Reviews
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...
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A funny thing happened as we were evaluating the latest iteration of Microsoft's Surface Pro, a now iconic 2-in-1 that the company describes as "the most versatile laptop," despite its tablet-first design. A rumor emerged suggesting Microsoft would phase out its Surface line within the next couple of years. It was...
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The upheaval of the high-end desktop processor segment continues today with the official release of Intel’s latest Coffee Lake-based 8th Generation Core processors. 2017 easily been one of the most exciting years in a decade for desktop processors, thanks in no small part to AMD’s entire line-up of Ryzen products...
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The PC gaming market continues to grow, thanks in part to the increasing popularity of eSports. While Lenovo is best known for its Thinkpad and Yoga family of notebooks with legendary reliability and slick form factors, it was time the company got serious about gaming. So, Lenovo took the plunge and launched a new...
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Crucial recently launched a new series of solid state drives that somewhat defy convention. While a number of other recent releases feature various flavors of TLC NAND, the Crucial BX300 series we’ll be showing you here actually features 3D MLC NAND flash memory. In the current SSD landscape, MLC NAND isn’t typically...
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Last year we offered a detailed exploration of NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience tool set for capturing screenshots and videos. Since then, a few bells and whistles have been tacked on to further enhance the experience. The most recent of these is ShadowPlay Highlights, a slick feature that intelligently identifies your...
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Over the last few months, Intel slowly divulged a number of details regarding the two processors we’ll be covering today, its flagship 18-core, behemoth Core i9-7980XE and its slightly smaller sibling, the 16-core Core i9-7960X. The fact that these two processors were in the works was officially disclosed all the way...
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Lenovo introduced their Moto Z family last year with high hopes of being something different. The evolution of smartphone design has been more iterative than innovate in recent years from most manufacturers. The Moto Z smartphones, however, offered modularity to allow the phones to adapt to a user’s in-the-moment...
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The Galaxy Note 8 is an important product for Samsung. Not only because the Note 8 is the company’s newest, flagship, large-screen smartphone, but because it also carries the additional burden of righting all of the wrongs associated with the company's Note 7 snafu. For some people, there is a certain stigma...
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Today we are going to take a look at three popular Intel Z270-based motherboards targeted at power users and gamers, produced by enthusiast favorites Gigabyte, ASUS and MSI. The three boards we've rounded-up here cover a wide range of price points. The Gigabyte Aorus Z270X-Gaming K5 and ASUS ROG STRIX Z270F...
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Owners of the ASUS ZenFone AR may be tempted to ask their friends and co-workers, "Do you even AR, bro?" Actually asking that question is a surefire way to solicit puzzled (and perhaps annoyed) looks, but once they see what the ZenFone AR is capable of, those dirty glances and quizzical faces will quickly morph into...
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WD recently updated its mainstream Blue line of solid state drives with new 64-layer 3D BiCS NAND flash memory. When we first took a look at the original WD Blue SSD, we found it to be an admirable performer with competitive pricing. This new generation of drives, however, promises better performance and features all...
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Here's the long and short. Huawei’s Mate 9 may no longer hit all the high notes on the cutting-edge smartphone release circuit, but it still remains more than competitive on performance and stocked with impressive base-level features, including rear dual-camera capabilities.In his fascinating book The Millionaire Next...
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The new iStorage diskAshur2 is a specialized, external hard drive geared toward security conscious consumers. The diskAshur2 is a little pricey, and although it's no slouch in the speed department (we'll get into that in a bit), it's certainly not going to compete with that shiny new internal SSD you've got your eye...
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Last year’s release of the Moto Z family of phones introduced the world to Mods – magnetic accessory attachments that added features to the phones, like higher-quality speakers, a portable projector, or optical zoom camera. However, the US release of the Moto Z was limited to Verizon and unlocked customers only. This year Motorola is back...
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The sound of silence -- there’s nothing like it, especially when it comes to a media PC. The last thing anyone wants while binging on the new season of Game of Thrones is the distracting drone of a fan or whir of a hard drive. Silence is precisely what the Streacom DB-4 chassis we'll be featuring here has to offer...
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A new feature of NVIDIA's latest GeForce technology for laptops that we weren't able to evaluate until now, is something NVIDIA calls Whisper Mode. Like its recently introduced Max-Q technology that paves the way for thinner and lighter gaming laptops such as the ASUS ROG Zephyrus GX501, Whisper Mode is another type...
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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...
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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...
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Today is the day AMD's Radeon Technologies Group has been working towards for a long time. The official launch of the Radeon RX Vega is here, and it's now time for AMD RTG's moment in the spotlight. Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) has been on a tear as of late; the desktop and server processor group executed...
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AMD’s unrelenting attack on the desktop CPU market continues today, with the official launch of the company's beastly Ryzen Threadripper processors. If, by some cruel joke, you are unfamiliar with Threadripper, it is AMD’s premium, high-end, many-core desktop processor, that leverages the same Zen microarchitecture...
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It was not that long ago when the idea of buying a gaming laptop meant spending a heavy premium versus a desktop setup. That was always a tough pill to swallow, because for the most part, there was no way to upgrade critical components like a GPU, down the road a bit. What you got is what you would have to live with...
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