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Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

ADATA Premier SP550 120GB, 240GB and 480GB SSD Review
Asrock DeskMini 110 Review
ASRock Z170M OC Formula (Intel LGA-1151)
Computex 2016
Crucial MX300 Review
EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW Gaming ACX 3.0 Review
Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming RGB Review
How to Install VLC 3.0 Nightly On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
iBuypower Revolt 2 Review: A Powerful, Portable Gaming Desktop
Is AMD readying a 32-core, 64-thread Zen-based Opteron chip?
MSI GTX 1080 & GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G Overclocking Review
MSI X99A Godlike Gaming Carbon Motherboard Review
Ozone Neon 3K Review
Palit GeForce GTX 1080 GameRock Premium Edition + G-Panel Review
Samsung Portable SSD T3 Review
Samsung Reveals 2016 Galaxy J Series Smartphones
Windows IFEO, GWX, Nirvana, and more



ADATA Premier SP550 120GB, 240GB and 480GB SSD Review

If you are looking for a low cost SSD for you system you have likely seen the ADATA Premier SP550 SSDs for sale online. The Premier SP550 is one of the lowest priced SSDs around and feature a Silicon Motion SM2256 controller and SK Hynix 16nm Triple-Level Cell (TLC) NAND. The ADATA SP550 series offers up to 560MB/s read and up to 510MB/s write speeds for sequential performance and the maximum random 4K Read/Write speeds would be up to 80,000 and 75,000 IOPS. Performance varies greatly depending on the capacity of the drive, but you can find out about that in our review!

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

Asrock DeskMini 110 Review

You’re probably sick of me saying this but if you haven’t upgraded your video card in the last three to four years you are missing so much. As a start how about newer more power efficient GPU’s, PWM’s that switch phases smoother than your nine speed automatic transmission and aftermarket heatsink and fan combinations that can actually keep your card cooler than 80C and do it with so little noise you can actually hear your wife talking to you from the other room. Ok, if that didn’t arouse your interest, are you able to play the latest games at their highest settings? Maybe you’re thinking of delving into the world of VR? Can your video card do that? I’m guessing that if your video card is that old you are probably still using a 1080p monitor with a 5ms refresh rate. If that’s the case you’re missing a lot, 1440 and 4K resolutions, IPS screens with 75MHz and above refresh rates and yes the ability to generate enough frames per second required to run a VR unit (90FPS). Newer video cards open a lot of doors, doors that may be closed if you’re running an outdated video card.

Read full article @ Legion Hardware

ASRock Z170M OC Formula (Intel LGA-1151)

ASRock is back in the overclocking game with a purpose-built Z170M OC Formula mATX motherboard ready to take your Skylake CPU and DDR4 memory to the absolute limit. Rated to support DDR4-4500+ and built with ASRock's Hyper OC Engine, this OC-centric Z170M OC Formula board has the highest rating for memory speeds on the market today.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Computex 2016

A couple weeks ago, we trekked all over Taipei to take in everything that Computex 2016 had to offer. Come with us and see the state of the PC in 2016, as interpreted by dozens of companies both small and large.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

Crucial MX300 Review

Today sees the official launch of their newest SSD in the MX series, the Limited Edition MX300 750GB. As the debut outing for Micron’s own 3D TLC NAND, the MX300 offers high-performance SATA III storage with high write durability, ensuring that performance-oriented consumer applications are catered to in a manner which doesn’t break the literal or proverbial bank. At just £165 in the UK it's aggressively priced to offer great value presupposing the performance holds up.

Read full article @ Vortez

EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW Gaming ACX 3.0 Review

You’re probably sick of me saying this but if you haven’t upgraded your video card in the last three to four years you are missing so much. As a start how about newer more power efficient GPU’s, PWM’s that switch phases smoother than your nine speed automatic transmission and aftermarket heatsink and fan combinations that can actually keep your card cooler than 80C and do it with so little noise you can actually hear your wife talking to you from the other room. Ok, if that didn’t arouse your interest, are you able to play the latest games at their highest settings? Maybe you’re thinking of delving into the world of VR? Can your video card do that? I’m guessing that if your video card is that old you are probably still using a 1080p monitor with a 5ms refresh rate. If that’s the case you’re missing a lot, 1440 and 4K resolutions, IPS screens with 75MHz and above refresh rates and yes the ability to generate enough frames per second required to run a VR unit (90FPS). Newer video cards open a lot of doors, doors that may be closed if you’re running an outdated video card.

