Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

7 Reasons You Should Upgrade To GNOME 3.12 On Linux
802.11ac routers review: 20 models tested
ADATA AE800 DashDrive Air Review
AMD Athlon 5350 APU and AM1 Platform Review
be quiet! Dark Rock 3 CPU Cooler Review
Cooler Master Nepton 140XL CPU Cooler Review
Cooler Master Nepton 280L Water Cooler Review
DXRacer M-Series Game Chair
EVGA Backplate Install for the GTX 780 Ti Classified
Gigabyte BRIX Pro And Intel Iris Pro Graphics Review
Gigabyte CDRomland OC Workshop
GIGABYTE R9 290X OC and ASUS GTX 780 Ti DCUII Review
How Does an SSD Work
How to run XP on Linux Mint with Oracle VirtualBox
HP Slate 7 HD Review
Humble Bundle: PC and Android 9 Review
Intel lists Haswell refresh parts
KobraLan Extreme Review
Linux and the Post-XP Cry for Help
Linux-ready SBC runs on 2 Watts
Lumsing 11000mAh External Battery Bank Review
Mionix Naos 7000 Gaming Mouse Review
NVIDIA GeForce 337.50 Beta Driver Comparison
OCZ VERTEX 460 240GB Review
Overclocking The AMD AM1 Athlon & Sempron APUs
Plextor M6e 256GB PCI Express SSD Review
Samsung Galaxy S5 Android Smartphone Review
Samsung XP941 Native PCIe M.2 SSD (512GB) Review
Scythe IORI Scior 1000 Review
Thermaltake Urban T81 Full Tower review

7 Reasons You Should Upgrade To GNOME 3.12 On Linux

Labeled by some as unintuitive and a usability nightmare, GNOME Shell used to be crap. Not anymore. GNOME released version 3.12 of its popular desktop environment recently, and it refines the Gnome Shell concept yet again. It managed to pass the usable threshold a few releases ago and hasnt stopped improving since. It might take a while before this new version is packaged into your favorite distributions next release, but heres a preview of what changes you can expect.

Read full article @ MakeUseOf

802.11ac routers review: 20 models tested

The market for routers is dynamic, and given that it has been a while since we have last published an overview covering the state of affairs surrounding 802.11ac routers on Hardware.Info, it's high time for an update. We've tested 20 different models, including a number of the already third generation 802.11ac routers.

802.11ac saw a definitive breakthrough in 2013, and was finally officially ratified in January of 2014. Almost all brands have brought an 802.11ac router onto the market by now, and most manufacturers have an entire line-up of 802.11ac models nowadays. One thing is certain: 802.11n dual-band routers won't be holding on much longer. Let's take a look at Linksys, for example: the EA2700 is their only dual-band router which does not yet use 802.11ac for the 5 GHz band.

Read full article @ Hardware.Info

ADATA AE800 DashDrive Air Review

With the warmer weather coming on the hiking trails are the perfect place to get some exercise and enjoy the outdoors at the same time. Sometimes that means getting splinters or thorns in your hands when bushwhacking through brush and means that you need something to pull the thorns and clean the wounds. I find that it is always important to be prepared in these situations so I typically carry a backpack with a small medical kit and a Swiss Army knife. The knife has everything I need for pulling splinters or thorns and the med kit has some alcohol wipes and bandages.

Read full article @ HiTech Legion

AMD Athlon 5350 APU and AM1 Platform Review

Earlier this month AMD released the low cost AM1 platform that they believe will succeed in the low cost general everyday use and office markets. To do well in this very competitive market AMD will need an affordable platform that has enough performance to get the daily tasks done. The AMD Kabini APU's range in price from $31 to $55 and the mini-ITX and micro-ATX AM1 motherboards with the FS1b socket range between $25 - $35. That means you could be looking at a fully integrated desktop platform for less than $60! Does AMD have your attention now? Read on to see how this platform performs.

