Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

25 Stocking Stuffers For Every Tech Lover
Apple iPhone 6S Review - iPhone 6S Versus iPhone 5
ASUS Maximus VIII Impact Review
ASUS Strix 2.0 Multi-Platform Gaming Headset Review
AZZA Zen 8100 Review
be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 CPU Cooler Review
Corsair Carbide Quiet 600Q Chassis Review
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming 4GB Review
PNY AnarchyX 2800MHz DDR4 16GB (4x4GB) Quad Channel Memory Kit Review
Razer Mamba (2015)
Roccat Kiro Modular Ambidextrous Gaming Mouse Review
Samsung Pro 950 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD Review
Synology DiskStation DS716+ Review
Thecus N5810 5-bay NAS Review
TP-Link Touch P5 review: touchscreen router

25 Stocking Stuffers For Every Tech Lover

Christmas is almost here! It is this time of year where we are buying last minute gifts for friends and family. We all have that tech lover in our family and sometimes they can be very hard to buy for. Well luckily for you we’ve put together a list of 25 great stocking stuffers for every type of tech lover out there. Many of these products we’ve actually reviewed too and we can fully recommend them! So let’s jump right in and see what we think are some of the best tech stocking stuffers this year!

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Apple iPhone 6S Review - iPhone 6S Versus iPhone 5

Christmas is just one week away and if you are one of those last minute shoppers you might still be looking for a gift. The Apple iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus has been out for a few months now and there are a number of holiday promotions available right now to help entice people to purchase one of the new models. AT&T is even doing a buy one get one (BOGO) offer on the iPhone 6S series that might make it a great gift item that will allow you to gift yourself one as well. There have been a literally thousands of iPhone 6s reviews posted since the smartphone debuted in September 2015, so we are going to try to do our phone review a little different and compare it to the aging iPhone 5 that came out in September 2012.

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

ASUS Maximus VIII Impact Review

Although we have already had the privilege of reviewing one wonderfully compact ASUS Z170 motherboard - the Maximus VIII GENE - we still had our sights on something even smaller. With that in mind, we bring you today a review of the ASUS Maximus VIII Impact. This Mini ITX powerhouse falls under the Republics of Gamers (ROG) product line, so it represents the pinnacle of ASUS' engineering know-how, which really comes into play when you're dealing with such a small PCB footprint. You can either decide to leave features off or get clever with the design, and needless to say the Maximus VIII Impact is one clever piece of work.

First and foremost, thanks to the vertically-mounted Impact Power III module, this tiny Impact model is still outfitted with a robust power delivery subsystem in the form of an 8-phase digital power design, 60A MicroFine alloy chokes, and 10K Black Metallic Capacitors. This is basically the same high-end components that you see on all RoG models, so we expect precise power management and very high overclocking capabilities. Case in point, ASUS has certified this model's two DDR4 DIMM slots for speeds up to DDR4-4133. There's also an encyclopedia's worth of unique ASUS-only overclocking features onboard like KeyBot II, LN2 Mode, MemTweakIt, ProbeIt, and much more in the UEFI BIOS and various utilities.

The Impact features a single PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot, which is the only expansion slot on the motherboard if we discount the M.2 socket that is occupied by the pre-installed Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module. Speaking of which, this Wi-Fi module is a dual-band 802.11ac solution with MU-MIMO, Bluetooth 4.1, and a 2x2 external antenna. Those who prefer wired connections won't be disappointed since the single gigabit LAN port is powered by Intel's latest i219-V controller. When it comes to storage connectivity, this model features four SATA 6Gb/s ports, one NVMe U.2 connector, and both USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports courtesy on an Intel Alpine Ridge controller. Regrettably, there is no M.2 NGFF connector on this model, despite it seemingly being an ideal fit for this form factor.

Read full article @ Hardware Canucks

ASUS Strix 2.0 Multi-Platform Gaming Headset Review

ASUS have done a lot of good for the PC gaming community, not only have they created some of the best looking and performing graphics cards and motherboards on the market, but they’ve also created a stunning range of gaming peripherals. Their new STRIX range offers a lot of products that are packed full of gaming focused features and the DSP gaming headset is as feature packed as headsets come!

Having a high-performance gaming headset can reap huge rewards to your gaming experience, while I couldn’t say that most headsets will actually make you a better gamer, the ASUS STRIX DSP has a few features that could give you the edge in your favourite game. If you’re a fan of multiplayer games that have a team element, then you’ll certainly benefit from clear audio and a high-quality microphone. If you play at LAN gaming events or anywhere noisy, you’ll also benefit from environment noise cancelling technology. If you want surround sound to hear exactly where your enemies are coming from, it can make the difference between life and death (at least in the game). If you enhance the sound of your game to make footsteps or engine noises stand out more, it can make the difference between first and last place. Fortunately for gamers, the STRIX DSP ticks all these boxes and more, so let’s get right to it and see what it can really do!

The STRIX DSP is full of features, so it comes with a few extra cables to help you get the most out of the headset. You’ll find three high quality braided cables with gold-plated connectors; a full size USB cable to hook the base unit up to your PC as well as two mobile cables to provide support for the majority of handsets from brands like HTC, Apple, Samsung, Sony etc.

