Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

AYL SoundFit Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker Review
Band v2 Enhancements: Counting Flights of Steps
Benchmarking Intel's Skylake-U Series Core i7 Processor For Laptops
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 PC graphics performance review
Case Mod Friday: Adrenal Express
First Look: Lenovo Yoga 900
GE Plug-in Smart Switch Z-Wave Module Outlet Review
How to fix 40% freeze during install of Windows 10 Build 10586
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs. GTX 960 SLI
Razer Mamba, Wired & Wireless (Chroma) Mouse Review
Samsung 950 PRO 256GB RAID Review
SanDisk Ultra Fit 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review
The IBM POWER8 Review: Challenging the Intel Xeon

AYL SoundFit Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker Review

Your Life or AYL and this speaker is very rugged and IPX5 certified for water resistance which means you could take it in the shower with you if you wanted to. The speaker has the common controls for play/pause and volume and skip tracks and it worked fine with my Galaxy S6 phone but what’s most important is the sound, and it’s decent overall. Read on to learn more..

Read full article @ Technogog

Band v2 Enhancements: Counting Flights of Steps

The new Barometer sensor is used to keep track of your daily steps that take more effort.

Read full article @ WinSupersite

Benchmarking Intel's Skylake-U Series Core i7 Processor For Laptops

Intel's 6th Generation Skylake family of Core processors has been available for some time now. We previously gave you a look at the desktop variant that Intel initially rolled out. However, the mobile variant of Skylake is perhaps Intel's most potent incarnation of the new architecture that's power-optimized on 14nm technology and with a beefier graphics engine, for more capable thin and light notebooks.

One of the first ultralight Intel Skylake-based machines to hit our test bench was delivered by team Lenovo. The company has refreshed and revamped their Yoga series notebook line-up with Skylake and the new Lenovo Yoga 900 is one of their more premium configurations with a 3K display, that just started shipping in the channel recently.

Seeing as this was one of the first Skylake-U series machines we had in for testing, we decided to work up a quick performance profile of the new platform here, replete with lots of benchmarks in a number of areas...

Read full article @ HotHardware

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 PC graphics performance review

Yeah, it is time for the once in a year opportunity and yearly cash-cow from Activision and the treyarch studios, the latest iteration of Call of Duty Black Ops 3 has been released. Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a military science fiction first-person shooter video game, developed by Treyarch and published by Activision.It is the twelfth (yep you read that well - 12th) iteration of the Call of Duty series and the sequel to the 2012 video game Call of Duty: Black Ops II. It is released on several platforms, ours .. Microsoft Windows and then PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. For this article we take out a dozen or so graphics cards and benchmark thr game. We have a look at DX11 performance with the newest graphics cards and technologies. This article will cover benchmarks in the sense of average framerates, qwe'll look at all popular resolutions scaling from Full HD (1920x1080/1200), WHQD (2560x1440 and of course that big-whopper of a resolution Ultra HD. UHDTV (2160p) is 3840 pixels wide by 2160 pixels tall (8.29 megapixels), which is four times as many pixels as 1920x1080 (2.07 megapixels).

Black Ops III will be a popular title and is looking OK from a graphics point of view. The release of Call of Duty remains a little weird for the PC as it is only 64-bit, and thus that requires a 64-bit operating system- this in fact eliminates a number of customers. A second requirement for the game is that you need to have at least 6 GB of memory. If you have 3 or 4 GB installed, the game will not start-up, but for previous releases patches inevitably did fix this and 4 GB at one point was allowed. The game engine itself is fairly equal to the its predecessor and with all tricks and bells enabled, it does look okay if your graphics card can manage it of course. COD however always is tricky to benchmark as the results are and always will be a little unreliable. One test run will result on 40 FPS, the second 36 FPS and another 33 FPS. Then another factor is a need to be taken into account as well, some levels average out at say 40 FPS, yet there are a handful of scenes (with helicopters and such) where the frame rate will crumble down. Now 80% of the game plays with good playable framerates, but a handful of levels will just stall any graphics card whatsoever.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Case Mod Friday: Adrenal Express

Welcome to another Case Mod Friday showcase! This week we have Boddaker's “Adrenal Express” build. Here is what he had to say about it, "The Core X9 will become the vessel that transports this highly exuberant chemical to its new owners, curing them of the common doldrums. Of course, there is only one company internationally certified to carry such a fragile, and extremely rare commodity...And that company is: Adrenal Express."

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

First Look: Lenovo Yoga 900

Just in time for my next trip, the Lenovo Yoga 900 has showed up. This will give me a full week operating the device as my daily driver while traveling.

Read full article @ WinSupersite

GE Plug-in Smart Switch Z-Wave Module Outlet Review

Today we’re going to take a look at the GE Z-Wave Plugin Smart Switch module for small appliances, lights, and other devices which you may want to automate. One of the best things about the plug-in style smart switches is how fast they are to get up and running. There are no wires to run, no electrical boxes to dig in and they just simply work right out of the box and the GE Plugin Smart Switch is no exception to this. You can use these Z-Wave modules to automate lighting scenes, turn and off your Christmas lights instead of crawling under the tree looking for the plug, and even flip on a table top fan when the temperature in your home gets warmer than you’d like. The possibilities are truly endless when you begin to network multiple devices with Z-Wave technology. We’ll look at the features of the GE Plug-in Smart Switch module, see what’s included and how to get it configured and running. I’ll also show you a few different ways that you can use a smart switch to make your life easier while also saving electricity at the same time.

