Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

Adesso Xtreme S2 Portable Bluetooth Speaker Review
ASUS STRIX GTX 780 OC 6GB Review
ASUS Z97-A Preview
EnerPlex Kickr II Review
Intel Core i7 4790K Devils Canyon CPU Review
Noctua NH-D15 Review
Samsung 840 Pro Solid State Drive Review
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 Review
Western Digital Blue (WD10SPCX) 1 TB Slim Mobile Hard Disk Drive Review
Western Digital Red WD40EFRX 4TB Hard Drive Review

Adesso Xtreme S2 Portable Bluetooth Speaker Review

So say you are at the beach, a the pool or even hanging outside with friends. You are having a good time, but something is missing…good music! Bluetooth portable speakers solve this problem because they can be used with pretty much any smartphone and they do not require external power. So you can easily throw one in your bag and you will be good to go. Today we are taking a look at the Adesso Xtreme S2 Portable Bluetooth Speaker that features double bass subwoofer sound technology, multipoint technology so you can connect multiple devices at once, and even a built-in microphone to take calls. Is this the perfect device for summer? Read on as we find out!

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

ASUS STRIX GTX 780 OC 6GB Review

Our evaluation of the ASUS STRIX GTX 780 OC 6GB video card is now online. If you want a silent video card, with extreme hardware enhancements and 6GB of VRAM, this could be the one you are looking for.

Today we review the brand new ASUS STRIX GTX 780 OC Edition 6GB DirectCU II video card. ASUS has taken an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 GPU and wrapped it in a complete custom "silent" cooling solution and doubled the stock VRAM creating a unique package. We will look at performance and compare it to GTX 780 and R9 290X.

Read full article @ HardOCP

ASUS Z97-A Preview

The Z97-A from ASUS belongs to the manufacturer's Classic-Series which makes it feature a black PCB and champagne-colored heatsinks. This board certainly offers more than just a pretty color scheme like for instance great versatility regarding storage connectors. Also the price of this motherboard is quite interesting.

Read full article @ ocaholic

EnerPlex Kickr II Review

Have you ever wanted to go hiking, biking riding, mountain climbing, or any outdoor sport/hobby, but afraid that your mobile device might more than likely die? Well when your mobile charger isn't enough for the hours you love to spend outdoors, the Kickr II by EnerPlex, might just be the right solar charger for you, given that there isn't a cloud in the sky.

Read full article @ TechwareLabs.com

Intel Core i7 4790K Devils Canyon CPU Review

One of the most talked of processors this year has to be the product we are reviewing today. The Core i7-4790K. Dubbed and known as a Devils Canyon the new K model processor it finally has arrived in the highlands of that mystic land called Groningen in the Netherlands. Okay, lame puns aside, Intel last week announced a couple of K model processors. The Core i7-4790K will replace the 4770K as flagship processor. By itself that normally means a 100 MHz speed-bump, but know that for the 4790K things really are quite a bit different.

One of the bigger complaints over the past two years has been that Intel changed the thermal design of their processors, they are a lot harder to cool down. We'll talk more in-depth about it on the next pages, but that has been improved. Next to that if we look at the 4790K specifically, we notice a very healthy bump in performance, this processor has a base-clock of 4 GHz, and all its four cores are allowed to turbo towards a whopping 4400 MHz if they meet the thermal and power thresholds set by Intel. And yeah that is significant.

So in theory we have a processor that not only is clocked significantly faster, it should overclock a bit better as well. Join us as we look at the performance of this CPU in a wide variety of benchmark, will it be noticeably faster then say a Core i7-4770K? Well today we will seek & find an answer to that. As you guys know Z97 and the Intel refresh of their Haswell processors has been anything from a well-kept secret, up-to the tiniest little details have spread on the web. Now this month a number of things are going to happen. You'll notice the recently announced Haswell refresh based processors available in stores as well, mostly all of them merely have a small 100/200 MHz clock frequency increment for a tiny boost in performance. However you'll have noticed an extensive wave of H97/Z97 motherboard releases as the manufacturers are releasing some really cool stuff alright.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Noctua NH-D15 Review

A little over four years ago Noctua released the infamous dual tower / dual fan NH-D14, which is now simply known as the D14. It quickly became the standard that all the tower style coolers would be judged against. From the Noctua site: "Built on the basis of the legendary NH-D14 and carrying on its quest for ultimate quiet cooling performance, Noctua’s flagship model NH-D15 is an elite-class dual tower cooler for the highest demands." So it sounds like Noctua has drawn a new line in the sand, and used a great cooler (the D14) as the foundation. Over the years, many have copied Noctua's successful design and a few have made some improvements along the way. While the All-in-One (AIO) liquid coolers are now common place, they have not by any means replaced the good old reliable air coolers. The simplistic design and record of long-lasting reliability make air coolers hard to beat.

