Assassin's Creed 3 to take place during the American Revolution

After much speculation it has been confirmed that Assassin's Creed 3 will take place during the American revolution. Images with hints of this have been floating around the internet for a few days now but Ubisoft has released the official box-art for Assassin's Creed 3, which confirms that the game will indeed take place during the American Revolution. Prior to this several images were seen on Kotaku, Game Informer, and Shacknews leading to this speculation. No word yet on a release date or if the game will use the intrusive DRM that previous titles did.

Source: Shacknews

AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series Specs. Table Leaked

Japanese media has got a hold of the specifications table of AMD's Radeon HD 7800 series products, the HD 7870 and HD 7850. Hermitage Akihabara has not cited a source as such, so we assume it vouches for the accuracy of this table. The table reveals Radeon HD 7870 as having 1280 stream processors, a 256-bit wide memory bus width (derived from the memory bandwidth and clock speeds figures provided in the table), 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and clock speeds of 1.00 GHz core, with 1200 MHz (4.80 GHz effective) memory. This SKU has a typical board power of 175W.

The slide details the HD 7850 as having 1024 stream processors, 64 TMUs, 32 ROPs, the same 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface, with the same memory clock speed as the HD 7870, but with a lower core clock speed of 860 MHz. the board power for the HD 7850 is mentioned to be under 130W. Interestingly, 2 GB is standard memory amount for both cards. The Japanese site mentions the official launch date of HD 7800 series as being March 8, but also goes on to add that market availability (we're assuming they mean the Japanese market), is only expected on/after March 19.

Sources: Hermitage Akihabara, VR-Zone, and 456,000+ search results for "AMD Radeon HD 7800 Specifications" on Google

Borderlands 2 PC uses Steamworks

More and more publishers seem to be seeing Steamworks as the best viable DRM on the market and 2K Games is no exception. All PC editions of Borderlands 2 will use Valve's Steamworks suite as their DRM. Steamworks supports snazzy features beyond simple copy protection, Gearbox's shooter-RPG will also use it for multiplayer matchmaking, Steam Cloud storage, achievements, auto-updating, downloadable content, "and more." How Steamworks... works is that if you buy a boxed edition of Borderlands 2, you'll need to register the game with a Steam account, and launch it through Steam. The box will still contain a disc to install the game from, but you'll have the option to download it directly through Steam whenever you please. Digital distributors other than Steam will simply sell you a product key to activate on Steam. Steamworks was to be expected, really, as 2K Games has used it for PC editions of games it's published since Mafia II in 2010. It briefly dabbled in Games for Windows Live before then but, thankfully, that was a short-lived experiment.

Borderlands 2 is coming to PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on September 18. As ever, a selection of shiny things are on offer as pre-order bonuses.

Source: Shacknews

Cougar Officially Launches the Evolution BO and Evolution Galaxy PC Cases

German feline-loving firm Cougar has now rolled out two more Evolution Series full tower PC cases, the Evolution BO (which we mentioned back in January) and the Evolution Galaxy. These models feature similar specs but come with their own color theme - black and orange for the EBO and black and white for the EG.

Seen below, Cougar's cases measure 223 (W) x 523 (D) x 514 (H) mm, and have a steel 'skeleton', an I/O panel with two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, a top-mounted 3.5-inch/2.5-inch SATA drive dock, a built-in fan controller, six external 5.25-inch bays (with tool-free mounting systems), four internal 3.5-inch trays, and eight PCI slots. The Evolution BO also packs a 120 mm Vortex HDB rear fan.

Both the Evolution BO and Evolution Galaxy have a recommended price tag of $94.99.

Source