Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

ASUS R9 Fury STRIX Review
Crucial Ballistix Sport 2400MHz 32GB (4x8GB) Quad Channel Memory Kit Review
EKWB EK-XLC Predator 240 All-In-One CPU Liquid Cooling Unit Review
EKWB Predator 240 AIO Liquid CPU Cooler Review
GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs GeForce GTX 780 Ti - Should I upgrade?
Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming-7
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming Review
Intel Announces SSD DC P3608 Series
Intel SSD DC P3608 1.6TB PCIe SSD Review
Intel SSD DC P3608 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive Review
Intel SSD DC P3608 Review (1.6TB) - Over 5GB/s and 850K IOPS
Keeping Hot Laptops Cool and Running Fast
Killing Floor 2 - NVIDIA FleX Technology
Nanoxia Deep Silence 5 Rev. B Review
PowerNAS CMA 8TB Review
Samsung Galaxy Note 5 Review: A beautiful, power user device
Samsung Galaxy S5 review - I wanna hate, but I cannot
Seagate NAS Pro 6-Bay 24TB NAS Server Review
Synology DS215+ 2-bay NAS
Tt eSports Poseidon Z Forged Review
Zen developers were given total freedom, says AMD engineer

ASUS R9 Fury STRIX Review

When the R9 Fury was first launched, many gamers saw it as a near-perfect combination of performance, pricing and overall capabilities. Unfortunately, for the better part of six weeks after we initially reviewed it, actually finding one became a lesson in futility. Since then the stock situation has gradually improved and additional board partners have introduced their own designs, though retailers tell us that getting their hands on anything Fury-branded is a challenge. In this particular review, we will be looking at the ASUS R9 Fury STRIX.

The appeal surrounding AMD’s R9 Fury is well-warranted since it rings in at $549 but can run alongside the more expensive R9 Fury X when overclocked. In addition AMD’s board partners have been given a freedom to design custom boards with awesome cooling capabilities and upgraded component selections. This allows the Fury to be infinitely more adaptable that the cumbersome R9 Fury X with its large water cooling solution.

The introduction of AMD’s R9 Nano may have stolen some of the R9 Fury’s thunder in the news but there’s very little to no overlap between the two cards. While the Nano is an enticing yet expensive solution for small form factor builds, the Fury cards are typically massive due to large cooling assemblies. We highly doubt both would be cross shopped but if they are, the ASUS R9 Fury STRIX would come out well ahead on the performance per dollar front.

Read full article @ Hardware Canucks

Crucial Ballistix Sport 2400MHz 32GB (4x8GB) Quad Channel Memory Kit Review

When purchasing a computer, RAM generally is the last component that you tend to think about and when you do come to think of it; quantity is the only real factor you tend to consider. That is if you don’t have a colour scheme or a limited amount of DIMM slots to accommodate RAM. Since the early days of computing, RAM has come a long way, the most recent format DDR has seen four iterations. The latest being DDR4, which has surpassed DDR3 as the new mainstream RAM type and has introduced memory speeds up to and surpassing 3333+MHz.

Crucial are one of the big players in the RAM game, providing us with a solid performance at a more affordable price. Today’s kit is the Ballistix Sport 2400MHz, one of Crucial’s cheaper options on the market, providing us with minimal heat spreader size and design and the base unit to adopt the use of black PCB. Let’s see how this set compares in today’s review.

Read full article @ eTeknix

EKWB EK-XLC Predator 240 All-In-One CPU Liquid Cooling Unit Review

There  are various reasons that one chooses an AIO or All-In-One CPU cooler over assembling a custom water loop. One of these reasons could be cost; typically, custom loops tend to me more expensive than an AIO. Another reason could be a technical or skill based limitation; meaning, the user does not know how to assemble a custom loop. Whatever … Read more.

Read full article @ Modders-Inc

EKWB Predator 240 AIO Liquid CPU Cooler Review

EK Water Blocks (EKWB), if you've never heard of them before, is a top-tier CPU water cooling component manufacturer based in Slovenia and founded in 1999. They have strictly made components that you can buy separately and put together your own liquid cooling setup, or they sold them as a ready-to-assemble kit - until now. Today, EKWB is launching the Predator 240, which is their first pre-filled and pre-assembled solution.

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs GeForce GTX 780 Ti - Should I upgrade?

