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Category: CPU's
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Published: Friday, 17 July 2015 17:34
For those of you following what Intel has been up to, they officially announced their Broadwell based CPUs at Computex this year. Last year we did see a Broadwell based Core-M CPU come out for some ultrbooks but beyond that everyone has been waiting to see what they would have to offer for desktops and normal laptops. Well coverage has been trickling out and you can expect to see CPUs finding their way into stores soon as well. Today I’m going to take a look at the Core i7-5775C, Intel’s flagship desktop model. You will also notice their isn’t a new chipset launch to go with this one as these 14nm Broadwell CPUs run on the same 9 Series Intel chipset that the Haswell based CPUs ran on.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Wednesday, 15 July 2015 09:00
There are so many companies that make mechanical keyboards these days that I would completely forgive you for not knowing who Epicgear is. Unlike a lot of those companies though Epicgear is actually an offshoot from GeIL, just about anyone who has shopped for parts for a budget gaming PC will know them. You see, GeIL it known for making gaming focused RAM that is typically found at a good price as well. So when I was talking to a friend over at Massdrop about upcoming deals and they mentioned sending over the Epicgear Dezimator X I was interested. So today I’m going to find out what the Dezimator X is all about and find out if it follows in the footsteps of its parent company in being a gaming focused product for people on a budget.
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Category: Audio
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Published: Wednesday, 08 July 2015 19:33
I’m not sure if you guys have noticed, but the streaming market has been growing almost daily. Amazon invested over a billion dollars in buying Twitch last fall and even Google is expanding and doing their own game streaming service. It’s popular with people watching obviously, but that expansion has also meant a lot of people have been streaming, including a lot of the members of our community. We have even been streaming our LAN events as well. Razer recognized this and introduced their own USB desktop microphone the Seiren and more recently they followed that up with the Seiren Pro. Both get a high quality microphone into streamers, artists, and gamers hands. The Pro model does have a few improvements like the built in XLR port for anyone who later wants to move from USB to a proper mixing setup. Well Razer isn’t the only company with microphones focused on streaming and podcasts, so today I’m going to take a look at the Seiren Pro and see what it’s all about.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Thursday, 02 July 2015 13:43
With mechanical keyboards coming back in popularity the need/demand for wrist rests has been rising as well. A while back I covered the Grifiti wrist rests that I had picked up for myself. While I have enjoyed them as I mentioned in their coverage they aren’t exactly designed to hold up. As mine has gone downhill I have been keeping my eye on other wrist rest designs looking for something that would work well for me. One of the designs that stood out to me was the custom made leather Noko wrist rests. I saw their drop on Massdrop and then later explored the gallery of custom designs on their website. Lucky enough they were about to start a drop with Massdrop and were interested in us checking one of the TKL wrist rests they would be doing in the drop.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Monday, 29 June 2015 18:58
So last week we had our first peak at the kind of new R9 380. Well it just so happens that card was only a 2GB model. Lucky for us PowerColor sent over their PCS+ R9 380 and it has a 4GB frame buffer. So today I’m going to check out the card from PowerColor and see what they have going on and along with that we can see if having the additional frame buffer is worth it in our benchmark suite. With these cards not exactly being focused towards higher resolution gameplay I’m not sure if we will see too much at 1080p but given the 1440p numbers we saw before I bet we see some improvement there!
