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Category: Audio
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Published: Wednesday, 25 May 2016 12:10
It’s amazing sometimes how quickly things can change. Back in 2014 when Kingston introduced their first gaming headset, the original Cloud, it was a little surprising. It didn’t take very long though before we started seeing them a lot at LAN events and people were talking very highly of them. The same for their Cloud II’s as well. Well the some of you might not know but the Cloud was licensed from Qpad with Kingston tweaking a few things on the sound engineering side of things. Well recently they introduced a new headset called the Cloud Revolver and this time around everything is designed in house. Today I’m going to check it out and see if it stands up to the very high standard that the original Cloud designs set.
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Category: 3D Printing
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Published: Friday, 20 May 2016 09:56
So yesterday I did a relatively short rundown on what is 3d printing and I also spoke about my visit with SeeMeCNC. Well today I’m actually going to dive into the SeeMeCNC Eris 3d printer that I picked up when I was visiting them. The Eris is their brand new portable delta printer. Not only is easy to carry, but they set out to make the Eris their first truly out of the box and printing experience. Generally, with most 3d printers you have a lot of build and setup time, but with the Eris shipping completely built and with their new Auto Leveling system they are hoping it will be a great printer for new 3d printing users. Well it just so happens, I’m that 3d printing noob, so I’m going to run you guys/girls through my experience from start to finish to help you decide if the Eris is the printer for you.
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Category: 3D Printing
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Published: Thursday, 19 May 2016 13:00
It’s a combination of the kid in me and the maker in me but getting a 3D Printer has been on my short list of things I want to get for years now. I’ve spent a lot of time with things like my plotter designing and making my own stickers as needed. Frankly though 3d printer always felt a little unobtainable both because of the cost and because it seemed like you might need an engineering degree to build and maintain one. Well a few months ago my interest was renewed and I decided that I was going to get one and from then on I spent day and night learning as much as I can, reading anything and everything. I had a few printers in mind but couldn’t decide. One of the companies I was keeping a close eye on was SeeMeCNC, they had been involved with printers for custom PC builds with DarthBeavis, on the Vanilla Ice Project, and even involved with PDXLAN. The problem was for my first printer at least; I wasn’t really looking for a build it yourself kit. I feel capable of doing that, but I just really wanted to dive into it quickly rather than a long build time prior. The other problem was even in the kit form their printers were a bit higher than I was budgeting. Well when looking at them I found out that they are actually within a drive away and I reached out about visiting. It just so happened that they were also introducing their long awaited Eris, a smaller, cheaper, and more portable model that comes factory build. I went and visited their factory and picked up the first Eris and have been getting a feel for it all. Today I’m going to give a quick run through on what 3d printing is all about, go over my visit with SeeMeCNC, then tomorrow I will dive into the Eris and my overall experience with it.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Friday, 13 May 2016 19:55
Some of you might have seen Gamdias as a sponsor at our last event or maybe at a few of the other events as well. While I’ve seen their name around I haven’t had the chance to personally check out and of their products. So when they offered to slip in their Hermes RGB keyboard in with our LanOC V18 box I took them up on the offer. We have had a LOT of RGB keyboards in the office at this point so that itself isn’t unique but I was excited to see what Gamdias has going on. So for the last 3 weeks I have been testing and using the Hermes RGB for all of my writing and gaming to find out how it performs in both situations. Read on as I take a closer look at its features and then dive into its performance.
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Category: Power Supplies
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Published: Thursday, 05 May 2016 18:34
By now if you have been around LanOC on the review side of things as well as our LAN events you will have noticed that I love small form factor builds. I’ve gone on and on about them many times when covering all of the unique components that have been coming out for them. When it comes to feeding your new tiny build with power you used to have just two options. You could build a tiny build and use an adapter to run a laptop power adapter or you could shoe horn in the smallest ATX power supply you could fit. The laptop PSU option was limited in wattage basically eliminating the possibility of a powerful build and going ATX gave you the power but they take up a lot of space. Those of you who have dug into prebuilt PCs have most likely seen some of the FlexATX PSU’s, well SFX is a small standard form factor version of that. Over the past few years Silverstone has been the only option in SFX power supplies with enough power and modular options, but that has changed. Today I’m going to take a peek at the Corsair SF600 and see how it compares.
