| The A_List Game Box |
| Gamers can do without Hyperthreading and save $100 or more, compared to an i7. The K version is unlocked for easier overclocking. |
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| Labs Components Asrock Z97 Anniversary |
| The Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition is a gift from Intel to overclockers, delivering astonishing raw frequency performance provided you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty. ASRock has come up with a rather savvy marketing manoeuvre to capitalise on the excitement around the G3258, in the form of the ASRock Z97 Anniversary motherboard. |
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| Asus Geforce GTX 780 Ti Matrix Platinum Review |
| ASUS Republic of Gamers has been known to bring out motherboards and graphics cards that are top-of-the- line with a heavy emphasis on overclocking. Sticking to this mantra, ASUS ROG has come out with a beast of a card that's based on NViDiA's GeForce GTX 780 Ti; welcome the Matrix 780 Ti Platinum. |
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| MSI GX70 – Ignore The Names, Enjoy The Rest |
| AMD's quad-cored A10-5750M APU is paired with 16GB of DDR3 memory, while the storage combination of a 128GB SSD and 1TB mechanical drive delivers a useful combination of both speed and space. |
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| All You Need To Know About Water - Cooling (Part 2) |
| Another prime heat creator in today’s PCs are the power components found on the motherboard, such as the MOSfets and chokes. These get especially hot when the motherboard is used to overclock the CPU, as their workload is increased massively, even with just minor power increases to the CPU socket. |
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| All You Need To Know About Water - Cooling (Part 1) |
| Take a look under the hood of any performance vehicle and you’ll find the engine within cooled by water. H2O is one of the most efficient materials at removing heat, yet our PCs still use primitive air cooling instead. |
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| Back In Black - The GeForce GTX Titan Black (Part 3) |
| Given the specifications and price, it'd be easy to assume that the Titan Black is the fastest gaming product ever released by NVIDIA. However, that assumption would be incorrect, as it's basically the same speed as a GeForce GTX 780 Ti when it comes to cranking through games. |
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| Back In Black - The GeForce GTX Titan Black (Part 2) |
| Like the original Titan, NVIDIA has barred its customers from mounting their own cooling solutions to the Titan Black. Gigabyte sent us the GV-NTITANBLKGHZ-6GD-B Titan Black to review, which will arrive with another cooler in the box, ready for intrepid tweakers to mount if they so desire. |
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| Back In Black - The GeForce GTX Titan Black (Part 1) |
| One thousand, four hundred and ninety nine dollars. This princely sum is the price of Gigabyte’s newest product based on NVIDIA’s all-conquering GK110 GPU, the same chip that debuted a year ago in the original GTX Titan. |
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| State-Of-The-Art Standards – SATA Express (Part 4) |
| The alternative software foundation that SATA Express PCI-E devices will support is NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), which was built from the ground up to support SSDs. NVMe can handle up to 64,000 queues with 64,000 simultaneous commands each. |
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| State-Of-The-Art Standards – SATA Express (Part 3) |
| SATA Express PCI-E devices need a software foundation that facilitates the exchange of data between them and the attached host system memory. Traditional SATA-based storage devices use AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface), which was supported in Microsoft’s operating systems starting with Windows Vista. |
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| State-Of-The-Art Standards – SATA Express (Part 2) |
| Each PCI-E lane has the bandwidth to handle bidirectional 250MBps transfer rates. Four years after PCI-E’s debut, the 2.0 revision effectively doubled the data rate for each PCI-E lane—500MBps in each direction. |
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| State-Of-The-Art Standards – SATA Express (Part 1) |
| Whenever components available at retail begin to approach the theoretical bandwidth limits defined by the protocols they use, you can bet a new standard or a faster revision of the current one is on the verge of ratification by the appropriate industry associations. That’s exactly the case with SATA. |
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| The Excellent EVGA Card - PNY GTX 780 Ti XlR8 |
| Graphics card prices are ridiculous right now. We needed to get that out the way at the top of this review because we’re about to suggest that PNY’s latest overclocked version of the GTX 780 Ti is actually good value. At $850. |
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| The Inaugural Maxwell Card - NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti (Part 3) |
| The frame buffer is another part of the story though. The GTX 750 Ti is running with a pair of 64-bit memory controllers for a total 128-bit aggregate memory bus to run its 2GB GDDR5 VRAM. That doesn’t seem like much, but on a mainstream part it can be expensive to double the memory controllers in terms of both cost and power. |
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| The Inaugural Maxwell Card - NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti (Part 2) |
| In terms of the architecture, Maxwell inevitably shares DNA with Kepler and Fermi, being made up of many little CUDA cores for that parallel processing goodness we know and love. It’s the management and arrangement that’s different. The big change is in the streaming microprocessor. |
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| The Inaugural Maxwell Card - NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti (Part 1) |
| NVIDIA is calling this GTX 750 Ti Maxwell’s first generation of GPUs, but in these days of Early access it feels almost like a beta release of a graphics architecture. That may sound a little unfair – this isn’t some half-baked release or a buggy silicon setup. |
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| The Best Motherboards For $138 Or Less (Part 2) - LGA 1150 Motherboards |
| Like the later Lynx series, these motherboards all use the DMI 2.0 Bus Interface with a 4GB/s speed, but they differ wildly in terms of what SATA and USB support you get and if they support legacy PCI. If you must have a legacy PCI slot, I'd go for a Q77 board and otherwise I'd pick Z77. Some of the older Cougar Point designs have very few SATA ports for no obvious reason other than Intel dividing the market up. |
