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Category: Power Supplies
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Published: Friday, 10 October 2014 13:28
Sadly when a lot of people are shopping for a power supply things like does it have modular cables and styling play a big role. A lot of people forget that buying a quality power supply is important both to protect your components, but also higher power efficiency waists less. With power prices constantly going up every dollar counts, especially when you have more than one gaming PC in your household seeing heavy use. Well one of our event sponsors FSP sent over one of their new 80+ Platinum power supplies. Today I’m going to take a look to see what sets it apart beyond its high efficiency.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Monday, 06 October 2014 13:55
Even now that the GTX 750 Ti isn’t the only Maxwell cards on the market, I still find them an interesting GPU. Some of you may remember from our launch coverage of the GTX 750 Ti that it packed a punch without ever needing an extra power connection. Well that was the reference design; many of the other models on the market sadly required a 6-pin power connection for their overclocked models. Well Asus sent over their Strix OC Edition of the GTX 750 Ti and low and behold, it has the same low power requirements as the reference design. Today I’m going to put it through our test suite and see what a little overclock does for the Maxwell powered GTX 750 Ti.
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Category: Audio
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Published: Friday, 03 October 2014 12:30
While I suspect the Siberia V3 and even the Siberia Elite Prism will get the most attention with SteelSeries introducing an entire new product lineup. They also slipped in a new product the Siberia RAW Prism. We already know that Prism represents the full color lighting and Siberia is their most popular audio line. In the past we have seen RAW mice, in those cases they dropped the fancy features and sold the basic gaming mouse at a lower price. So with that we can come to the conclusion that the Siberia RAW Prism is their new budget friendly gaming headset. Frankly this isn’t an area that SteelSeries has competed in very much, they have always stuck with the mid-range audio products and more recently a little on the higher end with the Elites. Because of that I’m excited to see what they put together.
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Category: Audio
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Published: Tuesday, 30 September 2014 10:41
When SteelSeries introduced their Siberia Elite I couldn’t have been more excited. Sadly after testing I was left with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. They weren’t as comfortable as the Siberia v2 and I had a few audio issues as well. To the point where we even tried replacing them mid testing thinking my set might have been bad. In the end they weren’t terrible, but considering their price they didn’t live up to what they should have been. At our last LAN SteelSeries pulled me aside and had me try out a prototype Elite with a few changes and later they invited me to visit their Chicago office to check out their revamped product lineup. Well they listened to both us and the customer reviews on Amazon and made a few big changes with their new Siberia Elite Prism headset. Today I’m going to kick the dust off the original Elites and compare the two headsets to see if those changes are enough.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 24 September 2014 16:12
Every time I cover something Mini-ITX I talk about how great it is that we can build these monster PCs in such a small form factor. Even so, considering how sensitive they are to heat and bad wire management it’s not for everyone. If you don’t know about every single part on the market it can be a little harder to pick out your components for a LAN rig as well. You don’t know what will fit with what, larger builds are a lot more forgiving on all of these things. Well MSI might just have the answer to all of those issues. They have put together a Mini ITX barebones for gamers who know they want a small easy to carry rig. Their Nightblade comes with a variation on their Z97i Gaming AC motherboard that I recently reviewed, a case, slim DVD drive, and 600 watt power supply. You just need to bring your SSD/Hard drive, CPU, heatsink, and video card. The question is, does the Nightblade make things easier and also how well does it perform. Today I’m going to take a closer look and put it through a few tests to see what it’s all about.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Monday, 22 September 2014 10:45
I think by now most of you know I have a bit of an unnatural interest in mechanical keyboards. Almost six years ago I reviewed our first mechanical keyboard and from then on I have been obsessing over every detail on every board as they come out. Nearly two years ago I started to hear rumors that Cooler Master might be looking to produce a Topre keyswitch keyboard. Well today after all of the waiting, we finally have the chance to take a look at the Novatouch TKL with its capacitive (Topre) style keyswitches. Given my good experiences with both my last Cooler Master keyboard and Topre switches I have high expectations, let’s hope it can stand up to them.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Thursday, 18 September 2014 22:30
Nvidia may have officially launched Maxwell with the GTX 750 Ti launch back in February, but I think we can all agree that things don’t get really serious until they refresh their flagship card with the new architecture. Well the wait is over, Nvidia is taking the cover off of their new cards as you read this at their Game24 event. The new card is the GTX 980, this may come as a surprise seeing that the last generation of cards was the 700 series. Nvidia needed to sync their mobile and desktop GPUs, skipping 800 and jumping to the 900 series was the way to go about doing this. Before we dig into the changes moving to the GTX 980, everyone should check out our original Maxwell article HERE to see how well it performed.
