Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

Akitio Thunder3 Dock Pro Review
Asus ROG Maximus X Hero Review
Blue Yeti Nano Review
Cooler Master MasterAir MA410M Review
Corsair Force Series MP300 Review
Fnatic miniSTREAK RGB Keyboard Review
FreeSync on Nvidia GPUs Workaround: Impractical, But It Works
GamerStorm Castle 240 RGB AIO CPU Cooler Review
GeChic On-Lap 1102H Portable External Display Review
Intel Core i3-8350K Coffee Lake Desktop CPU Review
Lian Li Strimer Review
QNAP TVS-873E-4G NAS Server Review
Samsung X5 Portable SSD Review
Silverstone Redline RL07 Review
Toshiba XG6 M.2 NVMe SSD Review
Toshiba XG6 NVMe SSD Review
Toshiba XG6 SSD Review

Akitio Thunder3 Dock Pro Review

When you think of Thunderbolt 3 accessories, there are only a handful of companies as prolific as Akitio. The California-based company has released numerous Thunderbolt 3-centric products aimed at Mac users, and recently sent us its latest offering — a dock headlined by its 10GbE connectivity.
In addition to the 10GbE connectivity, the dock also features a speedy UHS-II-enabled SD Card 4.0 reader, and a rare CFast 2.0 slot. Where does the Akitio Thunder3 Dock Pro fit into a Mac users workflow? Watch our video review for our hands-on synopsis.

Read full article @ 9to5Mac

Asus ROG Maximus X Hero Review

Well with the Z370 launch I did get a few boards in to check out (and I have a few more still in the works), but none of them were nicer boards that would really allow me to play around with overclocking on the platform. So when I found out we had an Intel i7-8086K coming in I reached out to Asus about a board and they sent over their ROG Maximus X Hero. Like most Z370 boards, the Maximus X Hero does share a lot of features with the Z270 variant, in this case, the Maximus IX Hero. Well, today I’m going to check out the board and see what it has to offer and see if this is the board you want to get if you are planning a higher end Z370 build right now.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

Blue Yeti Nano Review

If there's one name synonymous with live streaming setups, it's Blue. Their range of hardware is a go-to option for anybody who wants an assurance of quality. Today, we're looking at their latest release with the Blue Yeti Nano. Billed as the smaller of the Yeti species, the Yeti Nano is an obviously pared down version of the Yeti and Yeti Pro. Read on for our full review.

Read full article @ MMORPG

Cooler Master MasterAir MA410M Review

It features addressable RGB LEDs, but does the performance live up to the £59.99 price? RGB lighting has been popular with custom PC builds for quite some time now, but with newer innovations in technology comes newly updated products. Following the boom in RGB lighting comes Addressable RGB lighting. Not only do addressable RGB LEDs require a specific three-pin header on your motherboard to make use of finer software control, but as a controller is applied to each individual LED there is a far greater variance of colours, modes and effects available to the ARGB devices.

Cooler Master has decided to embrace this with the new MasterAir MA410M, a dual fan air cooler, that supports addressable RGB LEDs on both the fans and cooler shroud itself. With a host of features including a built-in CPU temperature sensor and Air Guide Armour for £59.99, how does it stack up against both AIO liquid coolers and air coolers at this relatively saturated price point?

Read full article @ KitGuru

Corsair Force Series MP300 Review

Corsair released the Force Series MP500 at the start of last year, promising speeds up to 3000MB/s and 2400MB/s read and write; the downside was the cost. However, today we review the introduction of their Force Series MP300 M.2 range, offering much better value as well as impressive performance.

Read full article @ Vortez

Fnatic miniSTREAK RGB Keyboard Review

The eSports team company, Fnatic PTY Ltd, have released a few new mice and keyboards to their product line. One of those products is the miniSTREAK RGB Tenkeyless mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX switches. It features full RGB illumination, onboard macro recording, competition mode, and the Fnatic OP software for further customization. It is also price competitive especially with the choice of genuine Cherry MX Red, Red Silent, Blue, and Brown switches. The company has sent Benchmark Reviews the miniSTREAK with Cherry MX Brown switches for this review.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

FreeSync on Nvidia GPUs Workaround: Impractical, But It Works

Recently two separate Reddit threads brought an interesting topic to discussion: if you hook up your FreeSync monitor to an AMD GPU display output, while your primary Nvidia GPU is still in your PC, it may be possible to use your Nvidia graphics card and take advantage of FreeSync.

