Reviews 51945 Published by

Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

Alienware Alpha R2 Review: Big Screen Gaming In A Little Package
ASUS ROG Spatha Gaming Mouse Review
Asus' X99-A II motherboard reviewed
Beyerdynamic iDX 200 iE Review
Dream Machines DM1 Pro Mouse
Internet Archive adds 10,000 playable Amiga games
LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive 8TB Review
MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G Review
Netac Z5 USB 3.1 Gen 2 Portable SSD Review
Reeven Coldwing 12 and 14 Fans Review
Seagate announces 60TB SAS and 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSDs
Silicon Motion SM2258 Technical Preview With Micron 3D TLC NAND
Toshiba OCZ RD400 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive Review
Zalman ZM-K650 Waterproof Keyboard Review



Alienware Alpha R2 Review: Big Screen Gaming In A Little Package

As much as we like piecing together formidable desktop systems crammed full of high end hardware, the future of PC gaming for many mainstream users may lie in more compact setups. Certainly there's been a push to get PC players out of a dank basement and into the living room with Steam Machines and similar console-sized PCs.

However, Dell's Alienware division is hoping to take things to the next level with its pint sized Alpha R2 system, an ultra small form factor (SFF) gaming desktop.

Read full article @ HotHardware

ASUS ROG Spatha Gaming Mouse Review

The ASUS ROG Spatha Wireless/ Wired gaming mouse brings wireless gaming to the desktop. It has an aggressive body design, six tactile side buttons, RGB lighting, and swappable left and right OMRON switches. The magnesium alloy chassis promotes durability and the sparkly steel-gray non-stick coating prevents the finish from wearing off after years of usage. Inside of the ROG Spatha is the 8200 DPI Avago 9800 laser sensor. When the mouse battery runs low, a provided micro-USB cable can be connected directly to the mouse to charge it as you play. A charging station/ wireless receiver is included in the box to charge and show off the mouse when it is not in use. At Benchmark Reviews, we will take a look at what the ROG Spatha has to offer over the competition.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

Asus' X99-A II motherboard reviewed

Asus' X99-A became one of our favorite X99 motherboards when it first hit the market. With the advent of Broadwell-E, Asus refreshed this winning formula with the X99-A II. We tested this board with the Core i7-6950X CPU to find out whether it gives Broadwell-E a good home.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

Beyerdynamic iDX 200 iE Review

Competition in the sub-$200 in-ear headphone space is fierce, but Beyerdynamic's flagship iDX 200 iE may be one of the best. The iDX 200 iE sit at top of the company's in-ear headphone offerings, and after spending a week with them, I think they fully deserve the crown at the top. Beyerdynamic nails just about every aspect of what makes a great in-ear headphone, from its robust build quality, balanced sound, and excellent noise isolation. Although they don't offer active noise cancellation, these in-ears do a great job of blocking out noise whether you're commuting on a train or flying across the country. We loved the iDX 200 iE's predecessor, the Beyerdynamic iDX 160 iE, for its slick design and balanced sound. The iDX 200 iE are an improvement over the iDX 160 iE in just about every way, making them worth every penny of the $199 (€199, about £169 and AU$288) retail price. Design The Beyerdynamic iDX 200 iE feature an understated and somewhat generic design, with its "bullet" shaped buds. The earbud housings are made from a titanium alloy, which makes them super light and strong. Because of this, the substantial build quality of the iDX 200 iE should stand up to abuse.

Read full article @ Techradar

Dream Machines DM1 Pro Mouse

You probably haven't heard of Dream Machines, a new company planning on taking the peripheral market by storm. One of their first mice, the DM1 Pro, is here, and it looks as though it will be going head to head with products from such brands as Zowie and SteelSeries.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Internet Archive adds 10,000 playable Amiga games

10,365 games, applications and demos available to run straight from your browser.