Read full article @ HiTech Legion

Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming RGB Review

Today we take a look at the new Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming graphics card featuring a custom triple fan cooling system, out of the box enhanced clock speeds, improved power phase delivery alongside an RGB lighting system. This card is one of the higher end models available today and is priced accordingly, at £599.99 inc vat.

Read full article @ KitGuru

How to Install VLC 3.0 Nightly On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

A couple days ago we got a little giddy covering burgeoning support for Chromecast in VLC 3.0. Many of you were equally as excited as us, even though a formal, stable release of VLC 3.0 is still many months away. But, if youre brave, you  can try the latest bleeding edge release of VLC on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Read full article @ OMG! Ubuntu!

iBuypower Revolt 2 Review: A Powerful, Portable Gaming Desktop

In addition to being lots of fun, LAN parties also afford hardcore gamers and enthusiasts a forum to show off their rigs. Dusty, ho-hum home systems are the norm, of course, but there are also some modded systems, decked out with custom cooling, lighting and paint jobs. And, of course, there are the high-end, boutique-built gaming systems as well.

Sporting slick cases and the latest hardware, custom gaming PCs always stand out, but they are usually huge beasts that aren’t meant to be carried around regularly. That’s where iBuypower’s Revolt 2 comes in. Designed to deliver head-turning looks and performance, it’s also meant to make your next LAN party trip less of a back-breaker...

Read full article @ HotHardware

Is AMD readying a 32-core, 64-thread Zen-based Opteron chip?

So says a report that dubs it Naples. You could reasonably argue that AMD is back on the up. There's plenty of interest in the upcoming RX 480 GPU launching at the end of the month. Somewhat further out is the brand-new CPU architecture known as Zen hewn from a leading-edge 14nm process. A number of slides from an extant presentation at Cern shows that Zen will come in swinging armed with up to 32 cores and 64 threads through symmetrical multi threading. Feeding the best, we know so far, is space for octo-channel DDR4 memory and heaps of IO as well as 10Gbe Ethernet.

Just how much juicy meat is on the Zen bones is provided by some details obtained by the folks over at Fudzilla. With a good track record of rumour turning into fact, Fudzilla opines that the top-level Zen processor, designed for the server environment, is indeed beastly in specification and will come to market early next year.

Read full article @ Hexus

MSI GTX 1080 & GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G Overclocking Review

What I have seen so far with Pascal overclocking is that there is a clock speed envelope you have to work within to get the most performance out of your cards. All four samples I have looked at have been in the 2050MHz to 2100MHz as the maximum sustained core clock speeds. For all the cool hardware on the MSI Gaming X 8G cards, the biggest impact comes from the cooling performance of the Twin Frozr VI cooling solution. Keeping the Pascal cores cool lets them run at higher average core clock speeds. As the temperature rises, the core clock speed starts to drop and it's visible when you look at the clock speed monitor in MSI's Afterburner application. Overclocking these Gaming X 8G cards with Afterburner is a little more time consuming when you are finding the max core clock speeds, but once you dial it in it is an easier tool to use than EVGA Precision. Precision gives you an automatic tuning tool that helps you find the best voltage/clock speed curve for your card. However, MSI has a second application that has three pre-defined overclocking profiles that make overclocking a push button affair. MSI's Gaming App lets you choose from an overclocked, gaming, or silent profile to meet your FPS/noise needs. If you want to really get creative you can download and play with the mobile Afterburner app.