Read full article @ TechSpot

GamerStorm Castle 240 RGB AIO CPU Cooler Review

GamerStorm are one of the best known brands in terms of providing products on a reasonable budget. We have reviewed many of their components in the past and have, overall, formed an excellent opinion of them in terms of getting a lot for what you pay. Being part of the ‘DeepCool‘ family, GamerStorm products are well-known for having some highly impressive RGB lighting effects and in this instance, their brand new Castle 240 cooler is no different.

The GamerStorm Castle 240 RGB cooler has recently gained a lot of interest by being an officially endorsed cooler for the brand new 2nd-generation of Threadripper processors by AMD. This isn’t an exclusive cooler though. Every major Intel and AMD socket is covered here, but it is reassuring to know that it has been designed with such a powerful processor in mind.

Read full article @ eTeknix

GeChic On-Lap 1102H Portable External Display Review

Today we quick 3-page review on something that I simply found handy, it is little related to the enthusiast gaming audience but handy in many situations. Say you're on vacation, have a gaming need, and console but no screen, e.g. you or the kids want to play on the say a Nintendo Switch? Or you're working overseas on your laptop but need that bit more screen space? Well, the GeChic On-Lap 1102H Portable External Display might come in handy. It's a simple light-weight (480g) external monitor that you can carry along in a portable fashion alongside say your laptop. The cool thing is that is has a 7800 mAH internal battery, that offers 4 hours of unrestricted usage without the need for a power source.

11.6" FFS(Fringe Field Switching) Panel
1080p Full HD IPS Wide Viewing Display
Supports horizontal & vertical displays
Supports HDMI/VGA inputs
Supports Kensington Lock on the side
Plug and play without any driver required

Read full article @ The Guru of 3D

Intel Core i3-8350K Coffee Lake Desktop CPU Review

The Intel Core i3-8350K is an oxymoron. This 8th generation Coffee Lake is an unlocked CPU priced low where one will bundle it with a B or an H series, two motherboard chipset with no overclocking option. This 8th generation CPU has four physical cores. It doesn’t have turbo clock speeds and Hyper-Threading. But it has an increased L3 cache to 8MB but with 95-watt TDP, unlike 65-watt on the 8100 and the six-core i5-8400.

If you compare it with the Core i3-7350K, it is a big step-up. The Core i3-8350K has four cores while the previous Kaby-Lake i3-7350K is a dual-core with fix clock at 4.2 GHz with 4MB L3 Cache. Therefore its a useful Core-i3 chip. The other problem with Intel restricting overclocking only with the Z series. I’ve mentioned this with the price clashing between B and H series on the B360 AORUS motherboard review. Intel should have enabled overclocking on H370 series to keep up with AMD’s chipset offering and provide better value than its B360 chipset, therefore providing excellent upgrade options for base model mid-range systems. The stubbornness overshadows this unlocked Core i3 CPU with significant additions.

Read full article @ Hardware BBQ

Lian Li Strimer Review

If you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you may not know that the computer tech industry has been overwhelmed by the introduction of RGB LED lighting. Cases, graphics cards, memory, coolers and more are now all capable of delivering 16.8 million colour illumination and, for those who just simply can't get enough of this glitzy customisation, Lian Li has now created the Strimer - an RGB ready 24-pin cable extension kit.

Read full article @ Vortez

QNAP TVS-873E-4G NAS Server Review

Just like with every single device in the electronics industry there are different NAS servers aimed at different segments of the market not only due to the amount of available drive bays but also specifications and of course number of features. So although for most home users an 4 bay NAS server with a dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM and a single RJ45 Gigabit port should be more than sufficient for their needs small business owners will most likely pick a more powerful model with at least twice as many bays paired with a quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM (if not more) and at least 2 RJ45 Gigabit ports (for improved performance via link aggregation) or a single 10gbE port. Now if you've been following our NAS reviews then you should know that to date most models featured either ARM CPUs by manufacturers like Marvell and Broadcom or Celeron CPUs by Intel so since the very first AMD based models made their appearance not long ago we decided to take a look at one such model and specifically the brand new QNAP TVS-873E-4G.