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

be quiet! Dark Rock 3 CPU Cooler Review

be quiet! introduced their Dark Rock 3 Series of CPU coolers earlier this year at CES and we were very impressed. There are two main coolers in this series, the Dark Rock Pro 3, and the Dark Rock 3. The main difference between these two coolers is that the Pro version features a dual tower design, while the Dark Rock 3 has a single tower design. Today we will be taking a look at the Dark Rock 3. Besides the single tower design the Dark Rock 3 features six 6mm copper heatpipes, unique dynamic wave-contour cooling fins, a 135 mm be quiet! Silent Wings fan and a cooling capacity of 190W TDP. Let’s take a look…

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Cooler Master Nepton 140XL CPU Cooler Review

The Cooler Master Nepton 140XL is a high-end liquid cooling system for processors. It has a big 140 mm radiator with two 140 mm fans in push-pull configuration.

Read full article @ Hardware Secrets

Cooler Master Nepton 280L Water Cooler Review

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The rest were Made in China." Unless you have been living under a rock, many products are made in China for one reason or another, whether it is for cheaper labor, cheaper parts, or just because. This is true for products such as Apple's iPads and iPhones. Not only are many products made in China, some products may look awfully alike. For those Apple lovers out there, one could say that every iteration of the Mac pretty much looks the same. And although designed in California, everything is assembled in China, as with many other products these days. By this logic, the quote as stated in the beginning seems to be very applicable Mac products. That said, as technology evolves overtime, some products become slimmer, lighter and faster, but there are also those that become bigger, yet they're still just as great for the most part. But is bigger necessarily mean that the product isn't as great as slim and light products? Wait... what? As paradoxical as it sounds, take mainframe computers. Back in the days, these computers were massive, but comparing with today's super computers and servers, there is simply no competition in terms of processing power and other such factors. No doubt, slim HDTVs, laptops, ultrabooks, and tablets work the same way. But when it comes down to aftermarket coolers, the more surface area it has, the more heat it would be able to dissipate, given the same material that are used. What we have here today at APH Networks is Cooler Master's very own closed-loop liquid cooling system, the Nepton 280L. Like Apple's philosophy, its radiator design looks awfully like the Thermaltake WATER2.0 Performer and Thermaltake WATER2.0 Pro, but they are not related at all. Will the philosophy of "bigger is better" apply? Let us take a closer look to see how well this beast performs!

Read full article @ APH Networks

DXRacer M-Series Game Chair

’ve spoken about it in a few previous reviews but it’s really important to remember that there are a few things beyond your PC itself that will really improve your gaming experience. A few of the obvious examples are your keyboard and mouse but there are others that you might not even consider. A perfect example of something that most people skimp on is their chair. The ironic thing is that your chair is used more than any other product at your desk. As someone who spends both their work and recreational time in front of a PC, a high quality chair is even more important. I have been using the same “racing” style office chair for nearly 10 years now, after being repaired multiple times the chair has seen better days. When I came across the chairs from a company called DXRacer they fit the bill perfectly. Let’s see if their M-Series Gaming Chair can keep me gaming for the next 10 years.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

EVGA Backplate Install for the GTX 780 Ti Classified

Video card manufactures have started to go to great lengths to make their products stand out. For EVGA they provide a wide variety of NVidia based graphics cards and match that with their popular ACX cooling solution as a way to provide improve performance. The ACX cooler is comprised of three main parts. The dual fans provide improved cooling and make very little noise under normal operation. Below the fans you’ll find a large multi-heatpipe cooler for the GPU. The third component is the standalone heatspreader for the VRM and memory. This is a key component as it also reinforces the PCB to prevent it from bending under load.

Together the ACX system works extremely well but suffers from “Bare PCB Syndrome”. You see the ACX cooler is all positioned on one side of the video card leaving the back of the card exposed and ugly. Likewise if you happen to remove your ACX cooler, say to do overclocking with LN2, the only way to cool the VRM is to modify the heatspreader or make something yourself. In doing so you may invertedly break the one thing keeping the PCB from flexing.

Read full article @ Hardware Asylum

Gigabyte BRIX Pro And Intel Iris Pro Graphics Review

Intel's Haswell 4th generation Core series processors with Iris Pro Graphics (formerly known by the code name Crystal Well) offered the promise of more robust integrated graphics performance, since we first laid eyes on the Gigabyte-built device we're showcasing here today, back at CES 2014 in Las Vegas earlier this year.