A gamer simply can't have enough graphics power in his rig, which makes the question whether to upgrade or not omnipresent. To show you whether it makes sense to upgrade from one generation to another we have this series of articles ready for you, where will compare graphics cards from different generations. Today we're going to investigate if upgrading from a NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti to a GTX 980 Ti makes sense or not.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming-7

With the launch of Intel’s latest chipset and the i7-6700 CPU it’s no surprise that they brought along with them a long list of new motherboards from every manufacture. At the launch I took a look at one of MSIs boards. After the launch though we jumped into GPU mode and covered the latest budget cards. Past that I slipped in a vacation and then of course our 17th LAN event. With all of that past us I can finally revisit Z170 and take a look at the Gigabyte GA-Z170X Gaming 7. I’m excited to see what Gigabyte has packed into the board as far as features go and to find out how it compares to the MSI. So today I’m going to dig through the Gaming 7s features then put it to the test, let’s get to it!

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming Review

We review the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming (OC edition). The GTX 950 is an entry-level to mainstream graphics card in the Maxwell range of GPUs from Nvidia that sits pretty nicely in the 1080P domain. Gigabyte offers it in the all new Xtreme Gaming edition and that means the cards comes with some nice factory tweaks and a new cooler. Its price is tempting as well at US$ 169.99

The new GeForce GTX 950 is a cut-down version of the GM206 GPU that Nvidia uses in their GTX 960 series. This revised chip has a lower number of shader processors, a 128-bit wide memory bus and thus 2 GB of GDDR5 memory. The product has been castrated and stripped of everything that is sexy with the GTX 960/970/980. For the 'normal' models you have been able to see the memory cut down to 2 GB of memory on these puppies, that memory runs on a 128-bit wide bus, the shader processors have been cut-down to 768 Shader/Stream/Cuda cores.

So yes, this is the value segment we are now reviewing. The 128-bit wide bus sounds like a nag but the Maxwell GPU architecture makes efficient use of memory color compression. Maxwell, yes, named after the mathematical physicist. The Maxwell family of GPUs is actually the 10th generation of GPU architecture for Nvidia. With several design goals in mind (higher performance and lower power consumption) Nvidia was hoping to reach 20 nm by the time their high-end product would be released. It is now 2015 and it is abundantly clear that the 20 nm fab nodes are a huge yield mess, as no manufacturer dares to use it. Nvidia went with plan B and stuck with a 28 nm process, future products will jump to 16 and 14nm, of course. Nvidia has moved forward and today the 4th Maxwell based product (GTX 750 was actually the first trial run) is being released as a GM206 based GPU. Armed with voltage, power and load limiters, Nvidia these days can harvest massive performance out of chips when you think about it. Today is about the GeForce GTX 950 range of performance.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Intel Announces SSD DC P3608 Series

Intel is introducing a new family of enterprise PCIe SSDs with the aim of outperforming their existing DC P3600 series and even beating the DC P3700 series in many metrics. To do this, theyve essentially put two P3600 SSDs on to one expansion card and widened the interface to 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0. While this does come across as a bit of a quick and dirty solution, it is a very straightforward way for Intel to deliver higher performance, albeit at the cost of sharply increased power consumption.

The SSD DC P3608 appears to the system as two individual NVMe drives behind a PLX PCIe switch chip. This means that extracting full performance from this card will require software RAID-0 or some similar software load-balancing solution. A new version of Intels Rapid Storage Toolkit for Enterprise (RSTe) drivers will be providing this capability. The overhead of the PCIe switch and managing two independent controllers means that the P3608 cannot attain an oughtright doubling of the P3600s performance.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Intel SSD DC P3608 1.6TB PCIe SSD Review

Those following Solid-State Drive market have been waiting months for Intel to finally release the Intel SSD DC P3608 and SSD DC P3520 Series drives as they are the latest and greatest NVMe drives coming to replace the already released Intel SSD DC P3700, P3600, and P3500 series drives that were Intel’s first PCIe-based NVMe drives for the data center. The Intel SSD DC P3520 is the most interesting as it will be the first NVMe drive from Intel with the revolutionary new non-volatile 3D XPOINT memory developed by IMFT (Intel/Micron Flash Technologies). The Intel SSD DC P3520 isn’t quite ready to come to market just yet, but the good news is that the Intel SSD DC P3608 is ready and the performance numbers are very impressive.

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

Intel SSD DC P3608 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive Review

Today we’re going to take a look at Intel’s latest NVMe-based solid state storage device, the SSD DC P3608. As the DC in the product name suggests, this drive (or should we say drives?) is designed for the data center and enterprise markets, where huge capacities, maximum uptime, and top-end performance are paramount. The Intel SSD DC P3608 is somewhat different than the recent consumer-targeted NVMe-based PCI Express SSD from Intel we evaluated, the SSD 750 series, however. This drive essentially packs a pair of NVMe-based SSDs onto a single card, built for high endurance and high performance. Check it out...

