Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

ADATA PV100 Power Bank Portable Charger Review
AMD A10 7850K + Dual Graphics Review
ASRock Fatal1ty Z97X KILLER (Intel LGA 1150)
ASUS GeForce GTX 780 STRIX 6 GB Graphics Card Review
Asus Product Announcements and Press Event - Computex 2014
Club3D R9 270 royalQueen Review
Crucial MX100 (256GB & 512GB) Review
Crucial MX100 Affordable Solid State Drive Review
Crucial MX100 Solid State Drive Review
Crucial MX100 SSD (512GB) Review
Crucials MX100 solid-state drive reviewed
Event Coverage: Computex 2014 International Press Conference and New Product Preview
Intel 730 'Jackson Ridge' Raid 0 Review
Intel Core i7-4790K Devils Canyon (22nm Haswell) Review
Intel Devils Canyon receives support on ASUS Z87
Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Review
OCZ Vertex 460 240GB Review
Samsung 845DC EVO Review (960GB)
Watch_Dogs
Wolfenstein: The New Order Review
Z97 & Z87 Motherboard Charts: 34 Models tested - Update MSI Z97M Gaming

ADATA PV100 Power Bank Portable Charger Review

When the recent student union elections were held at the University of Calgary, there was a candidate running for a vice president position with a quirky yet neat idea. This person had other platform points, but one of them was to bring, what he dubbed, "Power Towers" to the university. These are universal-charging stations (Presumably USB) with the ability to charge at a "faster rate", while increasing Wi-Fi bandwidth throughout the university. These towers would be placed around the university for all students to use and enjoy. I am not sure how feasible this idea is, but it was probably the primary reason as to why he ended up winning his position. While I could rant on how inconsistent the internet is at the university, the charging capabilities do bring up an interesting concern. Our portable devices, both smartphones and tablets, use quite a bit of power. No matter how big the internal battery is, the battery life of these devices always seem to end up closer to zero than full at the most inconvenient time possible. ADATA believes they have a solution to this problem, and their answer is the ADATA PV100 Power Bank. Of course, they are not the only ones with this solution, as there are quite a few from many well known companies. This specific portable charger is advertised at being able to charge smartphones up to two times on a single charge, with a 4200 mAh battery inside, while delivering up to 2.1A of current. The last portable charger we reviewed was over two years ago, and it was able to remove up to twenty minutes off of charging time. Can the ADATA PV100 Power Bank pull up these kinds of numbers? Read on to find out!

Read full article @ APH Networks

AMD A10 7850K + Dual Graphics Review

AMD's vision of unifying CPU and GPU takes a step closer with the integration of HSA features in the latest line of APUs. Till now, the term 'APU' (Accelerated Processing Unit) has often been considered to be a buzzword, or euphemism for (competent GPU on die) that is often considered to be 'OK' for entry level gaming, but with hUMA (Heterogeneous Unified Memory Access), allowing both GPU and CPU to access the same system memory, for the first time in history, developers have instant access to the processing power of the GPU cores on a hardware level. Using the now mature 28nm fabrication we are likely to see an improvement in performance per watt as well as various improvements in regards to the GPU. The R7 GPU is using AMDs GCN architecture that has 8 compute cores and a total of 512 shader cores.

Read full article @ Vortez

ASRock Fatal1ty Z97X KILLER (Intel LGA 1150)

Hide your childrens, hide your wives! A KILLER is here! ASRock's Fatal1ty Z97X KILLER is on my test bench, after arriving in a plain white box. The only true Fatal1ty here is hopefully the one in the name, or this red and black gamer had better go back to training camp!

Read full article @ techPowerUp

ASUS GeForce GTX 780 STRIX 6 GB Graphics Card Review

For today's review we test the all new and hip GeForce GTX 780 STRIX 6 GB Graphics Card from ASUS. The customized product is equipped with a redesigned air cooler. This new unit comes with 6 GB graphics memory (rather handy with Watch Dogs if ya wanna play in ultra image quality settings eh ? And yeah, a sporty new design cooler. As you will see, the DNA of the DirectCU II cooler is still there, but the design is a little bit more well .. let's call it military ?

