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.
We’ve been hearing about AMD’s next-generation Zen-based processors for quite a while now, though the company just officially announced that desktop and mobile variants will be branded RYZEN. Over the past few months, we’ve seen Zen in action in both high-performance desktop and server applications and have been able...
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AMD is announcing a new series of Radeon-branded products today, targeted at machine intelligence (AI) and deep learning enterprise applications, called Radeon Instinct.
As its name suggests, the new Radeon Instinct line of products are comprised of GPU-based solutions for deep learning, inference, and training...
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Overclockers and frequent PC builders alike can appreciate the advantages of having an open air case 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...
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Today we are going to take a look at Gigabyte’s Z170X-Designare motherboard, one of the company's more recent Socket 1151-based boards for Intel's 6th Generation Skylake-based processors. At first glance this is an unassuming board, at least in terms of its appearance. It features a dark and subdued black...
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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...
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Rivet Networks recently announced its latest Killer networking product, the Killer E2500 Gigabit Ethernet Controller. For the uninitiated, the very first Killer Networking cards were introduced way back in 2005 and were designed to maximize throughput and minimize ping times for gamers. While total throughput is often...
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At this point, we’re sure you’re all aware of the goodness that is NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture and the GeForce GTX 10 series that is built around an array of Pascal-based GPUs. If you’re not – shame on you – you’ve been slacking on your tech homework and we order you to check out our coverage of Pascal and the GeForce GTX 10 series, in enthusiast,...
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External storage is commonplace now, but traditional standalone storage products sometimes leave a large number of devices hanging. I've got a 2TB external drive plugged into a USB 3 port, for example, which is great for the main PC, but it doesn't help much with the laptop, iPhone and iPad. That's where some of the...
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Although rumors had been circulating for a while, NVIDIA went ahead and made the GeForce GTX 1050 and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti official last week with an announcement featuring a number of details about the cards. In the announcement, NVIDIA covered some of the speeds and feeds, revealed a number of partner board designs...
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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...
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We have another premium Z170-based motherboard on the test bench today, by way of MSI. The MSI Z170A Gaming M9 ACK motherboard is the company’s top end gaming board for use with Intel 6th Generation Skylake-based Core series processors. The MSI Z170A Gaming M9 is packed with a host of premium features aimed at...
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SanDisk recently launched a new line of portable storage products, with photographers, videographers, and creative professionals in mind. The particular drive we'll be showing you here, the SanDisk Extreme 510, has a 480GB capacity and attaches to a PC using USB, though smaller capacities are also available. Not only...
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Samsung continues to advanced the company's very successful 900 series family of consumer class SSDs today, with the announcement of the Samsung 960 EVO and 960 Pro NVMe PCI Express M.2 Solid State Drives. Built on Samsung's 3D V-NAND technology and employing the new Samsung Polaris SSD controller, the 960 Pro is...
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The Samsung SSD 850 EVO has become somewhat of a yardstick, by which other SATA-based SSDs are measured, and not without good reason. It set a very high bar when we reviewed it more than a year-and-a-half ago and it still holds up against newer products. Samsung has also come out with a newer drive series, the SSD 750 EVO, that sits one step...
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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...
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A couple of weeks back, Intel announced a slew of new solid state drives, targeting a wide array of market segments, that leverage 3D TLC NAND. One of those offerings was a new series of M.2 NVMe drives, dubbed the SSD 600P. According to Intel, the SSD 600P series is “designed to deliver PCIe performance at near-SATA...
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Does the name Daniel Guermeur mean anything to you? It should. He's the founder and CEO of Das Keyboard, previously known as Metadot, and he's part of the reason why the peripheral market is now flush with mechanical keyboards. It started in 2005 when, on a mission to become a faster and more accurate typist, he...
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There has been quite a bit of noise and plenty of confusion online lately, since news broke that Microsoft would only be fully supporting Intel’s and AMD’s next-generation processor microarchitectures – codenamed Kaby Lake and Zen, respectively – with Windows 10. Some publications and scores of readers pegged the...
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Thumb drive makers have managed to cram quite a bit into the pinky-sized drives, but there are limits to capacity and to some degree performance, since there is only so much room to work with. Fortunately, there is a nice middle ground between thumb drives and larger external SSDs that conform to the popular...
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Intel 7th Gen Core Series Kaby Lake WaferIntel is readying a new family of processors based on its next-gen Kaby Lake microarchitecture. We’ve heard quite a bit about Kaby Lake over the last few months, and were even able to show you it in action last week while covering IDF, but today we’ve got many more details to...
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NVIDIA hit a lot of high notes with the Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1080. When the Founder’s Edition launched earlier this summer, it received accolades for its excellent performance, power efficiency, and host of new features. If you’d like a refresher on what’s new in NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture and see what makes the...
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AMD President And CEO Dr. Lisa Su AMD has been slowly releasing information about its next-generation Zen processor core architecture since mid-last year. Complete specifications haven’t been officially released, but we do know that initial Zen-based processors will be manufactured using a 14nm FinFET process...
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