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Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

APC Back-UPS Pro 900
ASRock Z270 Killer SLI Intel LGA 1151 Motherboard Review
be quiet! Pure Base 600 Chassis Review
be quiet! Pure Base 600 Review
Benchmarking Radeon Open Compute ROCm 1.4 OpenCL
Corsair Scimitar Pro Gaming Mouse Review
GIGABYTE GTX 1050 Ti OC Review
Id-Cooling Icekimo 120 Compact Liquid CPU Cooler Review
Mastering Gmail Search
MIFCOM Battlebox: High-End with Intel and NVIDIA
MyDigitalSSD BPX M.2 NVMe 480GB SSD Review
Sick of hearing about RGB, here’s an article about RGB
Watch_Dogs 2 Performance Analysis
WD Blue SSD Review: Aggressively-Priced Solid State Storage



APC Back-UPS Pro 900

After two lightning strikes knocked out power at our house, followed by several power breaker failures, we thought it was worthwhile investing in a UPS. We use RAID to protect against drive failures and the cost of protecting against another power failure seemed like a good investment. The idea behind a UPS is that you seamlessly switch power to internal batteries when mains power fails, but also signal that power has been lost and how much battery time remains. For example, you may tell a server to power down gracefully when there is 10 minutes of UPS battery time remaining. You also gain some protection from surges and spikes, which may protect against damage during lightning strikes.

Read full article @ PC Review

ASRock Z270 Killer SLI Intel LGA 1151 Motherboard Review

Today, we test the new ASRock Z270 Killer SLI motherboard at OCinside.de, which is designed for the 7th generation of Intel Core processors. Just in time for CPU Intel Kaby Lake we had already published an unboxing video of the ASRock Z270 motherboard and today the ASRock Z270 Killer SLI is extensively tested and overclocked. In this motherboard review, we install the latest Intel Core i5 7600K Kaby Lake CPU and compare the Intel 7600K Kabylake vs Intel 6600K Skylake CPU.

Read full article @ OCInside.de

be quiet! Pure Base 600 Chassis Review

The Germans have gone budget. be quiet! has launched its new Pure Base 600 case as an entry-level model that sits below the Silent Base and Dark Base cases we saw in 2016 and 2017. As you will see in our video, our initial impressions were a bit … glum. There are no windows and certainly no tempered glass, so basically you get a black box that looks a bit plasticky. Pull off the two side panels and the interior is an open design without a power supply cover where it appears that everything is on show and there are few features of interest.
You can see the optical drive bay housing and the three separate hard drive bays but perhaps the most exciting thing is the inclusion of two Pure Wings 2 fans, 140mm at front and 120mm at the rear. At this stage in the game KitGuru was ready to throw in the towel and award the Pure Base 600 a ‘Dull but Nice’ award and move on to the next review.
Happily we persevered which is just as well as we nearly missed a trick or two.

Read full article @ KitGuru

be quiet! Pure Base 600 Review

The chassis that is the Pure Base 600 series is a more compact version that slightly resembles the silent series chassis. A good looking, silent chassis with an attractive price as well, positioning itself in the value segment. The product is an all dark chassis design that remains fairly tool free while offering decent space to work in while retaining quiet airflow and even liquid cooling options. Have a peek at the product we'll review today, the Pure Base 600.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Benchmarking Radeon Open Compute ROCm 1.4 OpenCL

Last month with AMD/GPUOpen's ROCm 1.4 release they delivered on OpenCL support, albeit for this initial release all of the code is not yet open-source. I tried out ROCm 1.4 with the currently supported GPUs to see how the OpenCL performance compares to just using the AMDGPU-PRO OpenCL implementation.