Surprisingly, the STRIX packs a GTX 780 GPU, not a 780 Ti. So the more 'regular' GeForce GTX 780 is being used. This means it is based on the GK110 GPU and has a whopping 7.1 Billion transistors. That makes it a nice chunk faster opposed to the GeForce GTX 680 GPU. Just like Titan, the GTX 780 is based on the GK110 GPU with the distinctions that the Titan has a GK110-300 GPU and the GeForce GTX 780 a GK110-400 GPU. Same stuff, yet with some things disabled. The GK110 chip is BIG, and that makes it a difficult chip to bake, its recipe is refined though as the product has 2304 Shader Processing Units, 192 TMUs and 32 ROPs on a 384-bit memory interface of fast GDDR5. So yeah, NVIDIA trimmed down that 45 mm × 45 mm 2397-pin S-FCBGA Titan with its 2688 shader/stream/CUDA processors a bit, whereas the 780 Ti is unlocked. Memory wise you are looking at 3 GB over 6 GB, that is still huge (12 pieces of 64M ×16 GDDR5 SDRAM) of memory (384-bit) on there and started designing a bunch of new tricks at BIOS and driver

So the ASUS GeForce GTX 780 STRIX has your typical standards like 2304 CUDA Cores. The GTX 780 is based on the GK110 GPU with the distinctions that the Titan has a GK110-300 GPU and the GeForce GTX 780 a GK110-400 GPU. Same stuff, yet with some things disabled. 2304 Shader Processing Units, 192 TMUs and 32 ROPs on a 384-bit memory interface of fast GDDR5. The card comes with dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs and will be available in two versions - one with stock clocks and one with an overclocked GPU (as tested today). The GeForce GTX 780 STRIX 6 GB STRIX edition comes with that updated cooler called that packs two dust-proof fans. Interesting is that Strix drives the DirectCU cooler to run at 0dB, the fans actually stops spinning completely when the GPU temperature is below 70°C And during heavy loading Strix still performs 20% cooler and quieter opposed to the Nvidia reference (according to ASUS). The GPU is powered by an 8-phase (digital) power design. DIGI+ VRM digital voltage regulation helps with overclocking capabilities, which are further supported by the use of hardened Super Alloy Power components fitted onto the PCB.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Asus Product Announcements and Press Event - Computex 2014

Asus' CEO led the banner charge in an animated and highly charged press event at the Humble House in the middle of downtown Taipei today where they showed off some amazing new products and we got a first look at a new Zenbook as well as the new Transformer Book T300 Chi you will want to get your hands on as much as we do.

Read full article @ TechwareLabs

Club3D R9 270 royalQueen Review

DWith their R9 270 royalQueen Club3D have another entry-level discrete GPU in their portfolio. The card boasts a custom cooler mounted on a GPU that sits on a reference design PCB. This combination is good for a 30 MHz factory overclock, which should put this card a little bit ahead of reference clocked competition.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Crucial MX100 (256GB & 512GB) Review

Computex is officially kicking off today and unlike many of the products announced at trade shows, we actually have a full review of the Crucial MX100 that is launching today at Computex. The MX100 is Crucial's new mainstream drive, replacing the popular M500 while the M550 will continue to serve the higher performance market. With the MX100 Crucial is aiming even lower in terms of price per gigabyte by utilizing Micron's (i.e. Crucial's parent company's) state-of-the-art 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. Read on the see how the MX100 stands out with its new 16nm NAND!

Read full article @ Anandtech

Crucial MX100 Affordable Solid State Drive Review

Crucial has been on a tear as of late. In the last few weeks alone, the company has released a couple of new series of solid state drives, one targeting the enthusiast segment (the M550) and the other targeting data centers (the M500DC). Today, Crucial is at it again with the launch of the brand new MX100 series.

