A few years ago Cooler Master made a big push, slowly redoing their entire mouse lineup switching most of them over to their MM then numbers naming scheme. This also included a new exterior finish for mice like the Spawn/Xornet shaped MM520 and the Alcor shaped MM530, new sensors, and switches as well. They covered all of the main mouse shapes that you might be looking for at that time, but today they are finally jumping into the MMO mouse market. Their new MM830 has the same PBT finish as the previous mice, an Avago PMW3360 sensor, and Omron switches. But the big change in addition to its shape is the D-pad buttons that are tucked away on the left side. So today I’m going to check out the new mouse and see what it is all about.

One of the card designs that stood out to me with all of the RTX launches was EVGAs new designs. I was surprised to see them go with a transparent cooler design that lets you look inside and see the heatsink. I wanted to get a closer look so EVGA sent over their RTX 2070 XC Gaming. The XC Gaming isn’t their fastest RTX 2070, but it does have the same overclock that the Founders Edition card and it sells for less. So I was really curious to see how it performed and to see if it might be worth spending some of that valuable post-Christmas or tax time money. So today I’m going to run it through all of our normal testing and take a closer look at the card itself. Let's go check it out!

I hope 2018 has been a good year for everyone. Much like 2017, 2018 was a crazy year. Moving in late 2017 caused a slowdown early on and I don’t think I have gotten back up to the production level that I would like. The 58 articles published this year backed that up, down from last years 117 and 80 the year before that. In 2018 LanOC reached the 10^th anniversary of publishing reviews, planning for the huge giveaways we did with that also cut into normal publication time. So my goal in 2019 is to get my workflow worked out to get more coverage up including more smaller side projects like our Nixie clock project. 2019 looks like it will be just as exciting with leaks of launches already coming from the big three.

Two weeks ago before taking a Christmas break, I took a look at two different Asus products. Before the new year I figured I might as well check out one last Asus product that came in as well. Along with the new water cooling kits Asus has also brought out their own power supply lineup. They are calling them the Asus ROG Thor, which I think the biggest surprise is that no one else has snatched that branding up for their own power supplies given the whole god of thunder and lightning thing. Anyhow like with their water cooling kits, Asus has gone a different direction with the Thor lineup including building in an OLED screen that shows the real-time wattage usage as well as integrating addressable lighting into the power supply as well. Sop today I’m going to take a look at some of the features that Asus went with on top of an already highly rated Seasonic Prime Ultra Platinum power supply. With that at its base, the Thor lineup is already one of the best on the market, but I’m curious to see if the Asus specific features and styling makes this any better of a choice over the Seasonic.

The all in One market for watercoolers has been boring for a while now honestly. Almost every kit on the market is made by Asetek so what sets them apart is sometimes nothing and other times just a small change compared to the rest of the market. So Asus entering the market with more Asetek coolers wasn’t all that exciting at first, until I saw they added an OLED on to the pump. Now right off the bat, let me address the obvious, a screen isn’t going to change performance at all. But I was interested in being able to use it for customization and/or to show important information. Both were interesting when paired with a small form factor LAN PC build where you can’t have an extra monitor and temps can sometimes be an issue. So Asus sent over their Ryuo, one of two of their designs. This one is closer to a normal Asetek design with its round shape but today I’m going to see how it performs in our normal testing then test it out in a SFF build.

Well RTX finally has a game that supports it and the market for GTX 1080s and GTX 1080 Tis has all but vanished with new stock finally clearing out so it is looking more and more like RTX is the way to go on the high end of the market. Well not long after the original launch of the Founders Edition cards I did get an aftermarket card in from Asus, their ROG Strix RTX 2080. It's about time I put it through our testing and take a closer look at the card to see how a 2080 with an aftermarket cooler performs. So today I’m going to do just that, then at the end revisit and see if the RTX 2080 is any better of an option 3 months past the launch.

Considering Micron is the parent company for Crucial, it may come as a surprise that they hadn’t actually introduced a consumer-focused NVMe drive up until this past month. There was the Ballistix TX3 that they showed off at Computex back in 2016, but it was canceled, making Crucial one of the last companies to jump into the NVMe market. So the name for their NVMe is fitting, they call it the P1. They are using four bit per cell QLC NAND like the Intel 660p and they aren’t aiming for the top end of the market with this drive. This is more of an entry level NVMe drive and I’m excited to see what kind of performance you can expect at a price point that people are more likely to look to spend. So today I’m going to take a look at what makes the drive tick then look at its performance before then seeing where it fits in the market.

