AMD launched their new Ryzen lineup about a month and a half ago but when they sent out initial sampling they only sent out the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X. Those were mostly what people wanted to see, but they did launch a few other CPUs at that same time. A few reviewers went and picked them up at the store but I don’t have the budget for that. AMD did follow up though and sent over the Ryzen 7 2700 and Ryzen 5 2600, two really interesting CPUs. I will get into why in just a minute. After that, I will go through my testing and then talk about how they fit in the market. Let's go!

So the first X470 board to come in that wasn’t included in our Ryzen launch kit from AMD was a board from Asus. This was suppose to go along with the new Crosshair that AMD included but we didn’t end up getting one, so, for now, I’m going to check out the Asus ROG Strix X470-F Gaming. I’m going to check out what Asus has done with their X470 models, test the performance to see how it compares to the two other X470 boards I’ve tested, check out the cooling situation, and then run down and see if it’s a good buy for someone looking to build a Ryzen 2000 Series build.

So when it comes to peripherals most people think of their keyboard and mouse, maybe their headset. But with some things, especially your mouse, you need other hardware to get the best possible performance. Wrist Rests for keyboards add to comfort and can help prevent long-term issues and well mouse pads are needed most of the time for your mouse to work or at least work well. So it's no surprise that keyboard and mouse manufacturers would get into the market. Cooler Master has sold wrist rests with some of their keyboards and they have had a few different mouse pads. Well, today they are introducing new lineups of both and I’m going to take a quick look at them.

So our first mechanical keyboard review goes all the way back to 2008 and from them it really hasn’t stopped, not to mention all of the keyboards I personally have picked up over the years. What I’m getting at is that I’ve had the chance to check out a lot of keyboards but up until now they have always had some variation on a Cherry MX switch or other popular switch types like Topres’ so you would forgive me for being a little excited about optical keyswitches hitting the market. Well, it just so happens that I’ve had a few come in recently and for more than a month I’ve been switching between them. Today I’m going to dive into the first, the Bloody B975 Light Strike Optical Keyboard. The brand name might be a surprise but some of the guys behind a few of my favorite keyboards have been working with Bloody so I’m interested in seeing where things go with them. For now, though, let's see what the B975 is all about.

When it comes to headsets Corsair has been in the market for years now. But a lot of their designs, while good, have been a little on the aggressive side for styling. Now a lot of gamers are into that sort of thing, but for some people looking like a 15 year old kid while at their PC might get them judged by their significant other, roommate, friends, or by their own self. So some people just want a classic looking headset and a while back Corsair filled that gap with their HS50 and HS60 headsets. Well, I’ve had the HS60 around for a while and have been testing it out, let's talk a little about what its all about and how it performed in my testing.

A few weeks back while visiting SeeMeCNC to pick up my new Artemis I had an interesting opportunity pop up. You see last year when SeeMeCNC moved to a much larger building Atomic Filament moved from California into the same building. Well, they invited me (and my wife) over to check out their setup. This in itself is interesting, I’ve never seen filament being made, but what a lot of people don’t know is Atomic Filament is basically the Area 51 of the printing community. They are known for their extremely high-quality filament, but to protect that they are very careful on who can come visit.

Okay, so last week was a crazy one, at least here at the office. Testing and writing about the Ryzen 2000 series took up a lot of time then not to mention they also launched the X470 chipset. Well, I published our first X470 review and I finished testing other boards including the Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi that I’m going to take a look at today. We already know that the difference between X370 and X470 isn’t huge but I am curious to see what some of the companies have changed in the year gap between the chipsets. So today I’m going to see what Gigabyte has gone with their flagship gaming branded board and then see how it compares to the MSI board that I already tested.

Well along with the new Ryzen CPUs AMD also introduced their new X470 chipset. That means new motherboards. While they are still AM4 boards so most of the original boards should be getting updates to support the new CPUs and don’t worry the new X470 boards will also support the original Ryzen CPUs as well. But I’m excited to see what everyone is going to do different this generation, I’m not used to seeing new AMD boards on the regular like this, I could get used to it! So to start things off I’m going to check out the X470 Gaming M7 AC from MSI that MSI and AMD provided.