The Gigabyte BRIX Pro is a tiny 4.5-inch square "brick" of technology, if you will, and it's powered by an Intel Core i7-4770R quad-core processor with integrated Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200. This CPU actually boasts the fastest, most powerful Intel graphics engine we have tested to date, so this should be an interesting ride to say the least. Let's have a look...

Read full article @ HotHardware.com

Gigabyte CDRomland OC Workshop

After a first successful outing of the Hardware.Info Pro OC team, it was time to head to a new location. Bundling forces with Gigabyte, Intel and the CDRomLand store the stage was set for another OC workshop. Since the Hardware.Info team is involved in HWBOT's Pro OC Cup some scores had to be improved to remain within the top 10. A tedious task as overclocking with a curious crowd, constantly asking questions, adds up to the challenge. Time to head over to the lovely city of Breda to the CDRomLand shop.

Read full article @ Madshrimps

GIGABYTE R9 290X OC and ASUS GTX 780 Ti DCUII Review

Our evaluation of the GIGABYTE R9 290X OC and ASUS GTX 780 Ti DCUII pits two heavy hitters against one another to see who comes out on top.

Today we look at the GIGABYTE R9 290X 4GB OC and ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC video cards. Each of these video cards features a custom cooling system, and a factory overclock. We will push the overclock farther and put these two video cards head-to-head for a high-end performance comparison.

Read full article @ HardOCP

How Does an SSD Work

‘How Does An SSD Work’ is the fourth article in our series entitled ‘Learning To Run With Flash’. In this series, we take the time to try to explain the ins and outs of SSDs to you the reader, as well as doing our best to provide an understanding of how this amazing technology will benefit you. If you are new, welcome and please scroll to the bottom of this article where you will find previous articles, all compiled in a simple and progressive manner.

Read full article @ The SSD Review

How to run XP on Linux Mint with Oracle VirtualBox

For those times when you absolutely must still run Windows XP, one safer way of doing it is to run XP in a virtual machine using the Oracle VirtualBox hypervisor on Linux Mint.

Read full article @ ZDNet

HP Slate 7 HD Review

Following HP's disastrous previous entries into the tablet market, there is clearly a lot riding upon the 7-inch shoulders of the HP Slate 7 HD. Given the value of the tablet PC market, this is an area that HP can't afford to miss out on.When it comes to the modern tablet market, there are two clear winners, in the form of Android's OS and Apple's iPad range, although Windows 8 tablets have slowly started to provide a decent third option.Recent news that Android has now overtaken the iPad in tablet dominance is no surprise given the wide range of price tags that it covers, from the highest-end Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 all the way down to the much cheaper Google Nexus 7.That is where the HP Slate 7 HD sits, running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean for the rather reasonable price of £129 (about $215, AU$239), or for £169 (about $282, AU$312) if you want two years' worth of free 3G data (250MB per month) included.For the added cost you also get double the internal storage, up from 8GB to 16GB, so it's starting to look even more reasonable. The Slate 7 HD is one of the cheaper Android tablets out there, which may help it against the likes of the Kindle Fire HDX, Tesco Hudl and Nexus 7.

Read full article @ Techradar

Humble Bundle: PC and Android 9 Review

I found the two beat-the-average games, Kingdom Rush and Knights of Pen and Paper, to be very enjoyable. Kingdom Rush offers a deep and well-designed tower defense experience on both Android and PC. Knights of Pen and Paper is an even deeper game, but not too intimidating, especially if you are familiar with other turn-based RPGs. Either game, on its own, I would recommend beating the average for, so beating the average for both makes perfect sense.

Read full article @ OCC

Intel lists Haswell refresh parts

Intel has added a load of Haswell refresh parts to its official price list and there really aren’t any surprises to report.

Most parts ended up with a 100MHz clock boost and as far as we can tell there were no noteworthy tweaks other than the clock bump. Devil’s Canyon parts are supposed to bring a few nifty features including better packaging, but they are coming a bit later.