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| The Best Motherboards For $138 Or Less (Part 1) |
| All parts in this series support FDI and use the DMI 2.0 Bus Interface with a 4GB/s bus speed. The slightly shocking thing is that these chipsets don't support PCI 3.0, because on the Haswell CPU this is done in the processor, not the chipset. |
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| The Excellent EVGA Card - PNY GTX 780 Ti XlR8 |
| Graphics card prices are ridiculous right now. We needed to get that out the way at the top of this review because we’re about to suggest that PNY’s latest overclocked version of the GTX 780 Ti is actually good value. At $850. |
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| Lap Test – Asus Z87-Deluxe |
| ASUS has entered a new direction with its latest mainstream boards, as the company welcomes a more inviting gold-black paint job to symbolize an insistence on delivering high standards for innovation. |
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| Lap Test – MSI GeForce GTX 780 Ti Gaming 3G |
| MSI continues to bring in new products for its Gaming series, specifically motherboards and graphics cards. Adding to the lineup is the MSI GeForce GTX 780 Ti Gaming 3G graphics card. This latest addition sports a fully unlocked and overclocked Kepler GK110 GPU. |
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| ASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 780 Review |
| The Poseidon draws its name from the Greek God of the Sea. By letting you choose how you want to cool your card, ASUS has provided solutions and placed them directly into the hands of the gamer. If not for the two pipes that stick out at the top of the card, you could very well have thought that it was just a slightly, out-of-the-ordinary graphics card; a typical run-of-the-mill, custom- cooled graphics card that ASUS had produced. |
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| GIGABYTE BRIX - Gaming Handheld Gaming, Reinvented (Part 2) |
| For wired connectivity, the front panel offers a headphone output and two USB 3.0 ports, while the rear panel offers two more USB 3.0 ports, an Ethernet port, and the HDMI and mini DisplayPort video outputs. Those concerned about the security of the miniature gaming system will like that GIGABYTE includes a Kensington lock slot. |
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| GIGABYTE BRIX - Gaming Handheld Gaming, Reinvented (Part 1) |
| Here at CPU, we love LAN parties. Truth be told, there’s really not much we’d rather be doing than gaming all day (and night), surrounded by friends and fellow gamers. But there’s one thing about LAN parties we don’t like—lugging our rigs to the venue. |
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| Kaveri APU - AMD A10-7700K |
| AMD’s Kaveri APU finally turned up last month, bringing with it the promise of a new dawn of heterogeneous processors blurring the line between graphics and computational silicon. |
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| Cooler Master HAF Stacker Case |
| There are a total of three boxed products in the range. The 915R and 915F are both mini-ITX form factor cases, each with a slightly different interior layout, while the 935 combo delivers both a full tower case and a 915R in the one package. |
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| NZXT Phantom 530 – Shiny Case |
| In the past when we’ve looked at NZXT products, they’ve had a distinctly... budget feel. They’ve always been nearly perfectly adequate, but simply unable to compete with the monsters of case design such as Corsair and Silverstone. |
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| GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 750 Ti |
| It’s true, we spill more ink writing about flagship GPUs, architectures, and the high-priced graphics cards that house them than we do about entry-level and mainstream cards. But for a vast majority of the general PC gaming populace, the mainstream graphics card is what will ultimately end up in their systems. |
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| Cooler Master HAF Stacker Range |
| So, it doesn’t quite seem nearly as strong a phrase as we need to explain the sheer niche value of Cooler Master’s smashing together of the HAF (which stands for high air flow) series and the modular Stacker series. |
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| CPU Water Cooler Antec Kühler H2O 650 |
| Our hearts belong to the Corsair H75 this issue when it comes to traditional 120mm iquid coolers, but Antec’s single fan model gives it one hell of a run for its money, despite some markedly different design calls. |
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| CPU Water Cooler Corsair HYDRO Series H75 |
| The Hydro series H75 liquid cooler shares much of its DNA with the H105 tested last issue. But where the beefier H105 model fitted two 120mm fans along a 272.5mm radiator, for maximum heat dispersal, the slimline H75 features a 120mm radiator and two fans on either side. |
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| Cooler Master HAF Stacker 935 (Part 2) |
| There’s very little you can’t build with these units working together, but in the event that you’d like to add more room, you can easily add another 915R or 915F, and you can add them above or below the 935 and above or below the 915R, depending on your needs. |
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| Cooler Master HAF Stacker 935 (Part 1) |
| As its name suggests, Cooler Master’s HAF Stacker PC case system is a fusion of design elements from the HAF (High Air Flow) and Stacker case families. It’s also a set of modular case units that you can combine in a variety of combinations and configurations to build just about any kind of PC you can dream up. |
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| AMD Kameri APU A10-7850K |
| If you’re expecting AMD’s new APU to blow Intel’s products out of the water when looking at raw CPU performance, you’re going to be disappointed. There are three new APUs on the way – the A8-7600K is due in a few months, while the A10-7700K and A10-7850K are both ready now. |
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| Build Your Own Mini-ITX Marvel (Part 3) |
| With your chosen USB media attached, boot from it via the BIOS and go through the setup procedure. Once this is completed, the most important thing will be to make sure that you have web connectivity. Windows is pretty good at getting that set up, but you may have to navigate to your mobo’s download page to get the latest drivers on another machine first. |
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| Build Your Own Mini-ITX Marvel (Part 2) |
| If you’re going with a standard SATA SSD/HDD then now’s the time to secure that to your case. Manufacturers of small form factor chassis often devise innovative ways to attach your drive, though they may not necessarily be particularly easy to fit. |
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