Just over a year and a month ago AMD rocked the PC market with the launch of their Ryzen CPUs. They started off with their 7 series CPUs then slowly introduced the others, the Ryzen APUs only just hit the market in fact. I say it rocked the entire PC market because the Zen-based CPU launch had a cascade effect across AMD's whole lineup that drove innovation forward from just about everyone. Building high-end PCs was new and exciting. The product shortages in memory and video cards have hampered things a little but hardware wise the past year has been amazing. AMD hasn’t left things alone, now that Intel has responded AMD themselves are ready with their Zen+ CPUs. They teased them last week and today's the day you can get them. Well I’ve been busy testing them and I can finally pull the NDA shaped tape off my mouth and talk about their performance.

With the Coffee Lake launch, last fall Intel also launched their new Z370 chipset. Like in the past the Z370 chipset is Intel’s flagship platform, but unlike in the past, they didn’t also launch it with other mid-range and budget chipsets. In fact, it wasn’t until this week that the others were available. That’s a long wait for those of you who want something cheaper or just have no need for some of the Z370 overclocking features. So Tuesday the H370, H310, and B360 chipsets launched and the first one to come through the LanOC office is the MSI B360 Gaming Plus. Today I’m going to check it out and see how it compares to the Z370’s we have taken a look at before. I’m especially curious to see if this might be the sweet spot for budget builds right now to help save money to pay for the expensive video cards and memory that you are going to need.  

Next-gen Ryzen CPUs might be around the corner but I can’t forget about the X370 ITX board that Asus sent over a while back. While the AM4 boards launched early last year, ITX took a while longer. So even with new CPUs on the way if you are looking to build small form factor you will most likely still need to go X370 initially. So I’m excited both to finally see what Asus has to offer for AM4 ITX and to see how it compares to the Gigabyte AB350N board that I’ve been using all over the office. But I’m also hoping the Strix X370-I Gaming is a solid board that will let me build a crazy second gen Ryzen build when they finally come out as well.

For anyone unaware, when you go to a typical LAN party one of the things you need to bring along with your PC is an ethernet cable. The length of the cable depends on where your seat is and where the switch is located but most events just recommend bringing a 25-foot cable. Any cable will get the job done but you want to be able to spot it and you want to be able to pack it up quickly when the event is over. For me I use bring orange cables for both my wife and I so they stand out at the switch and then I just use Velcro cable wraps on the cable to keep it all bundled up. This gets the job done and helps maintain my cable, but it isn’t the fastest to pack up at the end. I do have to take my time winding it up to prevent damage and to make sure next LAN I don’t have a mess. Well a while back a good friend of ours Matt who you might know better as Vector from PDXLAN introduced me to Nick aka Vaelin who has been to PDX events from the beginning. Long story short, he has designed a solution to all of this in what he calls the LanReel. It is a 25-foot network cable that can quickly be spooled back up and packed away in your LANbag. He sent one over and I’ve been playing with it for a little while now, today I wanted to talk a little more about it and show everyone what it is all about.

For years my wife and I dropped cable television simply because we didn’t have the money for it in our budget. Then eventually we added back a basic package and were okay with that. Fast forward 6 years later and we are spending a fortune and have every channel under the sun. What happened was they slowly offered us deals that added additional channels, we started watching shows on those channels and then when the deal went away I would call and tell them I was going to drop it all and they would add even more channels to get me to stay. When we bought a new house though it was finally time to find a better option to save some money and it just so happened that Nvidia had sent out their Shield TV to us and it was sitting unused. So today I’m going to talk a little about how I dropped cable by using the Shield TV and I’ve been loving it.

