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Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

Cooler Master GeminII S524 Ver.2 CPU Cooler Review
Doom (2016) running on GTX1080 (Video showcase)
First AMD Zen chips may not be quad-core parts
iBuyPower MEK Mechanical Keyboard Review
Install Apache2 with PHP 7 support in Ubuntu 16.04 server
Linux Mint 18 Is Getting a Brand New Look
Microsoft EMET 5.5 review - The goodness abides
My Month Without a Smartphone
Nvidia editors day event gallery featuring GTX1080
Three high-end Z170-motherboards: comparison test
TRENDnet TPL-421E2K Powerline 1200 AV2 Adapter Kit Review



Cooler Master GeminII S524 Ver.2 CPU Cooler Review

Calgary has had a minor winter this year, with only a few days where it was super cold. Since about February, the temperature has been rising constantly, and most of the snow melted early. With summer now fast approaching and much warmer days coming ahead, there is so much more to do outside -- especially since university final exams are over. The extra time is great to go biking in a forest close to my house. During the summer months, especially on weekends, the forest gets very busy. It is great for walks or for biking, and I have even seen some people try to fish in the river, although I have no idea if they have ever caught anything. Even though I have been spending more time outside, I still have to deal with the entire house heating up quite a bit inside. Fortunately, I do live in the basement, and it is usually much cooler downstairs compared to upstairs. But my computer runs all day, it actually heats up my room quite a bit. In the winter, it was not as big an issue, but now with summer around the corner, the heat generated by my PC became much more noticeable. As such, a good heatsink is important to keep the exhaust heat away from my CPU rather than with the CPU. Today, we have the Cooler Master GeminII S524 Ver.2, a new air cooler from a company familiar to all of us here at APH Networks. Read on to find out how it performs!

Read full article @ APH Networks

Doom (2016) running on GTX1080 (Video showcase)

KitGuru had an invite to the Nvidia Editors Day Event last week, and the guys in green brought some of the ID software development team over to showcase Doom (2016). We managed to get a front row seat as Doom (2016) was running on a massive $100,000+ LED wall via the Vulkan API. Sadly the resolution was limited to 1080p, but the ID guys did uncap the frame rate part way through to highlight frame rate improvements from the upcoming flagship Nvidia GPU. One of the engineers Tom was playing the game as we watched it and you can just make him out bottom left in the video below. Sadly they didn’t detail the system specifications – apart from the fact it was powered by the upcoming Nvidia GTX1080 GPU.

Read full article @ KitGuru

First AMD Zen chips may not be quad-core parts

In May 2015, we reported that AMD’s first Zen CPUs, launching in Q4 2016, would most likely be quad-core chips based on a presentation slide showing the company’s Zen core units scaling up to four cores with shared L3 cache. According to new information released one year later, this may not be the case and, the company could be preparing to launch eight and six-core variants in a tight efficiency race against Intel's 'Kaby Lake' CPUs.

AMD’s official “Zen-based Quad Core Unit” slide” was released May 6, 2015 during its Financial Analyst Day when the company claimed its new platform will have a more competitively-focused IPC design, higher core counts, lower latency caches and will be based on second-generation 14nm Low-Power Plus (LPP) process technology.

Read full article @ Fudzilla

iBuyPower MEK Mechanical Keyboard Review

The iBuyPower MEK is actually a rebranded Gamdias Hermes Lite. It comes with TTC Red switches, and the price is right, but this keyboard has some issues.

A trend among many companies these days is to extend their branding and overall reach by adding nicely-appointed peripherals to their other offerings. Custom system builder iBuyPower has followed suit by "making" a keyboard, although it's not really making anything; it's rebranding and selling the Gamidas Hermes Lite.

I wrote earlier about Gamdias' decision to roll with TTC switches and iBuyPower's in-house QA testing. In sum, the cost of TTC switches appears to be significantly lower than Cherry, and there were no issues with TTC filling orders as fast as the OEM needed. iBuyPower's staff of former pro and competitive gamers were apparently sufficiently satisfied with the quality and performance of the TTC Reds. And so it's come to pass.

The result is a keyboard that portends to offer the benefits of mechanical switches at a comparatively low price. Inevitably, there will be some high-end features missing from a budget keyboard like this one, but those bells and whistles might just be noise, anyway.

Read full article @ Toms Hardware

Install Apache2 with PHP 7 support in Ubuntu 16.04 server

Sponsored Link The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

Read full article @ Ubuntu Geek

Linux Mint 18 Is Getting a Brand New Look

A newer, flatter GTK theme will ship as part of Linux Mint 18 ‘Sarah.’

Showing off progress made on the theme in a new blog post, project lead Clement Lefebvre says the new “Mint Y” theme is inspired by recent design trends towards flatter UI elements. It is based off of the (incredibly) popular Arc GTK theme.

Mint users content with the current design do not need to panic, though.

Although the newer, flatter theme is to ship as part of the next major release of the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution it won’t be the default system theme

Read full article @ OMG! Ubuntu!

Microsoft EMET 5.5 review - The goodness abides

I've written a short review of Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit v5.5, covering installation setup, system and application configuration, trust certificates, other options and new features, some small bugs, and more. Take a look.

Read full article @ Dedoimedo

My Month Without a Smartphone

You've probably seen plenty of "I spent a week without my smartphone" articles based on short social experiments. Two things make this article different from all those others. First, I've been without my device for over a month now, not a week. And second, I didn't choose to go this long without my phone, it was taken from me -- in a way.

Read full article @ Techspot

Nvidia editors day event gallery featuring GTX1080

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia launched GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 today in Austin, Texas.

The venue, Emo’s club, was packed with Press, analysts and an army of Nvidia fanboys (and girls) who had won entry to the event. It was heaving.

Read full article @ KitGuru

Three high-end Z170-motherboards: comparison test

While we have discussed a few high-end skylake motherboards in the past, those were mostly intended for overclockers and case modders. Today we will discuss three new high-end boards from three manufacturers: Asus, Supermicro and MSI.

The most surprising name in this list is Supermicro. This manufacturer whom we mostly know from their server-motherboards wants to fight its way onto the consumer market through the unofficial slogan ''consumer motherboards of server grade quality''. The C7Z170-OCE is marketed towards overclockers and other consumers with high requirements. Naturally, we are highly interested in what Supermicro has to offer.

Besides that, we also incorporated a new version of the ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme and the MSI Z170A Gaming M9 Ack into our comparison test. The latter is not particularly targeted at overclockers and is, for example, a competitor to the ASUS Z170-Deluxe, while the Maximus VIII Extreme Assembly brings, among other things, a new colour scheme and a 10Gbit-networking card to the table.

Read full article @ Hardware.Info

TRENDnet TPL-421E2K Powerline 1200 AV2 Adapter Kit Review

It may not finish in the top three fastest powerline adapter kits of our charts but the TPL-421E2K kit by TRENDnet is still a solid choice for people looking to expand their local network by using the electrical wiring.

Read full article @ NikKTech