Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

AMD FX Refresh FX-8370 FX-8370e FX-9370 and FX-9590
Antec ISK600 Review
Apple and Google Tablets Moving to Microsoft Territory
ASUS Z97 Sabertooth MARK1 Motherboard Review
Crucial MX100 256 GB
Gamescom 2014 Coverage
GIGABYTE Server GA-7PESH3 Motherboard Review
Huawei Ascend Mate 7 & Ascend G7 Hands-On
NZXT Kraken X31 Liquid Cooler Review
Plextor M6S 256GB Solid State Drive Review
PowerColor Radeon R9 285 TurboDuo Review
Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC Review
Sony SmartWatch 3 & SmartBand Talk Hands-On
Top SSD Picks for Fall 2014
Two And A Half Geeks 9/4/14: Intel Haswell-E, AMD Radeon R9 285 and FX CPUs, Samsung Galaxy Note 4, and Lots More

AMD FX Refresh FX-8370 FX-8370e FX-9370 and FX-9590

While it’s been obvious AMDs big focus has been on their APUs for the last few years. Even so in the background they have still been making a few waves with the FX line of CPUs, the main one being the launch of the 5GHz CPU a little over a year ago. Just when we thought they may have forgotten about the enthusiasts they are actually introducing a few new CPUs to the FX lineup and making changes to the overall pricing structure to better place their CPUs to compete with Intel’s introductions over the summer. Today I’m going to mainly be focusing on the newly introduced FX-8370 and the lower wattage FX-9370E, but AMD did send along the FX-9370 and the FX-9590 so we can see how the new CPUs perform in relation to their bigger brothers.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

Antec ISK600 Review

With the ISK600, Antec has a MiniITX case in their portfolio, which can either be used to build office PCs, HTPCs as well as small gaming systems. For this purpose there are for example two expansion slots to install discrete graphics cards and you can also mount ATX power supplies. Apart from that the case features a sleek design and overall we're rather curious to find out if this case is capable of convincing us.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Apple and Google Tablets Moving to Microsoft Territory

The common refrain has been that tablets are for consumption and that laptops are for productivity, and never the twain shall meet. But it's a different world today, and now Apple and Google want to cross that bridge, too, into Microsoft territory. Apple with the iPad Pro, and Google with the new Nexus.

Read full article @ Techspot

ASUS Z97 Sabertooth MARK1 Motherboard Review

There are many times that products are too specialized for widespread usage, but it is a much more common situation to see items that have the exact opposite problem. In the world of consumerism, it is natural for companies to try to make a product as appealing to as many people as they can, and often try to achieve this by cramming in as many features as possible. While it may look appealing on the surface, the result is often that these multi-dimensional items simply can’t do any of the functions particularly well. On the other hand, the highly specialized items may not be able to accomplish everything you need it to do. This leaves one trying to find the item that best fits their needs. It can sometimes be very tempting to always go with the “more”, but only until you find out where the associated “less” comes in.

This situation exists in motherboards perhaps more than any other single component a builder is going to need. There are plenty of motherboards out there that offer a world of features at a low price, many times lower than other seemingly less capable boards. They seem like a great deal until you find out the actual limitations of the features. 7.1 audio would seem like a nice feature, until you notice the specs point to bad separation and signal to noise, and you may be inclined to give up the additional USB 2.0 ports in favor of a board with a better audio solution. Or you may need more than the typical, or more precise, fan control. It would seem a board with eight fan headers would be perfect, until you find out that the control over the headers is very limited. In that case, a board able to tie specific headers to specific locations with custom curves would be a far better choice. To date, the only board that I have seen do this is the ASUS TUF Series, more commonly known as the Sabertooth.

Read full article @ HiTech Legion

Crucial MX100 256 GB

Crucial's new MX100 SSD is super affordable, yet provides excellent performance that can easily compete with the big boys. It uses brand-new 16 nanometer flash chips from Micron, paired with a proven Marvell controller. Hands down the best SSD you can get!

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Gamescom 2014 Coverage

From 13th to 17th August 2014, one of the most important European gaming fairs took place in Cologne, Germany.
Since the first day, we have reported about the gamescom 2014 news in our Forum and at Hardwarespot.de and already published several pages with many images.
Today, the full report of the gamescom 2014 is released, which has become the largest trade fair coverage on OCinside.de ever, with nearly 300 images on 10 pages.
Four pages fresh Hardware, lots of new Games, Cosplayers, Casemods, Impressions and more, you should not miss that !
It is available in German only, but it is worth watching the pictures with or without a translation tool to discover the latest gaming and gaming hardware trends.

Read full article @ OcInside.de

GIGABYTE Server GA-7PESH3 Motherboard Review

A dual processor system sounds awesome to the home user but in reality it is almost entirely a professional market. The prosumer has to use Xeons at JEDEC memory speeds and then ensure that the software is NUMA aware, especially if it decides searching for data in the other processor's L3 cache. However now that GIGABYTE Server is selling to the prosumer via Newegg, they sent us the GA-7PESH3 for review.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Huawei Ascend Mate 7 & Ascend G7 Hands-On

Today Huawei launches the successor to the Ascend Mate, the Mate 7 and a new mid-range device called the Ascent G7. I've got my hands on a Mate 7 and managed to play a bit with the G7 today at Huawei's event in Berlin. The Mate 7 directly attacks Samsung's Note lineup in the phablet sector, while the G7 being still very big at 5.5" is more of a budget device while trying to make little compromises.

