Reviews 51945 Published by

Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 Review
AMD 6th Generation Carizzo APU Unveiled: Taking On Intel At 15 Watts
AMD's Carrizo brings power savings to mainstream laptops
Benchmarking The Latest AMD & NVIDIA Graphics Cards On Ubuntu Linux
Corsair Carbide Series 100R Silent Edition Review
Corsair H80i GT Liquid CPU Cooler Review
GeForce GTX 980 Ti and DX12 Feature Level and Tier Details
Intel to merge Thunderbolt with USB-C
Intel's Broadwell goes broad with new desktop, mobile, server variants
New X99 and early Intel Skylake motherboards from EVGA
Origin EON15-X Laptop Review: Desktop power on the move
Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ATX Review
QNAP TS-451 Review (NAS)



Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 Review

Two years ago, if you would have told me you could buy an Android phone with flagship-worthy specs for under $300 unlocked, I would have said you're crazy. And, I would have assumed you hijacked a semi trailer full la Fast and the Furious. However, this is 2015, and Alcatel has managed to deliver exactly that with the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3.

Available in the US for $250 (£270, about AU$328) unlocked, it rests on the same spectrum as the Asus ZenFone 2, and OnePlus One. While you've probably heard of the latter, don't let the Idol 3's innocuous name fool you. It's rolled up to the party ready to have some fun.With a 5.5-inch, 1080p IPS display, it's got the same pixel density as the iPhone 6 Plus. A 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor and 2GB of RAM are tucked inside, along with 16GB of internal storage. If 10GB of actually useable storage isn't enough for you, there's microSD card support for up to 128GB. On the back is a 13-megapixel (MP) camera with a single LED flash, and on the front is a crazy 8MP snapper.

Read full article @ Techradar

AMD 6th Generation Carizzo APU Unveiled: Taking On Intel At 15 Watts

AMD previously only teased bits of detail regarding their forthcoming 6th Generation A-Series APU, code named "Carrizo." We heard from AMD about this next generation, highly integrated mobile architecture as far back as CES 2015 in January and then again in February and more recently with AMD's HSA (Heterogenous System Architecture) 1.0 spec roll-out in March. It's safe to say AMD has been beating the drum on Carrizo with a regular cadence for the better part of 6 months now and today the company is finally going to full kimono on all details of their upcoming processor silicon and its platform...

Read full article @ HotHardware.com

AMD's Carrizo brings power savings to mainstream laptops

The Carrizo processor is AMD's follow-on to Kaveri and a direct competitor to Intel's Broadwell CPUs. After a lengthy prelude, AMD is officially taking the wraps off of Carrizo today at the Computex trade show in Taipei. The firm expects laptops based on Carrizo to be available near the end of this month, and now that the chip is official, we know a number of juicy details about it that had previously been murky.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

Benchmarking The Latest AMD & NVIDIA Graphics Cards On Ubuntu Linux

Last year for the 10th Phoronix birthday I did a 60+ GPU comparison with the open-source drivers and a 30-way graphics card comparison with the binary AMD/NVIDIA Linux drivers. With Phoronix turning eleven this week, I did another large graphics card comparison under Linux... The results today aren't as large as last year, but represent most of the latest-generation AMD and NVIDIA hardware while running Ubuntu 15.04. With more games coming to Linux, there's new titles covered in this year's massive comparison including Civilization: Beyond Earth, Metro 2033 Redux, and many others.

Read full article @ Phoronix

Corsair Carbide Series 100R Silent Edition Review

A sound-dampened chassis, with fan controller, for £50. What's not to like? The evolution of PC hardware is such that today's more powerful components don't run as hot or as loud as you might think. It wasn't that long ago that building a truly high-end rig required careful planning for lavish cooling solutions installed inside formidably-sized enclosures, but modern builds can afford to be smaller, simpler and kinder on the bank balance.

Makes you wonder, when using up-to-date components, can a budget enclosure cope with the demands of an overclocked CPU and multiple fast-running graphics cards? To find out, we have Corsair's entry-level Carbide Series 100R Silent Edition chassis in for review.

Read full article @ Hexus

Corsair H80i GT Liquid CPU Cooler Review

Looking back into the not too distant past I can remember when the original Corsair H80 AIO cooler come out. I had started out my overclocking adventures a little while before that using an H70 and remember thinking how cool it would be to step up to the bigger more powerful H80. It had a much thicker radiator than my cooler and dual fans as well! Flash forward half a decade and here we are with the newest iteration of that cooler. While many things have changed, some things such as the dual fans and super thick radiator have stayed the same. The H80 was an excellent entry level cooler for those looking for higher performance back then; lets check out the latest version the H80i GT and see if the same is still true today.

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

GeForce GTX 980 Ti and DX12 Feature Level and Tier Details

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti video card is said to be ready for Microsoft Windows 10 when the OS is released on July 29th as the hardware and software is ready to take advantage of the DirectX 12 API. Legit Reviews was able to sit down with NVIDIA's Tom Peterson and discuss what exactly this meant in the days ahead of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti video card launch. Read on to find out what we learned!

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

Intel to merge Thunderbolt with USB-C

While even Apple is admitting that Thunderbolt is a damp squib and rushing to the arms of USB-C, it seems that Intel has not given up on the interconnect technology.

Intel's answer has been to put a USB Type-C connector on its next version of Thunderbolt – the imaginatively titled Thunderbolt 3.
A Thunderbolt 3 cable will look like the current USB-C cables and will support the same power and data transfers, but it will also be capable of much higher throughput (40Gbps) in Thunderbolt mode.

Read full article @ Fudzilla

Intel's Broadwell goes broad with new desktop, mobile, server variants

Today Intel introduced a new wave of Broadwell processors for a wide variety of systems, including desktops, laptops, and servers. These quad-core chips have Iris Pro graphics with embedded DRAM that can act as an L4 cache for the entire processor. We've got details on all the different variations, including the socketed desktop chips with overclocking-friendly unlocked multipliers.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

New X99 and early Intel Skylake motherboards from EVGA

Revving up for August launch of next-gen CPU.

Read full article @ Hexus

Origin EON15-X Laptop Review: Desktop power on the move

Ultrabooks, shmultrabooks. Mobile or otherwise, gamers know there is no substitute for a massive slab of expensive and power-hungry hardware. As a result, Origin PC has implemented a straightforward tactic to grant laptops hairier chests: cram in an honest to goodness desktop CPU. Yep, Origin’s EON15-X packs a full-fledged “Devil’s Canyon” Intel Core i7 along a GeForce GTX 980M GPU into a relatively modest 15-inch laptop.

Read full article @ Techspot

Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ATX Review

Phanteks has delivered the latest version of its aluminium Evolv chassis in a mainstream ATX form factor that stands a compact 495mm high and 510mm deep. It is notably smaller than, say, the Enthoo Pro which is also ATX. Pull off the aluminium front panel, release the full length dust filter, lift off the tool-free side panels and you reveal a steel chassis that is familiar from previous Phanteks cases however there are a few details that are new.

Read full article @ KitGuru

QNAP TS-451 Review (NAS)

Packed with features and plenty of performance to back it up... Storage, storage, storage… can we ever have too much of it? With all our devices (often with quite limited internal drives) consuming and creating content on a daily basis many users need something to manage their storage needs and thats what QNAP offer in todays review. The TS-451 is a 4bay NAS with storage, media and cloud functionality which looks to offer an all in one solution for the modern consumer. QNAP TS-451 Review.

Read full article @ HardwareHeaven