When you have a close look at a standard PC and a gaming PC, you will see that there are quite a lot of differences. Many parents do not realise the difference and have bought standard PCs for their teenagers as a Christmas present thinking their kid would be delighted when in fact they are feeling very disappointed. A standard PC is the perfect choice if you are going to be running things like educational software or office programs for example, but if you were hoping to be able to play the modern games of today then you will definitely need the gaming PC instead.

The fact of the matter is that today it is possible for us to make a standard computer much better by adding options which will enable it to handle the better graphics of the games that are out today. The problem with most PCs these days is that while the CPU might be one of the best, without the proper graphics card, the computer will not be able to handle the games of today.

Most of the games that have come out over the last five years will not be something you can enjoy if your PC has an onboard graphics system that is sharing the system memory. For the minimum you should have at least a standalone card with its own GPU or Graphic Processing Unit. For a decent card these days it will need at least a gigabyte of its own RAM so that it could handle large chunks of 3D rendering and high levels of shadowing that today’s games use more and more often.

Your standard PC is also unlikely to have a way that you can control it that is better than the games consoles in the market today. If you are using Windows based software however, then you should be able to use an Xbox 360 controller by installing a few drivers on your computer because of the fact that the Xbox is made by Microsoft. It is probably much more expensive to play your games on a gaming PC these days than on a games console but the extra outlay is well worth it when you consider the level of game play and the quality of the games.

R4i card are employed in a good many products nowadays. An RD card is an excellent example. One more thing which is used today is the ps3 jailbreak.

A supposedly tongue-in-cheek memo suggests that employees at videogame developer High Voltage might have “Amazon-bombed” the book of a reviewer who panned one of the studio’s games.

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Facebook has disrupted or helped to re-engineer many businesses and markets, including the photo-sharing market and the social-gaming market. But one thing it hasn’t really focused on so far is the news business. Plenty of media companies use Facebook as a news-delivery platform, and many users (including Gawker founder Nick Denton, according to a recent interview) rely on it as a news source. But Facebook itself hasn’t done much to capitalize on that. That could change, however, judging by some comments from chief technology officer Bret Taylor — and it could pit the social network against Twitter in the race to become a social news platform.

While Taylor — the former co-founder of the social network FriendFeed — didn’t provide much in the way of details during his interview, he did say that he sees disruption coming to a number of industries as a result of social platforms like Facebook, much like it has to gaming, and that one of those disrupted industries is likely to be media:

If we had to guess, it’s probably going to be orientated around media or news, because they are so social. When you watch a television show with your friend, it’s such an engaging social activity. We think that there’s a next generation of startups that are developing social versions of these applications, where what Zynga is to gaming, they will be to media and news, and we’re really excited about that.

Taylor’s comments seem to suggest that Facebook isn’t looking to do anything news-related itself, but is hoping that developers will come up with social-news applications that can run on top of the Facebook platform, the same way that Zynga’s games like Farmville or Cityville do. One example might be an app like Flipboard, which takes a person’s Facebook stream and makes it part of a social-news service. Another interesting experiment is a similar app called PostPost. Facebook is also clearly continuing to push the open-graph plugin strategy that has helped sites like The Huffington Post drive massive amounts of traffic and comments to the site, and offering improved commenting as a plugin for media outlets appears to be a focus as well.

At one point not that long ago, it looked like Facebook might be trying to become a news platform in a different way, by aggregating news itself, as a way of becoming a sort of personalized newspaper for users. There were some initial moves in that direction that didn’t really go anywhere, and then more recently the network launched something it called “community pages,” which aggregate posts based on topic keywords and looked as though they could become a news aggregation service. But many of those pages are effectively useless, and amount to little more than SEO spam traps: one early example pulled in every post that mentioned the word “depends” and displayed it on a page about the adult undergarments of the same name.