Late October I was at FortCon for their LAN event and I won a SilverStone FG121. I know the name doesn’t really explain what it is, but basically, it is a clear fan grill with RGB lighting built into it. The grills have SilverStone's snowflake design and this brought up the discussion with how it actually looks like an ornament. Well, one thing leads to another and not long after the event I reached out to SilverStone with a weird idea turning our new Christmas tree into an RGB tree with their grills. The idea is relatively simple, but there were a few things I had to figure out. So today I’m going to show what I did, maybe if you have one or two laying around or other RGB products you can take my idea to another level.

The SFX market has been slowly growing and with that companies have been finally taking notice with new brands now making SFX and SFX-L power supplies. Silverstone though was there at the start, being one of the only companies looking to provide a modular and high-power option for small builds. This has given them time to refine and work on their designs, that is why they have been increasing the wattage available over and over as well as coming out with new more efficient designs. They introduced the SX800-LTI early this year and the 800-watt capacity alone is worthy of getting your attention. With X299 and X399 systems having an extremely high-power draw and a renewed push in the GPU market that is starting to require more demanding power supplies the additional wattage is perfect for high-end SFX systems.  But the 80 Plus rating was really what surprised me. The SX800-LTI is an 800-watt SFX-L PSU with an 80 Plus Titanium rating, the highest certification currently available.

Well with the original RTX 2070 launch I had to switch right back over to my Intel i9-9900K testing and I haven’t really had a chance to revisit the 2070. At launch, I covered the Founders Edition model and while I talked about the pricing on other 2070’s the Founders Edition model runs more and also has a higher factory overclock. So after that launch, I did reach out to a few companies hoping to get the “cheaper” model in to get a better idea if the $100 lower price point really made a big difference when it came to performance or value. Well, I’ve finally had a little time to check one out, I have had the Gigabyte Windforce RTX 2070 in the office and have been testing it. Today let’s look at its features, performance, and then see how it all fits in the market.

So yesterday AMD introduced the RX590, a refreshed Polaris GPU based on a 12 nm FinFET manufacturing process. I did a full review of it while testing the XFX RX590 Fatboy, you can check that out HERE. Well in an accidental set of circumstances I ended up with two matching cards. Normally I patch together Crossfire or Multi-GPU testing with two different cards. Well, I spent the rest of the day yesterday after everything went live testing out the XFX RX590 Fatboy in our same tests only with both cards running. As always these results depend a lot on the games that you play but I was curious how things would work out with our test suite. Like our previous Crossfire and SLI coverage, the commenting will be at a minimum and this is just a quick article to show off the numbers so keep that in mind and use the information however you would like.

Unlike Nvidia, AMD has actually had a few more recent launches, they all fell right in the middle of the coin mining craze though that played havoc on GPU prices and availability. The RX580 launched last April and then Vega came in August to fill some of the gap in the high end. The RX580 was a refresh of the popular sweet spot card, the RX480 that launched back in 2016. They were both on the Polaris architecture and here we are again with a new Polaris based card in hand. AMD is officially introducing the RX590 today, just two weeks short of two and a half months after the original launch. AMD surprisingly decided to stick with the 500 series naming and just slip in a card hoping to fill in the gap between the RX580 and the GTX 1070.

Well, it wouldn’t be a new chipset and CPU launch if I wasn’t trying to get my hands on a good ITX board to use in one of our LAN rigs. Especially with a few LANs upcoming. Well from looking at the initial boards announced for the Z390, one of the most exciting ITX boards was the Strix Z390-I Gaming from Asus and I was excited to see it come in. I’m curious what is different from the Z370 or the Z270 for the matter and to dive into Asus’s feature set and see if the Strix Z390-I Gaming covers all of the bases for a high-end gaming PC that will take up less space on your desk and be easy to pack up and take to events to play with your friends. Let's run through the boards features, look at its software, check out the performance, then see how it fits in the market overall.

Just about every company now has memory with RGB lighting but Crucial with their Ballistix lineup was a little late to the party. I had been keeping an eye on them because the Ballistix brand made its name years ago by having their Tactical Tracer memory with LEDs built into them that would seek depending on how fast the memory was being used. This was long before RGB so I was curious what they would do to stand out in the already crowded RGB memory market. Well, they came out with a design that allows you to take the light bar off the top and customize it. Thermaltake and Asus have also jumped into this type of customization with 3D printing. Well, this was up my alley specifically because I love customizing my builds and I have a room full of 3D printers as well as a Carvey CNC. So rather than a normal ram review, today I’m going to check out the new Ballistix Tactical Tracer RGB memory and then play around with the customization.

