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.
The solid state storage market is highly competitive, and it is also one that changes rapidly as the technology continues to evolve and prices fluctuate due to various factors. There are dozens of companies with multiple product lines that vie for dominance in the SSD space, which can make selecting a drive for a system a rather daunting task for the uninitiated. In this piece, we'll endeavor to make the task of buying an SSD a little easier for everyone by shining the spotlight on what we consider to be some of the better SSD deals currently available in a wide range of prices and capacities....
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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...
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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...
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The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD we'll be showing you here today is the follow-up to the SanDisk Extreme 510 Portable SSD. This new drive fully embraces USB-C while retaining USB Type-A compatibility for older Macs and PCs. It promises speedy storage (up to 550 MB/s claimed), a wide range of capacities (250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB), and an IP55 rating against dust and water intrusion. The drive’s slim body looks more like a portable charger for your cell phone than the bulky external hard drives of old, and it fits in a shirt pocket easily. It feels rugged, with black soft-touch...
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Ask a group of gamers or hardcore PC enthusiasts what they want in a monitor and you’ll likely get a few common answers. High resolutions and refresh rates, adequate size, wide viewing angles, thin bezels, and a fully adjustable stand will likely be on the list, along with support for adaptive refresh rate technology and perhaps HDR (High Dynamic Range). The monitor we will be showing you here today, the 32" Samsung CHG70 Gaming Monitor with Quantum Dot Technology checks many of those boxes, and ups the ante even further with a curved screen, back bias lighting (sort of), and USB pass-through,...
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Samsung has been at the forefront of NVMe-based solid state storage essentially since the standard’s inception. The Samsung SSD 960 Pro and 960 EVO that were released all the way back in 2016 have been among the best performing, most sought after M.2 NVMe-based gumsticks available. It’s kind of hard to believe the 960 Pro and 960 EVO have been riding high for so long in such a rapidly advancing space, but it’s true. Samsung, however, is finally ready to supplant its popular drives with the brand-new – you guessed it – SSD 970 Pro and 970 EVO series that we’re...
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Samsung recently launched its latest SATA-based solid state drives, the SSD 860 Pro and SSD 860 EVO, featuring 2-bit (MLC) or 3-bit (TLC) versions of the company’s 64-layer 3D V-NAND flash memory. We’ve put up a review of a 2.5” Samsung SSD 860 Pro 2TB drive a couple of weeks back, but have something a bit different in store for you today. On tap here is an evaluation of a 2TB Samsung SSD 860 EVO, but of the M.2 variety. This drive is still packing a SATA interface, but is designed for the sleeker, more modern M.2 2280 form factor. In the current PC landscape, which is chock full...
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Bleeding-edge NVMe solid state drives are a hot commodity in the enthusiast space and the premium laptop market, but there are still billions of legacy SATA ports out there just waiting to be attached to fast, reliable solid sold state storage. To that end, Samsung is delivering some band new SATA-based solid state drives today using the company’s latest 64-layer 3D V-NAND flash memory and a new controller – the Samsung SSD 860 PRO and 860 EVO Series drives. We’ve got a 2TB Samsung SSD 860 Pro in-house and have put it through its paces alongside some other recently-released SATA-based...
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Creative Labs was instrumental in evolving PC audio with notable products, like the Sound Blaster 16, AWE 32, AWE64, Live!, Audigy, X-Fi, and Extigy, and algorithms like EAX technology. Most of its competitors through the last three decades, like Yamaha, ESS, Turtle Beach, Auzentech and M-Audio, evolved their product line-ups or faded into obscurity. There were acquisitions of Aureal and Sensaura technologies that further boosted Creative's technology portfolio, too. Sound cards seem passé nowadays, as motherboard manufacturers hop up high-definition audio codecs with higher quality op-amps, capacitors,...
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The Samsung Portable SSD T3 was a compact, durable, lightweight, and fast external solid state storage device, that offered killer performance when it launched. The T3 has been out for quite a while, however, and Samsung has since released a few newer types of flash memory, which are better suited to low-power, portable storage devices. As such, the company decided to tweak the T3’s design, update it with newer 64-layer 3D V-NAND flash memory, massage the firmware, and the brand-new Samsung Portable SSD T5 was born.We’ve got one of the new Portable SSD T5’s on-hand and have some benchmarks to share...
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The venerable Samsung EVO brand is well known among PC performance enthusiasts and workstation pros for its speed and reliability with respect to NVMe and SATA-based Solid State Drive (SSD) products. However, you may not recognize the brand so easily as is relates to the microSD card format for Flash memory. What's interesting here though is that microSD cards are getting much more capable, and as you can see, Samsung has some new EVO goodness on tap here as well. The SD memory card format has been around for many years and has evolved greatly to the point that the newer SDXC card format...
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Overclockers and frequent PC builders alike can appreciate the advantages of having an open air bench or rack for testing. These make component swapping a breeze for comparisons and provide a flexible platform for checking a build before installing it inside a tight case. Few things are more frustrating than learning your motherboard is dead on arrival after you finished meticulously routing every last cable.As nice as open air cases and test benches are, however, they have largely come with their own share of hassles. Many test benches walk a spectrum between structural rigidity and layout flexibility....
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When Samsung initially announced the SSD 960 PRO and SSD 960 EVO NVMe drives a few months back, we were eager to get our hands on them for some in-house testing. Their specifications, which included transfer speeds in excess of 3.2GB/s, were among the fastest we’d seen to date for consumer-class M.2-based Solid State Drive. Last month, when we were able to dig into the flagship Samsung SSD 960 PRO, we came away impressed. So impressed, that we gave the drive an Editor’s Choice award – you can check out that review right here. Today, we get to take a close look at the more affordable Samsung SSD...
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Samsung announced its latest, consumer-class NVMe M.2-based solid state drives a few weeks back, the SSD 960 Pro and SSD 960 EVO, but today marks the official launch of those products. As has been the case for the last couple of generations, the EVO moniker denotes the more mainstream line-up, while the Pro designation is reserved for higher-end, flagship products. If you check out our coverage of the initial announcement, you’ll see that the Samsung SSD 960 EVO line has some killer specifications, with read speeds in the 3.2GB/s range and prices that are competitive with other NVMe M.2 solid...
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