Read full article @ Phoronix

Corsair Scimitar Pro Gaming Mouse Review

If your hunt is for a very nice corded USB gaming mouse that meets and exceeds expectations, then you’ve come to the right place. In this article for Benchmark Reviews we dive deep into the Corsair Scimitar Pro’s features. We’ll be testing DPI responsiveness, its customization, and real world everyday use for both gaming and other mouse intensive tasks such as Photoshop

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

GIGABYTE GTX 1050 Ti OC Review

Today we focus our attention on the GIGABYTE camp and what they have to offer in the GTX 1050 Ti OC. As the name suggests, this graphics card arrives with a factory overclock - featuring a small boost to the GPU clock speed. GTX 1050 Ti OC also benefits from a small footprint allowing it to squeeze into small builds and its dependence on PCI-slot power means this could be a great upgrade for many with an aging PC.

Read full article @ Vortez

Id-Cooling Icekimo 120 Compact Liquid CPU Cooler Review

Id-Cooling believes its inch-thick 120mm closed-loop cooler can handle a mildly overclocked six-core LGA 2011-v3 processor. But should it? We take a closer look!

Read full article @ Toms Hardware

Mastering Gmail Search

When Gmail debuted 12 years ago it made a shift in how we thought about email. Instead of deleting, the idea of archiving messages indefinitely became plausible. This has been helped by good UX and powerful search capabilities. Gmail search is also speedy which makes it practical. Here I'll cover a few of my favorite and most useful Gmail search operators.

Read full article @ TechSpot

MIFCOM Battlebox: High-End with Intel and NVIDIA

MIFCOM is a German system integrator focussing on the German, Austrian and Swiss market. At this point we're going to show you there Battlebox, which is based on an Intel Core i7-6950X CPU and one or two GTX 1080 graphics cards.

Read full article @ ocaholic

MyDigitalSSD BPX M.2 NVMe 480GB SSD Review

Are you looking for a cost effective entry-level PVIe NVMe SSD for your system? The MyDigitalSSD Bullet Proof eXpress (BPX) 80mm (2280) M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSDs are shaking the market up right now due to some amazing price points. MyDigitalSSD currently offers the BPX series in three capacities; 120GB ($69.99 shipped), 240GB ($114.99 shipped), and 480GB ($199.99 shipped). Those prices put the 480GB drive around $0.42 per GB and that is the lowest priced Phison E7 controlled MLC drive that we have seen to date!

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

Sick of hearing about RGB, here’s an article about RGB

After spending the past few weeks sorting through all of the CES coverage, launches, and all of the comments and backlash on social media and websites like Reddit I wanted to sit down and talk a little about something that has been bothering me. Over the past year, but especially at CES, just about every product introduced now has RGB lighting. When seeing my friends in the tech press talk about it, you can almost see/read the frustration with it all and there are comments all over with people hating on RGB. I want to go on record and say that RGB is great for the industry and its one of those products that everyone is going to hate on but they will most likely be upset next year if someone brings out a product without it.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

Watch_Dogs 2 Performance Analysis

There are two points that I think are worth walking away from these tests with. The first is that the GTX 770 with 2 GB of VRAM, released three years ago, was still able to make this game playable at its High preset, and the other is that the game is still quite new. There are still the Low and Medium presets below it, and naturally you can use a custom set of options to optimize for your system. Naturally the more powerful GTX 980 and GTX 1080 support higher settings and higher performance, but that lower-powered GPU is worth noticing.

Read full article @ OCC

WD Blue SSD Review: Aggressively-Priced Solid State Storage

Western Digital is the king of the hard drive market but up to now has been a non-factor in SSDs. However, with its purchase of solid state storage giant, SanDisk, the company immediately leaped to the forefront of the market in one fell swoop.

Now the company is entering the consumer/commercial SSD market with WD Green and WD Blue SSDs, using a naming scheme borrowed from its hard drive line and technology acquired from SanDisk. WD's Green lineup is for entry level PCs meant to have a low power draw, while the Blue SSD series is aimed at mainstream consumers. Both series are available in both 2.5″ SATA III and M.2 SATA III form factors.

Read full article @ HotHardware