first drives to market created specifically for NAS, designed from the ground up with 24/7 operation in mind. The latest innovation for the range is the new HelioSeal helium-technology which allows the drives to hit a whopping 8TB capacity. As 1080p video, 4K presentations and 360 degree VR movies become more prominent, the need for large amounts of storage are paramount. Increasing to 8TB capacity is not only great for video-centric markets but is also a boon for home consumers as well. With the proliferation of mobile devices, more content is being created than ever before. The average home user may not necessarily…

“It’s bright and colourful (even during the few times that the predominant colour scheme is brown)” DEVELOPER KIRO’O GAMES PUBLISHER PLUG IN DIGITAL PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM aurionthegame.com Full disclosure - I backed the Aurion Kickstarter campaign, just as I have backed 50 or so other games. I back game for a variety of reasons, from liking the team behind the game, to being impressed by the pitch, to simple curiosity. In the case of Aurion, it was because I wanted to see what a fantasy RPG created by Cameroon’s first game development studio and based around African mythology. The end product is just as I suspected it would be, an overly, somewhat naively ambitious action RPG with some fascinating lore and a number of teething problems you would…

“It’s hard to describe the story as much of it is told only through imagery or the environment” DEVELOPER HEART MACHINE PUBLISHER HEART MACHINE PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, GOG www.heart-machine.com Hyper Light Drifter has one of the most coherent art designs we’ve seen in a game. It may sound like an odd claim, but think about it. Most games have different aesthetics for different locations that tie together in the general theme but use different palettes and forms. Drifter maintains the slightly dreamy mix of 70’s style prog rock album art and pixel graphics throughout, developing a huge, cohesive world that sucks the player in and keeps them trapped there with the amazing electronic soundtrack. It really is a thing of beauty that tells the story as much as…

PRICE $799 www.msi.com Yep, this is officially the most expensive motherboard to ever cross my test-bench, by a good $50 or so. Obviously this means that 95% of you guys won’t be interested in buying it, but you’re probably keen to see how MSI feels it can demand almost a thousand dollars for a motherboard. I know I was. Unfortunately the CPU it’s designed for doesn’t actually exist in stores yet, so this review is going to be based on features, rather than performance. MSI is aiming this product at upcoming owners of Intel’s brand new Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU, which uses the LGA 2011-3 socket. Those of you with better memories than mine will recall that this is the same socket used by the existing i7-5930K, a six-cored…

PRICE $2599 www.msi.com In some ways this laptop is extremely similar to the Gigabyte, with a set of features that are almost identical. Yet from a physical perspective it’s a very distinct machine, with a totally different form factor and size. The biggest change is the use of a larger 17.3-inch screen, which you might assume would make this a much larger, heavier laptop. Yet MSI has used some clever engineering to make this laptop incredibly thin, measuring just 22mm when closed, which is significantly thinner than the Gigabyte. As a result, despite being much longer and wider, this laptop is only 100 grams heavier than the P55W v5, weighing 2.6 kilograms. That’s exceptional for a 17.3-inch laptop, which probably accounts for the $500 increase in price. Despite stretching the…

PRICE $149 www.logitech.com In much the same vein as Steelseries, Logitech has moved away from the proprietary keys of their premium keyboard (the Romer-G keys of the G810 Orion Spectrum) to utilise Cherry keys on their more modestly priced follow-up keyboard. The reason given for moving to Cherry is sound - although Logitech is happy with the reception and success of the Romer-G keyboards, they understand that some gamers prefer Cherry, so have made a range to cater for their tastes as well. Whilst not as heavily features as the G810, the G610 is by no means a bare-bones board, with AV controls, and F-key macros the same as the more expensive keyboard. Rather than a full RGB lighting scheme, the G610 instead features an elegant white backlight. If you’re…

