Here a roundup of the latest reviews and articles:

Blackview Breeze Smartphone Review
Cirrus7 Nimbini — The Most Stylish Ubuntu PC Ever?
Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 2400MHz
Grand Theft Auto IV 7-Years Later Review
Grand Theft Auto V Performance Analysis
GRUB2 & EFI recovery - Tutorial
HTC One M9 Review: Lollipop, Octa-Core Snapdragon, Boomsound Impress
Microsoft Band: A week with Apple Watch rival
Nvidia is as open source friendly as a great white shark
ROCCAT Tyon Gaming Mouse Review
SteelSeries Siberia Elite Prism Review
Thermaltake Core X9 Review
Workshop memory overclocking: get the most out of your modules!
Xiaomi Redmi 2 Smartphone Review

Blackview Breeze Smartphone Review

This model was mainly built for people with lower budgets, which do not have enough cash to invest in higher-specced models and Blackview has picked one of the mainstream SoCs (MT6582) of 2013 to equip it, which now also has sources for building Android 5.0 distributions.

Read full article @ Madshrimps

Cirrus7 Nimbini — The Most Stylish Ubuntu PC Ever?

The new Cirrus7 Nimbini is the best looking fanless NUC Ubuntu PC we've ever seen. Inside the tiny alumium case comes fifth-gen Intel power.

Read full article @ OMG! Ubuntu!

Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 2400MHz

The Ballistix performance series memory has proven popular for their stock performance, overclock-ability, quality and the ever changing style employed by Crucial. We are looking at the latest addition to the Ballistix family, the Ballistix Sport LT. These should land right between the Sport models and the higher end Elite kits, hopefully netting us the best of both worlds, tighter timings and high clocks.

Read full article @ PureOverclock

Grand Theft Auto IV 7-Years Later Review

The story is, separate from the narrative, nothing too special, but when you consider the actual storytelling, GTA IV does it exceptionally well. You get a real feel for the world and characters, even if they do end up betraying you, or you end up killing them. Plus the voice work actually seems natural, without pauses when switching speakers. The gameplay, too, is a lot of fun, but there are definitely some issues to it. Sure, these issues in a way come from the game trying to be a simulator, but sometimes you should embrace a game for being a game and bend the rules of reality some. (I am mostly thinking of the vehicle management here.) The graphics are dated and clearly ported from the consoles, which is not something in the game's favor, but you can get through it. It may be old, but something worth returning to, if you are interested in it.

Read full article @ OCC

Grand Theft Auto V Performance Analysis

In this article we put GTX Titan X, R9 295X2, GTX 980, R9 290X, GTX 970, R9 290, GTX 960 and R9 285 through Grand Theft Auto V. We do so at resolutions of 1600x900, 1920x1080, 2560x1440 and 4K, to assess what hardware you need to play the recently released top-title.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

GRUB2 & EFI recovery - Tutorial

Pay attention. I've written this very long, detailed tutorial explaining how to fix the GRUB2 bootloader on multi-boot systems with UEFI and GPT, including no less than four different methods, covering GParted, disk, efibootmgr, manual recovery, and other useful tools and concepts. If you're running a multi-boot setup on a UEFI system, then this article is probably a must. Have fun.

Read full article @ Dedoimedo

HTC One M9 Review: Lollipop, Octa-Core Snapdragon, Boomsound Impress

Casually glancing at the One M9, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the handset for last year’s version. The 5-inch display size hasn’t changed, nor has HTC’s reliance on an all-aluminum and composite finish. The company’s design cues are now linked fairly tightly with the brand, much like Samsung has done with its Galaxy design and Apple with its iPhone - which in the One M9's case is a good thing.

The real magic with the One M9 happens within the shell, however. This year’s model has Qualcomm’s latest 64-bit engine, the Snapdragon 810. That’s powering Android 5.0.2 (Lollipop) and a new 20-megapixel rear camera, combined with 3GB of RAM and HTC’s Sense...

http://hothardware.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=efc4c507c2cf964fc2462caca&id=af73a7f29d&e=0c004f9c13]Read full article @ HotHardware.com[/url]

Microsoft Band: A week with Apple Watch rival

Our thoughts so far on Redmond's first wearable. MICROSOFT'S FIRST WEARABLE has finally launched in the UK. The Microsoft Band, a smart watch and activity tracker in one, is set to rival the likes of the Apple Watch, FitBit Charge and Samsung Gear Fit.

