Here today's reviews and articles, including Understanding Email Bounce Messages @ Hardware Secrets, SilverStone DS322 Dual Bay USB 3.0 Enclosure Review, HOT Raspberry Pi - A DIY Mini Desktop PC Build Project, Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost OC WindForce 2X Review, and A4Tech Bloody Gun3 UC3 Headshot V8 Gaming Mouse Review - $40 For The Ultimate Package
Understanding Email Bounce Messages @ Hardware Secrets
MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Motherboard Review @ PC Perspective
REVIEW: PowerColor 7790 Turbo Duo @ PureOverclock
MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Series Motherboard Review @ Legit Reviews
Cooltek Coolcube Maxi Black @ techPowerUp
SilverStone DS322 Dual Bay USB 3.0 Enclosure Review @ ThinkComputers.org
Sony VAIO T Series 15 Review @ TechReviewSource.com
A1 Tunguska 2.0 and v7.1 Review @ Vortez
Sandberg iConheli Bluetooth Helicopter @ NikKTech
HOT Raspberry Pi - A DIY Mini Desktop PC Build Project @ HotHardware
News: HGST packs 1.5TB into 9.5-mm, three-platter Travelstar 5K1500 notebook drive @ The Tech Report
Adata DashDrive Elite UE700 32GB Flash Drive Review @ Ninjalane
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost OC WindForce 2X Review @ Guru3D
Metro: Last Light Performance, Benchmarked @ Techspot
Seidio Active Case Combo for HTC One Review @ TestFreaks
Seagate Desktop HDD.15 4TB Hard Drive Review @ Hardware Canucks
Luxa2 P1 7000mAh High Capacity Battery & Charger Review @ OCC
GUNNAR Intercept Gaming Eyewear Video Review with Kaeyi Dream @ HardwareHeaven.com
A4Tech Bloody Gun3 UC3 Headshot V8 Gaming Mouse Review - $40 For The Ultimate Package @ TechnologyX
Understanding Email Bounce Messages @ Hardware Secrets
It is very frustrating to send an email to someone and see the message bounce back. In this tutorial, we will explain the meaning of the most common bounce messages, show where the problem is located, and how to fix it.Read more: Understanding Email Bounce Messages @ Hardware Secrets
MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Motherboard Review @ PC Perspective
With the Z77A-GD65 Gaming motherboard, MSI takes is award-winning Intel Z77-based board design and melds it with a Killer - a Killer NIC that is. MSI integrated the Killer e2205 GigE NIC into the board's design for the ultimate solution for online gaming. The Killer NIC is well known in gaming circles for its superior hardware-based network traffic prioritization engine, making it a natural integration choice for a top-end gaming board. We put the MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming through our rigorous suite of tests to measures is performance and were not disappointed. At a retail price of $179, this board is a steal.Read more: MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Motherboard Review @ PC Perspective
REVIEW: PowerColor 7790 Turbo Duo @ PureOverclock
AMD’s current 7000 generation cards have matured rather nicely for the most part, and now we’re looking at another Radeon HD 7790. This one is a PowerColor card, the Turbo Duo specifically, and it’s positioned in the market as a more budget-oriented choice.Read more: REVIEW: PowerColor 7790 Turbo Duo @ PureOverclock
The the recent release of the GTX 650 Ti Boost, It seems AMD has this card straddling the vanilla GTX 650 Ti and the Boost models, with a price range in the $150 bracket, targeted at mainstream consumers who want some moderate gaming without breaking the bank.
MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Series Motherboard Review @ Legit Reviews
Micro Star International, more commonly known as MSI recently sent us over one of their latest Intel Z77 Gaming motherboards. Part of the recently released Gaming series the MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming is meant for those looking for top tier gaming performance. The MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming is the top rung of MSI's Gaming Series, and today we will get to spend some time with it and put it through the paces! Read on to see how well it does!Read more: MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Series Motherboard Review @ Legit Reviews
When it comes to performance the MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming motherboard didn't disappoint. We ran the synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark, as well as the real world gaming in Battlefield 3 where we use fraps. Not once were we let down with the scores or gaming experience while playing through the levels. While looking at the peripherals like Audio performance, SATA III 6Gbps performance, and SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance everything was right where we would expect to find it. Overclocking on the MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming motherboard was a breeze...