Read full article @ HotHardware.com

Intel SSD DC P3608 Review (1.6TB) - Over 5GB/s and 850K IOPS

A year ago Intel launched their first line up of NVMe SSDs. The DC P3700, DC P3600, and earlier this year they officially launched the DC P3500. As you might be lead to believe, the DC P3700 was their top tier product, which we were able to review, not only in the view of enterprise performance (http://thessdreview.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3d9b6193ffd32dd60e84fc74b&id=5e9eff3d49&e=1230c2ab07) , but also from a storage enthusiast’s perspective (http://thessdreview.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3d9b6193ffd32dd60e84fc74b&id=24bd756847&e=1230c2ab07) . The Intel DC P3700’s performance at the time was very impressive and still is today, delivering up to 2.8GB/s read and 1.9GB/s write as well as being able to withstand 460K/180K IOPS. At $3/GB delivering such high performance and now, up to 17 DWPD endurance for data center use, it was a recipe for success from the start. The DC P3500, the runt of the litter, is meant for read-centric workloads with much lower random write performance
and a 0.35 DWPD endurance rating. The DC P3600 on the other hand is in the middle of the trio, meant for more mixed workloads with great read and write performance, but a 3 DWPD endurance rating.

Now, however, enterprise demands are evolving. We are seeing the need for higher capacity and even higher performance storage solutions. With NVMe now coming from all corners and 3D NAND from companies other than Samsung on the horizon, Intel has decided to breathe new life into their DC P3600 series before the new year and they did so with a pretty big breath. They continued down the road with NVMe of course, only this time they did so while utilizing a dual NVMe controller design and kept a similar $/GB value as the original DC P3600. The result is something rather impressive, the new DC P3608! This SSD has been designed to meet the demands of high performance computing (HPC), database, and big data analytics use cases. With incredible speeds of up to 5GB/s read and 3GB/s write, the ability to deliver up to 850K/150K IOPS read/write, and capacities up to 4TB, this NVMe PCIe SSD is definitively a beast. Now, let’s get on with the review shall we?

Read full article @ The SSD Review

Keeping Hot Laptops Cool and Running Fast

Back in the day, before everybody started checking email on their smartwatch or shopping online with their phone, mobile users did their work on laptop computers. These days tablets and smart devices get most the attention, but notebook computers are still beating them on performance and productivity. Unfortunately, all that power generates heat, which slows down the system to maintain stability. But what if it didn’t have to? That’s where notebook coolers come in, such as the Cooler Master NotePal Ergostand III used as our example in this article about keeping hot laptops cool and running fast.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

Killing Floor 2 - NVIDIA FleX Technology

If you every played the original Killing Floor you know that it was one game that would be considered an incredible gore fest. Killing Floor 2 brings that back with an even more intensity. Killing Floor 2 starts shortly after the end of the original and is set in Europe where the failed experiments of the Horzine biotech company have taken hold. Civilization is a complete mess with all communication, government, and military forces destroyed. Some of the survivors of the devastation have designed to fight the outbreak of Zeds, they have funded operations to exterminate the threat. They have turned up the gore level with a system they call M.E.A.T. (Massive Evisceration and Trama) this goal of the developers was enhanced through the use of NVIDIA Flex technology. In fact it is the first game to use this technology.

Read full article @ HiTech Legion

Nanoxia Deep Silence 5 Rev. B Review

Big on size, low on noise. Taking on the established names in the PC component space is easier said than done, but it's always good to see newcomers find success and a few have done just that in the field of performance chassis. The likes of NZXT and Fractal Design are good examples, and looking to join those ranks is Nanoxia.

The German outfit, founded in 2012, has quickly grown in popularity amongst enthusiast users and that's partially down the company's decision to focus on a very particular section of the market. Rather than ride the performance bandwagon, Nanoxia reckons there to be "a lack of quality, quiet PC cases available," and set out to produce "products that are high-performing, long lasting, and built for silence."

Sounds like our cup of tea, so we've got the company's Deep Silence 5 Rev. B in for review.

Read full article @ Hexus

PowerNAS CMA 8TB Review

PowerNAS has used a novel approach during the development of the CMA (it stands for Converged Media Appliance). To their way of thinking this Windows 8.1 PC can act as a replacement for three separate pieces of hardware and bring together the home PC, media centre PC and NAS Server in a single device.

Read full article @ KitGuru

Samsung Galaxy Note 5 Review: A beautiful, power user device

The Galaxy Note 5 is Samsung’s latest iteration of their stylus-equipped smartphone, featuring an all new body that continues the design language Samsung established in the Galaxy S6, with other updates including the 16-megapixel camera and Exynos 7420 SoC. Naturally the Galaxy Note 5 is a larger handset than the Galaxy S6 by virtue of its larger 5.7-inch display.