Read full article @ Fudzilla

KobraLan Extreme Review

KobraLan Extreme is the new mini-monster from KobraPC, which is based on an ITX formfactor with high-end components. The system is Haswell based with an Intel Core i7-4770K in order to pump out high frame rates there is a MSI GTX 780 Ti Gaming graphics card. In addition, the system is pretty clean inside but this build is certainly not cheap. If you're curious to see what KobraPC has been building, have look at the following review.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Linux and the Post-XP Cry for Help

Well the Linux landscape shifted dramatically last week, and not just because of the discovery of the Heartbleed bug. No indeed, there's another key reason this little planet of ours isn't the same as it was a week ago, and that's none other than Windows XP's long-anticipated end of life. "As of April 8, 2014, support and updates for Windows XP are no longer available," wrote Microsoft.

Read full article @ LinuxInsider

Linux-ready SBC runs on 2 Watts

Embedian has launched a 3.5-inch sandwich-style SMART-MEN SBC that combines a baseboard with a SMARC COM running Linux or Android on a 1GHz TI AM335x SoC. The SMART-MEN, or officially SBC-SMART-MEN, is a variation on the SMART-BEE announced by Embedian last month. T

Read full article @ LinuxGizmos

Lumsing 11000mAh External Battery Bank Review

Up for review today I have another portable battery for mobile devices and it’s a big one at 11000mAh in capacity but what’s even more interesting is that it has five USB ports which you can use all at the same time. The battery doesn’t really have any specific name, it’s from a company called Lumsing that makes many different products, this battery being just one of them. The Lumsing battery has five USB ports but they all vary in output from .5A up to 2.1A so you can charge a multitude of devices from small Bluetooth headphones up to tablets. Read on to learn more…

Read full article @ TestFreaks

Mionix Naos 7000 Gaming Mouse Review

Hello beloved readers, welcome the the Mionix Naos 7000 mouse review. We all need a mouse if you are a hardcore gamer, a hard working office person or just someone who loves facebooking. We all need a mouse and keyboard to work on computers and now even the newer UEFI bios' accept mice as input. My first "real" mouse was a Logitech MX 600 wireless mouse, then I was still using my Dell XPS "gaming" laptop. Then some time ago I decided to build my own computer and the only thing I had was a mouse.

Read full article @ FunkyKit

NVIDIA GeForce 337.50 Beta Driver Comparison

Video card driver updates usually bring incremental performance gains and aim to fix whatever the flavor of the month is in terms of graphical rendering issues. NVIDIA has a good track record on keeping up with the newest game releases and also collaborating with most major game developers to optimize performance by integrating its own technology such as NVIDIA Gameworks which we first took a look at last October.

It is still a pretty big deal when a major driver revision is rolled out, especially when it's announced with jaw-dropping performance gain claims. Last Monday, NVIDIA made available for download the GeForce 337.50 Beta drivers which are meant to bring a first wave of performance optimizations to DirectX 11 games and emphasize the Green Team's focus on Microsoft's response to AMD's Mantle, the highly anticipated DirectX 12 API. The new drivers comes also bundled with an update to the NVIDIA GeForce Experience software, which is now at the version 2.0.

NVIDIA claimed a performance increase of up to 64% in single GPU DirectX 11 performance and up to 71% for SLI setups. According to NVIDIA's announcement, which can be read here, these gains are achieved by optimising single-GPU DirectX 11 performance and globally reducing CPU overhead for the majority of DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and DirectX 11 games. These are very bold claims indeed, which created a wave of controversy across the net. To shed some light into the matter, we decided to run the new NVIDIA GeForce 337.50 Beta drivers through some intensive game-benchmarking, 100% in-house, for your reading enjoyment. The results were pretty interesting, even if not as mind-blowing as NVIDIA hoped!

Read full article @ Neoseeker

OCZ VERTEX 460 240GB Review

OCZ were renowned for producing very high quality, reliable memory components to the enthusiast market. In the latter years we saw OCZ branch out into supplying power supply units and most recently Solid State Drives (SSD). It was a sad day then when we learned the California based company had filed for bankruptcy. Thankfully the company was saved by Toshiba and OCZ is now still a standalone department of the much bigger Japanese multinational engineering and electronics conglomerate corporation.

Read full article @ Vortez

Overclocking The AMD AM1 Athlon & Sempron APUs

With the initial Linux tests of the AMD Athlon 5150 / 5350 & Sempron 2650 / 3850 out of the way, I ran some basic overclocking tests on all four of these week-old AM1 APUs.

