With thanks going to EVGA, I have the X299 Micro motherboard on the test bench today. This is one of the few mATX X299 motherboards available currently. According to EVGA this board will support all Core i9, even the big dog, 18 core/36 thread i9 7980XE. All I can test with currently is the Core i9 7900X so let's dive in and see how the X299 Micro holds up. Read More
A quick template with formatting and tables for motherboard reviews. Read More
Bringing in the tail-end of the newest AMD CPUs we have the Ryzen 3 lineup. This is AMD's offering for the budget-minded PC user. Today we'll be looking at the two quad-core offerings, the 1200 and 1300X. The 1300X has the XFR technology we've seen from the Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X, and Ryzen 5 1500X/1600X allowing for boost speeds over their typical max. The 1200 is locked to its listed speeds, unless you're overclocking. One major difference from the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 CPUs is the exclusion of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) from the Ryzen 3 processors. While this does mean a performance hit for multithreaded applications, it also cuts the cost of the product making it accessible to more users. Let's take a closer look at the lineup now. Read More
Today's newest victim for the torture table is GIGABYTE's new Z270X-Gaming SOC, their flagship overclocking motherboard. This board has one job, and only one job, to be as fast as physically possible while pushing your CPU as far as possible. There's notably fewer features than the Z170X-SOC Force, though, because GIGABYTE has gone back to the roots of the extreme overclocker with this board. If anything can handle the punishment, it'll be this board. Read More
The MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM is quite a mouthful but it's also an amazing looking motherboard. The Titanium line from MSI has, in recent years, been their "top of the line" offering. It comes loaded with extras and has a unique styling which sets this board apart from it's siblings. Currently it's sitting in the upper price range of the AM4 X370 motherboards at $259.99 from newegg.com. Read More
The last few months have seen a flurry of CPU releases as the RED and BLUE teams go toe to toe, vying for their piece of the mainstream PC market"pie". Today AMD has announced the pricing and availability for additional CPUs including the long awaited THREADRIPPER aimed directly at the HEDT ( High End Desk Top) segment. This niche of the enthusiast market has been dominated by Intel for years but I have a feeling that's all about to change. Read More
Noctua released a lot of items in May, including the NA-SAV3 and NA-SAV4 vibration isolators, the NA-SAC5, where SATA powers a fan, and the NA-FC1… Read More
Noctua has released a new 15 mm thick, named the NF-A12x15. It is designed to fit in skinny places and to provide relatively high static pressure. They faced challenges getting a fan this thin. For example, “For the 12cm NF-A12x15, a steel-reinforced motor hub and brass axle mount are being used in order to assure the required stability despite the fan’s 15mm thin profile.” Remember, Noctua guarantees their products out to six years and to make a thin fan last that long took some work. They also never made a fan this thin. As our press contact commented, “All of the new models are new form factors for us.” So let’s have a look at this, the newest entry into the slim fan derby: Read More
It has been a long time coming since there was true competition in the CPU market. Intel, for the last several years and CPU generations (since 2006/Conroe based chips and later), have been pretty dominate over their competitor, AMD Read More
As of May 2017 Noctua released its NF-A20 fan as the NF-A20 FLX two-speed fan and the NF-A20 PWM variable speed fan. Noctua has been working on a 200 mm fan for years – it first showed a 20 cm prototype in 2013 at Computex, so this month will be exactly four years. They had to have been working on it before that, to make a prototype, but only now has Noctua released their 200 mm fan. As their press relations person said, “We really had to put our backs into this one to make it happen. It's so easy to build a 200mm fan that spins, but so hard to build one that performs, doesn't feel flimsy, and will spin for more than 10 years...” Were the results worth it? Let’s see! Read More
Today on the review rig, we have the ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1070 to share with you. The 1070 Strix promises to have good and quiet cooling, your now typical RGB LEDs, and superior performance over any Founders Edition (FE) cards due to the factory overclock. There are a couple of neat features here, one of which is FanConnect, which you will later see why this sets the card apart from the others. Read on below to see if they have again accomplished what they set out to do! Read More
Up next in our review carousel is another very fast M.2 PCIe NVMe based SSD. With only Toshiba/OCZ and Samsung generally competing in this enthusiast space, it will be nice to see some more competition. To that end, our friends at Patriot have kindly sent over their 480GB Hellfire M.2 SSD. The Hellfire promises to be pretty quick using its Phison PS5007-E7 controller shared by others in the market. Let's dig in a bit and see what makes the Hellfire tick, and see how it performs in our testing. Read More
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