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Category: Mobile
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Published: Thursday, 28 April 2016 19:02
With LG’s main phone line being their G series it wouldn’t be a big surprise if you hadn’t heard of their V10. I have been testing the V10 for a while and every time someone asked what phone I had they had no idea what the V10 was. You might remember the LG commercials for it though with their focus being on the camera. That’s because the V10 added manual video controls as well as a vine like ability to stitch together short clips. Add to that there are two front facing cameras it’s clear that the V10 wanted to improve on the camera experience. Well after spending time with the phone I think there is a lot more to the V10 and I wanted to go over my experience with LGs premium smartphone. Read on to find out how things went.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Wednesday, 20 April 2016 11:03
For the last year to year and a half I’ve been running a tiny 60% keyboard with my LAN rigs to help cut down on how much I carry to and from events and also to open up more space on the small table space you get at events. Its worked so well that I wanted to swap my wife’s keyboard to a 60% as well. To prevent damage to the keyboard in transport I tossed around the idea of getting a sleeve to put it in but then I came across the Oaken 60% keyboard case from Datamancer. The case replaces the case on my wife’s Poker 2 with a custom machined wooden case and it has a matching second half that encloses the entire keyboard for transport. After taking it to a few events over the past few months I wanted to talk a little about the case and its pros and cons. So check it out.
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Category: CPU's
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Published: Wednesday, 13 April 2016 18:28
About two months ago AMD did a large product line refresh that focused around the newly introduced Wraith Cooler, at the time we took a look at the cooler. Then closer to our LAN event they sent out samples for some of the other CPUs and APUs introduced. In their FM2+ mainstream line they refreshed the Kaveri APUs as well as an Athlon X4 CPU. Well with our LAN event keeping my schedule tied up I’m just now finally getting a chance to see what the new A10-7860K sample and Athlon X4 880K that they sent out a that time. Then on top of that just last week the A10-7890K came in to round things out. So today I’m going to run through AMDs FM2+ refresh and see how they perform. I’m especially interested I the Athlon X4 880K to find out if it’s a worthwhile budget replacement for someone considering an AM3+ build.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Wednesday, 06 April 2016 09:06
Just a few weeks ago Cooler Master introduced their new Masterkeys Pro L and S keyboards. I spent a bunch of time with the L aka the full sized model but at that time I didn’t have the chance to check out the Masterkeys Pro S. Well after our review they were quick to get an S out to me. A lot of the features of the Pro L are the same on the smaller S but there are a few differences. So today I’m going to take a look at the Masterkeys pro S and show you guys what is different. This won’t be as in depth of a review as the original, but if you check out our original review HERE and then check this out you should have a good idea of what the new Masterkeys Pro’s are all about and if they are for you.
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Category: Cooling Hardware
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Published: Friday, 01 April 2016 22:37
Over the past eight years of reviewing, even with all of the different heatsinks and water cooling options we have covered there has been one constant. In nearly every build or test bench if we weren’t going with water cooling Noctua coolers have been at the top of our list. Recently as far as full sized builds go everything that wasn’t a test bench has been water cooled, but the small form factor builds have nearly all been sporting Noctua NH-L9i’s. This has partially been because I like Noctua’s low noise but more than anything the NH-L9i just kept them all cool and took up less space than even a stock cooler. Recently though I have been working on building a new Lunchbox project build, we have been collecting parts and covering them in various reviews. Well when I got everything together the NH-L9i just couldn’t handle the higher heat output that the i7-6700K was putting out. This wasn’t a big shock given the coolers 65 watt cooling rating and the heat issues that same CPU gave us even with a full sized cooler on our test bench. So this gave me the chance to test out the slightly larger NH-L9x65 from Noctua. Today I’m going to talk about how it performed and run through its features. You can also get a sneak peek at our upcoming build!
