Our first introduction to the Hyte brand was with the Revolt 3 launch last year. Hyte is a sister brand to iBUYPOWER and with the Revolt 3 we learned that they aren’t looking to continue the status quo, they are looking at each new product with fresh eyes and bringing new ideas. For the Revolt 3, the focus was on a travel-friendly case with a hidden carrying handle and features to make packing everything into the smaller case much easier. This last CES they also showed off their upcoming case, the Y60 which goes the other direction and is a case focused on desktop use, and with the Y60 they are specifically aiming at the market who loves posting up pictures of their systems in places like Reddit at an angle to show off the inside and front of your case. The Y60 brings the two together with a cornerless design and I’m excited to see what other kinds of changes Hyte has incorporated so let's dig in.

With our LAN events and early on with our reviews we worked with SteelSeries back when they introduced their first full mouse with their Ikari and after that, I tried to keep up with their launches. But over the last few years, I haven’t had the chance to check out what they have been up to. The last SteelSeries mouse we had in the office was the Sensei Ten. So we are due to catch up on what they have been up to and today I’m going to do just that. I have had the SteelSeries Prime, Prime Wireless, and the new 2022 edition of the Aerox 3 Wireless to get a look at part of their current lineup. Let’s check them out!

While we have had the chance to check out a few different Patriot SSDs that have performed well over the years. Their recently introduced P400 is Patriot's first PCIe 4.0 SSD which opens up new performance possibilities. When PCIe 4.0 was introduced only a few companies had compatible drives at that time and it makes sense. At that time only one chipset from AMD supported the new platform, but now Intel and AMD have had options available on both sides for over a year and even longer on the AMD side of things. The odds of people having PCs that support them are much higher now. So today I’m going to dig into the P400 and see what it has going behind the curtain then we can run it through our test suite to see how it performs compared to a few older PCIe 3.0 drives and a whole stack of 4.0 drives on the new Intel Z690 chipset.

The launch of the RX 6500 XT had a lot of public backlash due to some of the limitations of AMD's new GPU, specifically the 4GB VRAM and the PCIe lanes being limited to 4 lanes which combined hold the card back when it comes to higher resolutions and at times if you are running very high detail games at 1080p. That said, the card does still have a place in the market, you just need to be clear about what you plan on using the card for. It is also one of the only cards you can get new without crazy markups. So I was excited when Asus offered to send their TUF Gaming RX 6500 XT OC Edition over. Not to mention, even though I had a lot of experience with the TUF lineup years ago when it first came out on motherboards. I’ve never had the chance to check out any of the TUF cards. So today I’m going to check out Asus’s card to see how the overclocked card performs and I’m especially curious to see what sets the TUF lineup apart and how it performs in things like cooling, noise, and power usage that help set cards with the same GPUs apart. So let’s check it out.

So for someone like me with a lot of PCs in the house, storage on the network is the way to go. But it’s easy to forget that a lot of people may only have one PC and when that is the case you don’t need to overcomplicate things with networked storage. You can rely on internal or external storage options depending on how much space you need. When it comes to editing video you will see a lot of people with stacks of external hard drives but those don’t offer any redundancy or protection. Something with RAID as a possibility is always going to be the safer bet and TerraMaster has the network and external options covered. I’ve taken a look at a few of their options in the past and they sent over their D5-300 which is a 5 bay USB 3.1 option that just about any PC is going to support. Today I’m going to check out what the D5-300 is all about and see how it performs in a best-case scenario when packed with SSDs. Let’s check it out!

MSI has been expanding their reach for a while now and in a lot of ways, you can build a complete setup from the MSI lineup with the exception of your CPU and ram. They have been in the gaming peripherals market for a long time now including a range of headphones. But surprisingly they haven’t jumped into the dedicated microphone market, until now. MSI just recently introduced their new Immerse GV60 Streaming Mic that as the name implies is focused on the streaming market. I’ve had the chance to check out a wide variety of microphone options over the years and I’m excited to see what MSI’s take on it is. At first glance, their microphone looks a lot like some of the other options but MSI has avoided software altogether to keep things simpler for easier setup which I dig. So let’s check out what else it has going on and how it performs compared to some of the competition.

