Gadgets And Tech Peripherals Reviews And News
Keyboards, mice, Bluetooth speakers, smart displays and speakers, DIY maker products like Raspberry Pi - there are all these other gadgets and gizmos in the tech world and we'll cover them here.
There is a fledgling wireless standard that effectively renders the vast majority of home networks out of date -- don't panic though, your stuff isn't necessarily obsolete. It is called Wi-Fi 6, if using the simplified nomenclature that the Wi-Fi Alliance introduced last year, or 802.11ax if you want to stick with the more technical (and potentially confusing for the average consumer) description. Either way, what we have is a bleeding-edge standard that router makers are just now starting to adopt, one that is better equipped to handle the growing number of wireless devices that are commonly found in our homes (PCs and laptops, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, smart speakers, and so forth)....
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Fractal Design released it highly acclaimed Define S2 case a little over seven months ago and they are already back with a new iteration, the Fractal Design Define S2 Vision RGB. That's a mouthful, but even if the name doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, this DIY PC chassis is easy on the eyes. The Fractal Vision S2 RGB takes everything that made the Define S2, and the Fractal R6 before it, great but it but now it brings RGB lighting and tempered glass panels into the mix. We aren't talking just a single tempered glass panel here, however. Fractal has literally surrounded the case with tempered glass. The front and side panels are all tempered glass, as is a portion of the top panel....
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Long-time enthusiast will remember the Corsair Hydro H50. It was one of the first closed-loop water coolers on the market and it changed the game. Though the H50 was popular at the time of its release, it was a bit of a head-scratcher, because its performance and installation weren't ideal. Consumers bought it up though, and AIO water coolers were off and running. That was Corsair's first entry into the market, however, and things have gotten considerably better since. It seems as if each new AIO liquid-cooler released by Corsair has improved on their original designs, so much so that closed loop coolers are performing at levels approaching much more expensive custom water cooling loops. In the...
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When you think of Dell or its Alienware brand, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a PCs and not a peripheral. Be that as it may, Dell is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the peripheral market as part of a larger play, one in which it can sell gamers on a unified ecosystem through its Alienware division. You could, for example, buy an Alienware desktop and plug it into an Alienware monitor (even a giant 55-inch OLED display, if you have the bankroll), and then surround it with Alienware peripherals. Talk about an invasion! Whether you would want to is another question, and to help answer that, Dell sent us its AW988 Wireless Gaming Headset and AW959 Elite Gaming Mouse. We're already...
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Patriot is perhaps one of the lesser-known PC component and accessory manufacturers in comparison to large players like Kingston or Corsair, but the Northern California-based company has actually been around since 1985. About 10 years ago, Patriot launched its Viper Gaming brand, which offers high-performance gaming memory and peripherals. The product we have today, the Patriot EVLVR, is from Patriot's more business-facing product lines and it is an external, portable NVMe SSD which employs the Thunderbolt 3 interface for full PCIe Gen 3 performance capabilities. The Patriot EVLVR Portable NVMe TB3 SSD The Patriot EVLVR we have in hand is a 1TB model that retails for about $429.99 at Amazon,...
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Every year, Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season seem to become more momentous. We have already seen several large retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy, Microsoft, Sam's Club, Staples, and Target "leak: Black Friday adds in an attempt to offer select deals early. Even with so many deals out there, however, it can be exceedingly difficult to pick the perfect gift for tech-loving friends and family. But we're here to help! This guide aims to help you pick the perfect gift by listing items that are perfect for the tech enthusiasts in your life. Of course, many of these gifts would also work well for your non-tech enthusiast friends, assuming they enjoy using electronics like...
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Black Friday is just around the corner and retailers have been releasing “sneak peaks” and ads since October. Walmart recently revealed their own Black Friday ad. The superstore will be offering discounts on items like smart TVs, PC and console gaming gear, Chromebooks, and even a PS4 Spider-Man bundle. Smart TVs are one of the hottest commodities this year. Customers will be able to nab a 65" Class 4K Roku Smart TV for $398 USD. The Samsung 32" Class Smart TV will run you $178 ($72 off), while the Samsung 55" Class 4K Smart TV will ring in at $398 ($300 off). The Vizio 60" Class 4K Smart TV will be available for $498 ($100 off). The Samsung 55" Class 4K Smart TV If you are...
