Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

Best CPU cooler 2018: top CPU coolers for your PC
Biostar Racing Z370GT6 Review
Gamdias Hephaestus P1 RGB Gaming Headset Review
HP Envy x360 Review
Lian Li PC-T70 Open and Closed Air Test Bench Review
NETGEAR RN524X SMB 10Gbe NAS Review
NVIDIA Gaming Performance Minimally Impacted By KPTI Patches
Testing Windows 10 Performance Before and After the Meltdown Flaw Emergency Patch

Best CPU cooler 2018: top CPU coolers for your PC

The 7 best CPU coolers of 2017 are here. Targeting all budgets and PC sizes, which will it be?

Read full article @ TechRadar

Biostar Racing Z370GT6 Review

Biostar's Racing Z370GT6 is a cost-effective motherboard for Intel's newest mainstream platform. It still features two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots connected to the CPU, which means multi-GPU setups are possible. Also included are two M.2 NVMe slots and a heatsink to keep those drives cool.

Read full article @ TechPowerUp

Gamdias Hephaestus P1 RGB Gaming Headset Review

Today we will be covering the Hephaestus P1 RGB Surround Sound Gaming Headset from Gamdias. Some of you may not be familiar with Gamdias but hopefully after this review you will give these guys look as they offer a quality product. They have a full lineup of peripherals to take a look at! I am going to give the Hephaestus P1 a shakedown and see how they hold up!

Read full article @ FunkyKit

HP Envy x360 Review

Today we’re taking a look at the very first Ryzen Mobile laptop to hit the market: the HP Envy x360. This is the same laptop we used to benchmark the Ryzen 5 2500U mobile APU a couple of weeks ago, pitting it against Intel’s 8th gen Kaby Lake Refresh CPUs in a battle of CPU and GPU power.

While Ryzen Mobile is super interesting, the Envy x360 is worth talking about in its own right, especially as AMD enthusiasts or really anyone looking for decent laptop graphics might be interested in buying one of these systems. It’s also available in an Intel version, but Ryzen is the star of the show here so it will be the focus of this review.

Read full article @ TechSpot

Lian Li PC-T70 Open and Closed Air Test Bench Review

We check out the PC-T70, this is an open-air test bench from Lian li, with the option for an additional kit transforming it into a closed-air case. We test the unit and see if there is more to it than meets the eye. Granted, it's not a suitable product for everybody, but if it if test benches appeal to you, we can wholeheartedly recommend that you check this article out.

Read full article @ Guru3D

NETGEAR RN524X SMB 10Gbe NAS Review

The RN524X is a four-bay NAS solution in the ReadyNAS 520 series. This range of platforms is designed for medium office data storage and small virtualized networks supporting up to 80 users. These provide both local and remote access and are powered by Intel's Pentium Server platform. This range features four, six, and eight bay options and all offer 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The RN524X offers flexible capacity options with diskless options for those that bring their own drives, along with 16 and 24TB options in both desktop and enterprise drive solutions. Going over the specifications, we first find this platform VMware certified with the logo at the top. This is followed by the processor in the Intel D1508 dual-core operating at 2.2GHz paired with 4GB of DDR4 supporting ECC memory. It's a four-bay unit and as mentioned previously supports 80 users. Each of the drive bays supports the SATA 6GB/s protocol and hot swap while offering support for 2.5" and 3.5" HDDs and solid state drives.

Read full article @ TweakTown

NVIDIA Gaming Performance Minimally Impacted By KPTI Patches

Earlier this week when news was still emerging on the "Intel CPU bug" now known as Spectre and Meltdown I ran some Radeon gaming tests with the preliminary Linux kernel patches providing Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) support. Contrary to the hysteria, the gaming performance was minimally impacted with those open-source Radeon driver tests while today are some tests using the latest NVIDIA driver paired with a KPTI-enabled kernel.

Read full article @ Phoronix

Testing Windows 10 Performance Before and After the Meltdown Flaw Emergency Patch

The IT world was caught by surprise this week when it was disclosed that nearly every processor sold in the last 20+ years powering all forms of computers could be exploited due to two major hardware flaws (read our 'what you need to know' article). Discovered last year by Google’s Project Zero team, manufacturers have been investigating and working on a fix for months, although the public just came to know about this now.

Because of the nature of Meltdown and Spectre, the patches have to come at the OS level, and there's a possibility of performance loss. On the upside for consumers, desktop computing and gaming may not be as affected as other intensive tasks more commonly seen in server and database applications.

Based on the information received so far, we know most Intel CPUs are affected, but this issue also extends to select ARM architectures, while AMD appears to be mostly in the clear. There are three variants of the exploit and AMD is vulnerable to the “Bounds Check Bypass” method but this can be solved via an OS update and should come at an insignificant performance cost. The other two variants reportedly don't impact AMD processors due to differences in their architectural design.

Read full article @ TechSpot