Deepcool has been building computer cooling hardware for years. In the last several years they have been pushing into making products for computers. They started with fans. Then they made cases and heatsinks. We are reviewing a new entry, produced under Deepcool’s sub-brand, Gamer Storm. Today: the Lucifer K2. That’s four brand names for this heatsink. That last is a mountain in the Karkorams, second highest in the world. Will it cool as well as its lofty name? Let’s find out. Read More
Today we have the Z170X-UD5 which is in the upper tier of GIGABYTE’s current lineup, just behind their Z170X-Gaming 7. Being near the top of the lineup, the UD5 looks like a great board on paper and deserves a good testing. Read More
Today we will again take a high-level look into the world of benchmarking: CPU and GPU benchmarks, benchmarking tools and much more. Specifically, we will be looking at thirteen point-scoring benchmarks listed at HWBOT.org as well as the more common utilities used for overclocking and submitting scores to their system.… Read More
Once again, I have the pleasure of reviewing a new installment from EVGA’s FTW motherboard series. This time it’s the Z170 FTW getting strapped on to the benching stand. With an all-new look, new features, and support for Skylake CPU’s with DDR4 memory EVGA has had their work cut out for them revamping the FTW. Let’s see what they kept, improved, and dropped on this newest iteration. Read More
The Ninja heatsinks are beautiful, symmetrical heatsinks. The Ninja 4 is all that; you would love to have this heatsink decorating your computer from its looks alone. But will it cool? Is it easy to mount? Let’s see. Read More
Our next motherboard review comes courtesy of MSI. This go around, we get a chance to look at their flagship offering, the Z170A XPower Gaming Titanium Edition motherboard… wow was that a mouthful! On the cover, it looks like the board is a mashup between the monster, overclocking based, flagship XPower series we as overclockers love, and their black and white themed Krait line which focuses more on budget minded gaming. Being an avid overclocker, I am hoping MSI sticks to their roots on the XPower Gaming Titanium Edition and takes care of the overclockers. Bless your heart gamers, but your demographic is pretty easy to take care of in most cases. Let’s see where the needle lands when we look at MSI’s flagship Z170 motherboard! Read More
Today, Patriot announced a new addition to the Viper 4 series of DDR4, a new 3600 MHz kit geared towards use with Intel Skylake. This will be the fastest memory Patriot has available in terms of sheer MHz. Timings will be 17-18-18-36 at 1.35v. Read More
Today we continue our Z170 and Skylake motherboard parade with another offering from ASUS. This time, we get to look at the rugged Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1 motherboard. As we know, the Sabertooth line offers a board that should handle a bit more of the rough and tumble situations. It offers an ‘armor’ to protect the board and even dust caps all around to keep the nasties out of where it shouldn’t go. ASUS says it is an “Enduringly-tough Z170 board with ultimate cooling and extreme durability”. So, it’s time to strap the board on to the Humvee and take it out in the desert and…..ok, ok, we won’t do that, but we will put it through its paces and see if it comes out swinging in the end. Read More
Today, Arctic released the new semi-passive Freezer 32 series of CPU coolers. Thanks to a special German fan controller, the heatsink is silent during low-intensity/Windows CPU operation and speeds up during gaming and other demanding tasks. Read More
In the world of new GPU releases, we haven’t had a chance yet to look at AMD’s new lineup with its Fiji based cards, but we do have a consolation prize in the R9 390 that AMD kindly sent us! The R9 390 is, for all intents and a tweaked R9 290 in that it has more vRAM (8GB up from 4GB), and higher reference clock speeds. The rest remains the same. Like is typically done with reference models, AMD will let the board partners change things up a bit and put their own spin on the reference design. With that, we have in our hands a MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G, with its Twin Frozr V cooler and 8GB of vRAM in tow. It is time to put the card through our new benchmarks and see how it shapes up! Read More
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