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Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

3DMark's Stress Test with a difference
A Bit More on AMD’s Polaris GPUs: 36 & 16 CUs
Acer Predator XB271HK 4K G-Sync IPS Display Review
AMD confirms most Polaris 11 and Polaris 10 specifications
Asrock DeskMini 110 Review: Flexible, functional and dead easy to work with
ASUS GTX 1080 Strix Gaming 8 GB
Bloody B720 Light Strike Keyboard Review
Corsair's Lapdog keyboard tray reviewed
EK-XLC Predator 240 Expandable Liquid CPU Cooler Review
High Performance PCs Need High Performance Drives
HIS Radeon R7 360 GREEN iCooler OC 2GB Graphics Card Review
Homefront: The Revolution Tweaking Guide
Inno3D GeForce GTX 1080 iChiLL X3 Review
Intel Core i7-6950X vs Core i7-5960X - 2D Performance
LG X Mach Hands-on Review
Samsung 750 Evo 120 and 250 GB SSD review: the cheaper brother



3DMark's Stress Test with a difference

Compares best and worst runs and gives stability rating. We're always on the lookout for augmenting our testing suite with benchmarks that do something different. The folks over at Futuremark have updated the popular 3DMark benchmark - one that we use in our graphics-card reviews - to include a stability tool, and it works in an interesting way.

Rather than tell you the hardware has an absolute pass, as a program like Prime95 or wPrime would do for the CPU, the 3DMark Stress Tests, available to users with registered copies of either the Advanced or Professional Editions, look at the average frame rate during a loop and compares it against the scores obtained in other loops. The premise is to weed out graphics cards that throttle frequency once a certain temperature limit has been reached, thus lowering performance compared to usually the first run.

Read full article @ Hexus

A Bit More on AMD’s Polaris GPUs: 36 & 16 CUs

Along with this week’s teaser of the forthcoming Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 at E3, AMD also held a short press briefing about Polaris. The bulk of AMD’s presentation is going to be familiar to our readers who keep close tabs on AMD’s market strategy (in a word, VR), but this latest presentation also brought to light a few more details on the company’s two Polaris GPUs that I want to quickly touch upon.

First and foremost, AMD’s presentation included a slide with pictures of the two chips, and confirmation on their full configurations. The larger Polaris 10 is a 36 CU (2304 SP) chip, meaning that the forthcoming Radeon RX 480 video card is using a fully enabled chip. Meanwhile the smaller Polaris 11 (note that these pictures aren’t necessarily to scale) packs 16 CUs (1024 SPs). This puts it a bit below Pitcairn (20 CUs) before factoring in GCN 4’s higher efficiency. Meanwhile as is common for these lower-power GPUs, AMD’s slide also confirms that it features a 128-bit memory bus.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Acer Predator XB271HK 4K G-Sync IPS Display Review

The Acer Predator XB271HK is a 27-inch IPS display that offers both 4K resolution and 60Hz G-Sync support – with a complete package of high-end features and nice touches to round it off.

Read full article @ KitGuru

AMD confirms most Polaris 11 and Polaris 10 specifications

According to the slides published by Computerbase.de, both GPUs are based on AMD's 4th generation Graphics Core Next (GCN 4.0) GPU architecture, offer 2.8 perf/watt improvement compared to the previous generation, have 4K encode and decode capabilities as well as bring DisplayPort 1.3/1.4 and HDR support. 

Read full article @ Fudzilla

Asrock DeskMini 110 Review: Flexible, functional and dead easy to work with

The Asrock DeskMini 110 mini-STX form factor PC certainly has an industrial look about it, and it looks a bit drab sitting next to the Cubi 2 Plus from MSI. What it lacks in aesthetics, however, it makes up for in ease of installation and flexibility, thanks to those very same design choices, including support for pretty much any Skylake desktop processor and high-speed NVMe SSDs.