PRICE $199 www.razerzone.com Don’t believe the beautiful rotating 3D animation of the Wildcat on the official Razer website. There’s no way you’re going to be able to get the palm grips stuck on that neatly. Yes indeed - self-applied palm grips on this $200 gamepad, and it’s almost impossible to get them on straight. Plus, for the first week or so the edges of the stickers will feel rough, until your filthy palm-sweat softens them. I guess the Wildcat is more like a quality baseball glove? It starts off all stiff and uncomfy, but after a few weeks it mellows, becomes supple? Well, almost. One upon a time there were at least six gamepad brands to choose from, but the Xbox One controller has essentially killed the market. The Wildcat…

“in the early 90’s, Michael Land and Peter McConnell developed the iMuse system” No Man’s Sky is right around the corner. It feels like it has been an eternity since we first saw the gameplay preview video. Everywhere you look, the game is getting well deserved attention and why shouldn’t it? It’s an incredibly bold idea. It’s big, it might even be the biggest game universe ever made, which is even more impressive when you consider the fact that the studio developing the game, Hello Games, has only 15 employees. This issue’s cover article is all about the game’s procedurally generated universe and how incredibly near-infinite it is, but you already knew that. What you might not know is that the music for the game is just as interesting, just…

FEEDBACK #250 Michael Barrs: Loved the Total Warhammer coverage. Can’t wait to get my hands on it- it’s the fantasy game I’ve been waiting for since Shadow of the Horned Rat was released. Also really looking forward to HBS’ new Battletech game. A WINNER IS YOU Congratulations to Lachlan Vaelioja for winning our issue #249 Dark Souls III main subscriptions prize! MAKE YOURSELF HEARD! facebook.com/pcpoweplay www.pcpowerplay.com.au LETTER OF THE MONTH MY TURN Hey guys, I really feel like we’ve been spoilt with turn based strategy games in the recent years. My favourite of these being the XCOM games as well as Divinity: Original Sin. With XCOM Enemy Unknown receiving a huge expansion (Enemy Within) and Divinity: Original Sin giving out a free enhanced version for those who bought it originally.…

Lian-Li have released some funky PC cases in their time and the tradition continues with the Lian-Li DK-04. The DK-04 is an aluminium desk with a glass top that you can shove PC parts in to. The table top is 1200mm x 750mm in size and can handle up to 100kg of weight on top of it. Inside, the DK-04 can be filled up with 10 disk drives, eight 120mm fans and accommodates full size ATX motherboards and 320mm long video cards. If you’re into water cooling, hoses and radiators will fit comfortably in the DK-04’s insides. It’s fully height adjustable via an electric motor, so at the touch of a button the desk can be raised to 1160mm or lowered to 675mm to ensure you’re ergonomically taken care of.…

Mechanical keyboards are all the rage lately, proving popular with gamers who need every millisecond of latency removed to gain a competitive advantage. Cherry have jumped on this opportunity and have released a new keyboard switch, dubbed MX Speed. These new switches allow a keypress to be registered at the shallow depth of 1.2mm, which is 40% quicker than Cherry’s previously fastest keyboard switch. Cherry has retained the same activation force though, so you don’t need to tap the key any differently to achieve the fastest response time. Of course, this new switch also supports RGB backlighting, a must have for any serious gaming rig. Corsair are first to use the new Cherry keys, on their K70 and K65 keyboards, which sell for US$170 and US$150 respectively.…

NO MAN’S SKY DEVELOPER HELLO GAMES PUBLISHER HELLO GAMES DUE 23 JUNE, 2016 no-mans-sky.com No Man’s Sky is a tricky game to pitch. It looks like a space simulator, but it’s not. It lends itself to multiplayer, but that’s not really there. Procedural generation should result in an overwhelming amount of amazing things but, by design, there’s a lot of the mundane in No Man’s Sky universe. Even if you’re abiding by developer Hello Games’ simplified No Man’s Sky gameplay equation – exploring, fighting, trading and survival – it doesn’t help to sell the interconnected nature of those pillars, nor the gameplay mechanics outside of them. Hell, even after an exclusive half-hour presentation and half an hour of hands-on time with No Man’s Sky’s starry second heaven, plus a chat…