Let's be honest, both some of the best heatsinks and fans are Noctua’s, especially when you are looking for low noise output. The problem is they have been very stuck on their brown and tan color scheme. The benefit is that when you see them you know exactly what it is and you know it is a quality product. They ignored the clear and glowing transparent fan fad that came and went but with cases and other hardware sticking with black they resisted changing to it. A few years ago they did bring out their Industrial PPC fans that were black but they were much more expensive and even though they are great fans a lot of people have looked other directions when swapping out their fans. Well a while back Noctua expanded their Chromax lineup with a new line of fans, new cables, and covers for most of their heatsinks that help give people color options for trim and finally fans and coolers that won’t stand out like a sore thumb while still giving people Noctua quality. I’ve had them in the office for a while and as I work on catching up I just recently got a chance to play with them when a build I put together just wasn’t going with the Noctua cooler that I put in it.

Wow, as of March 17^th its going to be 10 years of posting reviews and news. LanOC started off as a joke, talking about hosting a LAN party to promote myself running for council in our small town. It quickly turned into a very real event. From there after a few events, one of our sponsors asked if we had ever considered posting up coverage and not long after that I ended up posting up a few (really bad) reviews. Things just grew from there really. Our events had been relatively small at the time started to grow as well as our readership on the review side of things. Eventually, the review website started to take up all of my free time and I ended up leaving my job to do it full time.

After looking at the Fractal Meshify C Mini last week I figured I would see what other cases I had in the office to check out and I happened to have another Micro-ATX case that I had been excited about. This time it was from NZXT and it was the H400i. Like the Fractal, the H400i is a smaller version of the H700i that I didn’t get a chance to check out so this is a great chance to check out NZXTs new line of cases. The H series of cases have a new look that is an extension of what NZXT has been doing with their cases for a while, but the biggest feature of their new cases is the built-in CAM powered controller that powers the built-in lighting and fan controls. So today I’m going to break down the cases features, then build in it and see how this smart controller works.

Last August Fractal introduced there new Meshify product lineup with the Meshify C and it was extremely popular. For years now Fractal has had just one main style and the Meshify managed to keep the clean look while doing something different. It was also a departure from Fractal’s noise focused designs with a design focusing on cooling. Well, they are back at it again and this time around I’ve been testing the new case out. Today they are introducing the Meshify C Mini, a Micro-ATX or Mini-ITX variation of the Meshify C. It is just a smaller version of the original, but because I didn’t get a chance to check out the original this will give us a look at the new design with the smaller more compact Mini version.

Well as you can tell we are a little late on this article. Last week AMD launched their new CPUs with Vega graphics. Without getting too much into it right now (I’ll explain later) but I spent well over a week fighting with issues when trying to test and I didn’t get things worked out until just before this past weekend. Anyhow, testing is done, now we just need to talk a little about what AMD is doing with these new CPUs and then dive into the results! So let's go see what AMD's new Raven Ridge CPUs are all about!

So I’ve been tossing around the idea of giving our Crush build an upgrade to one of the new Core-X CPUs and sadly the Asus Rampage VI Apex doesn’t fit so I reached out to Asus to see if they have anything that might fit the bill in their X299 boards. They had the ROG Stix X299-XE Gaming and I figured I should get it in and see just how it compares to all of the other X299 boards we have had in. I knew it fits the dimensions needed for the Case Labs case but is it going to be what I need otherwise? Well, I’m going to take a closer look at its features and then test it to see how it performs. Read on if you are interested in finding out what it has to offer. 

As you guys have most likely noticed, things have been slow around here for a few months now. In addition to being sick a few times and hurting my back. We also bought a new house and had been working on the move and later doing work around the house. One of the best parts about moving and getting a new place is that I finally have an excuse to take a closer look at more of the home automation and smart home products that have been coming out. Even before the move I had a few things already planned and upgrading to a smart thermostat was one of them. Well, I reached out to Nest and they sent over a new Gen 3 Thermostat as well as one of their Nest Protect smoke and CO detectors. I finally have some time with both and wanted to run through what they do and how they have performed for me so far.