News::Razer's gaming Ultrabook lets you bring your own video card

If you're a gamer, you don't have it easy when buying laptops: you may want a sleek, lightweight Ultrabook when you're traveling, but you also want the big, powerful desktop replacement when you're home. What to do? Razer thinks you can have both. It's launching the Blade Stealth, a 12.5-inch ultraportable with some proper gaming cred. Its centerpiece is an optional Thunderbolt 3-powered dock, the Core (below), that lets you use most any modern desktop graphics card when integrated video won't cut it -- if you just have to play Battlefront at max detail with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti, you can. It has Ethernet and four USB 3.0 ports, too, so you only need to plug in one cable to get all your usual peripherals.

Source: Razer

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News::Intel is taking its fight against GamerGate even further

The most important news from last year's CES was Intel's $300 million response to GamerGate, the caustic online movement that targeted women with vicious harassment. But talk is cheap, even with that high of a price-tag on it. How has the tech titan fared since that announcement? Some 43 percent of its new hires were women and underrepresented minorities since, CEO Brian Krzanich said near the end of the company's media briefing.

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News::HP's Envy Phoenix gaming desktop will support HTC's new VR headset

If the events of the past year have proven anything, it's that VR is going to be a big, big deal. HP certainly gets it, and that's why it inked a curious partnership with HTC — they of the new, improved Vive headset — to build a high-end machine called the Envy Phoenix meant specifically for virtual reality gaming. And hey, it's a little cheaper than one might expect too: we're told prices will start at $1,700 when the Phoenix officially launches on January 16th.

Dana Wollman contributed to this report.

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News::PlayStation Now just got 40-plus new PS3 games

Sony announced the addition of more than 40 PS3 games to its Now service, bringing the total number of available PS3 games to 300, 100 of which are PS3 exclusives. Additionally, Sony's offering a pretty steep discount on the Now service itself for the holidays -- $100 for a full year's subscription. That's more than half off what they normally charge. The discount offer runs through Monday, January 11th.

[Image Credit: Getty]

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News::'Rise of the Tomb Raider' officially hits PCs this month

The latest Lara Croft game, Rise of the Tomb Raider, launches on Steam, the Windows store and other retailers on January 28th, Square Enix announced today. Rise of the Tomb Raider popped up on Steam last month with a vague promise to hit PC sometime in January. It wasn't the most complicated clue to figure out, but at least it turned out to be accurate.

Source: Square Enix

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News::The Engadget CES stage show kicks off at 1:05PM ET tomorrow

Sure, here at CES we're scouring the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center (and hotel suites in a roughly three miles radius) for all the latest tech toys to write about. But that part of our work isn't exactly fun to watch. Fortunately, we have you covered with live news and entertainment from our stage all week long. From daily previews and recaps, video game competitions, interviews with tech's biggest names and even a chance for our dear readers to join in the fun, there's pretty much always going to be something to watch. Best of all, it'll take you no effort at all to It all to keep on top of all the goings ons. You'll be able to watch every minute of our stage programing right on the homepage. And it all kicks off here in 24 hours. Check out our entire schedule for the week below.

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News::Play as Ronda Rousey in EA Sports' 'UFC 2' in March

UFC 2 lands on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on March 15th, and pre-orders are open right now. Pre-ordering grants players day-one access to UFC Hall of Famer Bas Rutten, "The Gracie Hunter" Kazushi Sakuraba and one mystery fighter.

Source: YouTube

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News::PlayStation 4 sales top 35 million after a huge holiday

If you had a hunch that the PlayStation 4 would keep up its gangbuster sales rate through the holiday season... well, you guessed correctly. Sony is crowing that lifetime sales of the PS4 have reached 35.9 million, 5.7 million of which were sold this holiday alone. In other words, a sixth of all PS4 owners joined in just the past few months. Many of these customers are online, too -- PlayStation Plus subscriptions jumped 60 percent compared to a year earlier.

Source: PlayStation Blog (translated)

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News::Oculus gives Kickstarter backers the finished Rift for free

Sometimes, it pays to be an early adopter. Oculus just revealed that it's handing out free Kickstarter Editions of the finished Rift headset to everyone who pledged enough money to get the development kit during the original crowdfunding drive. Yes, you heard that right -- you won't have to pre-order the completed virtual reality goggles if you were eager to get a prototype in 2012. The hardware ships with the copies of Eve: Valkyrie and Lucky's Tale that regular customers get, too.

Source: Oculus

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News::HTC's making virtual reality safe for the home with Chaperone

I was standing with my back facing a large glass window, the mammoth casinos that punctuate Vegas' vast expanse of excess and desert showboating behind me. Here, on the top floor of the Wynn's opulent Tower suite, a staff photographer, moving around the room looking like some sort of bluish, 2D negative image, was instructing me to strike various poses of the decidedly unsexy sort. I was outfitted with the head-mounted display and wand controllers that make up HTC's revamped virtual reality developer kit, the Vive Pre, which it recently unveiled at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show. It wasn't the first time I found myself looking ridiculous while modeling bulky VR hardware for a photographer, but it was the first time I managed to avoid doing it blindly.

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News::Origin has an all-in-one gaming PC, too

One trend we didn't expect to see at CES this week was all-in-one gaming PCs. But here we are with another, this time from the folks at Origin PC. Dubbed the "Omni," the machine packs quite a bit of customization for its class. The company's calling it the "world's most powerful and customizable" device of its kind, saying that there's room for up to an Intel Core i7 5960X processor and a 12GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X under its 34-inch Ultra-wide 3K display (3440 x 1440 resolution).

Source: Origin PC

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News::Maingear proves that all-in-ones can be monster gaming PCs

Ask gamers why they don't buy all-in-one PCs and they'll usually give you two main reasons: the hardware isn't beefy enough, and it's rare that you can upgrade after the fact. Well, Maingear might have both issues licked. Its new Alpha 34 crams genuinely good hardware behind a curved, 34-inch 1440p display -- we're talking up to an 8-core Intel Core i7 processor (or an 18-core Xeon chip), NVIDIA Titan X graphics and other parts you'd normally expect in a big tower. You can still expand it with desktop-sized parts, and there's optional liquid cooling to spare you from listening to fans all day.

Source: Maingear

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