Read full article @ eTeknix

AZZA Zen 8100 Review

Onwards! Alright, it's not often I don't have much on the negative side to say. AZZA has a few minor flaws for an overall decent chassis, one of which is the fans. Having fans with a fixed speed is great for some quiet operations, but it doesn't help with a loaded case, as only so much unwanted hot air can be pushed out. An easy fix for AZZA would be to have them as 3-pin fans instead of being powered by 4-pin Molex cable. Any modern computer has a bunch of fan connectors on the motherboard, so it seems counter productive to force the consumer to use a bulky power connector.

Read full article @ OCC

be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 CPU Cooler Review

Today we will be looking at our latest upgrade to our older, but still efficient, Z77 build, by swapping out our all-in-one CPU cooler for the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3. From our past experience with be quiet! we can guarantee one thing before we even open the packaging, that is this product is going to be near-silent. Take a read to find out more!

Read full article @ TechnologyX

Corsair Carbide Quiet 600Q Chassis Review

Corsair may have been a little quiet in terms of chassis releases recently, but it’s because they’ve been busy cooking up something big! Their new chassis, the Corsair Carbide 600Q is designed for high-end systems and comes packed full of features that are sure to put a smile on any system builders face. With a focus on compatibility for high-end components, which are often quite large, without making a compromise on style or acoustic performance; we’re eager to take a closer look at what the latest from Corsair has to offer.

There are two models available for the new 600 chassis, a windowed model, and a quiet model. We have the quiet model at our disposal today, which comes with solid side panels that are lined with noise dampening materials. It’s certainly nice to have a choice between showing off your rig and that extra bit of silence, which one is best suited for your build is really a personal choice. For the most part, however, the quiet version is all but the same, with the exception of the right side panel.

Equipped with an inverted ATX layout, a great solution to allow direct airflow across you hardware, especially your graphics cards. There’s a good range of fan mounts for both 120mm and 140mm spacings, as well as a three-speed integrated fan controller, allowing you to further tune the systems cooling performance and acoustics. Of course, you’ll also find plenty of room for water cooling hardware, a good amount of storage drives, an ATX motherboard, long graphics cards and more!

Read full article @ eTeknix

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming 4GB Review

Xtreme Gaming, that's what Gigabyte calls its new flagship graphics cards. All the pixel accelerators which belong to this series features a powerful cooler, a complex PCB and a beefy factory OC. This sounds like an interesting combination and we're certainly curious to find out what this card can do on the following pages.

Read full article @ ocaholic

PNY AnarchyX 2800MHz DDR4 16GB (4x4GB) Quad Channel Memory Kit Review

Prior to the release of Intel’s Z170 platform, DDR4 memory prices remained extremely high compared to DDR3 equivalents and required the use of other expensive components designed primarily for professionals. Thankfully, DDR4 prices have plummeted and usually cost the same as DDR3 capacities or slightly less in some cases. So why consider DDR4? Firstly, the latest standard in computer memory operates using lower voltages and capable of reaching frequencies in excess of 3200MHz. Granted, this doesn’t make a difference in most gaming tasks, but it’s useful for rendering, video editing and other workloads. Additionally, the price variation between 2400MHz and 3000MHz is still relatively small and well worth your consideration.

For the mainstream market, most consumers buy memory kits on the basis of aesthetics. One particular example which looks absolutely fantastic is the PNY AnarchyX series and comes in a variety of speeds from 2400MHz up to 2800MHz. Today, we’ve decided to take a look at their highest frequency model and compare it to other premium kits. From a technical standpoint, the sample we received operates at 1.2V, and CAS16 which makes it an excellent choice. Given the memory’s impressive visual design, and specification, I expect it to perform rather well during our rigorous benchmarking procedure.

Read full article @ eTeknix

Razer Mamba (2015)

Its funny, as much as things change there are some areas where things stay the same. A great example of this is with a lot of today’s gaming mice. The fact is, with mice like the G5 and the Deathadder, they just got almost everything right. This is why we have seen both reintroduced multiple times with just small changes to keep up with what people are looking for. For the Deathadder, Razer’s biggest change or update was the introduction of the Razer Mamba. I first saw the Mamba back in 2009 at CES in a tiny little booth that wasn’t even on the show floor. Back then Razer was still a very small company. The reason I associate the Mamba with the Deathadder is they share a lot in their shape. Anyhow, here we are six and half years later and I finally have a Mamba in the office. Only this time around it’s not the original, this year Razer reintroduced the Mamba under the same name but with a new design. I’ve been testing it for almost a month and it’s not time to dig into its features and tell you all about it.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

Roccat Kiro Modular Ambidextrous Gaming Mouse Review

PC gaming is serious business, sure you can pick up virtually any old keyboard and mouse and make do with what you have, but having the right tools for the job can not only improve your performance while gaming, but also make the whole experience much more enjoyable. Enter the Roccat Kiro, a finely tuned gaming mouse that is designed for both left and right-handed gamers.

