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.
Toshiba has released a string of top-notch, affordable NVMe solid state drives over the last couple of years featuring its BiCS flash memory technology, which target a wide array of market segments. We’ve shown you a few recently, like the diminutive, affordable OCZ RC100 and the mainstream OEM targeted, XG5. Today, Toshiba is redoubling its efforts in the OEM segment with yet another new client NVMe drive, the XG6. We first posted news of the XG6 a few weeks back – if you’d like to check out the initial announcement, it is available right here. Like the XG5, this new drive is optimized for consumer desktop and mobile computing applications and it features Toshiba’s...
Read more...
Although we first caught a glimpse of the SSD that would become the Toshiba OCZ RC100 back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, they are now ready for public consumption and Toshiba has just begun shipping the drives. If you’re not hip to the OCZ RC100, it’s a new family of solid state drives that’s specifically designed to push the NVMe interface and smaller M.2 form factor further down into mainstream price points. Toshiba accomplishes this feat by using a single-package design that packs the NAND flash memory and controller into a single chip. The drive’s design is also DRAM-less to further reduce costs. The end result is a tiny, power-efficient product that...
Read more...
We are almost to the end of yet another wonderfully innovative year in technology. The non-stop innovation of the tech sector has presented us with products and services that deliver more horsepower, lower power consumption, and smaller form factors that deliver more value and features. The tradition of Black Friday began with retail merchants feverishly working over the year to pull their bottom lines out of the "red", and utilizing the US Thanksgiving long holiday weekend to bolster sales and revenue back into the "black." For 65 years value-seeking consumers in the U.S. have been looking forward to today. While most Americans are recovering from excessive levels of tryptophan and...
Read more...
Toshiba has announced an array of products featuring various flavors of its 64-layer BiCS 3D Flash memory. We previously took a look at the speedy Toshiba XG5 NVMe M.2 SSD, and found it to be a capable performer. Today, however, Toshiba takes its 64-layer BiCS 3D Flash technology in another direction with the brand-new TR200 series SATA solid state drives we’ll be showing you here. The Toshiba TR200 series SSDs are built around 64-Layer 3-bit-per-cell TLC (triple-level cell) BiCS Flash, but use the legacy SATA interface and target budget-conscious do-it-yourselfers. Toshiba’s BiCS Flash memory employs a three-dimensional (3D) stacked cell structure that is designed for high density applications,...
Read more...
At Dell EMC World a few weeks back, we gave you a glimpse of an unnamed Toshiba NVMe SSD that featured 64-layer BiCS 3D flash memory. We couldn’t reveal much about the drive back then, but Toshiba eventually lifted the veil, and revealed a new family of drives dubbed the XG5. The Toshiba XG5 is the follow-up to the successful XG3, and is designed to offer a combination of high performance and high density, at what should be competitive price points. If you're unfamiliar with the technology, Toshiba’s BiCS flash memory employs a three-dimensional (3D) stacked cell structure that is designed for high density applications, but it also offers higher endurance than typical 3D NAND flash memory....
Read more...
The annual Consumer Electronics Show – CES – is typically chock full of bleeding-edge technology. Numerous companies take advantage of CES as the backdrop to launch or announce new products, and this year's CES 2017 was no exception. But for every killer piece of technology shown off at CES, there are a dozens of chintzy unmentionables that fill the millions of square feet that comprise the show's multiple venues. The Las Vegas Convention center and virtually all of the surrounding upscale hotels and resorts are packed to gills with CES-related tech products every year. It can be tough to discern what’s HOT and what’s NOT coming out of CES, so we’ve decided to save you the trouble and...
Read more...
Although NVMe PCI Express solid state drives are all the rage as of late, due to their relatively strong performance and inherent feature benefits, manufacturers continue to tune and refine their SATA based offerings as well. Case in point: the brand new OCZ VX500 series solid state drives we’ll be showing you here today. The OCZ VX500 series targets the mainstream computing segment and initially consists of a quartet of 2.5mm SATA SSDs, packing all, in-house, Toshiba made technology. The hook is, even though these new drives are priced aggressively, they eschew less expensive TLC NAND in favor of more durable MLC, and performance is relatively strong too.We’ve got the full list of features and...
Read more...