“players will be able to choose the sex of their character, and, rather interestingly (or worryingly) each sex has different powers and abilities” FERAL RITES DEVELOPER INSOMNIAC GAMES PUBLISHER OCULUS STUDIOS DUE LATE 2016 www.feralritesvr.com Insomniac Games, a studio best known for creating Playstation hits such as the Ratchet & Clank franchise and the Resistance series of shooters has jumped into the VR pool with both feet, developing a slew of new games due out for the Oculus Rift in 2016. In addition to Edge of Nowhere, a fascinating, and somewhat nerve-wracking looking Arctic survival game and the crazy looking first person, gesture based magic duelling game The Unspoken comes Feral Rites, a colourful third person action brawler that sounds part Altered Beast, part Zeno Clash. Players take the role…

“Earth dying, Mars ripe for exploitation, arrive, set up colonies, step three, profit!” DEVELOPER MOHAWK GAMES PUBLISHER STARDOCK ENTERTAINMENT PRICE $39.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.offworldgame.com As my rival’s buildings burned in the aftermath of another successful dynamite attack, and as space pirates shot his transports out of the sky, and as I readied an underground nuclear detonation, I reflected how refreshing it was to play an RTS without any combat. Because, see, all these things are just perks you buy from the Black Market rather than being core to the experience of Offworld Trading Company. And anyway, the AI will use them on YOU. So it’s fair. OTC is an RTS that doesn’t PRESCRIBE familiar gameplay, geddit? Because OTC also stands for Over The... Phew. Tough crowd. Anyway, it’s ostensibly…

“far worse is the fact that the control screen shows a picture of a Nintendo DS for button layout” DEVELOPER STUDIO SAIZENSEN PUBLISHER DEGICA PRICE $14.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM saizensen.degicagames.com/ The system setting and control screens of Code of Princess do not do it any favours. There aren’t a lot of options when it comes to PC optimisation, but far worse is the fact that the control screen shows a picture of a Nintendo DS for button layout. It has to be one of the laziest ports we’ve ever seen when it comes to the interface, making all the Xbox ports that have a large “Press Start” or “Press A” prompt look positively bespoke. Don’t let the extremely lazy port put you off though, as Code of Princess quickly shows…

VR HEADSET HTC Vive The all-encompassing VR experience PRICE $1350 APPROX www.htcvive.com Last month saw my mind being blown by the Oculus Rift Consumer Version 1, the first consumer Head Mounted Display (HMD) that didn’t (make me) blow chunks. This beautiful piece of technology finally transported me inside the virtual worlds I’ve spent three decades peering through a 2D window at. It was a surreal, dreamlike experience, yet there was something missing. The lack of motion control meant that while I was inside these worlds, I couldn’t interact with them in a natural way, instead forced to replicate my hand and arm movements with the primitive analogue sticks of the Xbox One controller that ships with the kit. A month later and I’ve finally spent some real hands-on time with…

It’s finally happened – after reviewing gaming laptops for more than a decade, I’m finally convinced that the manufacturers have nailed it. In the past, we’ve had to make too many compromises to get gaming power into a laptop chassis. The most obvious problem was a lack of GPU power, but NVIDIA’s latest mobile chips are now delivering performance on par with its desktop parts, and have been for about a year or two. However, they had one major issue – fan noise that sounded like you were firing up a hairdryer every time you played a game. I’m happy to report that the following laptops all remained relatively quiet during my testing, quashing this final issue once and for all. So now that I’ve given gaming laptops the thumbs…

