EVGA GTX 660 Ti Superclocked 2Gb

titleThe video card market in the past 8 months has been filled with lots of up and downs. Both AMD and Nvidia have been going back and forth as they introduce their new product lineups. Kepler specifically has been especially impressive in the efficiency and power side of things. Even still there are a lot of people who have been holding out from throwing down almost $400 on a GTX 670 because of its price. Today a lot of those people will finally get the chance to see what else Nvidia has to offer. The GTX 660 Ti is launching at a sup $300 price point and today we will be taking our first look at a Superclocked 2Gb model from our friends over at EVGA. I’m just as excited as you are to find out how it will perform. The price point puts it up against the HD 7870, but how will they compare in performance. 

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Raidmax Agusta

titleFinding innovation and creativity in the case market today seems to get harder and harder as time goes by. It’s not that everything has been done, more that coming up with new and innovative ideas is getting tougher for all of the manufactures. We are starting to see more and more cases that look alike. A while back Raidmax sent over a case they wanted me to take a look at, something different they had been working on. Today I will be taking a look at the final version of that same case, the Agusta. With a few new ideas and a style that no other case has, it’s most likely for everyone, but I have a feeling we will see a few around at LAN’s in the future.

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MSI Barricade Case

titleWe recently had a chance to take a look at the MSI Ravager case, a case that is marketed towards people who want something a little flashing. Today we are going to look at another offering from MSI called the Barricade. This time around the Barricade has more subtle styling for those who may not be looking for a case for your youngest cousin or baby brother. It has been interesting to see MSI branch out a bit into different areas such as cases and SSDs. It should be interesting to see how this case compares to the previous one and how it stands on its own.

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Corsair Vengeance Lineup Part two – Mice

titleEarlier this week I took a look at the K60 and K90 Vengeance keyboards from Corsair. I was impressed with their unique take on the mechanical keyboard. Prior to looking at their keyboards I also took a look at the Vengeance 2000 wireless headset. To round out our coverage we of course need to check out Corsairs Vengeance gaming mice. We know that Corsair always takes a different path with any product they introduce and I am excited to see what they did differently in the gaming mouse market, a market that has become fairly stagnant with higher DPI, more buttons, and more lighting be the focus from most manufactures.

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Corsair Vengeance Lineup Part one - Keyboards

titleEvery once in a while you find a company that is able to take a normal product that everyone has and change it in a way that makes everyone wonder why it was never done before. As much as it pains me to say this, Apple was one of those companies. In the pc components business there are a few as well, but the company that stands out the most to me would be Corsair. Every time corsair enters a new market, I find myself impressed with what they have to offer. Even though it seems like they are always jumping into random markets, they take their time and research what everyone has to offer and what people would really want to see. This week we are going to take a look at their new Vengeance lineup of mice and keyboards to see if they have done the same in these new markets. Today we are going to start with their new keyboards, let’s dig in and see what they are all about.

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CoolerMaster Storm QuickFire Pro

titleWe have spoken about it before, it seems like everyone and their mom jumped onto the mechanical keyboard market  in the last few years. Because of this we have seen many designs with nothing to make them stand out, a few have had full LED backlighting for example like Cooler Master’s Storm Trigger. The problem with a full backlit keyboard of course is the cost. A few manufactures have introduced mechanical keyboard with just backlighting on WASD, but this has left non FPS gamers out in the cold. When I saw Cooler Master was introducing the QuickFire Pro with lighting expanded past the WASD, I was excited to check it out. We enjoyed both their Quickfire Rapid, and the Trigger. Today we are going to take a closer look at the QuickFire Pro to see if it’s an improvement over the other semi backlit keyboards on the market.

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Cooler Master TPC 812

titleFrom a quick glance, the TPC 812 looks very similar to the Hyper 612 PMW from Cooler Master we reviewed recently, and given the similarities in their name, you'd be likely to accept that and move on. Cooler Master has engineered many subtle differences with the new cooler in hopes of improving functionality and performance, including vertical vapor chamber to pull the heat up into the heatsink away from the CPU. So take another look and read on as we put the latest air solution from Cooler Master to our tests.

