Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

Acer Predator 15 Gaming Notebook Review
Acer Predator X34 Review
AMD Unveils 64-Bit ARM-Based Opteron A1100 SoC With Integrated 10GbE For The Datacenter
Mionix Castor Optical Gaming Mouse Review
QNAP TS-451+ NAS Review
Server Hardening
The OpenGL Speed & Perf-Per-Watt From The Radeon HD 2000/3000 Series Through The R9 Fury

Acer Predator 15 Gaming Notebook Review

With their Predator gaming notebooks Acer has powerful devices its portfolio. On the following pages we're going to have a close look at their Predator 15 with 16GB RAM, GTX 970M graphics and 256GB NVMe SSD. Apparently we're curious to find out how this machine is going to perform.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Acer Predator X34 Review

Gaming at 3440x1440 is a sight to behold in most scenarios and I'm not so sure I could ever go back to mere 1080p gaming or even 1440p. Depending on the game, the size and slight curvature definitely increased immersion. While a few games lack native 3440x1440 support, you can always play in windowed mode at 1080p or 1440p. Unfortunately, I've never used any other 3440x1440 monitors to compare the Predator X34 to, so I cannot say if this is the best one for your money. You can find 3440x1440 monitors for as little as $800 without the bells and whistles, but throw in G-SYNC, the curvature, the four USB 3.0 ports, and more, and suddenly the $1300 price tag isn't all that unreasonable.

Read full article @ OCC

AMD Unveils 64-Bit ARM-Based Opteron A1100 SoC With Integrated 10GbE For The Datacenter

AMD is adding a new family of Opteron processors to its enterprise line-up today, the Opteron A1100. Unlike AMD’s previous enterprise offerings, however, these new additions are packing ARM-based processor cores, not the X86 cores AMD has been producing for years. The Opteron A1100 series is designed for a variety of use cases and applications, including networking, storage, dense and power-efficient web serving, and 64-bit ARM software development.

The Opteron A1100 System-on-Chip (SoC), was formerly codenamed “Seattle” and it represents the first 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57-based platform from AMD...

Read full article @ HotHardware

Mionix Castor Optical Gaming Mouse Review

If you're a gamer who enjoys a simple mouse with easy day-to-day function, the Castor is perfect for you. Take a read to find out our thoughts on the Mionix Castor!

Read full article @ TechnologyX

QNAP TS-451+ NAS Review

QNAP has two new NAS appliances designed for the SOHO market: the TS-251+ and the TS-451+. The latter is an updated model based loosely on the original TS-451, and we're ready to measure what should be improved performance.

Read full article @ Toms Hardware

Server Hardening

Server hardening. The very words conjure up images of tempering soft steel into an unbreakable blade, or taking soft clay and firing it in a kiln, producing a hardened vessel that will last many years. Indeed, server hardening is very much like that.

Read full article @ Linux Journal

The OpenGL Speed & Perf-Per-Watt From The Radeon HD 2000/3000 Series Through The R9 Fury

What's the best way to beat the winter blues? Benchmarking, of course! For starting off our 2016 of graphics card benchmarking under Linux, I've been working on a large round-up of re-testing AMD Radeon graphics cards from the HD 2900XT (R600) graphics card through the latest R9 Fury (Fiji) graphics card while running Ubuntu and using the very latest open-source graphics driver stack. Here's an interesting look at how the OpenGL graphics performance has evolved on the AMD side over the past decade while also looking at the performance-per-Watt.

Using all of the graphics cards I had available and weren't busy in the dozens of other benchmarking systems at Phoronix, I set to carry out an OpenGL comparison -- looking at the raw frame-rates as well as the performance-per-Watt -- of every graphics card from the latest R9 200/300 series and R9 Fury all the way back to the R600 series from ~2006. I didn't test any hardware prior to the HD 2000 (R600) series for being too slow and it was with the R600 GPUs that support OpenGL 3.3 at least. However, not all of the graphics cards I tried to run were in a workable state on the current Radeon Linux driver due to various bugs as I'll go over shortly.

Read full article @ Phoronix