Read full article @ OCC

MSI X99A Godlike Gaming Carbon Motherboard Review

MSI’s Godlike Gaming X99 motherboard first made an appearance mid last year with a striking design and a brazen claim to X99 motherboard superiority. Positioned against the ASUS Rampage V Extreme, now the Rampage V Edition 10, the Godlike Gaming motherboard is MSI’s no holds barred X99 implementation.

Read full article @ KitGuru

Ozone Neon 3K Review

The Neon 3K is Ozone's latest gaming mouse. This particular product combines an attractive price point with high build quality. Apart from that there is an ambidextrous body, which opens the field to left handed gamers as well. In addition to the ambidextrous design there is an optical sensor with 3500DPI.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Palit GeForce GTX 1080 GameRock Premium Edition + G-Panel Review

Palit joins in with a review as well, they released their GameRock series in several flavors, we test the GTX 1080 version with G-Panel (a breakout box that allows GPU monitoring). The product looks totally different opposed to what you are used too in a black and white coating. Don't let the looks fool you though as this card runs very fast, in fact it is the fastest tested to date. It is armed with an all custom design including a dual-fan triple slot cooler and a very hefty factory tweak as this card is boosting at close to 2 GHz all the time. Oh and yes, it has an RGB LED lighting as well. Team up with us and check out that 8 GB Palit GeForce GTX 1080 GameRock Premium Edition + G-Panel.

The GPU industry has been on hold, waiting for a smaller GPU fabrication process to become viable. Last generation GPUs were based on a 28 nm fabrication, an intermediate move to 20 nm was supposed to be the answer for today’s GPUs, but it was a problematic technology. Aside from some smaller ASICs the 20 nm node has been a fail. Therefore the industry had to wait until an ever newer and smaller fabrication process was available in order to shrink the die which allows for less voltage usage in the chips, less transistor gate leakage and, obviously, more transistors in a GPU. The answer was to be found in the recent 14/15/16 nm fabrication processors and processes with the now all too familiar FinFET + VLSI technology (basically wings on a transistor). Intel has been using it for a while, and now both Nvidia and AMD are moving towards such nodes as well. Nvidia is the first to announce their new products based on a TSMC 16 nm process fab by introducing Pascal GPU architecture, named after the mathematician much like Kepler, Maxwell and Fermi. That stage has now passed, the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 have been announced with the 1070 and 1080 cards slowly becoming available in stores as we speak. Both models are equally impressive in its product positioning, though I do feel the 1070 will be the more attractive product due to its price level, the 1080 cards really is what everybody want (but perhaps can't afford). The good news though is that the board partner cards will offer SKUs for less opposed to the Nvidia reference / Founder edition cards. Obviously the higher-end all customized SKUs will likely level with that founders edition card price level again, but I am pretty certain you'd rather spend your money on a fully customized AIB card that is already factory tweaked a bit opposed the the reference one.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Samsung Portable SSD T3 Review

For creators and people who need fast portable storage typical USB flash drives just will not cut it.  For those of us who need serious speed in a small portable form factor there are a palm-sized solid state drives, namely from SanDisk and Samsung.  Today we will be taking a look at the Samsung Portable SSD T3, which was announced back in January at CES.  This dives succeeds the very popular SSD T1 and adds improvements like a higher capacity (up to 2TB), a new USB 3.1 Type-C connector, a partial metal enclosure, and official compatibility with Android.  Samsung says the drive is capable of sequential read speeds of 450 MB/s.  Let’s take a look and see what the Portable SSD T3 is all about!

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Samsung Reveals 2016 Galaxy J Series Smartphones

Arguably the key feature of the 2016 Galaxy J series is their Ultra Data Saving (UDS) Mode. The new UDS mode is designed to reduce data usage by up to 50%.

Read full article @ Tech ARP

Windows IFEO, GWX, Nirvana, and more

You may like what's on today's menu: a neat tutorial explaining how to use a less-known but highly powerful Windows feature called Image File Execution Options (IFEO) to pass programs as debuggers to other executables through registry tweaks, a trivial example, and how the use case applies to the Windows 10 GWX upgrade tool, other considerations, and more. Enjoy.

Read full article @ Dedoimedo