Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

Astell & Kern AK Junior Review featuring Sennheiser HD650
Buying guide: 10 best gaming mice: best gaming mouse to buy
Charts CPU Performance Content Creation: 11 CPUs tested - AMD FX-8320
Corsair Neutron XTi 480 GB SSD Review
Creative Sound BlasterX H7 Headset Review
Drobo B810n 8-Bay NAS Review
EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 SC Gaming ACX 3.0 Review - Affordable Enthusiast Gaming
Experiencing NVIDIA's SHIELD With Plex Media Server Streaming Prowess
Gigabyte 970 Gaming SLI Motherboard Review
Inateck FE2010 USB 3.0 Portable 2.5-inch Enclosure Review
LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive Review
Qnap TBS-453A NASbook Review
Samsung EVO+ 256GB MicroSD Review
Tesoro Gram Spectrum Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review

Astell & Kern AK Junior Review featuring Sennheiser HD650

Astell & Kern has had a place in the high-end Digital Audio Player market for years now, with its top-tier model running up a hefty £3300 price tag. However, there are those out there who enjoy quality audio products but don’t want to spend thousands of pounds on equipment and for those there is the Astell & Kern AK Junior, a £399 portable player that packs in a lot of quality with a more manageable price tag.

Read full article @ KitGuru

Buying guide: 10 best gaming mice: best gaming mouse to buy

PC gamers have never had it so good. While the e-sports scene is ramping up to enjoy unprecedented popularity, powerful graphics cards are becoming more affordable than ever, finally allowing PC to serve as a viable alternative to consoles.But, whether you aspire to be the next League of Legends or Call of Duty superstar or, more likely, just enjoying a few rounds of Overwatch, you'll assuredly find yourself at a disadvantage if you skimp on your choice of mouse. And assuming you've already shelled out the dough for a robust gaming rig straight out of science fiction, there's no excuse for cheaping out on control inputs.How to choose the best gaming mouseYour choice of mouse depends very much on your gaming preferences: if you're into first-person shooters, say, finding the right balance of sensitivity and responsiveness is vital, so you'll need to pay attention to DPI ratings and decide between optical or laser sensors (fear not – leave the technical stuff to us). Whereas if you're into real-time strategy, MMOs or MOBAs, it's vital to pick a mouse that lets you map macros triggering the actions you use most to specially configured buttons. So, we've picked the 10 best gaming mice: whatever your gaming preferences or needs, one of these will complete your ultimate PC or Mac gaming setup.

Read full article @ Techradar

Charts CPU Performance Content Creation: 11 CPUs tested - AMD FX-8320

These days there are basically two different groups of customers who demand lots of processing power: content creators and gamers, while this 2D performance comparison is targeting content creators. After having had a look at the following pages you'll have an overview on how fast recent CPUs are in regarding a variety of programs, may it be video encoding, rendering, ...

Read full article @ ocaholic

Corsair Neutron XTi 480 GB SSD Review

Corsair unleashed its new Neutron XTi series SSDs. The Corsair Neutron XTi 480 GB SSD we put under some heavy testing should be a notch more price-competitive yet offers enthusiast class SATA3 performance. Armed with truckloads of performance and that attractive pricing, Corsair will lead the way not just in performance, but also its dandy cool looks.

As you guys know, we've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning, and it is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking! You get between 450 MB/s to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 which is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, over the past year, NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices a year ago settled at just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. These days a good SSD can be found under 50 cents per GB. With parties like Samsung, Toshiba and Micron the prices now have dropped towards and below the 30 cents per GB marker. This means that SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream and due to the lower prices, the volume sizes go up as well. A couple of years ago a 64 GB SSD was hot stuff, then slowly we moved to 120 GB, last year 240 GB for an SSD in a PC was the norm, upcoming year we'll transition slowly to roughly 500 GB per SSD as the norm with sub 150 USD prices. With the market being so huge, fierce and competitive, it brought us to where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Creative Sound BlasterX H7 Headset Review

Creative are on of the most iconic and instantly recognisable brands on the market when it comes to audio. Having created some of the most popular and best-performing consumer audio products for the PC market over the last few decades, I’m sure many of you, if not all of you, have owned or used a Creative product at one point or another. So when I heard that Creative felt they had one of the best gaming headsets on the market and that it would cost less than £100, I simply had to try it out.

Read full article @ eTeknix

Drobo B810n 8-Bay NAS Review

Drobo. Now that's a name we haven't heard in a long time. The company is back, and it sent us its new Marvell-powered B810n storage appliance to test. Is there new magic in this once-prolific brand, or does it fail to reignite that old flame?