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Category: Motherboards
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Published: Monday, 15 September 2014 17:27
When EVGA announced their first Classified motherboard back with X58 I saved up my money so I could get one soon after its launch. The X58 Classified was one of the first mega high end motherboards on the market and it started a race to the top to see who could make the coolest motherboard possible while trying to pack in the highest overclocking headroom as possible. From then on EVGA has introduced Classified motherboards for each Intel chipset launched. They have even expanded into Classified GPUs as well! Well with the launch of X99 it wasn’t a big surprise that EVGA would be ready to go with their latest and greatest based on the new enthusiast chipset. Today I’m going to see how it compares to the other X99’s on the market and see just how far things have come from the X58 Classified that is still hanging on my office wall.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Friday, 12 September 2014 19:34
I absolutely love building Mini-ITX gaming rigs. Every time I build a new Lunchbox (what I call our LAN rigs), I try to make them smaller and faster. Either of those along can be a challenge, but trying to constantly pack a faster rig into a small can be a huge challenge. Thankfully recently motherboard manufactures, video card manufactures, and heatsink manufactures have taken notice and have started to make things easier. With the launch of the R9 285 Sapphire jumped into that same market with their first Mini-ITX focused video card. With their focus on attending LANs this wasn’t a huge shock. What was surprising was the fact they went with the new R9 285 when MSI has the R9 270 and GTX 760. I have no doubt that the ITX Compact R9 285 will outperform the other Mini-TX cards, heck we proved that live at our LAN last weekend. Power usage and heat are also important in small form factor builds, I can’t wait to see how well it will perform.
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Category: Editorials
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Published: Friday, 12 September 2014 13:33
I arrived at the LanOC office around 1:00 AM or so Friday morning to join Chad, Debo, and Wes in an informal review of what would be the next few days, better known as LanOC v15.0. We quickly decided, influenced largely by late-night appetites, that it was a discussion better had over food. Van Wert is not known for its nightlife, so we started out East (the way I had just came) in search of food. We found ourselves at a Denny’s off of US 30, conversing with the third shift waitress about how Debo reminded her of her daughter (they both hate everything). With full stomachs, a game plan, and most importantly a new nickname for Debo (Shelby), we returned home before the sun came up to catch a few hours of sleep.
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Category: CPU's
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Published: Thursday, 04 September 2014 13:35
While it’s been obvious AMDs big focus has been on their APUs for the last few years. Even so in the background they have still been making a few waves with the FX line of CPUs, the main one being the launch of the 5GHz CPU a little over a year ago. Just when we thought they may have forgotten about the enthusiasts they are actually introducing a few new CPUs to the FX lineup and making changes to the overall pricing structure to better place their CPUs to compete with Intel’s introductions over the summer. Today I’m going to mainly be focusing on the newly introduced FX-8370 and the lower wattage FX-9370E, but AMD did send along the FX-9370 and the FX-9590 so we can see how the new CPUs perform in relation to their bigger brothers.
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Category: Editorials
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Published: Tuesday, 02 September 2014 17:25
All the way back before LanOC V14 when I was tossing around ideas for our next event we tossed around the idea of putting together a PC to give away at V15. This quickly tuned into a discussion about how to give it away. I decided early on that I wanted make sure that everyone would have a chance to win it. Well today is the day, I can officially announce our PC giveaway for LanOC V15 and more importantly I would like to announce our collaboration with Child's Play to raise money for Parkview Hospital in neighboring Fort Wayne, Indiana.
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Category: Motherboards
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Published: Friday, 29 August 2014 12:00
We can’t very well look at the i7-5960X from Intel and not do a motherboard review along with it right? As the first of what I expect to be a list of X99 motherboards I will be covering, I wanted to use the X99 Deluxe first because Asus boards are always reliable and the software is perfect for keeping an eye on things when benchmarking the CPU. Asus went with a simpler name than on previous generations with the X99 Deluxe and they also went a little ham and changed up a lot with the new design. Let’s see what all changed, beyond the new white styling.
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Category: CPU's
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Published: Friday, 29 August 2014 12:00
If it feels like we were just right here not to long ago talking about Intel’s latest CPU it is because we were. They launched their Devils Canyon CPUs about two and a half months ago and here we are again. The thing is, today’s launch is designed to be sold alongside of the I7-4790K. This is because officially the 4790K and everything else on the 1150 socket are considered mainstream products. The i7-5960X Haswell-E CPU I will be looking at is an enthusiast product. That means there aren’t limitations like the limited number of PCIe Lanes that the mainstream line runs into all of the time. On top of that we have twice as many cores, twice the ram, DDR4, and a big price tag like all of the other flagship CPUs. The 5960X will certainly not be for the light hearted or budget builds, but I’m excited to see how it performs compared to the model before it and the extremely fast mainstream chips that sell beside it. While I’m at it I’m going to see what king of room you might have left when it comes time to overclock as well.
