Reviews
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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AMD's Ryzen series of next generation desktop processors have garnered a lot of buzz and praise around the web, but among the family of chips, none have created quite the stir as the company's Threadripper models of 16-core and 12-core processors. While Ryzen helped propel AMD back to essentially performance...
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Adjustable sit-stand desks are all the rage these days, after some smart person in the healthcare field put two and two together to figure out that planting your backside in an office chair all day long is really not good for you, and in more ways than one. Adjustable height desks come generally in two variants...
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ASUS has earned high praise over the years for its ZenBook line of ultraportables. They marry sleek ultrabook designs with generally good value. We usually don’t see a lot of groundbreaking new technology from the line-up, but not everyone needs that and consistent quality builds are more generally the ZenBook...
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AMD has officially lifted the veil on its new Radeon RX consumer graphics line-up, featuring the company's next-generation Vega GPU architecture. After months of architecture disclosures and rumors, we finally have real specifications and details on the actual Radeon RX Vega graphics card line-up, including...
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When Dell announced in June that its Alienware gaming division would be the exclusive OEM partner for pre-built 16-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper systems, we figured Alienware would have a jump on the rest of the OEM pack, but we never thought they'd have this much of a head-start. In fact, we have Ryzen Threadripper...
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AMD is officially launching its latest series of Ryzen processors today, the affordably priced Ryzen 3. As the branding suggests, Ryzen 3 will complement the previously launched Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 series of desktop processors, but will target lower cost, entry-level price points. Ryzen 3 isn’t your typical...
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Today, we are looking at a gaming monitor from Acer with a blazing-fast 240Hz refresh rate and NVIDIA G-SYNC support. The Acer Predator XB252Q gaming monitor speaks clearly to both media buffs and hardcore gamers who have a penchant for fluidity and triple-digit frame rates. This display offers a Full...
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Gaming enthusiasts understand the impact that a proper gaming mouse can have on their performance. Whether it be for fast flick-shots in CS:GO or for programming macros in MOBAs, having a gaming mouse tailored to your needs is an absolute necessity. For this review, we compared three newer mid-range gaming mice from a...
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There was a time when laptop options were basically a choice between desktop-like performance in a heavy and bulky form-factor, an ultralight with integrated graphics, or something in the middle, around 5-lbs with a low-end GPU. NVIDIA sought to solve this choice compromise with its Max-Q Design initiative that was...
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Dave Haynie, one of the chief engineers that worked on the Amiga back in its heyday, put it best when he said, “Amiga users make Macintosh users look like PC users”, in the Viva Amiga documentary that was released early this year. Those of us that were around when the Amiga initially debuted knew Commodore had...
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There is a new-found push to market, lightweight 2-in-1 devices as productivity tools for business-savvy road warriors. That has occasionally been an angle, though for the most part, the appeal of these convertible systems has largely been their ability to function as both a tablet and a general purpose laptop for...
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Intel announced its Xeon Scalable processor family based Skylake-SP a few weeks back, but today marks the official launch of the platform. These new processors feature a new microarchitecture, versus previous-generation Xeons. In addition, Intel has also completely revamped the naming convention and arrangement of the...
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Much of the current excitement in the consumer storage space involves blazing-fast NVMe solid state drives, but there are still hundreds of millions (if not billions) of systems packing SATA hard drives that would benefit greatly from an SSD upgrade. As such, many manufacturers continue to introduce SATA-based...
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While 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...
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Dell updated its Alienware 17 gaming laptop at PAX West 2016 with NVIDIA Pascal graphics, but at the time Intel’s quad-core Kaby Lake mobile processors weren’t available yet. It was a short-lived update, however, as the Kaby Lake-powered Alienware 17 was announced a short time later at the start of the Consumer...
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The slim, sleek Razer Blade gaming laptop we'll be looking at here is an interesting beast that does its best to perform a balancing act of sorts. The gaming laptop arena is a landscape full of compromises. Gamers generally crave the most powerful technologies on the market, but until we can cram 8K displays...
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Today marks the launch of AMD's EPYC family of processors for data center servers. Based on the company's Zen microarchitecture, it has become abundantly clear that AMD was targeting the lucrative data center market first and foremost with its new CPU architecture and the highly scalable Naples platform that leverages...
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Over the next few months, Intel will be releasing an array of new high-end desktop processors in the recently-announced Core X Series, based on the Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X micro-architectures. The first chips in the series to arrive in the lab are the 10-core Core i9-7900X and quad-core Core i7-7740X. We’ve got an...
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Lenovo has carved out quite a business for itself in the laptop space over the years, led more recently by premium machines like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. However, there are obviously many more models in the ThinkPad family of products, beyond just the top-shelf X1 Carbon line. In the more affordable ThinkPad T470s (starting price...
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We dig burly, decked-out gaming PCs stuffed with powerful hardware as much as the next guy around here. Sleek, ultra small form factor systems like the MINIX Neo Z83-4 we’ll be showing you here today, however, also have a certain appeal. Powerful gaming PCs are awesome for their intended purpose, but try sticking one...
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Los Angeles-based Nixeus has been working with AMD on FreeSync since the project’s inception. Nixeus was among the first companies to offer anaffordable, Full-HD FreeSync monitor with a wide adaptive-sync frequency range and one of Nixeus’ monitors was used in AMD’s initial FreeSync demos all the way back in 2014. Now...
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