Read full article @ TechSpot

Samsung Galaxy S5 review - I wanna hate, but I cannot

You prolly shan't believe today's article's conclusion. But don't just read the conclusion, you naughty men. Read the whole thing. 'Tis a long, detailed review of Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, covering specification, dimensions, look & feel, usability, ergonomics, Android operating system and the new Material Design, system options and settings, Google play store and applications, security, multimedia playback - MP3, HD video and availability of content in the store, camera, battery life, comparison to other smartphones, overall considerations, and more. Enjoy.

Read full article @ Dedoimedo

Seagate NAS Pro 6-Bay 24TB NAS Server Review

Many people used to ask us what we use in our lab to share files, download data, record through our IP cameras and stream media content and as answered numerous times in the past we use one (and even two sometimes) network attached storage devices/servers. Recently however some of you have asked us if it's really worth having a NAS online 24/7 and although electricity where we're located is not what we'd call "cheap" if you think about the pros the answer is crystal clear. It's true that you can't obviously perform the same tasks as you would with a desktop system or even a laptop (we're getting there however) but just the fact that the majority of NAS models use even less electricity than your average light bulb alone is enough to justify using one either as a media or a download server. Seagate may not be the very first brand name to come in mind when talking about NAS servers but they've actually been in that market for quite some time now (quite successfully) and since many of you asked today we'll be testing the NAS Pro 6-Bay model (DP6) with 24TB worth of storage preinstalled.

Founded in 1979, Seagate is the leading provider of hard drives and storage solutions. From the videos, music and documents we share with friends and family on social networks, to servers that form the backbone of enterprise data centers and cloud-based computing, to desktop and notebook computers that fuel our personal productivity, Seagate products help more people store, share and protect their valuable digital content. Seagate offers the industry’s broadest portfolio of hard disk drives, solid-state drives and solid-state hybrid drives. In addition, the company offers an extensive line of retail storage products for consumers and small businesses, along with data-recovery services for any brand of hard drive and digital media type. Seagate employs more than 50,000 people around the world.

The NAS Pro 6-Bay (DP6) is the top model in the desktop line by Seagate (there's also a 2-Bay and a 4-Bay model) and is targeted towards small businesses and offices with up to 50 employees. The DP6 is currently available in 5 different versions without (diskless) and with preinstalled drives (6/12/24/30TB) by Seagate and although this is nothing new since many other manufacturers sell their NAS with preinstalled drives it just feels slightly better when everything (including the software) is made by the same company (guaranteed compatibility). Under the hood of the DP6 we find a dual-core Intel Atom C2338 64-bit CPU running at 1.7GHz, 2GB DDR3 RAM (SO-DIMM) and Phison PS2251-03 USB 3.0-to-Flash micro-controller chip (used to store NAS OS 4) and an Noctua NF-P12 120mm fan (1300RPM/54.32CFM/19.8dBA). In terms of connectivity since the DP6 is aimed towards businesses it only features the basics such as two RJ45 Gigabit ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports and 1 USB 2.0 port (no HDMI port). Time to see if the NAS Pro 6-Bay (DP6) has what it takes to take on similar models by other manufacturers.

Read full article @ NikKTech

Synology DS215+ 2-bay NAS

The Synology DS215+ is a business NAS for centralized backup and the protection of critical data. Our tests also show that it offers high performance while consuming very little power.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Tt eSports Poseidon Z Forged Review

Tt eSports promised gamers a 'gorgeous and sleek' keyboard and they certainly did deliver! Though it is easy to judge a book by its cover and if we were to do that now, out the box, the Poseidon Z Forged is absolutely stunning in such a way most pictures and images simply do not do it justice. But wait, there is more!

Taking a look under the hood, gamers will be able to get the most out of their macros with the Instant Shift System (I.S.S.) enabling them to instantly swap between profiles using the alt, ctrl or shift keys. Many will be pleased to see the inclusion of a dedicated USB hub and integrated DAC amplifier for headphones for convenience. Finally, having passed an 'arduous' testing process, Tt eSports are confident with their product to such an extent that they offer a 5 year warranty. Oh it has LEDs too...

Read full article @ Vortez

Zen developers were given total freedom, says AMD engineer

The processor was designed "from scratch" to be the best it can be. In the wake of the news of legendary CPU architect Jim Keller leaving AMD last week, there was a lot of discussion about the upcoming highly anticipated Zen microprocessor. The success of this upcoming processor is vital for AMD as it battles its performance and business challenges. Zen is expected to be the foundation upon which AMD builds new ranges of processors from late 2016/2017 onwards and then refines for several years thereafter.

Read full article @ Hexus