Reviews 51945 Published by

Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

20 of the Worst PC Setups June 2014
4 Media Center Remote Apps For Windows Phone 8
ADATA XPG SX300 SATA 6Gb/s mSATA SSD Review
ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer Motherboard
be quiet! Shadow Rock Slim Review
Diamond Xtreme Sound 7.1 External Sound Card Review
LG G3 Review: QHD High Res Android Power
MSI GTX 780 Gaming 6 GB
Netgear Nighthawk X6 AC3200 Tri-Band WiFi Router Preview
NZXT Source 530 Review
Overclocking the Core i7-4790K
PowerColor Devil 13 Dual Core 290X (290X2) Graphics Card Performance Review
Review: OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB PCIe SSD
Samsung WB1100F Review
Sentey Lumenata Pro Gaming Mouse Review
XTracGear Carbonic Gaming Mousepad Review



20 of the Worst PC Setups June 2014

I’m sure at some point you had a bad PC setup. Maybe moving into a new place, waiting for a new desk to arrive or you just ran out of room. I can remember my horrible PC setups from when I was living at the dorms in college. If you have ever ventured over to the Shitty Battlestations sub-reddit you will find a lot of horrible PC setups. We will are going to pick 20 each month and feature them as 20 of the Worst PC setups for that month. Here are some of the bad ones from June!

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

4 Media Center Remote Apps For Windows Phone 8

Windows Phone 8 is more than capable of providing you with music and video entertainment, but what if youre sat in front of your TV or console? Well, rather than waste valuable movie time looking for the remote control, you could use one of these apps to press play and enjoy your new album or movie. Why Would You Use A Remote App? If you have easy access to your handheld TV or media center/streaming remote control, using a remote control app on any platform might seem a little pointless. Then again, how often do you lose your smartphone down...

Read full article @ MakeUseOf

ADATA XPG SX300 SATA 6Gb/s mSATA SSD Review

ADATA is one of the market leaders in memory and SSD drives. Their current solution for the mSATA market is the XPG SX300 mSATA drive. The ADATA XPG SX300 is a MLC mSATA drive that features an LSI controller.

Read full article @ Modders-Inc

ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer Motherboard

The ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer is a mid-range socket LGA1150 motherboard based on the new Intel Z97 chipset, supporting the fourth and the forthcoming fifth generation Core i processors. It brings high-end network interface and audio codec, six SATA-600 ports (allowing one SATA Express connection), and six USB 3.0 ports. Let's take a good look at it.

Read full article @ Hardware Secrets

be quiet! Shadow Rock Slim Review

It seems like there are a million different ways to design a CPU cooler, and each big company has at least one of each type. In the case of be quiet!, we have reviewed their Dark Rock Pro 2, a giant dual tower cooler with 120 and 135mm fans, as well as the Shadow Rock Topflow, a somewhat low profile cooler that fits in narrower cases.

Today we’re looking at their option for those who don’t have a lot of free space around the CPU area, but can manage to fit a rather tall cooler in their case.

Read full article @ HCW

Diamond Xtreme Sound 7.1 External Sound Card Review

Ah, the nineties. Fresh Prince was on the TV and sound cards were a growing part of every top-end household PC. Not only did they put us past the archaic beeps and boops of the era but also added a level of Xtreme! to everything. We had the inaugural X-Games, the Chevy Xtreme, and for a time, the whole world forgot that there ever was a third-E in "extreme".

Then the 21st century arrived. We put the E back in "extreme", Fresh Prince was in syndication, and motherboard manufacturers began integrating audio onto their boards. For a time the world seemed to have gotten a bit more structured with a clear vision of the future.

Modern computing continues to shrink at an incredible pace. Ultra-thin notebooks and tablets are all the rage and small form factor computing is making a comeback. Of course as components get smaller so does their proximity of there functions. While the obvious advantage is size and cost the drawback can be increased interference, distortion, and degraded audio quality. So, what can be done to help improve and enrich the modern audio experience if your system is lacking in the department? Well, we can start by taking some advice from our past, and get a dedicated sound card.

Read full article @ Hardware Asylum

LG G3 Review: QHD High Res Android Power

LG is probably getting a little tired of scraping for brand recognition versus big names like Samsung, Apple and yes, even Google. However, the company is also likely taking solace in the fact that their smartphone sales figures are heading for an all-time high in 2014, with an estimated 60 million units projected to be sold this year. Part of that success probably comes from private label sales of devices like the LG-made Google Nexus 5, though the LG G2 certainly sold its fair share as well. So, at the end of the day, LG is sort of the "sleeper" of smartphone makers and as a major OEM display manufacturer, they've got the chops to compete with the best of breed in the race for superphone dominance.

LG's third iteration of their popular "G" line of flagship smartphones, simply dubbed the LG G3, is the culmination of all of the innovation the company has developed in previous devices to date, including its signature rear button layout, along with cutting-edge IPS display technology that only a first tier manufacturer can muster. In fact, the G3's 5.5-inch QHD display drives a resolution of 2560X1440 with a pixel density of 538 PPI, one of the highest density smartphone displays to hit the market to date...