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MSI R7770 Power Edition 1Gb

titleWe have taken a look at HD 7770’s from both Sapphire and XFX. But that only covers a small portion of the AMD GPU market, when I was given a chance to take a look at MSI’s offering, I jumped at the chance. I know what to expect as far as performance, but what I am especially interested in is how MSI does their cards differently. MSI has a unique design that allows you to add a second fan on top of the original fan; I am really curious how this will work out. Let’s take a look.

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SteelSeries Sensei [RAW]

titleWhen SteelSeries introduced the Sensei, we were very excited about their latest flagship mouse. We have consistently had a SteelSeries mouse in use in the LanOC office all the way back to the introduction of the Xia. The Sensei was a nice progression from the Xia, but I did miss the rubber finish from the Xai. When I heard they would be introducing a Sensei with a rubber finish, I was very excited to check it out. When I heard about its price, I was even more excited. Without further introduction, let’s take a look at the SteelSeries Sensei [RAW].

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Lian Li PC-TU200

titleWhen it comes to Mini ITX cases for use in portable LAN builds the selection leaves a lot to be desired. After taking a look at the Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe I realized how Mini ITX has even more possibility’s now than back a few years ago when I was pushing it before. With that potential you are going to need a case to pack everything in and it will hopefully be easy to carry to LANs. This is where Lian Li is coming in with the PC-TU200. Its small form factor design and carrying handle have all the potential to be a perfect LAN case, of course if you can’t fit your cutting edge rig inside, it won’t matter. Let’s take a closer look and see what you can do with it.

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Corsair Vengeance 2000 Wireless Headset

titleOf all of the headsets that we have had into the office, almost every headset at some point in time has ended up tangled up in the wheels of my office chair. With wired headsets you either end up with too short of a cord or so much that you are running it over like me. Wireless is an interesting option but the wireless headsets available haven’t been interesting for the most part. Seeing Corsair bring out a wireless headset, I had to get my hands onto one to see if they live up to Corsairs growing reputation. After getting the Vengeance 2000 wireless gaming headset in and spending a few weeks we can go over their performance, comfort, and find out if wireless is the way to go.

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EDIMAX N300 Universal Wi-Fi Extender

titleWe have all run into the issue at one point or another, you are running on Wi-Fi and you have a perfect signal all the way until you get to where you need to be and BAM nothing. I run into this issue when trying to work at the back of my house on the patio as well as in my bathroom. This prevents me from streaming music in the bathroom when needed and from working outside on nice days. A big portion of this is the placement of my router, but due to where my cable is installed it’s not really an easy fix. When I heard about EDIMAX’s new Wi-Fi extender, I was excited that I might have finally found an easy fix. Let’s take a look at what it’s all about and see if it was able to take care of our problem!

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Cooler Master Storm Sentinel Advance II

titleMost of you who have read any of my past mice reviews will know that I am very particular about them and have a strong hate of the Phillips Twin eye sensor that a good portion of the market has been using for a few years now due to a few of the sensors quirks. When I was introduced to Cooler Master’s Gaming Accessories Product Manager, Carter Salley, he and I had one of the geekiest conversations about mouse sensors and our dislike of the Twin Eye sensor. When it was all said and done I was left very excited to see what Cooler Master would be coming out with in the future with someone like Carter as the wheel. Today I have in my hands their Sentinel Advance II, a revamped version of the Twin Eye equipped original, but without the god awful sensor. With a proper sensor onboard, it might very well be a mouse to consider.