QNAP Systems, Inc., headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, provides a comprehensive range of cutting-edge Network-attached Storage (NAS) and video surveillance solutions based on the principles of usability, high security, and flexible scalability. QNAP offers quality NAS products for home and business users, providing solutions for storage, backup/snapshot, virtualization, teamwork, multimedia, and more. QNAP envisions NAS as being more than "simple storage", and has created many NAS-based innovations to encourage users to host and develop Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and machine learning solutions on their QNAP NAS.

Read full article @ NikKTech

Samsung X5 Portable SSD Review

We review the Samsung X5 Portable SSD (1000GB). This, by far, is the fastest portable storage ever released to date as puppy is both NVMe and Thunderbolt based, combined with the DNA of NMVe it can reach 2800 MB/sec (!) The X5 makes use of the latest Vertically stacked NAND and one could say, this is Samsungs fastest M2 unit packaged into Thunderbolt. The storage solution is stronger, and faster compared to last year’s T5 thanks to an internal NVMe unit.

The unit looks really slick, in an all-new but somewhat bigger and heavier design. This is needed as the device is so fast, it needs some sort of cooling. We'll show you that in the teardown of course. You need to connect the X5 to Thunderbolt 3 on your PCs or Macs. Important to mention is that the X5 is not backward-compatible with the anything USB, which is a bit of a deficit of course. It is external and a portable storage unit, so it will also offer optional password protection via robust AES (256-bit) encryption. You can set the password and manage the security mode through the Samsung Portable SSD Software which is available for computers (Windows and Mac OS) and Android devices through an app. You get maximum read speeds of 2800 MB/s and writes in the 2300 MB/s range, the NAND used is Samsung's 64-layer 3d NAND (TLC written, with an SLC cache) is used, and yeah that makes this a 970 Evo in a shiny red box really.

Read full article @ The Guru of 3D

Silverstone Redline RL07 Review

The Redline RL07 is the most expensive chassis in the Redline line-up and offers an all-steel construction with a cool look in either black or white. It utilizes the same body as the PM02 or KL07, but has a much lower price tag.

Read full article @ TechPowerUp

Toshiba XG6 M.2 NVMe SSD Review

SSDs are steadily displacing HDDs in the consumer market, but progress is slow in some areas. Yes, more notebooks are coming with SSDs by default, but adoption in OEM desktop PCs has been slower. Today we take a close look at Toshiba’s latest OEM-oriented SSD. Toshiba designed the XG6 for desktop PCs, mobile systems, embedded systems, and even data centers.

That means the XG6 could power your next laptop or pre-built PC. More importantly for us, the XG6 comes with Toshiba's new 96-Layer TLC BiCS flash that will soon power the newest enthusiast-class SSDs from multiple vendors. The new flash promises more performance and efficiency at a lower price point, and based on our testing, it delivers.

Read full article @ Tom's Hardware

Toshiba XG6 NVMe SSD Review

Toshiba has released a string of top-notch, affordable NVMe solid state drives over the last couple of years featuring its BiCS flash memory technology, which target a wide array of market segments. We’ve shown you a few recently, like the diminutive, affordable OCZ RC100 and the mainstream OEM targeted, XG5. Today, Toshiba is redoubling its efforts in the OEM segment with yet another new client NVMe drive, the XG6...

Read full article @ HotHardware

Toshiba XG6 SSD Review

64-layer flash was the great equalizer allowing Toshiba and Micron to close the performance gap on Samsung's V-NAND technology. The next step builds the stack in 96-layer formations while increasing the memory bus speed again. Today, we look at Toshiba's next-generation high-performance NVMe SSD featuring 96L memory but don't expect to find this one on Newegg soon. The XG6 will go to big box system builders first, and we may see a retail variant at a later period. The Toshiba XG6 is the replacement for the XG5 but not the upmarket XG5-P currently shipping in high-performance workstations. The new XG6 is faster than both XG5 variants but lacks an important feature many workstation-class users require, a 2-terabyte capacity model for large datasets. Since you can't buy the new Toshiba XG6 as a standalone purchase, our review will serve as a technology preview of the BiCS4 96L memory and a look at what OEM notebooks and desktops currently ship with from the factory. From time to time, we do see Toshiba OEM SSDs listed on EBay and Amazon from gray market sellers.

Read full article @ TweakTown