Reviews & Articles

Introduction AMP branding is expanding into the mobile market with various peripherals such as speaker, headphone and power adapter for mobile devices. Among the power adapters, Antec has shipped us the 4-port USB Charging Station (model number UA4-25) and the external battery pack, the PowerUp Slim 2200 (model number APS-2200) …

AMD today brings the latest implementation of the heterogeneous computing with the introduction of the heterogeneous queuing (hQ). As you may recall, AMD founded the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation with other chipmakers and industry giants such as ARM, Qualcomm, and Samsung to promote a great utilization of various computing …

A well-known brand among the PC industry, Antec is branching out like many other manufacturers. Antec A.M.P. (which stands for Antec Mobile Products) is the branch of Antec that specializes in mobile products. Antec’s foray into mobile peripherals started with an array of audio, power, and cleaning product. Today, we …

MSI GeForce GTX 780 Lightning MSI had shocked the market with the Gaming series but the ones for the extreme overclocker on the high end has always been the Lightning series. With that I knew it was only a matter of time till we got one of the new Nvidia …

Remember old times, when you had to plug a cable in the 3.5” mm headphone jack of your mobile device to the speaker in order to amplify the volume so that everyone at the party could enjoy music? Many IOS devices also utilize the 30-pin or lightning connector to pass …

Looking at the model number of the OCZ Vertex 450 and you would be thinking that the product falls in the same family as the Vertex 4. However, the only thing that the Vertex 450 shares with the Vertex 4 is only the branding of Vertex. Other than that, the …

Introduction – Gigabyte Aivia Neon 1200Dpi Presenter Mouse Gigabyte has been best known for their motherboard solutions at varying levels. Here today we have one of their devices from their growing and maturing peripheral line which is a presentation mouse named the Aivia Neon. This mouse is not just a …

Sapphire Radeon R9-280X Toxic Sapphire Has been AMDs premier partner for a long time now so it was only natural that when the new AMD R Series cards launched that we would have one with Sapphires special touches in hand rather quickly. The model we have in hand is a …

MSI Radeon R9-280X Gaming MSI as always dresses to impress with its non reference designs and well with the Radeon R series of cards there is no mistaking a MSI card from the rest as they carry very distinctive cooler designs and honestly when first seeing this card I was …

Gigabyte GTX 780 Windforce OC When thinking graphics so many times names jump into out minds like EVGA, ASUS and whatnot but many times when you think about Gigabyte, graphics cards simply don’t jump to the forefront. Gigabyte is best known for their extensive motherboard offering while for some reason …

Introduction – ASUS Z87I-Deluxe ASUS while best known for the crazy features and designs on ROG boards they also do design some very impressive mainstream level boards much like the ITX offering we are looking at today. The Z87I-Deluxe is a highly featured ITX Z87 model that offers ASUS performance …

Introduction – ASUS Maximus VI Impact The ASUS Z87 series is far from over as something we have today is something people have been asking for some time for ASUS to produce. Being as the PC world is going through a trend of smaller systems it started with lanBox style …

Introduction – ASUS Maximus  VI Formula The Z87 lineup has moved along quickly and now we have had a few months to let things settle and the platform is still getting new boards trickling in like a few I got here just recently one of them being the one I …

  Closer Look When we first took on the Dynatron coolers honestly one of the most excited I was to work with was this one and that’s because I feel a bit more at home working on a tower cooler like this as the small flat coolers you get with …

  Closer Look Previously we had taken a look at a unit from Dynatron for the LGA 2011 server side application utilizing the Slim ILM design and active cooling for a really thin 1U blade server application. Well today we have a similar unit in appearance but its application is …

Introduction Patriot has been in the market for a long time but it is the lesser known little brother in the memory game. However this has not kept them from making some very cool memory models among other devices such as USB flash drives, mobile wireless storage and even a …

Introduction Gskill has been a popular memory provider for some time and their innovation along with work with high end overclockers helps push them to even more popularity as their memory can be seen at some tof the top benchmarks records in the world. Also the recent Computex show Gskill …

Introduction Some of our lives are busy and disorganized. We wake up in the morning and we rush to work to find ourselves overwhelmed with too many things, sometimes too much to handle. The clutter of paperwork doesn’t help either, making us feel like we’re working in a mess and …

Introduction Many times you will find that building a PC while to us enthusiasts seems so easy and we can almost do it blind folded. But when many gamers want a PC the task is too daunting to even consider building their own system which is why they end up …