Launched in the US in October, the Microsoft Band has a unique selling point when compared with many other wearables on the market as it works across iOS, Android and Windows Phone platforms.

This should prove a successful move for Redmond, as the device targets the wider smartphone user base of people who don't stick to a particular operating system, rather than focusing on a smaller audience locked into a specific ecosystem.

Read full article @ The Inquirer

Nvidia is as open source friendly as a great white shark

Open sourcers are furious that while Nvidia's GeForce GTX 900 series is a dominant card for Linux gamers it is about as open source friendly as an Apple fanboy who has been queuing for two months for the latest pointless tool he cant use.
The GeForce GTX 900 has excellent performance and great Linux OpenGL/OpenCL performance but only when using the proprietary driver. Rather than becoming more open sauce friendly Nvidia's newer GTX 900 / Maxwell hardware more hostile to the weirdie beardie open sauce extremists.
According to Phoronix the Linux 3.19 kernel had basic support for the new Nvidia GPUs in the open-source, community-based, reverse-engineered Nouveau driver.
But this was restricted to mode-setting and not hardware acceleration. Nvidia's move to requiring signed firmware images for their graphics processors is biting the open-source developers.

Read full article @ Fudzilla

ROCCAT Tyon Gaming Mouse Review

Gaming mice have remained more or less the same for quite a while. Well with the mouse we are taking a look at today we have at least two new features that I’ve never seen on a mouse before. They are a analog thumb paddle and a dorsal fin switch. Will these new features change the way we game? I guess we will have to see. The mouse in question is the ROCCAT Tyon and even without these innovations its pretty impressive featuring 12 programmable buttons, an 8200 DPI Pro Aim (R3) laser sensor, ROCCAT’s EasyShift[+] functionality, RGBA illumination and of course ROCCAT’s impressive driver software. Let’s get to gaming and see what this mouse can do!

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

SteelSeries Siberia Elite Prism Review

SteelSeries latest high end multi-platform headset gets tested...

Read full article @ HardwareHeaven

Thermaltake Core X9 Review

The Thermaltake Core X9 is a builder's dream. There is just a ton of space. You can put a license plate on the X9 and take the family camping. Stack two cases together and you have a condo on the beach. Ok, I exaggerate, but the large internal volume and modular design allow for almost unlimited options for fan and radiator mounting. HDD space? Not a problem. There are dedicated hard drive cages as well as a few places under the motherboard tray to sneak in a few more HDDs. Do you have a custom water cooling system that leaves you grumbling and compromising with other cases? Not a problem with the Core X9. It can handle everything from extra tall CPU coolers to long GPUs.

Read full article @ OCC

Workshop memory overclocking: get the most out of your modules!

Those who purchase fast memory modules will obviously want to get the most out of them. In this workshop, we'll explain how you should go about doing so, regardless of whether you are a novice or an experienced overclocker.

Before we begin, we'd like to make an important remark: overclocking your memory has a much lower effect on the performance of your PC than, say, overclocking your processor or graphics card. Here at Hardware.Info, we have often studied things such as the performance difference between outfitting your PC with DDR3-1600, DDR3-1866, or DDR3-2133 memory. Every time, we concluded that it is practically impossible to determine the difference using benchmarks that are not specifically tailored to memory, let alone to determine if there is a noticeable difference. We would thus recommend that "regular" users purchase more memory rather than faster memory. Hence us always putting affordable DDR3-1600 kits in our PC Advice systems.

Read full article @ Hardware.Info

Xiaomi Redmi 2 Smartphone Review

While those interested in technology may well know of Xiaomi, they are not a household name in the western world. Today we managed to get hold of a Xiaomi Redmi 2, one of the latest handsets from the Chinese manufacturer. While Xiaomi are yet to retail outside of Asia, an import can be picked up for as little as £95. We put the Redmi through its paces to see if it’s worth the cash.

Read full article @ KitGuru