Read full article @ Tom's Hardware

EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 SC Gaming ACX 3.0 Review - Affordable Enthusiast Gaming

Everyone is enthusiastic about something in their life, for some it is cars, others live and breathe sports. Then there are those of us who love electronics, computers, and PC gaming. I personally have an affinity for cars in addition to PC games and one thing that always gets me going is the sleeper. I recently had the opportunity to take a ride in a car that looked like any ordinary hatchback, but under the hood was the personality of a sports car. I was amazed by how the vehicle stuck to the curves when entering the highway and how much torque it had when putting your foot on the gas. Sometimes this happens with computer hardware for me too, I am expecting a reasonable gain in speed but end up with a massive jump in performance.

Read full article @ HiTech Legion

Experiencing NVIDIA's SHIELD With Plex Media Server Streaming Prowess

As we’ve detailed a number of times here at HotHardware, the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV console is a powerful media streaming and gaming device that features a beefy Tegra X1 processor and an integrated 256-core Maxwell-based GPU. While we’ve seen plenty of streaming devices come to the market with potent quad-core SoCs before, none of them are packing the kind of graphics hardware and Android TV polish lurking inside the SHIELD.

To that end, NVIDIA thought that it could use the standard SHIELD (16GB) and the SHIELD Pro (500GB) as a centerpiece for Plex Media Server. As you may recall, Plex is a powerful media app that lets you stream your media library to just about any device — TV shows, movies, home videos, music, pictures, etc. are all fair game.

Plex supports virtually any media file format, which makes playing back even your most obscure content possible...

Read full article @ HotHardware

Gigabyte 970 Gaming SLI Motherboard Review

Gigabyte's GA-970-Gaming SLI adds contemporary features such as USB 3.1 to AMD's classic AM3+ platform. We examine how well it stacks up against the competition in overclocking and value.

Read full article @ Tom's Hardware

Inateck FE2010 USB 3.0 Portable 2.5-inch Enclosure Review

With the Inateck FE2006 pushing two years of age, it was time for Inateck to release an updated drive housing that uses the latest SATA to USB 3.0 controller. Meet the Inateck FE2010 that features the JMicron JSM578 controller and is available for $17.99 with free shipping from Amazon. Read on to see how it performs!

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive Review

LaCie is a well-known brand to Mac users, as it started as a company supporting Macs in the early 1990s. Acquired by Seagate Technology in 2012, it now serves as Seagate’s “premium brand”, designing “world-class storage solutions for photographers, videographers, audio professionals, and other power users.” Utilizing the latest USB-C connector and providing up to 8GB of storage as well as simultaneously charging your laptop computer, the LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive is powerful, stylish, and usable with any computer with a USB 3.0/3.1 port. There are other features as well, which Benchmark Reviews will test in this review of this interesting external drive system.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

Qnap TBS-453A NASbook Review

A four-bay portable NAS with M.2 storage and a built-in network switch. Network-attached storage has evolved to such an extant that today's servers can be thought of as the swiss army knife of computing devices. Be it centralised storage, media transcoding, company-wide backups or IP-cam surveillance, most modern NAS solutions are versatile enough to tick all these boxes and more. They are, in short, a useful addition to any home or office.

Yet the NAS marketplace is mighty competitive, with numerous high-profile players all vying for customers with a similar feature set. And given that there tends to be little romance surrounding these units - they're typically small black boxes that mainstream users could easily overlook - there's real benefit in being able to stand out from the crowd.

Read full article @ Hexus

Samsung EVO+ 256GB MicroSD Review

The Samsung EVO+ 256GB has been rated for read and write speeds of up to 90MB/s. With 256GB at your disposal, users can now record up to 12 hours of 4K UHD video or 33 hours of Full HD video or store up to 55,200 photos without needing to change or replace the memory card.

Read full article @ TechSpot

Tesoro Gram Spectrum Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review

The mechanical keyboard market is hardly short on choice, with a huge number of brands providing a massive range of keyboards for work and gaming, with various switch types, sizes, lighting effects and more. These days, many keyboards have to offer something unique to stand out from the crowd, and that’s exactly what the new Gram Spectrum from Tesoro promises to do. Featuring a super low-profile design, the Gram looks set to be a great keyboard for gamers, with fast and light switches combined with low-profile key caps and a low-profile chassis, allowing for super fast actuation times that could give you the edge on the digital battlefield.

Read full article @ eTeknix