Reviews 51949 Published by

Here a roundup of todays review's and articles:

AMD previews Carrizo APU, offers insights into power savings
Audio-Technica Sonic Sport ATH-Sport1 Review
Crucial BX100 SSD Review
Crucial MX200 250 GB
Crucial MX200 and BX100 Series SSD Review
GIGABYTE GA-X99M-Gaming 5 Review
Griffin Twenty Digital Audio Amplifier Review
Microsoft Lumia 435 Review
NVIDIA GTX 960 5-Way Roundup
Roccat Tyon FPS Gaming Mouse Review
Roundup: 6-Way, Sub-$100 Gaming Headset Battle
Seasonic TFX 350W PSU Review
Thermaltake Core V51 Case Review
Turtle Beach Earforce Z60 DTS Headphone X Review
USB 3.1 SuperSpeed+ tested with the ASUS Z97-A/USB
Xiaomi Mi4 64GB Smartphone Review



AMD previews Carrizo APU, offers insights into power savings

This week, in conjunction with ISSCC, AMD has begun to tell the story of how it achieved major improvements in power efficiency and performance in its upcoming Carrizo APU.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

Audio-Technica Sonic Sport ATH-Sport1 Review

The fitness and technology worlds have collided in a big way in the past couple of years. Along with the growth of wearables tracking steps, heartbeats and other information, there has also been a big interest in sports related accessories such as headphones. Audio-Technica is a company that makes a lot of these sorts of products and today I am looking at the Sonic Sport ATH-Sport 1 line of earbuds, specifically, the blue and black ones.

They are very eye-catching and have quite a unique loop designed to keep them falling from your ear. But how do they sound and perhaps just as importantly, are they comfortable? That is what we are here to find out.

Read full article @ KitGuru

Crucial BX100 SSD Review

Crucials new budget/value series SSD gets reviewed.

Read full article @ HardwareHeaven

Crucial MX200 250 GB

Crucial's new MX200 SSD is able to utilize portions of the flash capacity in super-fast SLC mode, which makes it the fastest SSD we ever tested. Once the disk gets fuller, the drive automagically switches to MLC mode, block-by-block, all in the background, so you can maximize disk space usage.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Crucial MX200 and BX100 Series SSD Review

Crucial and Micron have been hard and heavy in the SSD arena and since they are also a big player in the semiconductor business they have a good foundation for the storage media platform. We had a look at the MX100 drive back in June of '14 and we found that the performance was very good and the pricing was very attractive. They've now released the follow up drive in the MX200 series along with a more budget friendly BX100 series. They sent us over some samples to evaluate and see what improvements they've made. They are really targeting to cover both entry level and mainstream consumers with these drives and as a spoiler we'll say that they did a pretty good job....

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

GIGABYTE GA-X99M-Gaming 5 Review

Today, we get to look at the latest LGA2011-3 Socket X99 motherboard from GIGABYTE only this time it is far from the monolithic SOC Force we reviewed upon release. This time the motherboard is much smaller but still encompasses the Gaming-G1 branding so it will be interesting to see if this mATX motherboard still has what it takes to house Intel's finest range of processors or it is simply a diminutive but basic motherboard hoping to draw in consumers on the back of previous success and clever marketing.


Read full article @ Vortez

Griffin Twenty Digital Audio Amplifier Review

Twenty is an interesting name for an audio product, but once it’s known that Twenty provides 20 watts of power per channel, its name immediately makes sense. Griffin originally released Twenty when Apple’s AirPort Express was popular and tech products with rounded edges were all the rage. Slide into 2015 and Griffin has redesigned Twenty to be a centerpiece for Bluetooth home entertainment. 2015’s Twenty has sturdy metal speaker terminals, a weighted aluminum volume knob, and a modern design that will fit in with any home’s decor. Twenty’s latest incarnation also supports AAC and aptX Bluetooth codecs, while retaining an optical input and subwoofer out from its past form. Twenty is ready to transform your current audio setup into a stylish masterpiece.

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Microsoft Lumia 435 Review

Microsoft isn't short on Windows Phones at the lower end of the price and hardware spectrum but that didn't stop the launch of another. The Lumia 435 is the new entry level point for a Lumia Windows Phone. It's a crowded space, though. With even some of its own stable mates to compete against, does the Lumia 435 have what it takes? Let's find out.

Read full article @ Windows Central

NVIDIA GTX 960 5-Way Roundup

It seems that we have been covering the GTX 960 quite a bit and there’s good reason for it: despite our love / hate relationship with it, NVIDIA has created an inexpensive, efficient card with plenty of interesting features. The GTX 960 may have severely limited abilities at higher resolutions but its performance at 1080P is more than adequate and when overclocked, it can really fly.

When we looked at the reference GTX 960, one thing was mentioned again and again: the lower base clock speeds NVIDIA specified for this card weren’t sufficient to make it competitive at $199. However, there are plenty of other options that use higher frequencies, upgraded components and advanced cooling solutions that go for the baseline cost of a few bucks more. The ASUS STRIX set the bar quite high and in this roundup we’ll take a look at several other GTX 960 cards from MSI, GALAX, EVGA, Zotac and Gigabyte.