Cooltek Coolcube Maxi Black @ techPowerUp
Cooltek has expanded the Coolcube line with two new cases. On one hand, the ultra-compact Coolcube Mini and, on the other, the mATX Coolcube Maxi. We had the chance to look at the larger of the two, which cannot only hold a larger motherboard, but also more hard drives and bigger components.Read more: Cooltek Coolcube Maxi Black @ techPowerUp
SilverStone DS322 Dual Bay USB 3.0 Enclosure Review @ ThinkComputers.org
Sometimes it can be hard to find an easy, affordable and reliable solution for external PC backups in one product. I have used several HDD enclosures and NAS products from several different makers and never really fell in love with any of them. Most of them have extremely complicated menus that you have to sift through to try and figure out how to change the RAID setup of the device. Then you have to wait several hours just for it to format a few hundred Gigs of space. In the past, when deciding on a RAID capable enclosure you really need to prioritize what is important to you and ask yourself a few questions. How much does it cost? How reliable it is? How easy is it to use? Keep all of those questions in mind as you read this review and I think you will be pleasantly surprised with this enclosure.Read more: SilverStone DS322 Dual Bay USB 3.0 Enclosure Review @ ThinkComputers.org
Sony VAIO T Series 15 Review @ TechReviewSource.com
The all-new Sony VAIO T Series 15 has an attractive design, a beautiful 1080p HD touch display, long battery life and very good performance. It does lack a Blu-ray drive, which would have put it over the top, and the touch pad wasn't the best.Read more: Sony VAIO T Series 15 Review @ TechReviewSource.com
A1 Tunguska 2.0 and v7.1 Review @ Vortez
Founded in 2011, Attitude One are newcomers in the market and have entered with an array of peripherals aimed at gamers. The Tunguska gaming headset line has a bold and striking design backed by an aggressive branding, hoping to capture the attention of people looking for that vivid and extroverted gaming aesthetic. The Stereo version comes in three flavours, Orange, Green and white, while the v7.1 USB version has the choice of White/Blue or White/Orange. Let's look over the details and move onto testing.Read more: A1 Tunguska 2.0 and v7.1 Review @ Vortez
Sandberg iConheli Bluetooth Helicopter @ NikKTech
Women like to think that all men regardless of age always remain children deep inside and they just might be on to something since we all enjoy playing our favorite game titles alone, with our friends and perhaps more times with unknown people from around the globe (even if they are not right however who am i to argue especially when something works in my favor?). Remote controlled cars used to be amongst my favorite hobbies around 10 years ago (i still own a Mugen 2hp 1/20 RC car) but due to the fact that there aren't that many certified tracks where i live (the nearest one is like 60km away) i lost interest. Then i turned to RC helicopters but since the really good ones were quite large and also needed fuel to run i soon realized that once again i needed to operate them in specific places which were quite far as well (the law doesn't allow people using them on rooftops unfortunately). Such limitations however don't apply for all the small Bluetooth RC Helicopters that have flooded the market lately and one of those is the iConheli by Sandberg which has been in our hands for a full month of testing both indoors and outdoors.Read more: Sandberg iConheli Bluetooth Helicopter @ NikKTech
HOT Raspberry Pi - A DIY Mini Desktop PC Build Project @ HotHardware
We recently set out to design a mini desktop computer with the wildly popular Raspberry Pi single board computer. The Raspberry Pi is a Linux-driven, ARM processor-based micro computer that is known for its low cost and small size. People use the device for a variety of projects, from micro-servers to low cost media players. Basically, our goal was to turn what is currently one of the cheapest bare-bones computer boards into a fully enclosed mini desktop computer that could be taken anywhere without the need for cabling or setup. One of the high level goals of this project was also to learn about programming with Linux and get a good feel for it with the Debian distribution.Read more: HOT Raspberry Pi - A DIY Mini Desktop PC Build Project @ HotHardware
News: HGST packs 1.5TB into 9.5-mm, three-platter Travelstar 5K1500 notebook drive @ The Tech Report
HGST's Travelstar 5K1500 is the first 9.5-mm notebook drive to offer 1.5TB of storage. We have the goods on the unique three-platter design that allows the drive to offer 50% more capacity than its rivals.Read more: News: HGST packs 1.5TB into 9.5-mm, three-platter Travelstar 5K1500 notebook drive @ The Tech Report
Adata DashDrive Elite UE700 32GB Flash Drive Review @ Ninjalane
Portable storage is available in many different formats from external hard drives, mobile phones and even optical disks. Of the many options available there is one format stands above the rest and has quickly become de facto standard in portable storage called Flash. Flash storage isn't new and started its popular career in digital cameras due to cost and manufacturing constraints. These days you can find flash memory in just about everything including USB storage devices like the one featured in this review.Read more: Adata DashDrive Elite UE700 32GB Flash Drive Review @ Ninjalane
The DashDrive Elite UE700 from Adata is not unlike other flash devices on the market. It comes in a variety of storage capacities and features a USB interface enabling it to be used on any modern PC of the past 10 years. What makes the UE700 special is the new USB 3.0 interface and large capacity.