Read full article @ HotHardware

MSI GTX 780 Gaming 6 GB

MSI's new GTX 780 Gaming 6 GB doubles the available video RAM over the reference design, which has just 3 GB. With latest titles requiring 3 GB VRAM minimum for Ultra textures, this 6 GB card could help provide a performance advantage. We will investigate this claim using our brand-new VGA test suite.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Netgear Nighthawk X6 AC3200 Tri-Band WiFi Router Preview

Netgear unveiled their newest wireless router on June 25th and they didn’t pull any punches with this product introduction. The Nighthawk X6 AC3200 Tri-Band WiFi Router (R8000) builds on the latest 5G Wi-Fi XStream technology from Broadcom and captures the crown for fastest consumer Wi-Fi router, if only for a while. On the surface, the most notable improvement is the addition of another 5 GHz 802.11ac band, stepping outside the dual-band architecture that has dominated the marketplace for more than five years.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

NZXT Source 530 Review

Source 530 is a tower case from NZXT offering quite a few features as well as a lot of flexibility in terms of cooling. Other than that manufacturing quality appears to be on a high high level and overall this is already more than reason enough for us to have a closer look at this case.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Overclocking the Core i7-4790K

Intel has tweaked the package on its "Devil's Canyon" processors to open up more overclocking headroom.

How well has it worked? Well, uh, yeah. Let's have a look.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

PowerColor Devil 13 Dual Core 290X (290X2) Graphics Card Performance Review

PowerColor offer their own branded version of the liquid cooled R9 295 X2… and now for those who want a similar level of framerate they have their air cooled dual core R9 290X with Devil 13 branding. Today we take a look at this R9 290X2 to see what Powercolor can do with their custom design card in a selection of games including Battlefield 4 and GRID Autosport at 4K resolution.

Read full article @ Hardware Heaven

Review: OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB PCIe SSD

Over the past year or so, it’s been no secret that OCZ has had a bit of a rough time in the market, but with the sale of their company to Toshiba late last year, OCZ has quickly been turning themselves around with several new product introductions to complete their transition from the old OCZ Technology Group to the new OCZ Storage Solutions, a Toshiba Group Company.

As a part of their transition, OCZ has been revamping their entire product stack to utilize parent company Toshiba’s NAND. By doing so, this will not only allow OCZ to put top quality NAND in their SSDs, but also provides OCZ with better cost efficiency.

Back in late 2013, OCZ began their transition to Toshiba NAND with the introduction of the Vector 150. This was then followed by the move to Toshiba NAND with the OCZ Vertex 460, which was released back in January making both OCZ flagship SATA drives based on Toshiba flash. This then leaves the RevoDrive series which not only needed to be converted to the new flash, but also needed an update as well, given the fact that the last generation RevoDrive was introduced sometime in 2011.

Read full article @ Custom PC Review

Samsung WB1100F Review

Samsung's smart cameras are a range, also including the larger WB2200F, that while a step down from the Galaxy Camera in terms of complexity still manage to cram in a great many features. The concept is an interesting one – can you make a camera that does everything, capturing, editing and sharing, severing the link between a digital camera and a PC or smartphone, or will the inevitable compromises make the final result unworkable?While it doesn't have quite the range of skills of its bigger brother, lacking manual, aperture- and shutter-priority modes, the WB1100F is no slouch either. Featuring a 1/2.3in CCD sensor that's either 16.2MP (according to the spec sheet), 16.4MP (according to the back of the camera) or 15.9MP (images are actually made up of 4608x3456 pixels), and a 35x zoom lens that's equivalent to 25-875mm in 35mm terms. This optic has a maximum aperture that varies from f/3 at the wide end to f/5.9 at the long end. Along with 1080p video, Optical Image Stabilisation and wireless features, the WB1100F certainly seems on the surface to have plenty to recommend it.The screen, which isn't touch sensitive, is a three-inch TFT LCD with 460,000 dots.

Read full article @ Techradar

Sentey Lumenata Pro Gaming Mouse Review

This week I had the pleasure of reviewing the Lumenata Pro by Sentey, a professional gaming mouse that goes above and beyond to deliver the satisfaction you paid for. Sentey has delivered a phenomenal product with minor flaws that can be overlooked, perhaps the most enticing feature is that the price point allows it to compete with better established mice while staying at a relatively low price. If you are looking for a comfortable, customizable, good looking mouse that wont put a dent in your wallet I recommend you keep reading!

Read full article @ TechwareLabs.com

XTracGear Carbonic Gaming Mousepad Review

I’ve come across many people who think that think any mousepad is as good an any other mousepad, they just think it doesn’t matter. A friend of mine just stopped using a mousepad and used his desk and recently asked me why his mouse wasn’t working correctly and skipping all over the place. Granted the mouse was one of those that comes with the system, so it wasn’t the best to start with but the surface under the mouse was not flat anymore and worn down from using the mouse, so the optical sensor couldn’t track correctly so it skipped. The point is that if you’re a gamer or not, a good mousepad can make a world of difference in your computing experience. A good mousepad can, for the most part, make a cheap mouse track better from my experience.

Today for review I’ve got the latest gaming mousepad from XtracGear called the Carbonic. The pad gets it’s name from the carbon fiber appearance on the surface of the pad, it’s not carbon fiber, it’s what would be considered a cloth pad, but it’s not cloth as you might expect. The surface is shiny and what Xtrac calls a polished textile surface making it have the rougher surface of a cloth pad for more control but also making it slicker than most traditional cloth pads are. The Carbonic has what I would call a hybrid surface, it’s flexible like cloth but yet slick like plastic. Read on to learn more..

Read full article @ TestFreaks