Read full article @ TechSpot

ASUS GTX 1080 Strix Gaming 8 GB

The ASUS STRIX GTX 1080 Gaming OC is the highest clocked GTX 1080 variant so far, running almost 2000 MHz actual clock on average, boosting up to 2050 MHz out of the box without any manual overclocking. The new cooler is not only quiet but also looks good, and the backplate has RGB illumination.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Bloody B720 Light Strike Keyboard Review

A4Tech is a Taiwanese company whose “Bloody” gaming division was launched in 2012. Bloody produces gaming keyboards and mice using a unique switch technology: rather than metal contact points closing an electrical circuit when a key is pressed, Bloody’s mechanical switches use infrared LEDS and photosensors, which Bloody claims provides faster key response and a more reliable and durable switch. Benchmark Reviewschecks out the Bloody B720 Light Strike gaming keyboard to see how it compared to other premium gaming keyboards.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

Corsair's Lapdog keyboard tray reviewed

Corsair's Lapdog keyboard tray is built to bridge the gap between the desk and the den by giving gamers a way to put a keyboard and mouse right on their laps. We invited the Lapdog into our living room to see whether it's a good boy.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

EK-XLC Predator 240 Expandable Liquid CPU Cooler Review

Offering the ease of a pre-filled kit and the convenience of standard fittings for additional water blocks, the Predator 240 looks like it could be the best of the closed and open loop designs. We check its as-delivered performance.

Read full article @ Tom's Hardware

High Performance PCs Need High Performance Drives

Many users make the common mistake of focusing too much on CPU and graphics card performance while ignoring the performance of their hard disk drives. Today, we are going to show you why high performance PCs need high performance drives.

Read full article @ Tech ARP

HIS Radeon R7 360 GREEN iCooler OC 2GB Graphics Card Review

With the eyes of every gamer and enthusiast all over the world turned towards the brand new ultra-high-end GeForce GTX 1070/1080 graphics cards by NVIDIA and the upcoming high-end RX 4xx series by AMD noone seems to really focus on the lower-end models aimed towards casual everyday users who care not about equipping their systems with one of the fastest models around. This became obvious to me a couple of months ago when a friend of mine was looking to build 5 desktop computers for his office and since instead of going with onboard graphics he was looking for something slightly faster, better and with relatively low power consumption with which he (and the people in his office) could also watch movies during lunch break he asked if i had something in mind. Now as you all know "Green" cards are not popular amongst gamers and enthusiasts but that's what my friend was after so after looking around for something ideal we came across the latest Radeon R7 360 GREEN iCooler OC 2GB by our good friends over at HIS.

HIS - is an internationally acclaimed brand of graphics cards. Time and time again, HIS were compared and tested by hundreds of worldly renowned critics. The results are phenomena, HIS have proved to offer far superior, cooler, quieter, and faster graphic cards than any other leading rivals. Up to the first quarter of 2015, HIS has won over 1700 awards with AMD graphic solutions from major media worldwide. HIS is being recognized by providing performance leading and award-winning products: IceQ, IceQ X, IceQX2, IceQX2II, OC and Turbo Edition. HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality PC products in the industry. Headquartered in Hong Kong, and with sales offices and distribution networks in Europe, Middle East, North and South America, Asia Pacific Regions; our worldwide customers benefits from efficient and localized services. HIS's manufacturing facility in China is managed by a team of professionals with expertise in quality control and production planning. Working with world-class clients, HIS has been consistently meeting high quality standards and fulfilled volume order in short lead-time.

Since the Radeon R7 360 GREEN iCooler OC 2GB is based on the Tobago core by AMD (renamed Bonaire core) it too features 768 stream processors, 48 TMUs (texture mapping units), 12 compute units and 16 ROPs (raster operators) and comes outfitted with 2GB of GDDR5 memory (128 Bit). It also offers complete support for DirectX v12, OpenGL v4.5, OpenCL v2.1 and Shader Model v5.0 (it also supports AMDs FreeSync technology) but unlike all the Radeon R7 360 cards out there the Radeon R7 360 GREEN iCooler OC 2GB by HIS doesn't require an extra 6-pin power connector and because of that not only does it have a TDP (thermal design power) of just 50W at load (most similar models need over twice as much) but it should also reach lower temperatures by even 10 degrees Celsius. Now of course we don't expect miracles from a Radeon R7 360 card but it will be very interesting to see just how good a graphics card powered just by the PCIe slot can be.

