Reviews 52123 Published by

Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

7 best 4K games: the must-play titles to punish your PC
Arespark AS100 Bluetooth Speaker and MP3 Player Review
ASUS ROG G751JY-DB72 w/G-Sync Gaming Notebook Review
Guru3D Rig of the Month - June 2015
Ozone Strike Battle keyboard Review
Supermicro C7Z97-M Review
Synology DiskStation DS1515 Review
The Samsung Exynos 7420 Deep Dive - Inside A Modern 14nm SoC
Toshiba AL13SXB60EN 600GB SAS 12Gb/s HDD Review
Turtle Beach Impact 700 Mechanical Keyboard Review
WD My Cloud EX4100 4-Bay Expert Series 16TB NAS Review



7 best 4K games: the must-play titles to punish your PC

The 4K revolution has arrived on PC, and if your eyes haven't yet dined at the table of Ultra HD gaming, we've tracked down the best 4K games sure to give them a visual feast.Packing four times as many pixels as common 1080p displays, 3,840 x 2,160 pixel-resolution 4K monitors can make newer games breathtakingly immersive, and those extra pixels can even help pump life back into older titles using high-resolution texture packs and mods.Of course, in addition to a 4K monitor, you'll need a beefy gaming rig with a powerful graphics card (or three) to do them justice - because even gorgeous visuals soon wear thin if your frame rate matches your shoe size. Whether you've already made the leap or are about to, click on to view our best 4K games screenshot gallery, which was produced using an MSI GS60 2QE Ghost Pro 4K. We'll be adding to it as we go along, so drop us a comment below if you'd like to see a particular game make the cut.

Read full article @ Techradar

Arespark AS100 Bluetooth Speaker and MP3 Player Review

I get all kinds of mobile accessories for review and most of them are just more of the same, but every once in a while I run across on that stands out from the crowd like what I have today for review does. The Arespakr AS100 Bluetooth speaker is wireless speaker yes, but it also has a microSD slot that turns it into a basic MP3 player. The AS100 also comes with a 3.5mm cable so it can be used with non-Bluetooth devices and it can be used as a speakerphone if need be. All that aside, the speaker itself is very well made, it’s durable and seems rugged and it sounds good and it can get very loud. Read on to learn more…

Read full article @ Technogog

ASUS ROG G751JY-DB72 w/G-Sync Gaming Notebook Review

Quite a few of my friends have trashed their desktops for notebooks. I have always used a notebook as an extension to my desktop. Meaning that this is as mobile as I’m going to get. Notebooks offer me portability and storage. Storage being the number 1 priority. I’m not going to type on an Android Tablet or an iPad, they are not quick enough to transcode a 2GB video and despite what others think the “Cloud” is not as safe as its made it out to be. Tablets have too many limitations for what I require from a mobile device. Yet in a way so do notebooks, I use my notebook when I am away from home, either working at the fire department or when I travel for HiTech legion. It allows me to store needed data, apps and entertainment. Since I have a YouTube Channel my notebook has also become my mobile transcoder.

Read full article @ HiTech Legion

Guru3D Rig of the Month - June 2015

We just adore PC relalated hardware & think you do too. And sometimes some you guys really make a PC that really stands out. We ask you to answer a few simple questions and send in photo's of your rig. Each month we'll have a look at the entries and perhaps pick you and post your PC with photo's and everything here at Guru3D.com Here you can find out what you need to do and win a nice prize courtesy of Corsair.

Each month one winner walks away with a cool prize. This month we give away a platinum certified Corsair HX750i power supply. The power supply is rather extraordinary in performance and its Platinum 80 plus certification, the one massive 63 Amp 12-volts says it all really. Superb for mainstream to high-end and even multi-GPU solutions. Corsair also embeds their LINK technology into the PSU. That means you can monitor the PSU with the help of software, things like PSU efficiency, power usage or simply to adjust the fan RPM. The winner also recieves a fully sleeved cable kit (cables + 24 pin).

Read full article @ Guru3D

Ozone Strike Battle keyboard Review

PC gamers come in all shapes and sizes and so do the spaces they game on. If you have a small room with limited desk space can come at quite a premium. That is the group of gamers that Ozone is hoping to appeal to with its new STRIKE Battle keyboard – a barebones design with an eye-catching metallic red paint job. Its unique look is backed up by customisable backlighting and mechanical switches, ticking most of the boxes that gamers hold most dear. How does it perform though?

Read full article @ KitGuru

Supermicro C7Z97-M Review

The renowned server vendor tries its hand at a consumer Z97 motherboard. At present the consumer Z97 motherboard market is dominated by the big four brands of ASUSTek, ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI. Smaller vendors like Biostar, ECS and EVGA make honourable mentions but still fall some way behind the market share of the big four.