When it comes to air cooling and fans Noctua has been extremely reliable over the years and has been an easy go-to when doing builds. Especially because noise is very important to me. Keeping noise down in the office helps with testing and more importantly helps with my sanity. So with builds it's not unusual for me to change fans over to Noctua. With them having nice blacked-out fans has helped with that as well. For my wife's last PC I went with a crazy custom water cooling loop which looked amazing. But I would have to take it all apart and clean everything multiple times a year and performance would drop as the “show” coolant would fall out and clock things up. That’s fine for my PC maybe, but when it's my wife’s PC it needs to just work. So this time around I went with an air cooler, Noctua’s NH-U12A chromax.black. It was the largest cooler I could fit in her system and I knew it would meet our needs for cooling and noise performance and it has. But before doing that I did bring the NH-U12A over on to our test bench to see how it performs in an even more demanding situation. Let’s go see what the NH-U12A is all about and how it performed.

With the RTX 3050 launch I had a stocked clocked card come in and I had originally planned to also cover an overclocked card as well but shipping issues put a stop to that. Things have finally come in including this card from MSI and today I can take a look at MSI’s new RTX 3050 Gaming X 8G. They have this model cranked up to 1845 MHz over the stock 1777 MHz. The card also has a significantly larger cooler attached so I am curious to see how the overclock helps performance and if the larger cooler is worth going over a compact stocked clocked card.

Shipping delays and issues hit us hard over the last few weeks. The biggest one was our RX 6500 XT launch sample which ended up hung up and delayed in shipping. So I am way late to the party when it comes to checking out how the RX 6500 XT performs. Today I finally get the chance and I’m checking out the Pulse from Sapphire. I know there was drama around this launch (frankly what GPU launched for the last few years hasn’t lol) but I am excited to see how AMD's latest GPU performs and how Sapphire card does at keeping things cool and quiet. So let’s jump in and check it out!

At CES this year both AMD and Nvidia announced new GPUs that would be coming soon. Both were focused on a little lower on their product stack which makes sense because that is the biggest market share. Steam hardware survey still has the GTX 1060 with the highest usage with the 1650, 1050 Ti, 2060, and then 1050 rounding out the top five. Most of those cards also haven’t moved up into the RTX range, so the new RTX 3050 may be the first introduction to ray tracing and tensor cores for a lot of people as well. Today I’m going to check out what the RTX 3050 is all about then put it to the test on our freshly updated test bench and test suite to see how it compares. There aren’t Founders Editions of the RTX 3050, so today I am checking out the RTX 3050 XC from EVGA.

With the new 12^th Gen Intel CPUs and the Z690 chipset that Intel launched with them being released. It also means that we get to check out the latest motherboard designs. This time around Intel only focused on the high performance focused CPUs so most of the options that came out were gaming, overclocking, or high-end workstation focused. The first board that came in was from MSI which was one of their gaming focused boards, the MPG Z690 Carbon WiFi. Today I’m going to check out what features they have included with this board and check out how the Z690 Carbon WiFi performs with the new i9-12900K as well. I’m also going to take a look at the MAG Coreliquid C280 AIO cooler that MSI sent over as well for LGA1700 testing. Let’s dive in!

The big news earlier this year was the sale of HyperX which has been Kingston’s long time gaming lineup to HP. With that brand gone, they did need to make a new gaming brand for their memory and SSD product lines and they went with one of the model names of their past memory kits for something short and sweet, the new brand is called FURY. With that, they have slowly been introducing new products under the brand including their latest gaming-focused M.2 SSD that they are calling the Fury Renegade. The Renegade is a PCIe 4.0 based M.2 SSD based on the Phision E18 controller and today I’m going to check out what the new drive is all about testing it out on our recently updated Z690 test bench and test suite.

With Intel’s new CPUs moving to the LGA1700 socket and the new larger socket requiring a wider mounting bracket after Intel sticking with the same sized mounting hole for a very long time it has had me looking at changing up the cooling in a few of my systems and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Not only that, there are a LOT of options on the market. Everyone and their mom is now getting into the AIO market. Cooler Master has been around going back near the beginning for AIO coolers and they are one of only a few who often make their own designs rather than going with a standard OEM design so I’m interested in seeing what their new MasterLiquid PL240 Flus is all about. I’m also curious to see how it will perform on our new 12900K based test bench so let’s dive in and see how it does.