“Most impressive of all the specs is the inclusion of twin GTX 980M GPUs, each packing 8GB of dedicated memory.” PRICE $5699 originpc.com.au The previous two laptops both delivered solid gaming performance at a great price point, which is basically the opposite approach to this mega-beast from Origin. This company is renowned for its ridiculously fast, super-expensive machines, and the EON17-SLX is no exception. With more horsepower than most $4,000 desktop PCs, this is an absolute speed demon of a machine, aimed at those who need the ultimate in frame-shredding capabilities. Like the MSI, this too uses a 17.3-inch display, but Origin hasn’t tried to make this laptop thin nor light. Weighing just under 5kg, it’s almost twice as heavy as the MSI, so I wouldn’t plan on moving this…

PRICE $199 au.ttesports.com The Poseidon Z Forged is so sturdy, weighty and long that it could double as a weapon, shield or battering ram when not being used as a keyboard. This size and heft is due to a number of factors - the top of the chassis is a huge expanse of metal, there is another sheet of metal inside that supports the switches, and each side of the keyboard is bracketed with a row of programmable macro keys. The Poseidon Z Forged offers an RGB colour scheme but goes a step further than many other similar RGB keyboards by colouring the steel plate to which the LEDs are affixed is painted blue, making them look brighter than on any previous Tt keyboard. The ten macro keys are easily…

PRICE $269.95 gaming.logitech.com The last two true innovations in the mouse’s 40+ year history were the mouse wheel and the optical sensor. Everything else is just... unnecessary. But that doesn’t mean it’s not cool or doesn’t work. As part of an ongoing trend, Logitech justifies a $270 price tag (find it the street for $199) by packing the G900 with tonnes of extra features. All of these are geared toward gaming performance - ultra-low latency sensor, mechanical buttons, something called “clock tuning technology” which maximises battery life, and 11 programmable buttons. You can even pull the two left thumb buttons off and stick them on the right side of the mouse instead, for lefties. Thing is though, this mouse suffers from the same problem as pretty much every other “pro…

“I’ve been lucky in that I’ve only been burnt once by a project that has achieved its funding goal then shut down development” I have a sickness. I can’t for the life of me stop backing projects on Kickstarter. I’m not joking – it’s getting to the state that it’s near pathological. This month (April) alone I’ve backed five new projects (one of which has since been cancelled) and in March I backed seven. It’s not getting out of control. I can quit anytime I want to. Honest. Although I am a consummate collector at heart, the reason why I back so many projects is not simple acquisition or collecting in the same manner it is with movies for me. The reason why I back so many game and film…

MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURES: 1. The monitor! 2. USB Saturn Controller! 3. Concealed PS3 and PS4 behind the monitor! 4. Over-clocked i7 920 still going strong after 7 years! 5. Spiderman! 6. The monitor! 7. I don’t know! 8. The new video cards I don’t actually have yet and may not get for 18 months! 9. Custom Coffee-Mug! 10. Baby Monitor! LAST UPGRADE: Christmas 2015: Sony Bravia KD49X8300C, 512GB Samsung Evo SSD, 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 and Logitech G933 Wireless Headphones. DREAM UPGRADE: A new Skylake PC with dual-Pascal 980Ti equivalents. Realistic dream upgrade is one or two Pascal 980Ti equivalents, when they come out. But really, all I want is to be able to have a 60Hz 4k Desktop and to be able to play Dark Souls 1 at 4k.…

Acer showed us their latest gaming laptop, the Predator 17X, which Acer reckon is designed from the ground up to support VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. It packs an i7-6820HK CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 graphics and a custom cooling system to keep both those high end chips from melting. The 17.3” screen comes in FHD or UHD options and both are IPS panels with G-SYNC support. On the storage front, it’ll take the latest NVMe PCIe SSDs and memory wise, will support up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM. Impress your friends with the RGB backlit keyboard and frag them with the low-latency Killer DoubleShot Pro network interface. All that performance weighs a hefty 4.5kg, twice the weight of your traditional 17” laptop. The Predator…