The NH-D15 is designed to handle one of the most obvious and frustrating problems often encountered with high performance air-cooled solutions: inaccessible DIMM slots on the motherboard caused by interference from large heat sinks. RAM modules with large heat shields, such as the Patriot Viper Series, Mushkin Ridgebacks, and Corsair Vengeance and Dominator modules (plus many others), present a real clearance issue. You have to make a choice regarding the CPU cooling method or how much memory to install in the system, and to further complicate things, you have to consider the use of high performance modules versus standard modules. These issues pertain to any company that offers a large tower-style heat sink. To combat the space constraints, companies bring new slim tower designs to the table, like the Noctua NH-U12S. Of course, the popularity of the all-in-one (AIO) liquid coolers is hard to ignore, and many companies offer them. Personally, I like the AIO solutions, but many people are not comfortable with liquid solutions and prefer standard air cooling. For those people, Noctua again step up to the plate to take a swing.

Today we will review the NH-D15. With a list price of $99.99 and equipped with a six-year warranty, Noctua has again released another high-end cooling solution to meet the challenge of memory compatibility. Let's look at it in more detail.

Read full article @ OCC

Samsung 840 Pro Solid State Drive Review

For going on two years now, Samsung has been a major player in the SSD market. Before that, Samsung SSDs just didn’t compete. That has all changed with the Samsung 800 series of SSDs and even more recently with the release of Samsung’s RAPID technology for use with Samsung 840 SSDs. Samsung now competes at the top of the market and their SSDs are forces to be reckoned with. In this article, Benchmark Reviews looks at the Samsung 840 Pro SSD’s performance, with and without RAPID mode enabled.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 Review

The Galaxy Tab Pro's combination of security and productivity services makes it one of the most enterprise friendly options currently available running Android. However, its use of an older Snapdragon 800 processor could impact its long-term appeal.

Pros:
Robust security, decent application offering, good display, reasonable camera by tablet standards

Cons:
No S Pen, uses previous generation processor

Read full article @ V3

Western Digital Blue (WD10SPCX) 1 TB Slim Mobile Hard Disk Drive Review

The new WD Blue drives also come in slimmer form factors with heights of just 7 mm and 5 mm, allowing them to fit in ever thinner Ultrabooks. In addition, they offer these key features :

Low Power Consumption - State-of-the-art seeking algorithms and advanced power management features ensure low power consumption and long battery life.

Quiet - In a notebook drive, silence is golden. WD’s exclusive noise reducing technologies yield one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market.

Available SATA 6 Gb/s interface -The SATA 6 Gb/s interface provides greater flexibility for use with the latest chipsets as well as backwards compatibility to legacy systems with SATA 3 Gb/s requirements. (xPVX, xPCX, and MPCK models only).

Read full article @ Tech ARP

Western Digital Red WD40EFRX 4TB Hard Drive Review

"When it comes to buying cars," I explained to my friend, "it is actually quite similar to relationship choices we make. For example, I love BMWs. I rave about their attractive looks, desirable specifications, charming personality, and outstanding performance, but I would never buy one. It is like the girl you would not mind dating, but when it comes to marriage, it is wise to look elsewhere." Why is that? Well, for me, it will have to be the long term implications. Three or four years down the road, all the emotional factors I first had will soon be overshadowed by many practical considerations, like reliability and maintenance costs. Therefore, despite my frequent public profession of my admiration for BMWs, I always end up buying a Honda. Sure, emotional appeal is important. My Honda's looks, features, personality, and performance may not win over the BMW every time, but its well rounded package, in conjunction with affordability, low maintenance costs, great fuel economy, and top notch reliability will almost guarantee an excellent relationship for years to come. It is simply a choice that makes sense. As I have said in my SilverStone Strider Essential Gold 700W report last month, sometimes, practical considerations win over pure emotional desirability. In the storage world, it is no different. Obviously, you can slap several SSDs in RAID in your NAS with a 10GbE card and rip 500MB/s over your network, but how practical is that? If I am building a file server, what I want is a balance of speed, capacity, reliability, and affordability. When it comes to reliability, there is one brand that always pops up in the dictionary: Western Digital. And when it comes to speed, capacity, and affordability, the name for reliability has a color for you: Red. Designed specifically for network attached storage systems, the Western Digital Red WD40EFRX 4TB drives promises to excel in all four factors. Will it live up to all these promises? To find out, we took in not one, but four, to see how they perform in our synthetic and real life tests today. Read on to find out what we have found!

Read full article @ APH Networks