Workstation- and server-orientated Supermicro is another long-standing, often-overlooked vendor in the consumer motherboard space that is looking to relaunch itself with a slew of new products. The company kick-started its consumer motherboard portfolio back in late 2013 with the C7Z87-OCE and since then it has diversified its offerings further with an expanded line-up of Z97 and X99 products.

Read full article @ Hexus

Synology DiskStation DS1515 Review

The DiskStation DS1515 is aimed at home users as well as small businesses. Out of the box this NAS can handle five 3.5" hard drives, giving it a maximum capacity of 40TB using the latest 8TB drives, while the addition of two DX513 expansion units boosts capacity to a whopping 120TB.

Read full article @ Techspot

The Samsung Exynos 7420 Deep Dive - Inside A Modern 14nm SoC

Over the past few years it’s been somewhat expected tradition for Samsung Electronics to employ a strategy of multi-sourcing the SoC for their mobile devices. Most notably it’s the on the North American and specifically CDMA markets that we saw wide usage of Qualcomm SoCs. This diversification started with the Galaxy S2 as it was offered both in versions with Samsung System LSIs Exynos chipset as well as variants with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon offerings. On the last few generation of devices we’ve seen the average share of Exynos in Galaxy devices continually decline, as the shift to ARMs Cortex A15 based SoCs just didn’t work out as well in terms of power consumption and thus lost design wins to better balanced Krait-based SoCs from Qualcomm. In fact the last time we’ve seen a Galaxy device make use of an Exynos throughout all its global variants was the Galaxy Note 2 back in 2012.

With the Galaxy S6 again offering a world-wide release of exclusively Samsung designed SoCs, we see an immensely contrasted situation to what we had just over a year ago. The Exynos 7420 marks a true new generation of SoCs for Samsung. The chipset is described as the company’s “most advanced application processor to date”, and today we’re going to have a deep investigation into what a modern SoC looks like, and try to put the chip through its paces through power and performance measurements.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Toshiba AL13SXB60EN 600GB SAS 12Gb/s HDD Review

Most people i know think that enthusiasts and serious gamers are the ones who always choose the fastest hardware components money can buy for their own systems but that's really far from the truth at least in regard to storage media. In that area for most consumers (enthusiasts and serious gamers included) even a regular SSD is good enough to do the job but for professionals and enterprise users alike there are more important things to take into account other than performance with endurance and the typical price/capacity ratio leading the ist. There are of course several enterprise-grade SSD models in the market as we speak but unfortunately to date they haven't been able to catch up with mechanical HDD models in terms
of price (that may change in 2016 however) and in some cases even endurance. Toshiba has released several enterprise-grade HDD lines over the past 3 years or so and they continue to do so this time with the brand new AL13SXB60EN (and to date we're the first to take a look).

Read full article @ NikKTech

Turtle Beach Impact 700 Mechanical Keyboard Review

If you have watched Top Gear episodes produced near Christmas, you will have seen the part of the show where they pull out bad gift ideas rather than doing the news. These products they produce include anything somewhat related to motoring as a whole. Among these gifts are a multitude of basic products branded by random car manufacturers like Ferrari and Lamborghini, like T-shirts, leather jackets, baby clothing, mugs, or spoons. Most of these products are not any better quality than their generic counterparts. Even still, the branded product ends up being a lot more expensive than the non-branded item, just because of the logo pasted on the product. In the electronics world, this kind of rebranding is not as common. Some people accuse Apple of marking up their products just purely based on their brand status. However, while I am not a fan of the fruit company, I must admit the "extra" costs on their products goes towards improving the product quality, design, and even performance, in addition to the marketing costs. This is one of the reasons why Apple products sell quite well, despite a reputation for being more expensive. Even though people may buy it to "fit in", there is no doubt in denying the quality on these computers. On an aside, the price gap between Apple laptops and Windows laptops is actually quite slim when comparing apples-to-apples, no pun intended. Thus, when companies mark a "premium" on products, I do not mind the higher costs, as long as my money goes towards an actual better product. When Turtle Beach sent us their newest foray into the PC keyboard market, the Impact 700, these questions popped into my mind. With a premium price of $200 USD at press release, this keyboard seems to take a bigger bite out of the wallet compared to its competition. Does it offer more than similar offerings from Cooler Master or Tesoro Technologies, or are we paying for Turtle Beach branding? Let us read on to find out!

Read full article @ APH Networks

WD My Cloud EX4100 4-Bay Expert Series 16TB NAS Review

We ain’t all equally skilled when it comes to the configuration of network and storage devices nor is it everyone that has the same interest in that. Sometimes you just want to purchase something, enter your preferred name and password, and then be ready to rock.

WD’s My Cloud series is designed for just these scenarios and it comes equipped with drives and is pre-configured. All you need to do yourself is connect it, turn the power on, and set your password. Today I’m taking a closer look at the WD My Cloud EX4100 from the Expert series and will give it a good spin in the test area.

Read full article @ eTeknix