June 2017 - Overclockers

Noctua NF-A12x15 Fan Review

June 21, 2017 Ed Hume 18

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:

Intel Skylake-X (i9 7900X) and Kaby Lake-X (i7 7740X) CPU Review

June 19, 2017 Joe Shields 52

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

Noctua NF-A20 Fan Review

June 13, 2017 Ed Hume 7

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!

ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1070 Gaming 8G Review

June 10, 2017 Joe Shields 3

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!

Patriot Hellfire M.2 NVMe SSD Review

June 5, 2017 Joe Shields 4

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.