Under The Hood: This Week In PC, Component And Software News

Thinking of building a new gaming PC? Struggling with whatever random error your desktop is throwing up this week? Under The Hood gives you a quick and concise run-down of the most important things that happened to the PC master race in the last seven days.


Australia Won’t Get The HTC Vive Until May
Pre-orders are now open for the HTC Vive, the major virtual reality competitor to the Oculus Rift. As well as being slugged with a price of around $1400 Australian dollars, we’re also disadvantaged by about a month over our international compatriots when it comes to shipping.

Over at Kotaku, Alex has the news — US$817.27 for the device itself and US$110 for shipping, which is a solid $1413.46. for anyone wanting to buy the Vive in Australia. And more than the price, is a significant extra wait for the actual headset and its accessories to ship internationally.


The New Raspberry Pi 3 Is Out Now In Australia
The new iteration of the tiny but powerful but cheap Raspberry Pi is the US$35 Pi 3 Model B. Despite being exactly the same price as the previous version, the RPi 3 is 50 per cent more powerful, and for the first time includes both on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy, making it even more useful for those hobby projects or as a cut-rate Linux terminal or media centre box.

You can buy the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B for around $62 from both Element14 and RS Components. Both Element14 and RS Components offer free delivery; the list price is $56, but you’ll have to add 10 per cent GST on top of that if you’re buying as an individual rather than a business.


This Analogue Mechanical Keyboard Is For Gamers Who Want Complete Control
There are two types of keyboards — analogue and digital. Analogue is mostly found in musical instruments, where the weight placed on a key often defines amplitude. Digital ones are the keys most often found packed away in your laptop and are either on or off. There’s no middle ground. But Wooting’s analogue keyboard wants to be the best of both worlds.

Where console games get the added benefit of an analogue stick, making it easier to creep around in Assassin’s Creed or whatever, traditional WASD keyboards don’t offer up that level of control.


Your Next Phone Might Have 256GB Of Storage Thanks To Samsung’s New Chip
I love high capacity things. So when Samsung announced that it’s producing 256 GB flash storage that can be used in mobile devices, I swooned. The memory is two times faster than the previous generation of Universal Flash Storage (UFS) memory, meaning that phones will not only have greater storage capacities, but also breeze reading and writing operations.

Nonetheless, there are probably still a lot of you thinking this isn’t a huge deal. You might say that the most popular Android phones already support microSD expandable memory, or that Android 6.0 Marshmallow supports adoptive memory, making it easier for your phone to read and write to expandable storage. But that would be missing the point.


Four Tips To Make Your Windows 10 Computer Run Faster
Microsoft’s newest operating system is getting better all the time, and if you’ve already updated, you’re no doubt wondering how to get the best software experience you can.

These tips should help you improve performance on your computer by cleaning the clutter you don’t really need. Here are four things you can do to streamline your Windows 10 experience.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

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