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.

Late last year I set out to update one of our project builds, specifically the build that I have been using as my main PC. I was fighting performance issues with the latest games. But more importantly, things were starting to break down and I had been ignoring them. I had a hard drive that was making noise and an SSD that was slow compared to modern drives and that wasn’t large enough for my needs. Cooling was noisy and I found out when digging into things that the heat contributed to the hard drive failure as well. I was also dealing with weird network hiccups that seemed to indicate a motherboard issue or a PSU problem so in past episodes I updated the cooling, the PSU, the video card, and all of the storage. But that left the main issues with the CPU performance and the motherboard issues, plus not having as much ram as I would have liked for Microsoft Flight Sim. Well, I’ve put it off a lot longer than I should have, but today I’m going to update those last few areas.

A lot of you will most likely be familiar with iBUYPOWER, a system builder who we have also covered cases from in the past. Today they are announcing their latest brand called HYTE which is going to focus on lifestyle and PC components. They are launching with a case that I’ve been looking forward to for a while now. They teased their Revolt 3 back at CES but we had no idea about the HYTE brand. iBUYPOWER has had the Revolt lineup in the past as their LAN-focused systems. Well, the Revolt 3 continues that focus, but with a completely new look. As the LanOC name might imply, we love LANs around here and I especially have a soft spot for SFF builds that make it easier to take your system to and from events. Dragging a monster build to and from a LAN is one of those things you do when you are younger and you eventually learn and avoid it. The new Revolt 3 from HYTE is designed with a handle in the top and with a focus on making it easy to transport for LAN events and esports which iBUYPOWER is also heavily focused on. So today I’m going to see what all the Revolt 3 has to offer and then see if it will be the next system that I’m taking to events. Let’s check it out!

In my previous coverage on our TrueNAS CORE build, I got the entire system together but I skipped talking about how I hooked up the 8 SATA drives to our mATX motherboard. I had a plan when going in, but sometimes things don’t go the way you had planned. In fact, my problems went even beyond that. So today I want to run through what went wrong with our original plan and then our backup plan as well and go over what I ended up doing. When getting things running I also ended up adding an upgrade as well. So let's get up to date on the TrueNAS CORE servers current setup and why!

AMD has been quiet for the past few months after the launch of their RX 6700 XT, but they have still been busy in that time. Just last week they announced their RX 6600 XT. The 6700 XT was targeted at 1440p, but the new RX 6600 XT is still focused on high performance 1080p gaming which is still by far the most popular gaming resolution being used. The 6600 XT doesn’t have a reference design, so today I will checking out the MERC308 version from XFX to see how the 6600XT performs in our test suite. Is it going to be the best option for someone looking to get the best performance at 1080p? We will find out.

Back in 2019 I took a look at a set of wireless earbuds from Jaybird called the Vistas and was extremely impressed with their performance. Even with having multiple other wireless earbuds come in, I have stuck with the Vistas as my go-to earbud using them anytime I’m doing outside work. Especially when mowing the yard. They don’t have active noise cancelation, but they sounded great and did a good job of sticking in my ears even with the vibration of riding around on the mower. When I saw that Jaybird was introducing a new earbud, the Vista 2 I was very interested in what they had changed. Low and behold, one of the big changes was adding active noise cancelation. Today I’m going to check out the new Vista 2’s and see what else Jaybird has changed as well as putting them through the normal use to see how well they work. Will they replace the originals for me? Well, I can get a little attached to what I’m used to, but we will see!

The last time we took a look at our Project Data Hoarder build I went through what we were using for the CPU and motherboard as well as cooling and ram to get all of that sorted out. We are down to just the last few components to button things up. So today I’m going to talk about what power supply I went with, the rack rails, and getting things installed and set up. So let’s dive into our TrueNAS CORE build as I work out ways to use some older hardware to get an open-source NAS up and running. The goal is to finally condense some of my home and office storage needs down into fewer devices, get them tucked away into my rack, and learn about TrueNAS CORE which was formerly known as FreeNAS.

I recently took a look at the RTX 3070 Ti and was impressed with its performance. But that was just with the Founders Edition card, what can the 3070 Ti do with a monster cooler and an overclocked? Well MSI sent over their RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X which is their flagship card design and the X indicates that it is also overclocked. So today I’m excited to see what Nvidia’s newest GPU is capable of when paired with MSI’s biggest and best card design. I was impressed with the SUPRIM 3080, will the 3070 Ti be the same?