With the 9900K launch, a few weeks back along with the other 9^th generation core processors Intel also released their new chipset, the Z390 chipset. This is the latest high-end chipset for the mainstream socket but you might be wondering what is even different when compared to Z370. Well as far as the chipset goes, it is adding USB 3.1 Gen 2 onto the chipset and the option to integrate Wireless AC. But it also means new motherboards and I’m curious what else might get changed. MSI, for example, has revamped their naming scheme. The board they sent over is the MPG Z390 Gaming Plus. So I wanted to touch on the new MSI naming and then check out the new board and see what it has to offer.

About a week and a half ago Intel gathered up a lot of the press and live streamed the introduction of their new 9000 series of CPUs as well as new Core-X CPUs. They also brought out details on the 28 core CPU that they teased earlier this year. We had a chance to dive into the details and then check out the new CPUs being used in a variety of demos including some overclocking demos showing off their new soldered TIM. By now I’m guessing most of you have seen some of those details but today I’m going to run through what Intel introduced and then after that I’m going to put the new i9-9900K through our tests and see how the new 8 core CPU performs. It’s been a busy month for big launches and this one has been a long time coming, I can’t wait to see how it performs compared to the growing competition from AMD so let's get into it!

So just over 3 weeks ago both the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 were unveiled. You can find my reviews of the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 at those links. While both were extremely fast, they were also expensive and a lot of the main features weren’t really out yet. With those at the top of Nvidia’s product stack that left a lot of people wondering what to do for builds that aren’t as expensive as a used car. Some people just decided to go with last generation cards, but today the RTX 1070 is finally available and with a $499 starting point it is at least in reach of a lot more people. But before you run out and buy one, let’s take a look at how they perform. With the RTX 2070 Founders Edition in hand, I’m also curious to see how different it is than the two other RTX cards so I will take a quick look at that as well. 

So we have to go back a few years to get to the Define S launch from Fractal Design. All the way back to April of 2015, a lot has changed in that time especially in the case market. The Define S came before the tempered glass explosion and there are a few other checkboxes that people look for in cases like hidden power supply mounting and some modularity for options with AIO and custom water cooling. So Fractal introducing a new Define S wasn’t a huge surprise. But I am interested in seeing what else Fractal has done to continue to evolve the always popular Define design. I’m sure they went beyond just hitting the standard features, so let's dive into the case and see what is new then build in it to get the full experience!

In addition to the new RTX 2080 Ti that I already took a look at. Nvidia also introduced the cheaper RTX 2080 and I have also been testing the RTX 2080 Founders Edition to see how it performs and compares to the 2080 Ti and everything already on the market. The RTX 2080 Ti had a shockingly high price tag and the RTX 2080 FE comes in $400 less so it does have the potential to be a little better on the pocketbook.  While still not cheap, it is currently the cheapest way to get the Turing architecture and you still get that great looking Founders Edition cooler design. So let’s dive in and see how the RTX 2080 does and figure out of the RTX 2080 Founders Edition is the right direction to go if you decide to go RTX 2080, or if you should look at some of the aftermarket designs.

Just to put things in perspective, the GTX 1080 launched May 27^th, 2016, that was the last consumer launch of a new series of cards and microarchitecture from Nvidia. That is nearly two and a half years ago. In that time the US elected a new president, we saw a total eclipse over the US, the Cubs broke their 108-year long curse and won the world series, we have even been through TWO Olympics, and not to mention the whole crypto craze! Even crazier, the PC market has completely changed as well, The Intel i7-6700K was the top dog in the consumer market with its 4 cores and the bleeding edge was the recently introduced i7-6950X with its 10 cores. Now 6 and 8 core CPUs are the norm in the mainstream lineups and AMD has the 2990WX with 32 cores on the high end! So even with the 1080Ti and later the 1070Ti, we are long overdue for big graphics launches and Nvidia is going all out. Today both the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 launch, I’m going to check out the 2080 Ti first and dive into the new Turing architecture, the use for RTX over GTX, the completely new cooler, and of course performance so hang on we have a lot to get through and a short time to get there (RIP Bandit).