Toshiba OCZ is at the ready with a brand new NVMe solid state drive, targeted squarely at the high-performance enthusiast computing market. We first caught a glimpse of the drive we’re going to be showing you here today, the OCZ RD400, back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. OCZ had the drive on display – branded the RevoDrive 400 at the time – blazing through some benchmarks at over 2.6GB/s.It took a bit of tweaking and fine tuning to get the drive ready for market, but it’s here now, and as you’ll see on the pages ahead, the RD400 was worth the short wait.Like the last couple of OCZ solid state drives we’ve looked at recently, the new RD400 is packing all Toshiba-made, proprietary...
Read more...
If you spent any time on the site or digging for news from GDC last week, you probably heard that NVIDIA’s CEO Jen Hsun Huang crashed one of EPIC’s talks at the show to unveil the company’s next flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX Titan X. The only details Jen Hsun revealed were that the Maxwell-based GPU powering the card packed 8 billion transistors and that it was paired to a whopping 12GB of memory.Well, we can’t disclose any more official details just yet, but can tell you that a shiny, new GeForce GTX Titan X has arrived on the lab and we’ll be putting it through its paces shortly...The GeForce GTX Titan X BoxThe GeForce GTX Titan X ExposedFront View: GeForce GTX Titan XGeForce GTX...
Read more...
Don't beat yourself up if you're not familiar with the Cougar brand. It's a German company that's been in the game since 2007, though its presence in the United States is largely overshadowed by companies like Razer and Logitech, two of the bigger dogs in the gaming peripherals scene. But like Roccat, another device maker headquartered in Germany, Cougar is making an effort to establish a higher level of brand recognition on our home turf by releasing competitive gaming gear that blend form and function. The product we're looking at here is Cougar's 600K Mechanical Gaming Keyboard. It's a subdued version of Cougar's flagship 700K intended for people who want the look and feel of the higher end...
Read more...
When NVIDIA first announced that it would create a workstation-class remote virtualization system that enabled full GPU acceleration with latency-free streaming I was more than a little skeptical. Not only did it seem like a solution in search of a problem, the bandwidth requirements and technical heavy-lifting to support professional PC users seemed too steep to surmount in a few short years. Then, this week, NVIDIA announced that it would offer a free 24-hour test drive of NVIDIA GRID to anyone who wanted to see what the technology could do. We took the company up on its offer and what we've seen is damned impressive. Understanding NVIDIA GRID NVIDIA's GRID is a virtual GPU technology that...
Read more...
Every so often, I get my hands on a product that doesn’t necessarily require a multi-page, deep-dive technical analysis, but is interesting nonetheless and something worth talking about. When that happens and the product is something that I (or another member of the team) can use on a daily basis, we’ll take it for a spin and then post our findings in a concise piece, just like this one. We’ve covered some really cool stuff in our blogs here on HotHardware, like the Eaton 5PX UPS, the Ooma, Logitech's Wireless BoomBox, and some of my favorite peripherals, i.e. mechanical keyboards. The Patriot EP Pro SDHC Card In this post, I’m going to cover something I suspect...
Read more...
We have been talking about Intel's Thunderbolt technology here at HotHardware since well before it received its official name. Way back in the day, Thunderbolt went by the Intel codename "Light Peak". We had discussed Intel’s Light Peak technology on a number of occasions over the last few years and caught glimpses of the technology at work at past Intel Developers Forums. Light Peak eventually matured into what now is known in the market as Thunderbolt technology, which debuted initially as an Apple I/O exclusive last year. As we mentioned in our IDF coverage a few years ago, Light Peak was being developed by Intel in collaboration with Apple. So it wasn't...
Read more...
It's only been five months since Skyrim hit store shelves, but the amount of work done on the game by both Bethesda and an army of modders has been enormous. With the Creation Kit now in the wild for several months, we've rounded up some of the best mods available and brought them for your consideration. We'll also walk you through the modding process and how to get started. ProTip: If you re-map the "F" key in Skyrim's key bindings, the new key to assign a favorite is "A." This isn't explained or listed anywhere in game; we found it by accident. What Makes a Mod 'Must-Have? There are literally thousands of Skyrim mods available, ranging from small adjustments to NPC dialog or tone of voice,...
Read more...