The Crucial MX100 series of solid state drives is somewhat similar to the M550 in that they both use the same Marvell controller. The MX100, however, it outfitted with more affordable 16nm NAND flash, and as such, the drives are priced more aggressively. Take a look at the full line-up and their specifications in the chart below, and then step through the rest of the review to see how the 256GB and 512GB models perform...

Read full article @ HotHardware.com

Crucial MX100 Solid State Drive Review

Micron Technology, the company behind the Crucial brand, has delivered many first’s to the computer industry. Primary among them are advancements in the solid state storage sector. Crucial delivered excellent price value when they launched the M225 SSD series back in 2009, then followed up with the fastest available SSD when they launched the SATA 6 Gb/s Crucial C300 back in 2010. Just last year they broke the price barrier for 1TB SSDs, then returned in early 2014 to combine all the best attributes of their M550 series. Now featuring Micron’s most affordable 16nm NAND flash components, the Crucial MX100 delivers high-end performance to value-driven mainstream users. Benchmark Reviews tests this solid state drive against the fastest SSDs available.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

Crucial MX100 SSD (512GB) Review

Computex 2014 takes place this week and one of the manufacturers launching a new product to coincide with the event is Crucial. A replacement to the M500 in their SSD range the MX100 uses the latest 16nm NAND Flash and has a slightly different price/performance ratio to their high end M550. Today we compare all of the above, along with some of the competition.

Read full article @ HardwareHeaven.com

Crucials MX100 solid-state drive reviewed

The Crucial MX100 is the first solid-state drive to use Micron's 16-nm MLC NAND. It's also one of the most affordable SSDs around, with the 256GB version priced at $109.99 and the 512GB at $224.99. We take a closer look at how the two stack up against a range of competitors, and the results might surprise you.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

Event Coverage: Computex 2014 International Press Conference and New Product Preview

This year's Computex has not even officially opened its doors yet and already we have some previews for you of award winning products that will be on display over the next 5 days. Starting the fanfare was Mr. Walter Yeh the Executive Vice President of TAITRA with a speech about the upcoming conference and its growth from last years conference as well as the overall impact of the conference in Taiwan.

Read full article @ TechwareLabs

Intel 730 'Jackson Ridge' Raid 0 Review

When we first reviewed the Intel 730 SSD we had mixed feelings. While read speeds were certainly good, write performance was below par for a drive of this calibre. Intel were keen to push the benefits of setting these drives up into a striped volume (Raid 0), indeed their own comparison showed the Raid 0 volume compares favourably with a single 480GB drive.

The 2 x 240GB Raid 0 volume will cost you just £30 more than a 480GB drive (£359.98 vs. £329.99) yet should offer significantly higher read speeds compared to the 480GB model while also upping the write speeds, an area which let the single drive down in our previous assessment of this drive. Obviously Raid 0 is not as robust as a single drive with regard to data integrity because should one drive fail, you will lose all of your data however it has to be said that with today's improvements in Raid hardware and software, a striped volume is much more reliable than it was 10 years ago.

With this in mind then, we will present our results of these drives in Raid 0 but do not forget to check out our in-depth review of the 730 Series which goes into greater detail regarding each drive.

Read full article @ Vortez

Intel Core i7-4790K Devils Canyon (22nm Haswell) Review

The first Intel processor running at 4GHz on all cores, find out how good it is. There's a cogent argument to be made for Intel having the enthusiast end of the desktop PC CPU market sewn up to such an extent that it has little reason to innovate until AMD catches up in the distant future. The lack of competitive pressure has caused technological stagnation at the £150-plus price point, as the Core i7-4770K - primarily a CPU with a basic GPU baked in - isn't going to face renewed competition from AMD's FX processors anytime soon.