Read full article @ Hardware Canucks

Roccat Tyon FPS Gaming Mouse Review

Roccat is easily one of my favourite gaming brands. They’ve created some truly incredible peripherals over the years that have been packed full of innovative features, exceptional build quality and a whole lot more. Today seems like history repeating its self as the new Tyon mouse is in the eTeknix office and it certainly looks like it packs a fair few innovative features.

Having a great gaming mouse really makes a difference to your gaming experience. Having the right tools for the job is no bad thing and a feature-packed mouse, that has been tuned for gaming can really make a difference between game over and racking up some headshots. All the usual gaming mouse features are here, with the addition of a two-way analogue stick called the X-Celerator. This is perfect for adjusting your throttle, controlling turrets and more, which could have significant benefits in games such as Battlefield, where you switch from on-foot to in vehicles a lot.

The mouse comes with a hard-wired cable, which features some high-quality black braiding and a custom moulded USB connector.


Read full article @ eTeknix

Roundup: 6-Way, Sub-$100 Gaming Headset Battle

I have long relied on desktop speakers when playing games. Now that I am a father, however, those speakers are too loud for me to enjoy the combined 500 Watts RMS of 5.1 audio. Having only ever bought relatively cheap headsets with proportionally cheap audio quality, it seems about time for me to upgrade. In the process of settling on a new headset, I've acquired six sub-$100 gaming-oriented models from separate hardware manufacturers to compare in a roundup.

Read full article @ Techspot

Seasonic TFX 350W PSU Review

We spend most of our review time analysing ATX power supplies, however we wanted to break with tradition today and take a look at the new Seasonic TFX 350 watt unit. This tiny supply is fully modular and ships with 80 Plus Gold Certification – but can it deliver the high level of quality we expect from a Seasonic design?

Read full article @ KitGuru

Thermaltake Core V51 Case Review

In the computer enthusiast world there are a variety of niche areas that often get glossed over when calling yourself a "hardware enthusiast". It is easy for us to say "this is an enthusiast grade motherboard" or "that a certain video card is good for overclocking". However, if you are a cooling enthusiast and like to experiment you may have encountered issues finding a proper case to hold your gear. This is often compounded by the near endless supply of worthless “pre-modded” cases dominating the low-end market followed by high-end cases that specialize in either premium aircooling or facilitating even known “feature” regardless if they are helpful or annoying.

Choosing a case is a difficult proposition and often weighs between styles and features. If you are a for mentioned cooling enthusiast you’ll also be adding another requirement that the case be modable or come with enough room to hold your gear. In this review we will be looking at the Thermaltake Core V51. This is a Mid-Tower case that comes with many traditional case features and a classic style. Inside it features a conservative layout that can be customized to match your needs and requires virtually no modifications.

Read full article @ Hardware Asylum

Turtle Beach Earforce Z60 DTS Headphone X Review

Turtle Beach are one of the leading names in the gaming audio market. They’ve got one of the most recognisable brand names in gaming and they’ve built themselves a great reputation for providing gamers with a wide range of headsets that cover virtually all budgets and formats. The headset I have at my disposal today is targeted at the mid-market, with a very reasonable price tag of around £79.99. This isn’t so expensive that it’s into the premium grade, but still more than enough money that you’re going to be expecting a great range of features and solid performance.

The Z60 is designed to work with PC, as well as mobile platforms and comes equipped with a great range of features that should provide us with some impressive audio, or at least I’m hoping it does! The Z60 is the first headset on PC to utilize 7.1 channel DTS Headphone:X Surround Sound and it pushes this new virtual surround technology through a pair of powerful 60mm drivers.

The Z60 comes equipped with a detachable boom microphone, a USB controller with built-in soundcard for plug-and-play compatibility with desktop PC/MAC and a hard wired 3.5mm cable on the headset for plug-and-play mobile use.

Read full article @ eTeknix

USB 3.1 SuperSpeed+ tested with the ASUS Z97-A/USB

We review a USB 3.1 motherboard from ASUS alongside a Samsung 840 EVO RAID SSD based storage unit that is USB 3.1 compatible. Recently we have tested USB 3.0 SSDs from Samsung (the T1) and that performance was amazing at roughly 400 MB/s. With USB 3.1 now becoming available things change once again as we can reach speeds of an excess of 600 to 700 Mb/s over USB 3.1, and in this article we'll show you all the details involved, and some performance numbers of course.

It has been topic of discussion for a while now, around CeBIT 2015 you are going to see manufacturers release motherboards with USB 3.1 controllers. The new iteration of USB is not supported natively, you will see motherboards and add-in cards based on ASMedia controllers.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Xiaomi Mi4 64GB Smartphone Review

After testing a lot of aspects of the Mi4 smartphone which was the Xiaomi flagship of last year, we can consider ourselves quite impressed in terms of performance and the gap it has created over the mainstream models we have tested in the past is quite big.

Read full article @ Madshrimps