To not much surprise given these are $60 USD parts and under, there isn't much to squeeze out of these Kabini APUs with Jaguar processor cores. Many AM1 motherboards reportedly are not even offering any overclocking options from within their UEFI setup area. Fortunately, the ASUS AM1I-A motherboard that I've been using for many of these AM1 Linux benchmarks, offers basic overclocking support.

Read full article @ Phoronix

Plextor M6e 256GB PCI Express SSD Review

Today we have a review of a product that should have your attention. Plextor released the M6e PCI-Express SSD, this product slides into your PCI Express slot, but more importantly ... it makes use of an M.2 PCI Expess SSD. Why is that so important ? Well, the upcoming Z97 and newer motherboards will likely all have that cute and tiny M.2 PCIe interface. That brings small form factors add-in SSDs to our PC platform.

There is an abbreviation for that, NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor). It is not just that though, SATA3 has not been amongst us for that long, but the SSDs evolved in a very fast manner, making SATA3 already a bottleneck for current generation SSDs. M2 PCIe links directly to your free PCIe lanes and as such, it is an interface with much more available bandwidth. See, at a cool 10 Gbps PCI-Express based M.2 has roughly 67% more bandwidth available opposed to SATA3 (6 Gbps). So that will definitely kick off a new SSD race in the upcoming months.

Z97 is not out yet, but M2 products are PCI Express ready and as such for plextor it is easy peasy to place an M2 PCIe SSd onto a daughter board. And these two combined offer a PCI Express SSD with a single controller that will scream performance. Plextor developed a PCI-Express based SSD that can reach performance up-to 770 MB/sec. Incredible numbers really, but is that performance across the board, or just here and there in certain conditions we figured ?

Read full article @ Guru3D

Samsung Galaxy S5 Android Smartphone Review

I’ve been a fan of the Galaxy series of smartphones from Samsung since the first Galaxy S many moons ago. Yes, some people may have their gripes about the plasticky feel, the oversaturated display or the TouchWiz UI, but my impressions of these phones has generally been positive. Given this, I fully expected to be equally impressed the newly launched Samsung Galaxy S5. Is this fifth-generation device worth your hard-earned money? Or are there better alternatives on the market?

Read full article @ MEGATech

Samsung XP941 Native PCIe M.2 SSD (512GB) Review

As we have previously mentioned in our review of the Plextor M6M solid state drive, it is important to remember that SSD's can come in different shapes and sizes. Not all drives are going to be the 2.5" form factor and fit perfectly into your ultra book or desktop. We spoke briefly about the mSATA form factor and that you will find it most often in a laptop, but as laptops and ultra books become slimmer, the demand for smaller, yet faster, drives increases. Bring in the native PCIe M.2 form factor. The PCIe M.2 SSD eliminates the SATA 3 bottleneck, where with SATA 3 you can expect SSD speeds around 500 MB/s, but with PCIe you can expect speeds nearly double this. Incredible isn't it? Imagine, 1GB/s and you are not even using a RAID 0 configuration; it really is astonishing. The Samsung XP941 PCIe M.2 SSD is one of, if not the fastest drive we have ever seen. Let's take a closer look!

Read full article @ The SSD Review

Scythe IORI Scior 1000 Review

With the IORI Scior 1000, Scythe has made a low-profile down-draft cooler, that is surprisingly well built, especially if we consider its price of 25 Euro. Other than that it should offer decent cooling capacity, so it's not going to be an issue if you want to overclock your CPU by a few hundred MHz. So far we're rather curious to see what this cooler is capable of.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Thermaltake Urban T81 Full Tower review

In a market filled with all kinds of PC Cases by a huge number of manufacturers we all know how hard it is for someone to pick the right one for the job especially if price is of a concern. The reason i mentioned price should be quite obvious so if you're aiming to get one of the most expensive towers in the market then you currently only have a handful of choices to pick from by just a few of the leading manufacturers. On the other hand if you're on a budget things get tougher since most manufacturers out there aim for the masses and not enthusiasts, serious gamers and professionals so the number of available choices skyrockets. Primarily Thermaltake also seeks to win over the masses but from time to time they too release high quality and feature rich PC Cases aimed at serious consumers and the brand new Urban T81 Full Tower which has been with us for roughly a week now certainly wants to get in their ranks.

Read full article @ NikKTech