Items tagged with Reviews
Boutique gaming PC system builders are a flourishing breed these days with new brands popping up on the scene regularly it seems. It's a testament to the fact that PC gaming, and the hardware the fuels it, is not only alive and well but kicking some major butt, especially with the advent of the eSports industry. Maingear has been building...
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Mechanical keyboards are commonplace now, but that wasn't always the case. For many years, squishy membrane and dome-switch keyboards dominated the landscape in part because they're cheap to produce, and also because typists who've never used anything else didn't really know what they were missing. Imagine trying to describe the taste of ice...
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In a broad sense, there are two types of keyboards in this world—those that use mechanical key switches and those that don't. If that sounds like something a keyboard snob would say, so be it, this editor stands guilty as charged, and happily so. We can accept that not everyone will find just cause to spend a premium...
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You could hear the collective groan from the enthusiast community when Dell announced it had purchased Alienware, in what now feels like 100 years ago. It's actually been just shy of a decade since Dell took ownership, and rather than let the Alienware brand wither into irrelevance like some other boutique vendors that were later absorbed...
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New processor architectures inevitably lead to a flurry of refreshed product lines from PC makers. That's how things have been playing out with Skylake, a "tock" in Intel's tick-tock design cadence and its 6th generation Core processor family. As usual, ASUS is on the bleeding edge with new Skylake systems ready to...
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You don't need a crystal ball to figure out Apple will release a new iPhone handset every year. It's been doing it since the original came out in 2007, and starting with the iPhone 3G, Apple's naming convention has consisted of introducing a new model number every two years, with "s" variants in between. There was the iPhone 3GS in 2009, iPhone...
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If you want to sell a tablet to the masses -- an increasingly difficult thing to do with tablet shipments now on the decline, according to International Data Corporation -- the go-to strategy is to pitch a vibrant display and boast about its thin and light design. Everything else is secondary for most consumers, including hardware specs and...
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Prices for solid state drives have fallen precipitously over the past year. This is especially true when shopping 2.5-inch form factor SATA SSDs, which is where some of the best values in solid state storage are currently found. That's certainly true of Micron's Crucial brand MX200 line, two of which we have in for...
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Before you even think about shopping for an Apple MacBook Pro for professional chores on the go, Dell wants you to give a long, hard look at its recently redesigned Precision M3800 Mobile Workstation. According to Dell, the M3800 is a superior product in several ways, and the OEM even put together an infographic showing more than half a dozen...
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And now we cannot even trust critics and reviewers! Jay Gentile, a man based in California who is said to be the operator of a number of sites that sell 4-star and 5-star reviews to Amazon sellers (among them buyazonreviews.com and buyreviewsnow.com) is the target of a lawsuit filed by Amazon in an effort by the...
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Not long ago, the battle for consumer dollars occurred on a field littered with ultralight notebooks. A few years later, that transitioned to smartphones and tablets. Today, the next major tussle is occurring on one’s wrist, in the red-hot "wearables" market in general. Motorola’s Moto 360 made waves by being the first major smartwatch to...
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Had things gone to plan, Steam Machines would be a shipping product by now. However, Valve threw a wrench into the works when it decided that more time was needed to tweak its custom Linux-based Steam OS and fine tune the platform's accompanying Steam Controller. That decision left several partnering OEMs and boutique system builders in limbo,...
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It was being hunted... The monster had been avoiding a team of four hunters ever since it saw them jump out of the spaceship. But by the time the hunters’ feet had touched the ground, the monster was already distancing itself, jumping over large boulders and running through trees in order to get away from the human...
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All in one systems are all about balance. Attempting to cram an entire PC’s worth of components into the back of what amounts to a slightly wider-than-normal display can be an iffy proposition. Pare down the specifications too much and you wind up with a limp machine that’s obsolete by the time you get it. Jam in too many high-performance...
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We applaud companies willing to push the envelope with innovative new design approaches. Sometimes their efforts aren't rewarded with complete market acceptance, but unique features and hardware that attempt to blaze new trails in existing markets, are always interesting to say the least. In a way, the Galaxy Note Edge fits...
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Welcome to the era of dual-mode devices, where the mantra "bigger is better" rules the day. Need an example? Take smartphones -- Samsung's been serving up large size handsets for the past several years, some of which are so big that it warranted creating a brand new category. Even Apple jumped on the big device bandwagon with the recent launch...
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Welcome to the era of dual-mode devices, where the mantra "bigger is better" rules the day. Need an example? Take smartphones -- Samsung's been serving up large size handsets for the past several years, some of which are so big that it warranted creating a brand new category. Even Apple jumped on the big device bandwagon with...
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We think it's fitting for Maingear to bring 3K resolution gaming to its Pulse line of laptops. Consider that playing games at full HD 1080p (1920x1080) on the desktop is nothing special these days, which is why we're seeing more and more players jump to higher resolution displays, from 2560x1440 (most 27-inch class monitors) on up to the emerging...
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We think it's fitting for Maingear to bring 3K resolution gaming to its aptly named Pulse line of laptops. Consider that playing games at full HD 1080p (1920x1080) on the desktop is nothing special these days, which is why we're seeing more and more players jump to higher resolution displays, from 2560x1440 (most 27-inch class monitors) on...
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Today we're evaluating NEC's new MultiSync EA244UHD, a 24-inch 4K Ultra HD monitor. As part of NEC's EA series, this monitor is intended for high-end desktop users as opposed to professional graphics users, though there are features of the EA244UHD that may tempt potential customers who fall into the latter category. Things that separate this...
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While you were busy blinking, a new development was fast tracking its way onto the monitor scene. We're talking about the transition to 4K, otherwise known as Ultra High Definition (UHD). No matter what you want to call it, the technology shift treats your eyeballs to four times as many pixels as the current standard, which is Full HD 1080p....
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Today we're looking at the Sound Blaster ZxR, Creative's flagship audio solution for PC power users. It's also one of three available cards in Creative's ultra high-performance Z-Series of sound cards, the ZxR being the top-end solution. It boasts a signal-to-noise (SNR) of 124dB that Creative claims is 89.1 times better than your motherboard's...
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