So what's Intel to do? The simplest method of partially reinvigorating this desktop space, which we're told is expanding year on year, is to offer desktop-builders a little more speed at the same price. Intel, therefore, has taken the year-old fourth generation Core (Haswell) architecture and selected three processors that could do with a sprinkling of extra performance. Core i7-4770K, Core i5-4670K and Pentium G32xx, your time is up. How and why, you might ask? Let's take the trio turn by turn by looking at their vital statistics.

Read full article @ Hexus

Intel Devils Canyon receives support on ASUS Z87

Till now all motherboard manufacturers were sticking to Intel's plan to ensure compatibility with the upcoming Intel K SKU processor aka the Devils Canyon. ASUS released today a BIOS update for the Z87 chipset-based Gene VI providing official support for the new unlocked flagship Haswell Refresh processors.

Read full article @ Madshrimps

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Review

For the past two weeks, I've put the new Surface Pro 3 through the wringer, using it as often as possible and in as many ways as possible. And while my tests will continue through the product's initial release date later this month, I feel comfortable stating now that Surface Pro 3 is the premium Ultrabook/tablet hybrid that I've been waiting for. And it's an excellent, if expensive, choice for anyone who needs both types of devices.

Read full article @ WinSupersite

OCZ Vertex 460 240GB Review

As far as performance is concerned, OCZ delivers. Performance and brand reliability are major defining factors in many hardware related purchases, and performance is covered pretty well with this drive, while reliability is provided with a nice three-year warranty just to be safe. Over those three years, it is rated for 20GB/day reads and writes; a level most of us will not hit. As a 7mm form factor drive, the OCZ Vertex 460 can be used not only in desktop applications, but also in many of the slim form factor ultrabooks or notebooks. The form factor of the drive allows it to easily replace standard hard drives in portables for improved boot and application load times, as well as extending battery usefulness per charge.

Read full article @ OCC

Samsung 845DC EVO Review (960GB)

The 845DC EVO comes in 3 capacities: 240, 480 and 960GB. We are primarily looking at the 960 version today. Regardless of the capacity, the 845DC specifies some blistering read performance. 87K IOPS is a huge number that puts Samsung at the top of almost every enterprise SSD list. Samsung did fix one of the wrongs of the SM843, which was the lack of power-loss protection. The 845DC should have a level of protection during power loss that SM843 lacked.

Read full article @ The SSD Review

Watch_Dogs

Ever since the fantastic teaser trailer Ubisoft dropped in our laps from seemingly out of nowhere at E3 2012, the world has been waiting to get our collective hands on Watch_Dogs. Seven months removed from the financial and critical success of GTA5, (PC owners are still waiting) Ubisoft has seen fit to finally let us dive into the networked world of Chicago. The time for anticipation is over, join us as we take a look at Ubisoft’s new open world IP and see if all this hype was worth the wait or if we will be found wanting.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

Wolfenstein: The New Order Review

Should we fight to undo this Nazi video game world, or just try to live our lives? In my opinion, Wolfenstein: The New Order is definitely a game worth playing, if you enjoy shooters with some adventuring in them. It is fun and, to that end, very well designed, allowing you to play how you want instead of how it wants. Of course it does have its problems, and some of them are serious (e.g., the pop-in). All I can do is hope that patches and drivers will fix most of those. If they do, then I expect many gamers will get a lot of enjoyment from the game. Even without the fixes, many will have fun, but it will be fewer as the problems may prevent some players from getting a playable experience. It was playable for me (obviously), but I do not know how lucky and tolerant I may be compared to others.

Read full article @ OCC

Z97 & Z87 Motherboard Charts: 34 Models tested - Update MSI Z97M Gaming

In our comparison tables, meanwhile you find benchmark values regarding 34 recent Z97 and Z87 motherboards. Furthermore we do not comment the benchmark values. The idea and also the goal is to present to you a market overview which helps you choose the right motherboard.

Read full article @ ocaholic