Reviews 51924 Published by

Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

20 of the Worst PC Setups - May 2018
Agony Review
ASUS Crosshair VII Hero AM4 Motherboard Review
IOGEAR Thunderbolt 3 Docking Station Pro 85 Review
Moonlighter for PC review: Fun gameplay but it (mostly) misses the mark
Plextor M8V (M8VC) 512GB 2.5-Inch SSD Review
To eat or to be eaten: Acer Predator X34P ultrawide G-sync gaming monitor review
We Tried the World's First Analog Mechanical Keyboard: 3 Months with the Wooting one
Western Digital's Black 1 TB NVMe SSD reviewed
XPG Spectrix D40 DDR4 Review



20 of the Worst PC Setups - May 2018

I’m sure at some point you’ve 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 May.

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Agony Review

Ever since becoming old enough to understand good and evil, we have always been told that if we do something bad, we will go to Hell. Literature, art and even video games tried to give the most horrifying representation of Hell, but none did it as well as Agony. Hellish is the only definition that can be given to Madmind Studio’s horror, and not only due to his excellent presentation, as the gameplay experience, sadly, it’s extremely flawed.

At the beginning of the game, main character Amraphel are thrown straight into Hell, with no idea on how he ended up there. Other characters suffer from the same peculiar form of memory loss: they cannot remember anything, except for the Blood Goddess, which they seek without rest. Other characters, however, know quite well why they are there, and it seems like it’s been Amraphel’s fault. During his trip through hell, Amraphel will start remembering why he ended up in Hell and what he has done to deserve this fate. He will also get the chance to get close to the Blood Goddess, and it won’t be a particularly nice encounter.

Read full article @ Wccftech

ASUS Crosshair VII Hero AM4 Motherboard Review

Along with the second generation AMD Ryzen CPUs, we are getting the new and somewhat improved X470 chipset motherboards. We have been beating on the Crosshair VII Hero for about a month now and have figured out what we like about, outside of it being an excellent overclocker for the Ryzen 7 CPUs.

ASUS is a company that’s been in the DIY motherboard business for a very long time. The company is well known for its gaming and enthusiast-oriented hardware. This includes motherboards, monitors, laptops, workstation and server hardware, routers, and gaming peripherals. And now even AIO coolers with OLED screens, Delta headsets, and Thor Hammer PSUs! Of course, motherboards are what the company is primarily known for now although I believe they make more money off of monitors than anything else these days. Over ten years ago, ASUS created its Republic of Gamers brand to better target products marketed towards the gaming segment at the intended customer base. The brand has been wildly successful and, in a sense has been imitated by everyone else in the industry in one form or another.

Read full article @ HardOCP

IOGEAR Thunderbolt 3 Docking Station Pro 85 Review

The solution is a USB C / Thunderbolt dock, and today Benchmark Reviews has IOGEAR’s latest Thunderbolt 3 Docking Station Pro 85 external dock to review. Connecting to your laptop with a single Thunderbolt 3 cable, the Docking Station Pro 85 supplies 8 additional ports, all of which can be used at the same time.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

Moonlighter for PC review: Fun gameplay but it (mostly) misses the mark

Moonlighter is decent, but it feels rather shallow overall.

Roguelike role-playing games (RPGs) are a dime-a-dozen on the PC platform, so the unique premise of Moonlighter caught my eye. While you spend time exploring the typical procedurally-generated dungeons for loot and items, you also have the responsibility of maintaining and upgrading a shop between expeditions.

This is an interesting premise, but unfortunately, Moonlighter never truly reaches its potential. But the game is decent, and if you're looking for a fun time-waster, it could be for you.

Read full article @ Windows Central

Plextor M8V (M8VC) 512GB 2.5-Inch SSD Review

Plextor is a company that continues to impress us with their drives. We recently saw the M9Pe blast through the benchmarks with impressive results. While the drive was great to test and showed impressive results, it also is out of the budget range for a lot of people. However, Plextor has a strong lineup of budget-oriented SSDs too and the M8V (product link) which we’re testing today belongs in that category.

Plextor continues to set standards for budget drives, simply by delivering more than the average drive. Their drives don’t just deliver a strong performance; they also come with a great software bundle which can take the whole thing to a new level. Part of this is that you get the full NAND capacity. In today’s case, you get 512GB instead of the often seen 480GB. We will get to why that is further down the page.

Read full article @ eTeknix

To eat or to be eaten: Acer Predator X34P ultrawide G-sync gaming monitor review

The Acer Predator X34P has it all: the extra wide 34 inch monitor has both a high resolution and a high refresh rate, with G-sync as the cherry on top. In doing so, the screen promises to be a worthy successor to the old Predator X34 without 'P' from 2016, which was basically the ultimate gaming monitor at the time. However, competition in the ultra-widescreen monitor segment has become fiercer than ever in recent years. Will the X34P be able to hold its own?

For a long time Acer's Predator X34 was the cream of the crop when it came to gaming monitors. The giant had an extra wide 34 inch IPS panel with an aspect ratio of 43:18 - in layman's terms also known as 21:9. Not only was the resolution high with 3440 x 1440 pixels, but also the refresh rate was not modest at 100 Hz. The presence of a G-sync scaler is the cherry on top.

Read full article @ Hardware.Info

We Tried the World's First Analog Mechanical Keyboard: 3 Months with the Wooting one

If you consider yourself a PC gaming enthusiast, you've probably selected every component of your build carefully, including your peripherals. Whether you're a fan of slower-paced RPGs like the Witcher 3 or fast-paced first-person shooters, you undoubtedly understand the importance of a solid keyboard.

High-quality, clicky mechanical switches, remappable keys, and -- of course -- fancy RGB lighting can make your gaming experience all the more satisfying. However, throughout my many years of PC gaming, I've always had one major gripe with using keyboards as a controller: variable movement, or more accurately, the lack of variable movement.

To elaborate, if you've played games on a modern console, you're probably aware that you can precisely control your character's speed by merely moving your controller's joystick less than its full range of movement.

Read full article @ TechSpot

Western Digital's Black 1 TB NVMe SSD reviewed

Western Digital has a long and rich history in the storage market, but for a long time it wasn't a player in the consumer solid-state storage space. The company first started to dabble in SSDs with its acquisition of Siliconsystems almost ten years ago, but that was a ticket into the business-focused market only. It wasn't until the company's much more recent and more expensive purchase of SanDisk that WD became truly ready to enter the mainstream SSD fray.Freshly armed with SanDisk's existing client SSD portfolio and the technologies and foundries of the SanDisk-Toshiba joint venture, WD wasted little time in getting SSDs carrying its own brand out the door.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

XPG Spectrix D40 DDR4 Review

XPG are a company who specialise in flash format PC storage and high performance system memory, tending to use flashy styling and plenty of lights. Today we look at the XPG Spectrix D40 RGB DDR4 memory, an RGB memory kit designed for enthusiasts and gamers in with an eye for aesthetics.

The Spectrix D40 kit is available from 8GB up to 64GB and speeds varying between 2400MHz up to a massive 4400MHz. We’ve been provided a 32GB – 2400MHz kit for testing, which should strike a good balance between capacity and performance. XMP 2.0 is supported, minimising any time spent in the BIOS once the RAM is installed, as well as featuring a 10-layer PCB for enhanced stability and overclocking. AMD and Intel DDR4 systems are also all supported.

Read full article @ Vortez