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Tuesday, 15 March 2016 16:27
As most of you guys have most likely noticed, I get a wide variety of keyboards coming into the office. Especially now that everyone and their mom has gotten into the mechanical keyboard market. With that the list of keyboards that make it into heavy use as a keyboard my wife and I take to events, test rigs, or my main PC is actually much smaller. Cooler Master has been one of the main brands you would find on that list and that is because from the day they introduced the original QuickFire Rapid I have loved their keyboards. They keep their keyboards simple with nothing flashy but the quality for the most part has been there. When they moved on to the Rapid-I I really started to get excited about the features they were introducing but with the XTI I was a little disappointed. Not because it was a bad keyboard, in fact it’s a great keyboard, I just really wanted it to be full RGB or have white backlighting like the Rapid-I. Well all of the waiting is finally over. For the past few weeks I’ve been using their new MasterKeys Pro L full RGB keyboard and today I’m finally allowed to unzip my lips and talk about it. So I’m going to run down through its features, talk about how it performed, then break down where it fits in the market. All of that will hopefully help you find out if this is the keyboard for you, check it out!
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Category: Cooling Hardware
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Published: Friday, 11 March 2016 23:41
So you have built your new rig but it feels like it is missing something. Well you might be running the stock cooler or you might even have a decent air cooler installed. They might get the job done but when it comes to putting so much money into your computer it’s hard to know that you spent that much while still skimping on your cooling. You could just throw down and build a full custom water cooling loop, I know I’ve done that on a few of my builds. But things have gotten so much easier with all in one water cooling kits coming out from basically every manufacture. Well in the case of my LAN rig I had installed an AIO water cooler last year but recently is has been driving me crazy with water in the lines. Because of that I reach out to our old friends over at Swiftech about their new H220 X2 AIO kit. The difference between their kits and most other manufactures is they are basically an all in one custom kit that you can expand and upgrade later. The new models add in LED lighting, a visible reservoir, and many more features over past models. So not only does it give me a chance to check out what the new kits are all about, it also helps give the LAN rig an upgrade before I make it out to a few events over the summer.
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Category: Motherboards
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Published: Friday, 26 February 2016 11:11
With companies finding ways to pack more and more features into Mini-ITX motherboards the small form factor market has flourished over the past few years. We are finally seeing a lot of people running smaller builds at events as LAN rigs and the idea of a higher end build doesn’t require a case that hardly fits in your car and needs a backbelt to pickup anymore. In fact, even when looking past the smallest builds we have been seeing cases designed for Mini-ITX that are still more mid tower designs. This is because most builds only need a single video card these days and built in NICs have improved in quality, ITX boards now sometimes have wireless, and even onboard audio has improved (and some people have moved to USB audio). All of that means most people don’t really need huge builds. I already took a look at MSIs Z170 ITX gaming board and today I’m checking out the Gigabyte Z170N-Gaming 5, Gigabytes highest featured ITX board to see what they have packed into the ITX form factor.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Monday, 22 February 2016 15:51
Just when we thought every company had jumped into the peripherals market at some point and time Patriot showed off their new product line back in June. They introduced a gaming mouse, headset, and a mechanical keyboard, basically the staples. Well late last fall they sent over the headset and mouse but I was a little slow to get into my testing. That said I’ve been testing them both out for a while now and today I’m going to break down what both the Viper V560 Gaming mouse and Viper V360 7.1 Headset are all about and see how they perform. With the peripheral market having so much competition, especially from a few well establishes brands Patriot has an uphill battle, but let’s see how they do with their first try.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Friday, 12 February 2016 13:49
It’s crazy that it was all the way back in 2014 when Sapphire first introduced their R9 285 ITX Compact. That that time we were excited because Ed from Sapphire had been taking a lot of notes at our LANs on builds like our LunchBox 3 and we finally saw why. The 285 ITX Compact blew me away by standing above all of the other ITX cards on the market both in gaming performance but also in cooling performance. In fact, I know a few of the LanOC staff swapped to the card in their LAN rigs. Well I still have it in the LunchBox 3 but I’ve been itching to build a new LAN rig and the first thing I need is a compact ITX card to put in it. As luck would have it Sapphire just refreshed their R9 380 ITX Compact with 4 gigs of ram so today I’m going to put it through the ringer and find out how it performs.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Tuesday, 09 February 2016 21:39
Almost a year and a half ago I took an in depth look at different ways that you can customize your mechanical keyboards. In that article we took a look at custom keycap sets, novelty caps, custom keysets, even ways to spice up your USB cable and keyboard case. While doing all of that I took a quick look at Artisan keycaps but at the time the only example we had were the molar keycaps and frankly the teeth creeped people out more than it peaked their interest. In the time between then and now I have been following the community and have picked up a few Artisan keycaps along the way that I found interesting. I’ve picked up keycaps from Martin at Hot Keys Project multiple times now and I thought it might be interesting to talk to Martin and find out a little about HKP and then check out their caps. He was nice enough to include a pair of caps along with my last order and answer a few questions I sent over as well. So let’s dig in and find out what Hot Key Project is all about.