“Meet the Kiro, the bigger brother of the Lua. With its highly modular, superdextrous build, the game has been changed for ambidextrous mice. Perfectly optimizable for both left and right-handed gamers out of the box, it ticks all the boxes for gamers who thrive on a highly functional mouse with a clean, ergonomic design. With no-sweat parts comprised of a ROCCAT-pioneered soft-touch surface, the Kiro is the flexible ergonomic mouse that lets you win your way.”

Read full article @ eTeknix

Samsung Pro 950 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD Review

In this review I’ll be showing you the Samsung Pro 950 M.2 NVMe SSD. This is a first of its kind and combines two excellent technologies on a single chip. The first is M.2 which is a small form factor PCI Express expansion slot with 4x lanes of bandwidth followed by the popular NVMe storage interface.

Earlier this year Intel launched two Enterprise SSDs using NMVe. These drives have become an instant success with their synchronous reads alone and have since gotten everyone excited to be on the NVMe train. The real question, is a M.2 NVMe drive faster than a straight up M.2 PCI Express drive?

Let’s find out.

Read full article @ Hardware Asylum

Synology DiskStation DS716+ Review

Today for testing we have the new Synology 2-bay flagship NAS on hand, the DiskStation DS716+. Armed with Intel’s latest low powered quad-core system-on-chip the DS716+ boasts support for AES-NI encryption and on the fly H.264 4K to 1080p video transcoding. The real party trick of the DS716+ is its support for EXT4 and more importantly BTRFS...

Having recently reviewed Asustor’s new AS6202T, a 2-bay NAS sporting Intel’s Celeron N3150 system-on-chip using the Braswell architecture, we thought it about time Synology’s offering got the once over.

Read full article @ Legion Hardware

Thecus N5810 5-bay NAS Review

We review the all new N5810, this is a Linux based NAS unit from Thecus that is price competitive while offering great performance and features. Armed with an Intel Celeron quad-core 2.0 GHz based processor and 4GB of memory and the ability to upgrade to 8GB, this unit rocks hard with its 5 HDD bays. Power consumption sits at just 15 to 20 Watts with one HDD for this mini-me version of a home server.

While the dynamics have changed rapidly over the past few years, our demand for massive volume storage capacity has increased. With the help of WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet in general in our homes; we started evolving in our lifestyle and thus requirements. It's exactly in the lifestyle segments where the latest NAS units come in. NAS units are really small handy servers that not only function as storage devices, they are getting more functionality combined with ease of use as well. With prices going down, and everybody having high-speed Gigabit LAN Ethernet at home the market is slowly adapting and targeting NAS devices at a hard to convince and very money attentive consumer. One of the companies out there making a really good effort in offering you a handy and more affordable NAS unit is Thecis. We armed the N5810 with new (non-public) Beta ThecusOS 7.0 firmware and get a massively updated GUI in return. So yes we tested a unit priced competitive against the big guns in the industry like Qnap, Synology and Netgear. We went blank into this review as we never had tested their Linux version before, but armed with very good hardware and an excellent software suite the NAS is not only a fast file server, it's loaded with applications and media functionality as well. Today's tested model NAS unit has five swappable HDD bays, full RAID functionality, Gigabit Ethernet, USB (2.0/3.0) and then a heap of software functionality that blows you away completely. I mean this puppy can download torrents, has an FTP server, a MySQL server, a WWW server and well anything with the word server mentioned in it. It's compatible with major OSes including APPs you can use on your smart-phone, all combined with user and group based management, yeah a proper NAS. As you will observe the Thecus N5810 is the little brother of the Thecus N5810 PRO, the PRO model has a tiny UPS built in + some xtra other features, so the Thecus N5810 is slightly trimmed yet shares the similar DNA.

The Thecus N5810 has an implausible amount of tricks in it, from file-sharing, to usenet or torrent downloading, towards being a fully fetched CMS server, hey man whatever you need is served and it's doing so with an Intel Celeron J1900 2.0/2.41 Turbo GHz quad-core based box and a standard 4GB of memory. Power consumption sits at 15 to 20 Watts with one HDD.

Read full article @ Guru3D

TP-Link Touch P5 review: touchscreen router

Most innovation in the area of routers is focused on theoretical wireless speeds. Throughout the years AC1750 has evolved into AC1900, AC2350, AC2600 and these days it's known as AC3200. We've even seen the first AC5300 router during IFA. In practice you won't really notice the increases in speed, since they are aimed at a small target audience. The only exception is tri-band technology, which is already arguably faster for all clients. TP-Link chose not to innovate internally with the Touch P5, but for external innovation, a touchscreen. It goes without saying that we tested this one extensively.

A touchscreen on a router is relatively new, however TP-Link is not the first manufacturer who've used one in their routers. Securifi has been selling their Almond routers, which come with a touch screen, for quite some time now. The same story goes for Amped Wireless. As far as we know though, TP-Link is the first 'mainstream'-manufacturer who took on this concept, even though at first sight the Touch P5 unintentionally heavily reminded us of 2007's DIR-855 from D-Link. However, the OLED screen present on the DIR-855 was controlled by two buttons below it.

Read full article @ Hardware.Info