Read full article @ Geek Inspector

How to fix 40% freeze during install of Windows 10 Build 10586

Some users are experiencing a freeze around 40% of the way through installing Windows 10 Build 10586 and the fix is a quick and easy one.

Read full article @ WinSupersite

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs. GTX 960 SLI

Maybe you're one of the gamers out there who simply can't have enough power coming from the graphics department or maybe you want to assemble a gaming rig with a given budget and you want to get the very maximum out of it. In both cases the following article might be interesting and it might be quite surprising to see how two GTX 960 in SLI stack up against a mighty GTX 980 Ti.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Razer Mamba, Wired & Wireless (Chroma) Mouse Review

Razer has a long tradition of revamping their products to meet the ever-changing needs of today’s gamers and the Razer Mamba is no exception to that rule. Razer actually went a little modest in naming this mouse just the “Razer Mamba” , it’s more the Razer Mamba Wired / Wireless Chroma but we aren’t in the naming department of Razer so Razer Mamba will have to suffice.. We were first exposed to the Mamba in the Wireless rechargeable Mamba back in 2011 and it sported a 5600 DPI Laser and was wireless and wired and at the time just holding it in your hand would draw a silent Wow from your lips.

Now Razer has revamped the Mamba and we aren’t talking a tweak here and there, this new Mamba has its roots in the original Mamba but it’s both Wireless and Wired, has a 16000 DPI Laser sensor that’s adjustable in 1 DPI increments and has the 16.8 Million color Chroma that’s taken the gaming world by storm. We’ve looked at the Razer Mamba Tournament Edition a short while back and it introduced us to the 16000 DPI laser sensor capable of 5G acceleration and we quickly adopted it as the go to mouse not only for gaming bet every day lab and computing use. Razer set the bar high with the Razer Mamba Tournament Edition and it’s a great gaming mouse by itself but toss in the same functionality and give it wireless capabilities as well as using it in wired mode and you have a mind-blowing great mouse that any gamer would be thrilled and excited to have in their gaming arsenal.

Read full article @ Bjorn3D

Samsung 950 PRO 256GB RAID Review

It’s fair to say the SATA-based SSD sector has now become quite a stagnant marketplace. Performance has hit its peak and plateaued – while this has meant that prices have plummeted, the arena has seen very little innovation and excitement in the last 3-4 years. With the introduction of Intel Z170 this Summer and full compatibility with M.2 and NVM Express this game is about to change. NVMe uses lower latency and can handle up to 64K queues and up 64K commands each while SATA and AHCI can only handle 1 queue and 32 commands each.

Last month Samsung unleashed their new NVMe SSD – the 950 PRO. This much-anticipated drive gives users the ability to home in on read transfer rates which exceed 2000MB/s. Today we’ll be taking two 256GB 950 PROs and configuring a RAID array to maximise performance and discover what kind of throughput figures we can achieve. Prepare to be amazed!

Read full article @ Vortez

SanDisk Ultra Fit 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

"Women are not that hard to understand," my friend explained to me. "A 'yes' means 'yes', and a 'no' means 'no'." She then continued on. "Well, sometimes." I just looked at her and laughed. "Exactly my point." In life, there are some things so unfathomable, it is hard to grasp a full understanding of the situation until you are actually there. For example, how do we know when a 'yes' means 'yes', a 'no' means 'no', or a 'no' means "please continue to convince me to change my mind"? The answer to that is not so simple; factors may or may not include who you are, who she is, the time of day, how she feels, where you are, what you said, and the list goes on. Fortunately, in the technology world, things are not quite as unfathomable. But in many cases, you have to be at a certain time and place to understand what we have and how we got there. I remember a picture floating around the internet last year showing a 128MB microSD card labeled '2005', and a 128GB microSD card (From SanDisk, no less) labeled '2014' next to it. I think if I saw that image in 2005, I probably would have had a hard time wrapping my head around it, even if I knew this was possible. I mean, how could something this small have so much capacity? Nearly ten years ago, I reviewed the OCZ Mini-Kart, a 1GB flash drive I called "downright tiny". Well, move aside, OCZ Mini-Kart 1GB: Today, we will take a look at the SanDisk Ultra Fit 128GB, which, at a physical footprint barely larger than a USB connector itself, redefines what we call "downright tiny" -- all at the same time equivalent to the capacity of one hundred and twenty eight Mini-Karts I reviewed back in 2006.

Read full article @ APH Networks

The IBM POWER8 Review: Challenging the Intel Xeon

We recently got our hands on a S822L, an dual socket OpenPOWER server. IBM claims that this is an affordable, high performance and highly expandable alternative to the typical Xeon x86 Linux server.  Will Intel finally have some competition in the mid range server space too? Find out as we take a look inside the server and unleash all kinds of benchmarks upon it.  

Read full article @ Anandtech