The interesting thing about Taylor’s comments as they apply to television — and how social it is becoming, as people talk about shows with their friends in real-time — is that this is exactly what Twitter is also focusing on. Robin Sloan of the Twitter media team has talked about this phenomenon (including during a presentation at GigaOM’s NewTeeVee Live conference in November) and how it can drive viewership for events such as the MTV Movie Awards, etc. In a more recent example, the number of tweets sent during the Super Bowl set a new record, with about 4,000 being sent every second at the peak.

With its new real-time commenting features, which are being rolled out to all users now, it seems obvious that Facebook is also interested in becoming the discussion forum for such events — and possibly for breaking news like the uprising in Egypt, where Facebook has played a key role in getting information out about the protests and in helping dissidents coordinate their activities (despite the issues with the social network’s real-name policy, which I wrote about recently). But Twitter is a powerful player in that regard as well, with people like NPR’s Andy Carvin becoming one-man newswire services and curating the information coming from Egypt in real time.

Although Facebook may be focusing more on itself as a platform for apps and media outlets, it clearly has ambitions when it comes to the ongoing “socialization of news,” and at some point that means it is going to run headlong into Twitter.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
• Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners
• What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Jeremy Mates

GigaOMTech

More 3D broadcasts are sweeping across Europe. The next countries up are Belgium and Poland. They follow the UK and Germany—oh, and the U.S.

The broadcasts will be football (soccer) matches. The Belgian one is between Andrelechtand Sint-Truidense, and will be on Belgacom. We all know Anderlecht thanks to its exploits in the UEFA Champions League, but I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about Sint-Truidense. I’m sure they’re nice blokes.

Poland’s games will be on Canal+. Hi, Poland!

Other countries better hurry up: these “[Country] will have a 3D sports broadcast” stories are very rapidly losing their appeal. Frankly, I’m surprised the NFL hasn’t announced its plans yet. We all know the NFL will be all, “THE FIRST 3D SPORTS BROADCAST IN THE WORLD,” conveniently ignoring all of these soccer stories.

Review aggregator Metacritic has released the results of its first annual Game Platform Power Ranking. Collating the media review scores of all of the past year’s games, it’s found that the PS3 had the most well loved software of the…

It hasn’t been the best couple of months for Nintendo. Profits were down for the six months leading up to September, which the company blames on the strong yen and the Wii’s price cut. Net sales, too, were down, some 34.5 percent. Fair enough, and those reasons are likely to explain Nintendo’s situation, but is there something else going on? I know Pat Buchanan, the older gentlemen that he is, always uses the phrase “the chickens have come home to roost,” and I think it’s applicable here. Perhaps Nintendo’s strategy of selling the Wii to the “casual” crowd (housewives and the like, to simplify this) has finally run out of gas?

How many games were released for the Wii that appeal to the more hardcore among us? I’m thinking back to all the games I’ve played this year—Street Fighter IV, Resident Evil 5, Bioshock, Fallout 3, Race Driver: Grid, Forza Motorsport 3, and maybe one or two others that I’m forgetting—and none of them were available for the Wii. Now, I consider myself a hardcore gamer only in the sense that I’m not going to play something like Mario Party or some sing-along game; I’m not hanging out on NeoGaf debating the merits of Xbox Live vs PSN. So that’s where I’m coming from.

The point? I would say that there have been next to no games released for the Wii that interested me, a gamer who’d rather sit there and try to 100 percent Resident Evil 5 (well, Resident Evil 4… Resident Evil: 5 had too many things that annoyed me) than lose five pounds playing Wii Fit. I’m a gamer, not someone looking to have a fun evening with my grandkids.

I think that’s what it comes down to: Nintendo has made, if I may, mad money over the past few years by positioning the Wii as an entertainment device for the whole family. That’s all well and good, but when Single Professional Woman buys a Wii so she can host a Wii Sports party once a month, what are the odds that she’s going to keep buying game after game?

That’s not to say Nintendo is doomed, of course. I played the New Super Mario Brothers Wii a few weeks ago, and I can honestly say, “Now there’s a game that’ll appeal to the ‘hardcore’ among us.”

But what do I care? I’m most concerned with leveling my warlock in WoW.

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