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Category: Mobile
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Published: Friday, 26 June 2015 15:48
While there seems to be an endless number of Android phones on the market, for those of you shopping for one this summer are most likely only going to be looking at just a few. The perennially popular Galaxy S lineup being at or near the top of that list. This year Samsung introduced the S6 with two models (and just recently announced a third), you can pick from the regular Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge. On top of wanting to see what the new Samsung phones had to offer, I also really wanted to take a closer look at the difference between the two phones. I spent a little time with the original S6 and then spent a bunch of time with the Edge to see what sets it apart and also to see what justifies its higher price point. So today I’m going to talk a little about my experience.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Wednesday, 24 June 2015 12:58
At this year’s E3 AMD announced its long awaited next generation of cards. While most of the eyes are on the Fury cards they also introduced the 300 Series. For the most part the 200 Series cards were rebranded but most of the cards did see some tweaks to clock speeds, memory capacity, and memory bus. To start off our coverage of the new cards today I am going to take a look at the R9 380 Gaming 2G from MSI. The R9 380 is a Tonga GPU card, the same GPU that was used in the R9 285 launched last fall. The R9 380 did see a boost clock speed increase over the R9 285 and the MSI I am testing today has a slight overclock over the stock R9 380 clock as well.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Monday, 22 June 2015 14:54
With Corsair locking in an exclusivity deal on the Cherry RGB key switches for their first year and in general with Cherry switches being on backorder sometimes over a year out it’s no surprise that a lot of the manufactures have been reaching out to other options. Razer uses an MX style knockoff with their specifications, SteelSeries introduced their QS1 switch with their new mechanical keyboard, and Logitech actually introduced their new Romer G switches all the way back in September of last year. Well the G910 that houses the Romer G switches has been extremely popular and only a few weeks ago did we finally get one in to test out. I loved the G710+ but with the G910 changing everything from the ground up I really have no idea what to expect. That said I’m excited to see how the new switches perform and find out if the new design is a good as the changes they have made in their mouse lineup have been.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 19 June 2015 13:40
Considering how often I spend taking photos in the office as well as all of our photos when at events. I can say without a doubt that having to pull the SD card out of the camera, walk across the room and plug it into the PC, then sit down and pull everything off of the card takes up far more time than it should be. Eyefi has been on the market for a long time with their WiFi enabled cards but for various reasons I have always put off getting on. Recently I decided that we should check them out and finally see if they are worth all of the hype. So today we are going to take a look at their standard Eyefi Mobi in an 8GB capacity while using it for photos around the house and the office.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Wednesday, 17 June 2015 12:51
This past January Cherry revealed an upcoming keyboard design called the Cherry MX Board 6.0. We have taken a look at the 3.0 but the 6.0 that they showed was a complete departure from anything they have done in the past. For one the entire keyboard was backlit and it had a heavy duty aluminum casing. But more importantly with it they were showing off a new technology called RealKey. Basically Cherry designed a way to almost completely drop any key lag while also giving full N key rollover and no ghosting. To do that they actually had to step back and go back to analog rather than the standard digital signals that all of the keyboards use today. Well after a few delays, I can finally say that I have spent nearly two weeks testing the Cherry MX Board 6.0 and I’m finally ready to sit down and talk a little about the keyboard and RealKey technology that it introduces.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Monday, 15 June 2015 13:36
At the start of this year I had the chance to work with Massdrop to check out their version of the community designed ErgoDox. When doing that review I especially enjoyed building the keyboard myself. So when I saw that Massdrop was developing their own keyboard the Infinity, I had to get my hands on it. Well like most things working out the bugs takes time so while we got a first gen infinity keyboard, we did have a few problems that pushed us back to checking out the second drop’s version. Needless to say this review has been a long time coming, but I’m excited to finally show everyone about my experience with the Infinity from start to finish.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Friday, 12 June 2015 16:02
In the past I have taken a look at a nice variety of small form factor PCs. Out of all of them I was most impressed with the NUC. Not only did it have the smallest form factor, but it also performed extremely well. It really opened up my eyes to the possibility that only gamers and enthusiasts will be sporting full or mid-sized PCs in the future. We already see a lot of people moving to just using a laptop or even a tablet. So beyond the NUC I was really curious about other NUC like PCs like the Brix from Gigabyte. Well today I have the chance to check out the Brix GB-BXA8-5557, an AMD based PC that has a similar footprint to Intel’s NUC. Let’s see what it is all about and find out if it can hold its own in the performance benchmarks compared to the others.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Wednesday, 10 June 2015 14:37