AMD has announced a 32GB version of the FirePro W9100 graphics card, making AMD the first to ship such a card. Designed to take on Nvidia’s 24GB Quadro M6000, AMD say this beefed up version of the Firepro W9100 is ideal for those doing large 3D renders and high performance computing, where the more video RAM can be made available, the better. Nothing else on the Firepro W9100 has changed. It’s still the same 28nm, 930MHz core, Hawaii based single GPU with 2,816 stream processors. This new card now makes pro users choose between the faster GPU on the Nvidia Quadro M6000, or the extra 8GB of RAM on the FirePro W9100. All that RAM comes at a retail price of US$4999 - definitely a professional price for a professional…

You can’t keep a good badguy down. World of Warcraft’s classic villains the Burning Legion are back in the next expansion. The game’s sixth expansion, The Legion - creative naming there, Blizzard - will be drop on August 30th. “Legion opens a dark and thrilling new chapter in one of the Warcraft series’ greatest conflicts, and things will never be the same for some of Azeroth’s most iconic heroes and villains” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, said in today’s announcement. “This expansion is loaded with features and content that give players whole new ways to explore the world and customise their heroes. We’re looking forward to sending everyone into battle against the Burning Legion this August.” So what’s in it? Well, the game’s level cap will…

THE WITCHER 3: BLOOD AND WINE DEVELOPER CD PROJEKT RED PUBLISHER CD PROJEKT RED DUE MID 2016 www.thewitcher.com We don’t usually run previews of DLC or expansions, but for Blood and Wine we’ll make an exception, not only for the size and scope of the expansion but also due to the welcome tweaks it brings to the main campaign. The latest expansion sees Geralt travelling to Toussaint – kind of an analogue of France under King Luis XVI to complete a contract hunting a beast that has been killing, dismembering then displaying the corpses of knights. The Knights of Toussaint aren’t too keen on the idea of allying themselves with an uncouth outsider, and a Witcher no less, but when a monster comes calling there is nobody better to have…

Already home to Australia’s finest coffee, best small bar scene and the Australian Grand Prix, Melbourne’s reputation as one of the world’s most happening cities was further cemented with the recent Intel Upgrade Australia event. Held at Monash University with support from most of Australia’s leading PC tech companies, the primary partner for this special PC&TA community event was none other than the CPU manufacturer who has been at the core of PC technology for over three decades; Intel. The event hosted Intel’s Graham Tucker, the local Aussie Technical Manager who has spent a hefty 28 years with the company. When it comes to Intel products, Mr Tucker is the man in the know. He imparted his wisdom on the crowd with a fascinating insight into Intel’s latest products, highlighting…

“action revolves around conversation and making decisions that will impact later events in the game” DEVELOPER INK STORIES PUBLISHER INK STORIES PRICE $11.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM Inkstories.com/1979RevolutionGame Set in the days before the infamous Black Friday massacre in which unarmed protestors were fired upon by the Iranian army, 1979 Revolution casts players in the role of Reza Shirazi, a London educated photographer who returns to Iran to both fight for freedom from the Pro-American puppet Shah, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and document the struggle as a photojournalist. It’s not a part of history that is particularly well known in the Western world, even though the aftermath - the autocratic rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini - is quite common knowledge. Reza is a very likeable and relatable character, a pacifist with…

“It adds a brutal overtone to what is already a rather melancholy experience” DEVELOPER STOIC STUDIO PUBLISHER VERSUS EVIL PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, GOG www.bannersaga2.com Don’t let the name fool you. The Banner Saga 2 isn’t a sequel to Stoic’s beautiful Norse fantasy tactics game, but rather a continuation thereof. It’s part 2 of the epic saga of a land in which the gods have died, the sun has stopped, and everything living is on the run from the terrifying Dredge. Set right after the events of the first game, the player finds themselves once again in charge of a small caravan, pressing through the ice and snow trying to make it to the human capital and supposed safety. Even though the game is a continuation rather than a…