ASUS GTX 670 DirectCU II Mini Graphics Card After the 680 card launched there was the 670 and the line carried on, then we had heard word of a special “Mini” card and even a few sneak peeks here and there but I never honestly thought it would materialize. Now …

 Introduction – Gigabyte Z87X-OC Well we are now many boards deep into the Z87 line and now we got a new fun toy from the team over at Gigabyte. This is one of the OC Series boards, and yes I did say one of them as there are two different …

ASUS GTX 780 DirectCU II OC ASUS with its top end DirectCU II cards always has its special spin and tweaks to the GPUs they create. and today we have the newest on the uber high end with the GTX 780 based model which comes packed with a full custom …

  Closer Look When looking at cooling solutions all too often we forget that besides the big names there are many solutions out there that never see the pages of many popular enthusiasts media or even get any coverage really at all. Especially when considering that besides the enthusiasts and …

Intel’s New Ivy Bridge-E Has Landed! Normally when Intel launches a new CPU it is brought along with a new chipset even if its the same socket. If you remember the launch a short while ago moving from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge, it utilized the same 1155 socket but …

MSI GeForce GTX 760 HAWK MSI with the introduction of the Gaming series set a whole new category for the MSI brand in the marketplace and a very necessary one at that. However there is still a gap to fill when it comes to extreme performance and that is where …

Back in January 2012 we reviewed the Seagate GoFlex Satellite, a 500 GB external hard drive that allowed users to connect to it wirelessly and then stream music, images and video to connected mobile devices. This time we are testing the latest version of the drive, the Seagate Wireless Plus, …

Introduction – MSI Z87 Mpower MSI was quick to let a flurry of boards hit the market including the new “Gaming” line but for those enthusiasts who want something to help push the limits there’s no better solution form the MSI camp than the Mpower/Xpower series. We have already shows …

Introduction – MSI Z87-G45 Gaming MSI stormed the market as of recent with the introduction of their gaming series and also offered a new level of segmentation to their lineup that previously simply was not there. By adding the Gaming series there now is a set boundary as to which …

Gigabyte GA-F2A85XN-WIFI (A85X Mini-ITX) Motherboard   With only 17cm x 17 cm of area to work with, available real estate limits what manufacturers can put on a mini-ITX motherboard. However, for the Gigabyte GA-F2A85XN-WIFI, Gigabyte has done a very good job at offering what users need the most. The F2A85XN-WIFI …

Introduction – ASUS Maximus  VI Hero The Z87 series keeps on trucking along and with this ASUS offers yet another ROG piece to the game with the newly released Maximus VI HERO. The Hero looks very much like a Formula from the Z77 line but without the WiFi or the …

Introduction – ASUS Z87-PRO ASUS along with its ROG boards also released the more mainstream channel series of boards one of which we actually looked at already in the Z87-A. The color seems to be the big topic in the community and for good reason since ECS did a similar …

Introduction – ASUS Z87-A When new chipset launches happen all of the attention is given to the big boys of the group or the high end behemoth that is the top clocking boards. All the while, there is a whole bunch of other boards that may not have all of …

 Introduction – Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H   Just a short time ago we looked at the Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H and now we grabbed up its little brother, the UD3H. This board offers similar feature sets as the UD4H but a little more on the value side which means it will omit small bells …

ASUS GTX 760 DirectCU II OC Graphics Card After the GTX 760 card launched we were quite surprised as to the power on tap, and were more excited to see what exactly can be done when put in the capable hands of some of the board partners. ASUS stepped up …

 Introduction – Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H   Gigabyte has been making boards forever and honestly, it has been up and down along the cycle. It seems like every board manufacturer has its good and bad times, and Gigabyte seems to have been going through a bit of a rough patch. With that …

Halo is one of those games that will be talked about for many years. Not only did it in many ways help make the first Xbox a success, it also was the game that at least for me proved that you can play a first person shooter (FPS) on a …

MSI just jumped into the extreme Haswell game with the recent release of the Z87 Xpower, today we have one in hand, so let’s see what this beast has to offer.

The juggernaut of elite air-cooling solutions, Noctua unleashes two new heatsinks.  Let’s examine the pair and see how they perform. 

One thing you can be certain of in the tech industry is that you can never be content at the status quo even if you are the leader in the industry. The tech industry moves at such a rapid pace where in a very short period of time, an industry …

With Intel’s new chipset introduction it was only a matter of time till we had the new boards from MSI. Now that we have it, let’s see what you get with the new Z87-GD65 Gaming!