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Category: Other
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Published: Friday, 22 August 2014 18:13
As some of you know we use a few projectors at our LAN events. In between events I have been known to setup a projector in the office to watch a movie, watch eSport streams, and even play a few games. The problem I have in the office is our textured walls don’t exactly give the best picture. Because of that and because we would like more flexibility for setting up at our events I have been on the lookout for a projector screen for a while now. My requirements were something that is portable, so it can be taken to our events no matter their location, easy/quick to setup, and of course, I would like it to give the best picture possible in different environments. I came across a company called Elite Screens that manufactures a wide selection of screens and found the ezCinema Plus Series that fit our requirements and even didn’t break the bank. Today I’m going to take a look at the ezCinema Plus in its largest size (100 inches) and see how well it performs.
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Category: Motherboards
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Published: Wednesday, 13 August 2014 17:27
It’s amazing how quickly things can add up. A great example of this is just how many motherboards a company like MSI manufactures. Just on the Intel side of things, you have multiple chipsets and then from there they have an overclocking line, gaming line, and their general line. From there they still have to break things down by price and feature set. Just for the Intel Socket 1150 they have a whopping 67 motherboards listed on their website. With the launch of Devils Canyon CPUs I really wanted to take a look at a few of their boards to get an idea of what the different price points will get you. So today, I’m going to take a look at four different Gaming motherboards ranging in size from Mini ITX to full ATX. Three are Z97 boards but there is also their only B85 gaming model slipped in as well. Combined with the Z97 Gaming 5 that I already took a look at, we should be able to get a good idea of what you should be looking at for your builds and why they have such a wide variety of motherboards.
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Category: CPU's
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Published: Friday, 01 August 2014 09:16
Earlier this year AMD introduced their Kaveri APUs and I had the chance to take a look at the A10-7850K. While I wouldn’t consider is an enthusiast part, I came out of our testing seriously impressed with the improvements AMD has made on the GPU side of things. I thought the new Kaveri APUs would be perfect for HTPCs as well as budget gaming rigs. Well today AMD is officially announcing a few new APUs that fill in a few gaps in that product line. The new APUs are the A10-7800, A8-7600, and the A6-7400K. While the architecture is the same, the new models do have a few interesting standouts. For one the A6-7400K is unlocked and has a low price to compete with the Intel G3258 Anniversary Edition. The other one that caught my eye was the A10-7800. It shares similar stats with the A10-7850K but with nearly half the power usage! Today I’m going to take a look at the A10-7800 to see if it is as exciting as the numbers imply.
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Category: Audio
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Published: Wednesday, 16 July 2014 14:04
A few years ago, we used to see the fatal1ty headsets all over the place at events. They were without a doubt the best low budget gaming headset on the market. They performed well and took a beating without falling apart. Even now, it is still one of the highest rated headsets on Newegg. Here we are seven years later and Creative is introducing the SB Inferno, the spiritual successor to the Fatal1ty Gaming Headset. It’s amazing how much has changed in seven years, I can’t wait to see how the SB Inferno compares to today’s latest and greatest in gaming audio.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 11 July 2014 19:20
OCZ like most other manufactures can’t just focus on just top of the line or budget products. Its important to cover a wide range of products to make sure you have something to meet all of your customers price and performance expectations. A good example of this was the Vector 150. They obviously also have the Vertex 450 that I reviewed previously. OCZ took the design that the Vertex 450 and original Vector both shared, kept the Barefoot 3 controller, and swapped out the NAND from 25nm IMFT MLC NAND to Toshiba's 19nm MLC NAND. In other words the Vector 150 replaced the original Vector. OCZs Vector drives are their enthusiast focused drives while the Vertex drives are their top of the line mainstream drives. Let’s dig in and see what sets them apart.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Monday, 07 July 2014 17:52
Smaller, Cooler, more efficient, those are three things that I have been working on with both our LAN equipment and in my own office for a few years now. For years the enthusiast in me would get excited about adding a new server, more storage capacity, and new toys to play with. At some point you look back and realize that as much fun as the toys are, you could really get the same job done with one device when you were using two or three before. Not only are you wasting space, but you are also using substantially more electricity each month/year to power it all. On top of all of that when its summer time, you have all of this hardware putting out more and more heat, fighting against your air conditioning, or even worse its already hot and you are making it even hotter. Late last year I took at look at the hardware we use here in the LanOC office and decided to work on combining as much as I could. Today I’m going to tell you about that experience.
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