Last fall, when the initial wave of RGB keyboards were first coming out, I had the chance to check out the Lobera Supreme from Tesoro. While the keyboard wasn’t perfect I was impressed with its value. One of the issues I had with the keyboard was the lack of individual key RGB lighting but recently that changed. Tesoro introduced the Lobera Spectrum with a similar design but with the spectrum backlighting. Today I’m going to dig into it and see if anything else has changed and find out if it is still a good value like their first RGB keyboard.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 05 June 2015 16:10
Over the last few months I have had the chance to check out a whole list of different SSD’s from a wide range of manufactures. For the most part all of them are sporting the new Phison S10 controller. While those drives have been fast I couldn’t help but notice that the OCZ drives that I tested well over a year ago were right up there holding their own. That got me wondering what the new PCZ drive is capable so I asked to check out the new Vector 180. Today I’m going to dig into it and see what they have going on and then run it through our benchmark suite to see how it performs to find out how it compares to everyone else’s new flagship drives.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Sunday, 31 May 2015 18:00
You might be wondering what I’m doing posting on a Sunday night but with Computex starting in Taiwan there are a ton of things getting announced or about to get announced. You see a lot of people think that CES is the big event each year for PC hardware but CES is really for consumer electronics where Computex has more of a focus on PC hardware. So with that Nvidia has stepped up and is introducing their GTX 980 Ti. While the launch is exciting, it is a little surprising to see them launch now, before AMD launches their 300 Series cards. Typically companies leave an ace in the hole so Nvidia must be really confident that AMD doesn’t have what it takes to outperform the GTX 980 Ti. While we won’t know that until AMD launches their cards, what we can do today is run the GTX 980 Ti through our benchmark suite and see just how it compares to what is available today.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Friday, 29 May 2015 17:25
One of the more up and coming company’s in the gaming keyboard market for me has been Thermaltake. They have introduced a wide variety of keyboards over the past few years including their Poseidon line. We have seen well priced keyboards from the Poseidon lineup that have also included backlighting and a clean look. For a lot of gamers this is the only way to get that clean styling and backlighting without completely breaking the bank. Today I have the chance to take a look at their newest Poseidon keyboard, the Poseidon Z Forged. The Z is how TT distinguished their non-Cherry keyswitch models but now they only make the Z. The Forged in the name however is completely new, this is because this specific model has a metal plate across the top, giving the keyboard a more solid construction and adding to the styling. So let’s dig in and see what it’s all about!
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Wednesday, 27 May 2015 21:04
After taking a look at the Titan X last week it really got me thinking. Currently you can pick up two GTX 980s for the price of one Titan X. That leaves me wondering how well two GTX 980s would perform in SLI compared to the Titan X. Well it just so happens I had two GTX 980’s in use in the office so I put them to the test. Today I’m going to take a quick look at their performance and see if they are a better buy than a single Titan X.
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Category: Other
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Published: Friday, 22 May 2015 13:36
It’s funny I spend so much time in the office playing with hardware and tech and gaming throughout the year that completely miss out on some of the cool tech that requires me to get outside a little. When we plan out trips I sometimes take that chance to bring things along with me that require a little more time out of the office. Well for the second year in a row my wife and I decided to make the trip down to Florida to visit family. Along the way we spent a few days at the Mid-Season Invitational League of Legends games, snuck off to Disney World, and spent a few days on the beach in Daytona. Well I decided this would be a great time to check out something completely different. As an old school car guy and a tech nut I keep my ear to the ground when I can and I have seen GM pushing their OnStar with 4G LTE. I thought it would be interesting to see just what they have going on the tech side of things. I reached out to GM and they were surprisingly happy to drop of a 2015 Chevy Trax with all of the bells and whistles. We took the Trax down with us giving us a great chance to check out what they have going on.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Wednesday, 20 May 2015 19:47
Sometimes you can’t explain it but you need the biggest and best. When it comes to video cards from Nvidia the GTX 980 is a beast, hell I have GTX 980’s in both my main PC and my LAN rig, but with 4 giga of ram I don’t think you can really consider it to be the end all be all video card. This is where Nvidia comes in with their Titan cards. In the past they have had the original Titan as well as the Titan Z with its dual GPUs and the Titan Black. Well the latest Titan is the Titan X. Nvidia launched it this past March and we were a little slow to get one in but today I finally have one to run through our benchmark suite. Let’s find out if it really is godlike like the name implies.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Thursday, 14 May 2015 15:11
I’m not sure if everyone else has been watching, but Kingston has been slowly expanding their product lines a little. They are obviously known for their memory and later their SSDs and flash drives. But they have also been dabbling in headsets with their HyperX brand. They started out by partnering with other manufactures but recently they have introduced their own headsets and they have been very popular from what I have seen. Well around that time they also quietly introduced a line of mouse pads. I guess they figure that a HyperX fan might be interested in keeping the HyperX trend going with a mouse pad. So today I’m going to take a quick look at the HyperX FURY Pro Gaming Mouse Pad and see what they have going on.
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