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Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

1Sheeld, The Ultimate Arduino Shield Review
2015: The year of PCI-Express SSDs?
6 Terabyte Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green And Seagate Enterprise
Corsair Carbide Series 330R Titanium Edition Case Review
Fractal Design Define R5
FUNC MS-2 Gaming Mouse Review
Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H-BK Black Edition reviewed
Intocircuit PowerMini 3000 Power Bank Review
Microsoft Wedge Mobile Keyboard Review
ROCCAT Ryos TKL Pro Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review
The Year in Tech: 2014 Top Stories



1Sheeld, The Ultimate Arduino Shield Review

A single Arduino shield that can link with an Android device and provide a multitude of sensors and advanced functions? Yep  thats a thing now. The 1Sheeld, in fact. From developers Integreight, 1Sheeld blew its admittedly humble Kickstarter goal of $10k out of the water 8 times over, but is now available to all from Amazon for $55. The 1Sheeld isnt designed to replace the Arduino though it supplements it, giving your Arduino projects access to a full complement of smartphone sensor data, and far more besides.

Read full article @ MakeUseOf

2015: The year of PCI-Express SSDs?

SATA Express and M.2 connectors are no longer a rare sight on the latest generation of motherboards. The PC ecosystem appears to be ready for the PCI-Express SSD revolution. Will 2015 be the year of PCI-Express SSDs?

Those who keep an eye on Hardware.Info's SSD reviews (click here for our latest big SSD round-up) will as of late mainly encounter charts in which SSDs from the high-end segment exhibit nearly identical performance. Especially for sequential read and write tests, we're consistently producing charts in which nearly all modern SSDs achieve speeds of about 550 MB/s. This is no coincidence, as this 550 MB/s value is the maximum real world throughput of the Serial ATA 600 interface that is used by nearly all SSDs. Back when we were only dealing with mechanical hard drives, we didn't even dare dream about it, but SATA600's maximum theoretical throughput of 600 MB/s has been the main bottleneck that limits SSD performance for quite some time now.

Read full article @ Hardware.Info

6 Terabyte Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green And Seagate Enterprise

The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Since most of us still need a hard drive for bulk storage, the question naturally becomes, "How big of a drive do you need?"

The market had been stuck at 4TB for a while, leaving content creators, digital pack rats and media aficionados in a lurch as storage demands grew. That's all about to change though, as recently Seagate, HGST, and Western Digital announced a breakthrough in areal density and other technologies, and 6TB drives were finally delivered to market.

In this showcase, we take a look at three 6 Terabyte hard drive offerings, two from Western Digital and one from Seagate.

Read full article @ HotHardware

Corsair Carbide Series 330R Titanium Edition Case Review

The brand new Carbide 330R Titanium Edition makes the already very popular gaming case of the Carbide 330R even better with an included conveniently hidden 3 step speed fan controller switch with a very stylish and minimalist aluminum anodized gun metal grey front metal panel finish to match many of the other gaming peripherals that are already offered by Corsair’s latest gaming series. The Corsair Carbide Series 330R already has some of the newest Corsair “Direct Airflow Path” design that causes less air resistance, better flow and silent running due to some very intensive fluid dynamics taken into consideration at the engineering phase of this case’s development. Basically the way this system works is with this case is the front door leaves a 5mm gap on both sides and inside the case front door. The air is pulled collectively from the frontal sides and a bottom indicated in the color yellow below. By pulling it from such a wide area it allows for less intake air noise by pulling from all the different angles.

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Fractal Design Define R5

The Fractal Design Define R5 is the fifth generation of this series, once again with updated features, looks, and functionality to meet the needs of those who want a quiet system and those looking to install a lot of liquid-cooling. It manages to impress in nearly every way with its unique and functional approach and great material mix.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

FUNC MS-2 Gaming Mouse Review

One size fits all? This is the question the guys at FUNC were asking when they were engineering their next creation. What I will be taking a look at today is one of the newest products by FUNC: the MS-2. The FUNC MS-2 is a mid-size mouse designed specifically for gamers.

Read full article @ Modders-Inc

Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H-BK Black Edition reviewed

The Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H-BK Black Edition motherboard is aimed at the upper-mid range market. It is an LGA 1150 board based on Intel’s Z97 chipset. Of course, owners of 4th generation Core (Haswell) desktop processors can use their workhorses inside on Z97 motherboards. The new 5th generation Core (Broadwell) CPUs is also supported.Note that the 9-series chipset has two versions - the Z97 is tailored towards enthusiasts and gamers, while the H97 aims at business and general purpose desktops. Gigabyte offers an incredible 26 different models based on the Z97 chipset.Our test sample, the Z97X-UD5H-BK Black Edition, offers the M.2 onboard interface (for thin and narrow M.2 SSD drives) that provides extra bandwidth (it tops out at 1GB per second). This is possible due to native PCIe-based storage, but be careful, not all Z97 motherboards come with an M.2 interface. Also SATA Express drives are supported, although the drives are not available yet, but the new standard promises twice the bandwidth of M.2. Both new storage interfaces use multiple PCI Express lanes as a pure PCI Express connection to the storage device.The Z97X-UD5H-BK Black Edition is listed online as a part of the UltraDurable series. As a Black Edition product, it was subjected to extended server level 168-hour durability tests and is backed by 5-years warranty.

Read full article @ Fudzilla

Intocircuit PowerMini 3000 Power Bank Review

Today I will be reviewing the Intocircuit PowerMini 3000 Power Bank. If you have ever been in a situation where you were in desperate need of charging your cell phone and either you left your car charger at home, broke it plugging it in, or blew the fuse in your car; these little portable quick power banks are a life saver. These power banks are becoming extremely popular. The convenience of having a charging device tucked away in your pocket for those times when nothing else is available is all in and of itself a feeling of calming knowing you will not have to go without your mobile devices. Many of the power banks are being manufactured in all shapes and sizes. What is amazing is the size of the PowerMini 3000 being only the size of finger and storing multiple charges for your device. The PowerMini 3000 also features a LED light.

Packing the most popular features and functionality into a finger-sized enclosure; this Intocircuit Power Mini 3000mAh Power bank is designed for maximum convenience and quickly juice up your devices.

Read full article @ FunkyKit

Microsoft Wedge Mobile Keyboard Review

We give a lot of attention to the Surface Pro 3 here at Windows Central, but I realize that not everyone uses one or plans on getting one. There are many other great Windows 8 tablets out there that do not have their own keyboard option available, so today I am taking a look at the Microsoft Wedge Mobile Keyboard. It is cute little devil with a lot to offer the tablet user who is often running around from place to place.

Read full article @ Windows Central

ROCCAT Ryos TKL Pro Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review

ROCCAT is a German company that was founded in 2007, and is best known for the original Kone gaming mouse. They have since branched out their offerings into other gaming peripherals, including keyboards, mousepads, gaming headsets, and even gaming notebooks. Today we're going to take a look at the latest gaming keyboard that was added to their arsenal, called the Ryos TKL Pro. The Ryos TKL Pro is ROCCAT's first Tenkeyless keyboard, aimed at gamers who are looking for a little more room to move their mouse...

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

The Year in Tech: 2014 Top Stories

As the year comes to a close it’s time to take a look back at some of the events that shaped the tech landscape in twenty-fourteen. There were some high profile buyouts, buzzwords, and a fair share of disruptions, controversies and security disasters with the likes of Apple, Google, Uber, Sony and the NSA -- among others -- as protagonists. This is a quick recount of the most relevant stories of 2014, divided into eleven different categories.

Read full article @ Techspot