Sapphire is known for being one of the main AMD and aftermarket card manufacturer but if we look back they have dabbled in a few other areas as well. Off the top of my head, just on things, we have covered they have done motherboards in the past and small form factor PCs. But they have also dabbled in thunderbolt enclosures and both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 3 dongles as well. Well, today they are introducing their newest product, their first all-in-one watercoolers, the Saphire Nitro+ S240-A and S360-A. While this is their first product in this market, it isn’t too big of a surprise given that in China they have shown off an air cooler and AIO watercoolers have been used on Sapphire video cards in the past. Not to mention most companies have been expanding their lineups and getting into the AIO market. Given that cooling is one of the main focuses for aftermarket video cards and Sapphire cards have done that well for years I’m curious to see what they have done with their first AIO to stand out in the crowded market. So let’s dive in and check it out!

Well Intel recently announced their latest generation of CPUs and they are looking right at the cutting edge with multiple jumps including PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 being included with the new 12^th generation of CPUs. So much so on the cutting edge that our coverage is a little late after trying to get in DDR5 memory to test with. So forgive the tardiness, but today we are here to finally take a look at Intel’s new CPUs, DDR5, Z690, and their new socket as well. The 12^th generation of CPUs which were formally known as Adler Lake take an all new direction, following what we have been seeing on the mobile market with low and high speed cores and I’m excited to put them to the test.

One of the features that Nintendo integrated into the Switch that I like was the Micro SD card slot for storage. Past game consoles have proven that integrated storage will almost always not be enough. Especially from the Xbox 360 on were full games and demos have been downloadable. With those consoles, you were limited to what came with your system or if you were lucky a proprietary upgrade option. A portable console like the switch have even fewer options. So going with MicroSD means they kept the cost down and as faster and larger options come out it could potentially support them. The switch does come with 32GB of onboard storage but with launch titles like Breath of the Wild taking up 14 GB each and newer games reaching up over 33GB now. Thankfully the switch does have cartridges as well, but if you don’t want to carry those around with you or If the games that you want to play are only available digitally you will need a MicroSD card. I was looking at options and Lexar’s Play series seemed to fit the bill well without making you pay more for licensed pictures on the card itself so I decided to check one out. So today let's see how the Lexar Play MicroSDXC 512GB performs!

Lexar is well known in the storage market, especially with their flash products and more recently with their SSDs and portable storage. But it was only last year that they jumped into the memory market with laptop memory. Well, this year they are expanding that and are getting into the desktop side of things. They have introduced their first gaming memory with a normal and RGB kit as well as a simpler standard memory kit without a heatspreader as well. Today I’m going to check out both the new Hades gaming-focused 32GB kit with RGB as well as take a look at the 3200 MHz UDIMM kit and see what Lexar has been up to. Let’s check them out!

Crucial’s P5 has been their flagship NVMe SSD for a while now and it was pushing the limited of PCIe Gen 3.0 but with AMD having PCIe Gen 4 for a while now and Intel catching up on that as well more and more people can potentially put a faster Gen 4 drive to use so Crucial recently introduced their new P5 Plus drive which has upgraded its interface to PCIe Gen 4. Today I’m going to check out the 1TB P5 Plus drive and see how it performs in our test suite compared to a mix of gen 3 and gen 4 drives then we will see where Crucial has the new drives priced to see how they fit in the market. Is the P5 Plus the drive you should be looking at for your next build? Let’s find out!

Two months ago for the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT launch, we saw the latest mid-range card outperforming high-end cards like the 1080 Ti from a few generations back. The steam survey has 67% of users currently gaming at 1080p and for a lot of them even the RX 6600 XT is more than they need, AMD is launching today the RX 6600 which might fit the bill. It is focused on 1080p performance and runs on the same Navi 23 GPU that the 6600  XT has, with a few things cut back.  Today I’m going to check out how the PowerColor RX 6600 Fighter that AMD sent over-performs as well as check out what PowerColor has to offer on their reference clocked option as far as cooling and noise performance goes.

Thermaltake has been doing the RGB power supplies for just about longer than anyone. They have had USB-controlled models as well as simpler cheaper models that keep things simple with push-button controls. One of their latest models, the Toughpower GF2 ARGB mixes things up by combining the push-button controls while also adding in the ability to tie itself into your motherboard's lighting to sync everything together. They are also aiming for a happy medium when it comes to efficiency. Some of those cheaper models have been 90 Plus Bronze and they have also gone to the other end of the spectrum with expensive platinum models. For the Toughpower GF2 ARGB, it is 90 Plus Gold rated. So today I’m going to check out the GF2 and see what else it has going on and find out feature-wise if it has the potential to be a happy medium for someone looking for a power supply with addressable RGB lighting.