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You do not need to wait until Black Friday to snag a sweet tech deal. A number of devices are on sale during the Sam’s Club Super November Event. You will even be able to nab some devices for $500 USD off of their regular price. This may be a good time to purchase a smart TV. The Samsung 82" Class 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV with HDR is currently available for $500 off its original price of $2,479.00. You can grab the Vizio 80" Class XLED 4K Home Theater Display and Vizio 36" 5.1.2 Home Theater Sound System with Dolby Atmos for $1,999. This is a particularly good deal because just the television alone will run you nearly $2,300 from other retailers. A number of less expensive smart TVs like...
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Gaming headsets are a dime a dozen these days, particularly with the explosion of eSports drawing the attention of PC peripheral companies, new and old. Be that as it may, HP figured out a way to stand out from the crowd with its new Omen Mindframe, the first audio headset to employ an active cooling solution inside each of the earcups. Say goodbye to sweaty ears, if that is something you find yourself battling against amid the throes of the frag. Before we dive into the headset, let's quickly reflect on the Omen brand. Omen is essentially a rebirth of the VoodooPC acquisition HP made more than a decade ago. VoodooPC was a popular boutique builder of premium PCs, founded by Rahul Sood, and the...
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Samsung has been a leader in the solid state storage market for a number of years. Whether you were looking for affordable SATA-based offerings or high-performance NVMe gumsticks, Samsung usually has an answer. And we’re not just talking about internal drives either; Samsung has also released a number of excellent external storage devices, like the T3 and last year’s T5, for example. What Samsung hasn’t had was an ultra-high speed external solid state device that shed the limitations of legacy interfaces – until today, that is. Samsung’s latest storage product, the X5 Thunderbolt Portable SSD, is a durable, attractive, external device packing an NVMe solid state...
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It seems a little late in the game to be reviewing Arctic's Accelero Xtreme IV GPU cooler, so what gives? Well, I recently upgraded my ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition model, and while that is a solid GPU upgrade for sure, it is a downgrade acoustically and thermally. Some people prefer the blower style cooler that ships on Founders Editions cards. I am not one of them. My main system sits in an open air Thermaltake Core P5 chassis, so there really is not a benefit to expelling hot hair out of the rear of the case, as Founders Edition cards do. If anything, the open air design exacerbates the noise since the card and cooler are...
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Corsair's line-ups of K70 and Strafe mechanical gaming keyboards have been on the market now for quite some time. The Strafe is a more streamlined speedster for performance freaks and the K70 a more full-featured deck with ultra-premium build quality. We recently looked at Corsair's K70 Lux RGB in a 5-way round-up and the board walked away with our Editor's Choice award. Today, fresh off its Computex 2018 unveil, Corsair returns to our lab with buffed-up and decked-out versions of the K70 and Strafe, both sporting some disco RGB goodness, but now in their MK.2 (pronounced Mark 2) incarnations, with new features, the same killer build quality, and a bit more bling. Corsair set the bar with the...
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Amazon and Google are massive tech giants, for vastly different reasons. Google is the leading search engine provider, a smartphone platform juggernaut, and huge advertising machine, while Amazon is the largest e-tailer in the world and a cloud services powerhouse, though Google is coming up strong. Though they are different animals, these two companies find themselves locked in heated battle with their respective Google Home and Amazon Echo devices; a battle for AI dominance that could determine who will ultimately control a good chunk of the Smart Home market. The Smart Home market has massive growth potential over the next decade and it's an area that Google wants to own. We all remember how...
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EVGA is best known for its graphics cards, and for good reason. EVGA is the number one NVIDIA authorized board partner in the U.S. and they have been for a long time. Like many brands in the PC enthusiast space, however, EVGA has started to branch out beyond just graphics cards and today they have a wide range of items in their product stack, ranging from motherboards and notebooks to peripherals and power supplies. Despite being in the peripherals game for a relatively short while, however, EVGA already has five gaming mice in the market, and it just introduced its first mechanical keyboard, the Z10. Like most products released by EVGA, the Z10 is designed with enthusiasts in mind. To accommodate...
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