Read full article @ Anandtech

NZXT Kraken X31 Liquid Cooler Review

I remember from several years ago using my electronic maintenance skills on assembling water cooler systems for my computers. In those days most liquid systems were assembled from separate components, so you had to make sure you bought a radiator, circulating pump and heatsink that all used the same tube diameter. After setting up these water cooler systems on my bench to make sure they did not leak and ruin my computer system, I would then move the water cooler into my case. Over the next couple of years I improved my skills and began assembling more elaborate cooling systems, even (unsuccessfully) adding a peltier to the system for more cooling potential.

As these assemblies began to get more time consuming, I started to use the new and more popular heatpipe designs emerging onto the market. I even have one of those old water cooler systems in a box that I believe would still be functional with a little work. But I digress, for we are here to look at one of the newer style of water cooler systems, the closed loop or all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooler.

The closed loop system we are looking at today is the smallest liquid cooling offering from NZXT. The Kraken X31 uses a 155x120x30mm radiator, cooled by a 120mm fan and a state-of-the-art variable speed circulating pump. Using the NZXT’s CAM software to control the system, you can make sure your computer stays cool as it handles your work or gaming needs. So, as usual, let’s get into the X31.

Read full article @ Neoseeker

Plextor M6S 256GB Solid State Drive Review

Our look over Plextor’s M6- SSD product line has seen us look at their M6e PCIe based M.2 drive, where the limitations of the SATA interface are no match for top end performance and more recently the M6M, a mSATA drive that packs the same components but in a tiny frame, with speeds that set it apart from many other drives in its class. Today we’re looking at the final piece of the SSD puzzle with a drive that looks much more standard if it were, with a 2.5″ chassis and the same ingredient list that we saw with the M6M and M6e.

Available in capacities ranging from 128GB up to 512GB, the M6S offers IOPs speeds of up to 94K read, 80K write with sequential speeds of 520MB/s read and 440MB/s write. Sat at the heart of the drive is a dual-core Marvell 88SS9188 controller giving the drive around 30-50% drop in power consumption compared to the last generation M5S.

Read full article @ eTeknix

PowerColor Radeon R9 285 TurboDuo Review

In this review we look at the new PowerColor Radeon R9-285 TurboDuo. Armed with an ultra silent cooler this Tonga GPU based product bring you high-end gaming at a price of 249 USD - With 2GB of graphics memory you can game with good image quality settings at Full HD. Follow us into this review where we'll look at temperatures, noise, performance and go with the latest game titles on the globe.

So as mentioned in the first paragraph, the Radeon R9 285 is based on a the new Tonga GPU. It's still built on the 28nm node from Global Foundries and features bit of a re-design applying the latest architectural improvements. A big focus of the Tonga GPU is actually power efficiency as we'll show you in this review. Tonga retains the basic technologies of the Radeon lineup such as Mantle, TrueAudio and XDMA for CrossFire support. The GPU actually has 2048 shader processors running over 32 compute units with 128 texture memory units.

The initial consumer graphics card based on Tonga now is the Radeon R9 285, it has 1792 activated stream processors making it perform at GeForce GTX 760 and Radeon HD 7970 level performance levels but with better thermals and lower power consumption. Performance wise this product is going to sit in-between the 280 and 280X. Most of the cards will have two 6-pin power PEG (PCI Express Graphics) headers to give the tweaking experience a little more room next to the 4+2 PWM phase power design. Overall a great card to play the latest games with whilst offering a good memory size versus good price versus the Full HD / 1080P monitor resolution. AMD actually releases the card as the perfect WQHD (2560x1440) resolution gaming alternative at the 250 USD level.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC Review

Earlier this week AMD launched their new R9 285 graphics card. Today we look at the second design to hit our labs, the new Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC – as we would expect, this card is supplied in an overclocked state and with a custom twin fan cooling system. Is it worth the £179.99 asking price?

Read full article @ KitGuru

Sony SmartWatch 3 & SmartBand Talk Hands-On

With Sony's launch event we had the occasion to see their first Android Wear device. Sony presents the SmartWatch 3 and the SmartBand Talk wearable device watches.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Top SSD Picks for Fall 2014

Summer has come and gone, and over the past few months, there have been quite a few SSDs released into the market, and the question of, "Which SSD should I buy?" seems to still come up a lot around forums. Usually, there are some predetermined recommended favorite in each.

Today we feel we should provide our own answer to the question. Since the answer can cover such a large audience, from those who want a cheap value drive to those who want high-end enterprise grade drives, we will separate our answers for multiple categories.

Read full article @ The SSD Review

Two And A Half Geeks 9/4/14: Intel Haswell-E, AMD Radeon R9 285 and FX CPUs, Samsung Galaxy Note 4, and Lots More

In this episode of HotHardware's Two and a Half Geeks webcast, Andrew, Dave and Marco discuss HotHardware's recent Intel Haswell-E Core i7-5960X CPU review, AMD's new Radeon R9 285 GPU and FX series processors, Samsung's just-announced Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge smartphones, ASUS' ZenWatch and other annoucements from IFA, 4K displays and a whole lot more...

Two And A Half Geeks 9/4/14: Intel Haswell-E, AMD Radeon R9 285 and FX CPUs, Samsung Galaxy Note 4, and Lots More

Read full article @ HotHardware.com