PC Components, Peripherals And Gadget Reviews And News
Dig into our deep-dive product reviews and news of PC components from processors, to motherboards, graphics cards (GPUs), sound cards, and storage, along with other gadgets and peripherals that complete the computing experience. Whether you're a DIY PC enthusiast builder or just looking to read-up on what should be inside or connected to your next pre-built PC, here's where you'll find all the nuts and bolts sorted on what makes modern computer systems tick, as well some of the best user interface devices to go with them.
Intel did something interesting when it launched its Kaby Lake-based series of 7th generation Core i processors recently. Tucked away in the product line-up, alongside quad-core speedsters like the Core i7-7700K, was a new, relatively low-priced Core i3 processor, which also happened to be unlocked for more flexible overclocking. Most previous-gen Core i3 processors were multiplier locked, which limited overclocking to only BCLK adjustments. The Core i3-7350K is a dual-core processor, with support for Intel’s Hyper Threading technology, so it can process up to 4 threads simultaneously. As the “K” in the product name denotes, the 7350K has an unlocked multiplier, so it can be overclocked through...
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The last time we saw OCZ, there were tearing up CES with an upcoming NVMe solid state drive that could transfer data at upwards of 2.7GB/s that was featured alongside a few new SATA-based solutions, like the Trion 150 series we’ll be showing you here today.The OCZ Trion 150 is an update to last summer’s Trion 100, which was the first drive from OCZ to feature TLC NAND and all in-house, Toshiba-built technology. The Trion 100 series of drives proved to be good performers overall, especially considering their relatively affordable price points. As its branding suggests, the new Trion 150 kicks things up a few notches over the Trion 100, thanks to some cutting edge 15nm NAND flash memory and a tweaked...
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Solid State Drive technology continues to make big strides in performance, reliability and cost. And of course, at CES 2016 there were a number of storage manufacturers on hand showing off their latest grear, though none made quite the splash that Toshiba's OCZ Technology group made with the annoucement of their new RevoDrive 400 NVMe PCI Express SSD. With this new drive, OCZ is tapping on Toshiba's NVMe controller technology to deliver serious bandwidth in this consumer-targeted M.2 gumstick style drive that also comes with a X4 PCI Express card adapater. OCZ didn't offer much detail on the controller other than to say it was Toshiba IP on board and supports the full NVMe 1.1b specification....
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OCZ is launching a brand new series of solid state drives today, dubbed the Trion 100. Early prototypes of the drives were shown off at CES a few months back, but the drives are now ready for primetime. We should note that the Trion 100 series breaks some new ground for OCZ. Not only are they the first drives from the company to use TLC NAND, but they’re also the first to use all in-house Toshiba technology with the drive's Flash memory and controller both designed and built by Toshiba.The OCZ Trion 100 series is targeted at budget conscious consumers and users still contemplating the upgrade from a standard hard drive. As such, they’re not barn-burners in the benchmarking department, but performance...
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OCZ Technology is at the ready with yet another new Solid State Drive, built around the company’s tried-and-true Barefoot 3 controller. The Vector 180 series drive we’ll be showing you here today is packing some of Toshiba’s latest A19nm MLC NAND flash memory and has some welcomed features and additions normally reserved for more expensive, enterprise-class drives.And the Vector 180 isn’t the only thing OCZ has in store today. Launching alongside this new SSD is a brand new utility, dubbed OCZ Guru, geared for easy management and tuning of OCZ’s enthusiast-class drives. The OCZ Guru utility will ultimately replace the OCZ Toolbox utility, OCZ has been cultivating for the last few years, with...
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OCZ is launching a brand-new series of solid state drives today, targeted squarely at budget-conscious, mainstream consumers. The new ARC 100 series doesn’t stray far from its roots, however. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 as the higher-end Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm NAND flash memory. The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to further bring costs down. We’ve got a 240GB OCZ ARC 100 in-house and have put it through an array of benchmarks, versus a number of other popular solid state drives. Before we get to the results though, take a look at the ARC 100’s features and specifications...