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost OC WindForce 2X Review @ Guru3D
The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost edition. It is their answer to the Radeon HD 7790 that AMD unleashed recently. Is entry level finally reaching mid-range? Can the card play your most favorite games at 1920x1080/1200? Well, yes it does, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti deserves some explanation though, as the entire 650 range itself now is getting a little flooded with products that differ quite a bit from each other.Read more: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost OC WindForce 2X Review @ Guru3D
See when you take the regular GeForce GTX 650 it comes castrated a bit with just 384 shader cores whereas the regular Ti model is released with a far better 768 CUDA cores (shader processors) and a 925 MHz GPU clock (for the reference products). So that's already nearly double the processing performance and allows the product to compete with the Radeon HD 7770. With the Radeon HD 7790 being roughly a third faster than 7770, NVIDIA needed to out a product that can keep up with that rather significant performance boost -- and as such the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost edition now is introduced. So budget graphics card series for gamers therefore just got a little more interesting. Albeit we say that 175 USD/EUR should not exactly really carry the mark of being low budget. With that price tag the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost positions itself smack-down in-between AMD's Radeon HD 7790 and 7850, and that really is a comfortable spot to be in for many of you as Full HD gaming (a monitor resolution of 1920x1080) is now becoming a viable option. Obviously NVIDIA did not want to make yet another separate chip. So The GTX 650 Ti Boost is the very same one used on the regular GTX 660, yup the GTX 650 Ti Boost is using the "GK106" silicon opposed to the GK107 being used on the regular 650 model (it's confusing as heck, we know). The GK106 silicon is armed with 768 active shader processor cores divided over four processor clusters running at a 980 MHz base clock on the reference products. That means that the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost packs decent enough punch. There is a distinct difference though, Boost or better yet, dynamics clocking has been added to this model. That means instead of running a strict 925 MHz base clock on the regular GTX 650 Ti, the Boost edition will now have a base-clock of 980 MHz, but will be allowed to boost to 1033 MHz. Realistically though, the Boost functionality is dependant of many factors like power usage, heat and temperatures of the GPU. So yeah, this GPU will run quite a bit of games at almost 1100 MHz all by itself as well.
Metro: Last Light Performance, Benchmarked @ Techspot
When the Metro 2033 was released in 2010 it contributed to raise the PC graphics bar making good use of the latest DirectX 11 rendering technologies such as depth of field and tessellation along with high resolution textures.Read more: Metro: Last Light Performance, Benchmarked @ Techspot
Before that little was known about the developers of Metro. 4A Games was founded by Oles Shiskovtsov and Aleksandr Maksimchuk, former programmers at GSC Game World, who left about a year before the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It's no coincidence that Metro 2033's visuals bared resemblance to those of S.T.A.L.K.E.R, though we would argue that they were better. Both Shiskovtsov and Maksimchuk had worked on the development of the X-Ray engine that powers GSC's first person shooter.
