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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I am USB 3.0

titleIt’s really crazy to think that it’s been over 16 years now since USB 1.0 was released. Even looking back to USB 2.0 in April of 2000 it’s been 12 years that we have been living with that 60 MB/s theoretical speed.  I can’t even imagine how many hours, days, maybe even weeks; I have spent waiting for files to transfer in those 16 years. When USB 3.0 was introduced in 2008 I literally couldn’t wait for the day I would finally be able to fully take advantage of the speeds that USB 3.0 brought to the table. Today for the first time I can say that I am taking full advantage. I’m going invite you all in to see what I am using to do this.

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Asus Z77 Roundup

titleWhen doing all of our Ivy Bridge launch prep we spent a LOT of time benchmarking and testing a whole collection of boards. You guys have seen our reviews of the Intel and Gigabyte boards. When it came time to write about the four different Asus Z77 boards I realized that most of you are not going to want to read through a lot of information that we would cover over and over on each review. We decided to roundup all four of the boards and cover them together. This way we can get to the point a little quicker, saving you time, as well as giving us a chance to talk more about the differences between the variety of boards that we tested.

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ASUS P8 Z68-V/GEN3

titlePerhaps one of the most daunting tasks after making the decision that you do not wish to purchase an off-the-shelf computer is attempting to figure out which components go in the machine.  There are fun aspects, like the graphics card and processor, and then there are the not-so-fun aspects, like the motherboard (at least in my opinion).  Why do I think it is a whole lot of not fun?  There are so many out there to choose from, with all sorts of features.  When shopping you will likely come across the ASUS board that I am going to review today.  Arguably, it is one of the better all-around boards out there, with features like good integrated graphics and killer sound.  But to a gamer that generally does not mean squat.  Does the ASUS P8 Z68-V/GEN3 board have what it takes to function as a serious gaming component?  Read on to find out!

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XFX R7750 Black Edition DD

titleNot everyone is looking to spend $500 on their video card, in some cases that is the total budget for a build. When you are up against a wall trying to pack the best performance you can get into a budget build you still want to get the most performance you can out of your video card. That’s where cards like the XFX R7750 Black Edition Double Dissipation come into play. XFX has taken the styling and cooling from their high end cards and combined it with the price of budget cards like the HD 7750. Today we are going to take a look at how those two things do combined in XFX’s  R7750 Black Edition Double Dissipation.

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Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X

titleEarlier this year when AMD introduced the HD 7770 we took a look at cards from both Sapphire and XFX. Although we were impressed with the cards performance it was a little ill-timed due to AMD still clearing out discounted back stock. Three months later we are able to revisit the situation with today’s release of Sapphires new HD 7770 Vapor-X. With Sapphires Vapor chamber cooling technology along with a nice overclock over the reference design, the Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X could be a great option for a gamer on a limited budget. Let’s take a look.

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Motherboard Sizing

titleWhen we got in a few oddly sized dual CPU motherboards from EVGA and Asus I posted up a few pictures on our forums and on Facebook. The problem was that even though they looked large there wasn’t any perspective. So we tossed in a couple other boards to give everyone a little perspective. This lead us to digging out even more motherboards to put together all of the standard motherboard sizes all together for everyone to be able to see the differences. Along with the picture we also have a breakdown on the dimensions of each size standard; I hope this helps everyone as some point. Sometimes it can be hard to understand all of the different motherboard sizes and how they all relate.

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Android to the Maxx, DROID Razr Maxx

titleThe list of different Android based phones available at any time is both overwhelming and frustrating. It’s almost impossible to get good feedback from friends who have the same phone because of this. So it’s rare than you have any one phone that manages to stand out. Doing something different is the only way to do this normally, but most times this ends off coming off as gimmicky or just lame. When Motorola introduced the Droid Razr Maxx it caught my attention right away. This was just before our trip out to San Francisco for the GTX 680 Editors day, what a better way to put the Maxx’s proposed batter life to the test!

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Lian Li PC 100 “The Hammer”

titleWe have had a few different Lian Li chassis come through the LanOC Offices and there hasn’t been a time that we haven’t been impressed with the new and interesting features Lian Li always seems to slip in. When they wanted to ship over their new case “The Hammer” PC 100, we signed up right away. We had seen the case previewed from a few shows prior and this time around Lian Li took a new perspective with its design, I was very interested to see how their changes worked out. Let’s jump in and see what it’s all about!

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Nvidia GTX 670

titleWhen Nvidia launched Kepler with the GTX 680 I was impressed with the launch price of the card but even at such a great value it is still out of reach for some people. Just because you can’t afford the top card doesn’t mean you don’t want to experience Kepler’s performance. Of course it was only a matter of time before we saw Nvidia filling in the gaps in their product line, starting first with the GTX 690 then going to the next step down from the GTX 680, the GTX 670. Today we get to have a look to see how the performance compares to both the GTX 680 as well as AMD’s offerings. We are also very curious how it compares to the GTX 580, a card that has found its way into most of our office PC’s.  

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