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 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 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

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

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

We saw a couple of weeks ago NVIDIA released the GTX 1080 Ti which we had a chance to review. From that review we concluded it was a beast of a card, even in its Founders Edition form. Truth be told, its the closest thing to a single GPU solution at 4K resolution with high settings we have, and at a more reasonable price than the Titan XP or Xp or... whatever the new one is called. As with nearly every GPU released, the AIB's get in the game giving us their take. MSI sent us the GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G to review. They have updated their Twin Frozr cooling solution as well as better goodies on the PCB to deliver a quieter and better performing version of the FE 1080 Ti. Read on below to see how it shapes up! Read More