Seidio Active Case Combo for HTC One Review @ TestFreaks
The HTC One is a remarkable phone, it’s a nicely made device, just gorgeous really, but it’s thin and I think it’s rather fragile. I know I wouldn’t want to drop it from any height at all without fear of damage. Such a nice looking device as the HTC One needs to be protected, the phone just looks very nice and it would be a shame for anything to damage those great looks so this is certainly one phone that needs a rugged and durable case to protect it to keep it looking so good. One such case is what I have for review today from Seidio, the case is the Active and what I have is actually the combination set which actually includes the case and a handy holster so it will always be handy right on your hip. The case itself is two parts, an inner soft rubber layer and an outer hard plastic layer which together provide excellent protection for the phone inside. The case also has a built-in metal kickstand so you can set the phone up and view it easily and comfortably. The second part of the set is the holster which is made from hard plastic, it features a spring lock to hold the phone in place no matter what you’re doing. The case does have one small flaw though, read on to learn more….Read more: Seidio Active Case Combo for HTC One Review @ TestFreaks
Seagate Desktop HDD.15 4TB Hard Drive Review @ Hardware Canucks
Seagate’s hard drive lineup is in the midst of some significant changes and their new Desktop HDD.15 4TB drive is the headline act. Gone are the Barracuda, Constellation, Barracuda XT and Momentus lines of yesteryear, all of which have been replaced with a simplified naming scheme. For example, the Barracuda 7200.14 lineup is now being rebranded Desktop HDD.15 while the Baracuda XT series will now carry the SSHD branding. These changes are being carried out in parallel with the inclusion of new, next generation drives like the Desktop HDD.15 4TB in today’s review.Read more: Seagate Desktop HDD.15 4TB Hard Drive Review @ Hardware Canucks
This unique drive’s design has been reworked from the ground up and is radically different than Seagate’s previous fourteen generations, allowing the HDD.15 to take an entirely different approach to consumer storage. The new philosophy can best be summed up in two words: efficient performance.
While power consumption hasn't been overly affected, quite a bit of work is being focused on optimizing data throughput and efficiency. Even acoustics have been analyzed and improved, perfectly avoiding the loud, clicking drives that Seagate released a few years ago.
Luxa2 P1 7000mAh High Capacity Battery & Charger Review @ OCC
The LUXA2 P1 7000mAh High Capacity Battery & Charger is a sleek looking and solidly built piece of hardware. The silver unit I reviewed delivered exactly what it claimed, with the only casualty being the carrying pouch that did not survive normal usage. Equipped with a 7000mAh battery and two USB charging ports, it will provide multiple full charges for smaller portable devices (such as iPhones) and a decent percentage of on-screen time for more power-demanding tablets. The shape and weight of the LUXA2 P1 7000mAh High Capacity Battery & Charger makes it fit easily into any regular laptop bag without much fuss.Read more: Luxa2 P1 7000mAh High Capacity Battery & Charger Review @ OCC
GUNNAR Intercept Gaming Eyewear Video Review with Kaeyi Dream @ HardwareHeaven.com
Today Kaeyi Dream takes a look at a pair of Gunnar Optiks named the Intercept. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay on top of all our latest video reviews.Read more: GUNNAR Intercept Gaming Eyewear Video Review with Kaeyi Dream @ HardwareHeaven.com
A4Tech Bloody Gun3 UC3 Headshot V8 Gaming Mouse Review - $40 For The Ultimate Package @ TechnologyX
The device that caught our eye was A4Tech’s Bloody Gun3 Headshot V8 optical gaming mouse. Along with the proprietary ‘Ultra Core 3’ software, A4Tech claims “you can adjust shooting rate and recoil suppression to rectify trajectory and increase shooting accuracy. UC3 lets you defeat enemy and win the games effortlessly. The Multi-Core system allows you to enjoy games without limitation!”Read more: A4Tech Bloody Gun3 UC3 Headshot V8 Gaming Mouse Review - $40 For The Ultimate Package @ TechnologyX
Of course these are the usual claims aimed at the gamer – hardcore or casual. We would be lying if we said most people do not buy into it; oddly though, we find ourselves a bit intrigued. Unlike baseless statements of peripherals making a gamer better – as we believe ultimately that skill will define a gamer, not necessarily the hardware – A4Tech’s Bloody V8 actually comes with unique proprietary software that seems to back their claims…although advertising “1ms response time” seems unbelievable.