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Category: Cooling Hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 03 February 2016 02:07
With both AMD and Intel, the stock coolers that they bundle with their CPUs seem like they have been the same forever. There have been changes in the Intel cooler over the years but AMD has stuck with it, mostly because their mounting system has been consistent forever. Well this year at CES AMD announced changes in theirs. They brought their new Wraith cooler to CES and were showing off the performance. Well last week they sent out their new cooler along with the AMD FX 8370 CPU. We have tested the FX 8370 before but it does give me a chance to see how the new cooler performs. So today I’m going to test the new coolers cooling and noise performance as well as the old AMD cooler to see how they compare.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Monday, 01 February 2016 23:15
Almost exactly one year ago I sat down and took a look at the original Massdrop ErgoDox kit. A few months after that Massdrop in combination with what would later be called Input Club announced that they had been working on a completely new designed called the Infinity ErgoDox. It’s important to note that the original ErgoDox was originally designed by Dominic Beauchamp aka Dox. Later the Geekhack and Deskthority keyboard community’s worked with Massdrop to provide a full kit. The ErgoDox isn’t exclusive to Massdrop but the specific design that I reviewed last year was. There are actually multiple places where you can put together your own parts or now even buy a pre-built model as well. The Infinity ErgoDox though is a new design based on the original but taking into account what they learned from the 60% Infinity Keyboard that Massdrop worked on with Input Club. The overall shape is the same but the Infinity ErgoDox uses a proper backplate and makes big steps forward with things like USB 3.0, NKRO, an LED screen, backlighting, and stabilizers. So today I’m going to dig into the new kit and see what it is all about, have a little fun building it all, then test out the new design and see how it compares to the original.
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Category: Mobile
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Published: Wednesday, 27 January 2016 22:20
Generally, I tend to consider myself up to date with technology, I mean I spend my days testing and writing about the latest and greatest. Every once in a while though something slips past me. A few years ago at CES Razer introduced their Nabu. It wasn’t really the first of its kind with Nike and Fitbit especially doing things that were similar, but it was very surprising to see Razer, a gaming company jump into the market. It wasn’t really until in the past year when I noticed just how popular Fitbit has been with even my own mom having one before me. Well my wife recently decided to get them to start working on bettering ourselves and Razer came back to mind. So today I’m going to take a look at the Razer Nabu and see what it’s all about.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Saturday, 23 January 2016 14:16
By now a lot of you have most likely picked up or at least tried a mechanical keyboard. After years of membrane keyboards being the norm, mechanical keyboards have burst back on to the scene over the last few years. This is great, but have you ever been in the same room or office as someone typing on a loud mech with blue or greens? I love them, but man it’s enough to drive you crazy. For me I’ve stuck with Cherry MX Browns or Clears on my personal keyboards whenever possible for my wife’s sanity. Even then people have tried O-Rings and other options to keep things toned down. Well Cherry recently introduced a new silent switch and for the first six months it is only available from Corsair. Lucky for us we got the new Corsair Strafe RGB Cherry MX Silent in. Not only does that give us a chance to check out the new key switch, but it’s also our first look at the RGB cherry switches and the Strafe as well.
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