When it comes to fans, they aren’t typically something people get too excited about. High-end fans can be ultra quiet, have lots of power, and of course, some have RGB lighting. Companies have been going crazy on the lighting side of things, but last year Lian Li shook things up with their UNI FAN SL120’s. I took a look at them in August. What is interesting though, is people have been surprisingly excited about these fans. The latching design that cuts down on your wiring along with addressable RGB lighting had them sold out immediately with for sale subreddits on Reddit having people constantly looking for them. Well, Lian Li is back at it again, almost a year later with a new Uni Fan design called the AL120. They have still included the same latching design but with a new lighting design and upgraded static pressure and airflow. Once again they are available in black and white and today I’m going to check out both and see how they compare to the SL120’s that we already love.

Last week Nvidia announced their new RTX 3080 Ti gaming flagship but at the same time, they also announced a second card, the RTX 3070 Ti. The RTX 3070 Ti is set to fit in between the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3080 with the same GA104 GPU as the original 3070 but with a few more SMs and a few other big upgrades as well. Today we can finally talk about how it performs, so I’m going to run through what Nvidia has changed to make the Ti then put it through our benchmark suite to see if it's worth the extra money they are asking. The GPU market is still extremely tough, but we still want to keep everyone informed of what to expect to help you figure out what cards you want to try to seek out.

While the RTX 3090 was Nvidia’s big dog, the RTX 3080 has been their gaming flagship, leaving the 3090 to fill a role similar to the Titan cards in the past. So Nvidia’s announcement of the RTX 3080 Ti Monday was big news for 4k focused gamers. The RTX 3080 Ti is situated to be the new gaming flagship. It’s hard to believe that the RTX 3080 was launched 9 months ago and the last flagship Ti card the RTX 2080 Ti was back in September of 2018. Unlike the RTX 3080 which had a 2-week wait from announcement to the launch, the RTX 3080 Ti on the other hand was announced Monday, reviews are out today and you can (hopefully) buy them tomorrow. But before then, today I’m going to see what the 3080 Ti is all about and how it performs, so let’s dive in!

The last Zotac card we had come into the office was back in late 2019 with the Zotac GTX 1650 SUPER Twin Fan. It’s a little crazy just how much things have changed from then to now, it’s no joke that 2020 alone feels like it was two years. But beyond all of that, with the latest generation of video cards, most of the manufacturers changed up their designs as well. Combine that with just how hard cards have been to get, I was excited to get the chance to check out one of Zotac’s cards when they announced the RTX 3060 AMP, but I was even more excited when they sent out the AMP White Edition. I’ve loved all white builds all the way back to our Fridge build in a Case Labs TH10, but at that point there just weren’t many white component options at all. I painted what I could and used chrome for a lot of the water cooling so it would blend in. That was also the first build that I went with RGB. Then here we are now 9 years later and white components are not only available, but you actually have options from multiple companies and RGB well... Okay, I’m sorry about that one.

Moving to WiFi 6 in my house and office did get us improved performance when it comes to transfer speeds and it also better handles having a lot of devices on the network. But the one big downside for me was a little less range, especially when running through our old plaster over plasterboard walls which are twice as thick and denser than drywall, not to mention who knows what kind of lead paint might be on there. This lead to wireless issues in a few areas in the house at the farthest points and also issues out in my yard and detached garage. This became a bigger issue when mowing as I listen to music on the wireless and it would drop at the farthest parts of my lawn. I also had trouble opening and closing my smart garage door from the mower when on the far side of the garage. Lucky for me EnGenius introduced their ECW260 WiFi 6 2x2 outdoor access point which matches the ECW230 I’m using inside. Our winter hit and I struggled to get it mounted out and get outside testing done but today I’m finally going to check out the ECW260 to see what it is all about.

The lightweight mouse trend started years ago in the enthusiast communities but more recently it has started to take hold with the mainstream gaming-focused products. I’ve been digging what some of the companies have been doing to keep the weight down and I’m glad to see that they are listening to what people want. MSI jumped into the trend earlier this year with their Clutch GM41 lightweight which came in at 65 grams. Well, today they are announcing that they have a wireless version of that same mouse which comes in at 74 grams and I’m going to check it out. Keeping the weight down with wireless mice is harder to do because you have to add batteries and I’m excited to check out how the GM41 performs in general as I didn’t check out the original so let's dive in!

Well, I’ve been busy and because of that projects like our TrueNAS Core build quickly get put aside for other things. But it is still important. The last time we took a look at it I went over the storage options that we went with. Well in order for everything to work, I need processing power. So today I’m going to go over what I’m planning on using for the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and for some of our cooling. The original goal for the build was to put to use some older hardware combined with new components on wear items like the storage into a new rack-mounted case. So some of this hardware isn’t going to be cutting edge, but that’s the point of a NAS build like this right? Putting your old PC hardware to use to get more life out of it.