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OCZ's RevoDrive series has been a popular enthusiast and workstation-class storage product family for years now. The last time we looked at an OCZ RevoDrive, the RevoDrive 3 X2 offered smoking-fast performance and bandwidth of up to 1.5GB/sec for reads and 1.25GB/sec for writes thanks to its PCI Express-based design, which basically comprises four Sandforce-based SSDs on a single card, alleviating the 6Gbps SATA bottleneck. Since then, OCZ was acquired by Toshiba and has been going through its product stack, revamping its SSD portfolio with fresh re-designs based on Toshiba NAND Flash memory for not only increased performance but better cost structure as well. OCZ has now replaced the RevoDrive...
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To say OCZ has had a tumultuous year in 2013 would be putting it mildly. The company took a brutal beating financially and was knocked down, but not out. Now, thanks to an acquisition by Toshiba, the newly formed and revitalized OCZ Storage Solutions, is poised and ready to make another run at enthusiasts and the enterprise. In an effort to clear up some of the rumors and hear what Toshiba’s OCZ Storage Solutions Group has in store this year, we reached out to OCZ’s CMO, Alex Mei. Here’s what he had to say: HH: How will Toshiba’s acquisition of OCZ affect future product development? Alex: Now that we are a Toshiba Group Company, one of the most exciting things...
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We had originally planned to start this review and evaluation off with a brief discussion of OCZ’s potential fate and what the company’s recent bankruptcy and looming acquisition by Toshiba could mean for its future. But in the 11th hour yesterday, news came through that the acquisition was complete and OCZ would go on producing solid state storage products but now as a “wholly owned subsidiary and Toshiba Group Company”. We've even got a fresh new logo to show you in the table below. Fittingly, the first product released after the announcement, and the drive we’ll be showing you here, features all home-grown OCZ controller technology and bleeding...
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OCZ is at the ready with a brand new line of solid state drives in its popular Vector family of products, targeted at performance-conscious PC enthusiasts. The new Vector 150 builds upon the success of the original Vector, which debuted last year at about this time, but offers better sustained performance and longer endurance, despite its use of 19nm NAND flash memory. We’ve got a couple of Vector 150 drives in-house, in 120GB and 240GB capacities, and have the full scoop laid out for you on the pages ahead. First up, take a look at the specification and projected performance of the new Vector 150 family of products and then we’ll dig in and get to some of the juicier details... OCZ...
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OCZ already offers a wide array of popular, high performance SSDs, but to the company’s credit, it’s not resting on its laurels. After employing SandForce controllers on some of the earlier Vertex SSDs, OCZ snapped up Indilinx and is using what is now its own proprietary silicon in many of its drives. Thus, the brand new OCZ Vertex 450 SSD we'll be showing you here today with an Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 series controller inside is very much a “vertical” effort, with the Indilinx and OCZ-owned PLX teams building both the silicon and firmware. OCZ will be selling Vertex 450s in capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB. The 128GB version will offer 525/290 MBps sequential...
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In between chipset releases, manufacturers typically pump out numerous motherboard variations, adding this or that feature or optimizing boards for a particular function. Unsurprisingly, folks like us enjoy tinkering with those boards when granted the opportunity to see if they offer anything special, over and above plain-Jane products. Gigabyte is one manufacturer that is never short on SKUs, and with a trio of its Z77-based motherboards in hand, we wondered what any red-blooded hardware enthusiast would: How far can we overclock these puppies? We especially wanted to find out how well they would overclock compared to one another, so we put together a test bed, outfitted it with a Corsair liquid...
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OCZ has been carpet-bombing the solid state storage market for years now. It seemed that every time a new controller technology emerged, OCZ was at the ready with a fresh batch of products and over time built a portfolio that targeted virtually every market segment. Consumer-class solid state storage is in an interesting phase right now, though. There was a time when there were only a couple of controllers on the market that allowed OEMs to produce drives capable of effectively saturating the SATA interface, while also offering strong all-around performance. That’s part of the reason everyone and their mother started producing SandForce-based drives. But now there are multiple...
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Back in April, we ran a pair of OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs (256GB and 512GB) through the benchmark grinder to see what they could do and also told you everything you ever wanted to know about them in the process. Today, we’re testing another brother in the family, the 128GB OCZ Vertex 4. When we first tested the aforementioned drives, we found that the latest generation of the Vertex series delivered somewhat uneven performance. In some workloads, the drives more or less smoked the competition, while they stumbled a bit in others. The bottom line was that the OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs were mostly impressive, but they didn’t demonstrate quite the upgrade from the previous-generation Vertex...
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