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Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 1500W

titleIn the power supply world, most people end up buying far too much power supply for their builds. Part of this is with the hope of upgrading to a second hard in the future and sometimes it’s because they don’t know any better. On our video test bench for example we run a 1200 watt power supply, but even then we found ourselves scrambling for adapters and hoping we wouldn’t push the power supply too far when we tossed four HD 7970’s in quadfire on it. With a TDP of 250 Watts for each card and our I7-3960x itself with a TDP of 130 watts we were already pushing it. That doesn’t even count in power for the motherboard itself as well as memory, disc drives, cooling, ect. It’s clear than in some cases there is a need for a power supply larger than 1200 watts, even if the market is limited. Cooler Master introduced their Silent Pro M2 line today including a 1500 watt monster, we are going to take a sneak peak at what they have to offer.

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Sapphire HD 7870 FleX Edition

titleNow that we have seen all of the various stock and overclocked versions of the HD 7000 series cards, some of the more interesting variations are starting to trickle out. A good example of this is from Sapphire, not only do they have a WIDE variety of versions. They are actually introducing a new card today, the Sapphire HD 7870 FLeX. For those of you who have been around for a while, you have seen us cover their FLeX lineup before. With the FLeX lineup allowing you to run three monitors in Eyefinity without any active adapters, it is perfect for someone who is already running multiple monitors. As we have seen in the past, if you plan on gaming in Eyefinity you need to have the power to push your favorite games, the HD 7870 is the fastest FLeX card we have tested to date, if any card can do it, it should.

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Seagate GoFlex Satellite

titleBy this time, we all should be familiar with the term "cloud" and what it means, and you probably already are using a cloud solution of some kind (either Dropbox, or Windows Live Mesh, or others). What about a personal cloud? A cloud that you can take with you everywhere you go that stores much more data than what you can put up in a Dropbox account. We have previously reviewed a 16GB product from Kingston, but lets take a look at something with a bit more storage. Today we will be looking at the 500GB Seagate GoFlex Satellite external WiFi hard drive, designed to give you access to media, particularly on your mobile devices, wherever you go.

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Samsung 830 Series 128GB SSD

titleIn the beginning, there were platter hard drives. They would spend their lives spinning away into a data driven oblivion. Google has even authored a study on hard drives, and their reliability. For awhile, there were drives called RAM drives. They would use some of your system memory as a temporary hard drive (temporary because they were volatile) as a means to store and access data. This process was very quick. Recently, solid state hard drives (like a RAM drive, but not really) have become popular. They access data very quickly, and although they are small in size, they do pack quite a punch. Today we will be looking at the Samsung 830 Series SATA 6Gb/s drive (128GB capacity). How does it compare to other SSDs on the market, and does its performance warrant installation in your PC? Read on to find out!

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Gelid Solutions DarkForce

titleAbout two years ago I reviewed Gelid Solution's 12PL case fan, an article I encourage you to read, not only because it will answer that 'what's so special about a fan' question on your mind, but also because its an early review of mine and you can find plenty to poke fun at. Bottom line, the fan was attractive, quiet, and effective. I was quite a fan of the company, often plugging the review when people would ask for case fan recommendations. Gelid has come a long way since then, now equipped with a healthy catalog of products to choose from. Today we'll be putting Swiss-managed company's first chassis, the DarkForce, to our tests.

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MSI Ravager Case

titleIt seems every time you turn around, a new case has hit the market. This is actually a good thing as it means with a little bit of looking you should be able to find one to suit your needs and tastes. MSI is a well-known brand in the graphics and mainboard market, but certainly isn’t my first thought when it comes to cases. We have seen one other offering from MSI this year in terms of a budget case – the Raptor. It reviewed fairly well, which makes us a bit curious as to what a mid-level offering will bring.

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Clar1tyOne Earbuds EB110

titleThe headphone and earbud market is over saturated to say the least, anymore to break into the market you need to have a big name or an innovative idea. Before CES we were contacted by a company named Clar1tyOne, wanting us to take a look at their new earbuds. After getting them in and taking them along with us for multiple trips, LANs, and even a few trips around the yard while mowing we are finally going to show you guys what they are all about. Be sure, this isn’t the same old set of ear buds.

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