Like it or not, if you’re building a new gaming rig, you’re probably going to have to make the switch to DDR4 memory. With Intel’s new Skylake 6th Gen Core Processor relying on this memory type, that old DDR3 kit in your last PC is only good as a letter opener. Thankfully DDR4 prices have plummeted to the point where they’re as affordable as DDR3, but the question remains – what benefit will DDR4 bring to my gaming performance? MOBILE COMES FIRST Unfortunately one of the main reasons Intel has moved to DDR4 has nothing to do with desktop performance. It’s all about saving power, as today’s mobile PC market is one of the few remaining growth areas. Laptop manufacturers are all about saving power, and DDR4 brings substantial energy…

Rounding out the hardware is NVIDIA’s excellent GTX 970M GPU, which performs on par with a desktop GTX 960 PRICE $2099 www.gigabyte.com.au This is the fifth version of the P55W from Gigabyte, so they’ve obviously had some time to get things sorted. It’s the cheapest laptop in the roundup, but don’t let that fool you – thanks to some savvy software installation, this actually manages to beat out some of the competition. At this price point, the fully plastic enclosure is forgivable, and Gigabyte has ensured it’s thick enough to handle a bit of a beating. The 15.6-inch screen is the smallest of the three here, but is just big enough to deliver an immersive gaming experience. The screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 is fine for these dimensions, with…

PRICE $145 steelseries.com With the Apex M800 released last year, Steelseries created an excellent, premium priced and featured gaming keyboard that utilised the company’s own proprietary mechanical keys so it seems a little odd to follow up such a great product with one that sits at a budget price point and uses the well-known Cherry MX Red switches instead of trying to capitalise on their own. It turns out to have been an excellent decision, as the Apex M500 is one of the most elegant and pleasant to use keyboards we’ve gotten our fingers on in a good long while. Aimed at the eSports market, the M500 has quite a no-frills design, with no AV controls or extra macro buttons bulking out the frame, and only a single lighting colour…

PRICE $195 www.razerzone.com Given that Razer pretty much singlehandedly kickstarted the mechanical switch craze in the broader gaming market with its first BlackWidow, it’s kind of a shame to see the latest iteration of the brand come to so little. The new BlackWidow X Chroma is a striking keyboard, with a very solid chassis, and some versatile lighting – if that’s your thing – but its keys are a massive disappointment. The Razer Mechanical Switches which are meant to be a big draw for the keyboard – and that no doubt keep prices down compared to the limited output from Cherry itself – feel muddy and in-exact, with a travel that seems like it’s always about to get stuck. In fact, the backspace key does that, and more than once…

PRICE $649 www.dlink.com.au First announced at CES 2015, it’s taken over 16 months for D-Link’s top-of-the-line Wi-Fi router to finally make it into stores. This is likely a result of the MU-MIMO functionality included within, which is still not actually enabled. At the time of press, D-Link was expecting to release a firmware update in the future that would finally bring MU-MIMO support to the table. So what the heck is MU-MIMO, and why should you care that this router has it? Today’s routers can only send and receive data packets to one device at a time. When multiple devices are connected, one device is getting data, while the rest wait. Thankfully this happens so quickly that we usually don’t notice, until we start to load up lots of extra…

Intel kind of paved the way for Stick PC’s with their original Compute Stick As we move towards a world where everything is getting smaller, the desktop PC hasn’t quite kept pace. Desktop and tower PC’s are pretty much the same size as they have been for the last couple of years. A new trend is starting to emerge however and is threatening to clear that valuable real estate on your desk. Mini PC’s, while not a new concept, are becoming increasingly popular as they get more powerful and therefore more useful. Let’s take a closer look at this trending category and see what’s fanning the fires. Mini PC’s basically come in two different flavours. You have the small boxy mini PC’s, which are like scaled down versions of their…