Read full article @ Hexus

LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive 8TB Review

Stylish and spacious, but can it deliver on speed? Available in 4TB (£165), 5TB (£215) and 8TB (£290) capacities, the drive claims to offer "forward-thinking technology from LaCie with immaculate style from Porsche Design," though one suspects it's the latter that forms the bulk of the appeal.

Measuring 123mm x 178mm x 39mm in size and tipping the scales at 1,225g, our 8TB review sample is neither particularly small nor light, however it does look fancy and makes for a stylish piece of desktop decoration. Whereas most external hard disks are staid affairs, the Porsche Design Desktop Drive employs an aluminium enclosure with polished edges, rounded corners and a sandblasted finish that feels as good as it looks.

Read full article @ Hexus

MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G Review

Today we take a look at the third RX 470 card to hit our labs – the MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G. This card ships with a dual fan custom cooler, as well as enhanced out of the box clock speeds. The talking point? This is the first RX 470 we have looked at which ships with 8GB of GDDR5 memory.

Read full article @ KitGuru

Netac Z5 USB 3.1 Gen 2 Portable SSD Review

The last few years have seen rapid advancements in flash technology including planar 1x nm NAND, TLC, and 3D V-NAND. External high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.x have also become ubiquitous. These advances have led to the appearance of compact bus-powered direct attached storage units with very high performance for day-to-day data transfer applications. We have already looked at portable external SSDs such as the Samsung T1 and T3, as well as the SanDisk Extreme 900. Today, we will be looking at Netacs Z5, a portable SSD with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps Type-C interface.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Reeven Coldwing 12 and 14 Fans Review

Reeven is fresh in the scene, most notable for their CPU coolers so far but quickly expanding their product line. Two recent additions to their product lineup are the new Coldwing fan series, designed for mainstream use and with affordability in mind. Clad in standard Reeven yellow, the Coldwing fan series comes in both 120mm and 140mm fan models as … Read more.

Read full article @ Modders-Inc

Seagate announces 60TB SAS and 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSDs

The former 3.5-inch device offers huge capacity, the latter breakneck speeds. Seagate claims its 60TB SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) SSD is the largest ever demonstrated. More specifically it says the 3.5-inch format drive offers "twice the density and four times the capacity of the next highest-capacity SSD available today". If you like 'equivalent to' figures, you could say this drive has enough capacity for around 400 million photos, or for a collection of 12,000 DVDs.

Read full article @ Hexus

Silicon Motion SM2258 Technical Preview With Micron 3D TLC NAND

The SMI SM2258 is the next small controller that will make a big impact on the entry-level and mainstream SSD market. The controller is already shipping with 2D NAND, but now it supports the new IMFT 3D NAND that will power several new SSDs.

Read full article @ Toms Hardware

Toshiba OCZ RD400 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive Review

While the speeds of graphics cards, memory, and CPUs continue to increase it seems solid state drive speeds have been bottlenecked for a while now.  With that we have seen storage start to move over to the PCI-Express bus as it is closer to the CPU and that brought with it the NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) protocol.  NVMe drives are currently some of the fastest storage options out there for consumers and we took a look at our first NVMe product, the Intel 750, not that long ago.  Well now it is Toshiba's turn with their OCZ RD400.  Toshiba has turned OCZ into their "enthusiast brand" so new products will still hold the OCZ name, but they are indeed Toshiba products.  The OCZ RD400 has sequential read and write speeds up to 2600 MB/s and 1600 MB/s respectively.  Let's see what it is all about!

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Zalman ZM-K650 Waterproof Keyboard Review

Lately, you've seen some flashy keyboards here on TechX, but that flashy RGB fancy stuff isn't for everyone. Today we are going to take a look at a more budget and functionality oriented Keyboard from the folks at Zalman. The ZM-K650WP (http://technologyx.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3d9b6193ffd32dd60e84fc74b&id=f54a38dc86&e=1230c2ab07) .

Read full article @ TechnologyX