Read full article @ NikkTech

Homefront: The Revolution Tweaking Guide

After having constructed most of this from the release-day state of Homefront: The Revolution and then performing some additional tests after the June 3 patch with a patch for multicore CPUs, I have found that the Object graphics setting still has a significant impact on the game's performance. It is better following the patch, but I would still recommend shifting it down if you experience any performance issues as you play. The Shading and Shadow options have a tremendous impact on visuals, so definitely try to have those turned up if you can. The save files are located in a somewhat obvious, yet still uncommonly used location, the Saved Games user folder Windows puts in your user folder. The game downloads all of the localization files it might need, even if you only need one language. While this could negatively affect the stability of the game, it appears to be possible to delete the unneeded localization files to reclaim some space. If you need them back, verifying the game cache should trigger Steam to re-download them.

Read full article @ OCC

Inno3D GeForce GTX 1080 iChiLL X3 Review

Nvidia knows that it has the high-end consumer graphics card space all sewn up for now... and is milking it in no uncertain terms. £525 is the entry price to join the GeForce GTX 1080 club. Admission buys you the fastest GPU ever made for the home PC, yet a lack of genuine competition from AMD means that Nvidia can release what is technically a midrange chip instead of a true gaming Goliath.

If you can get past how Nvidia is fully able to charge the wrong side of £500 from a lean, highly competent architecture named Pascal, the choice of GTX 1080s becomes the next consideration before purchase. Stock is still in constraint, with only Founders Editions (reference) cards widely available for £600 or so, though add-in card (AIC) partners are promising custom-cooled variants very soon.

Read full article @ Hexus

Intel Core i7-6950X vs Core i7-5960X - 2D Performance

There is a variety of customer groups in need of as much processing power as possible. Especially in the field of content creation, which includes editing pictures and videos or even rendering a complex scenery with beautiful effects, performance improvements quickly translate into higher income by the end of the month. With this series of articles we're going to compare two processors. The CPUs tested are being run at stock clocks as well as overclocked and apart from that we will also vary the memory frequency. It is our goal to show which CPU is how much faster or slower than another one.

Read full article @ ocaholic

LG X Mach Hands-on Review

The LG X Mach is out to fix the last thing people think of when they buy a new phone, but the first thing they often complain about: network speed. Like its name suggests, this Android 6.0 Marshmallow phone is far faster than any other in its category. That's because it boasts the new LTE-Advanced standard, LTE Cat. 9 3CA.You can find that on newer devices, like the Samsung Galaxy Galaxy S7, S7 Edge and a few other handsets on our best phones list, but they all come at a premium price.LG X Mach is also outfitted with competitive specs and a camera that does well in low light conditions thanks to the fact that it captures larger pixels. It's an Android challenger that came out of nowhere at mach speed.There's no final LG X Mach release date or price, but the company says it's coming to South Korea later this month.

Read full article @ Techradar

Samsung 750 Evo 120 and 250 GB SSD review: the cheaper brother

We already called the SSD-evolution a race to the bottom: the prices keep going down, meaning larger capacity SSDs become more accessible. Every manufacturer keeps a close eye on the other manufacturers. Seeing as how Crucial and OCZ are offering SSDs below the “850 Evo-price levels,” Samsung is introducing the Samsung 750 Evo to compete.

The Samsung 750 Evo-line is based on the same S4LN062X01-controller as the 850 Evo, called the Samsung MGX in marketing terms. The difference between the two is the used TLC-flash memory: where the 850 Evo uses 3D NAND, the manufacturer uses regular ‘2D’ memory for the 750 Evo. This is produced using the smaller 16nm-procedure, potentially having a negative impact on the life span. On the other hand: all of the competitors use similar memory at this price point. A second difference is the cache. With 256 MB it is half the size of the 850 Evo.

Read full article @ Hardware.Info