Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

AMD Zen Microarchiture Part 2: Extracting Instruction-Level Parallelism
Cooler Master Devastator II Keyboard and Mouse Combo Reader Review
Cooler Master Masterkeys Lite L Combo Review
Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite L Combo RGB Keyboard/Mouse Set Review
Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite Review
Cooler Master MasterLiquid Maker 92 CPU cooler review
Cooler Master ‘MasterMouse Pro L’ Review
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Performance Analysis
HTC One X9 Review
Jonsbo UMX4 Review
MSI Unveils the X99A Workstation Motherboard
Project build: Lunchbox 4 - Part 2
Quick Tips for Windows 10: The Master List
SanDisk X400 1TB SSD Review
Supermicro Releases Intel Xeon Phi x200 (KNL) Systems: Servers and a Developer Mid-Tower
The 20 best Chromecast apps for Google's streaming puck
Thermaltake Water 3.0 Riing RGB 240 Liquid Cooler Review
Unpacking AMD's Zen Benchmark: Is Zen actually 2% Faster than Broadwell?

AMD Zen Microarchiture Part 2: Extracting Instruction-Level Parallelism

Hot Chips is an annual conference that allows semiconductor companies to present their latest and greatest ideas or forthcoming products in an academic-style environment, and is predominantly aimed as the professional semiconductor engineer. This year has a number of talks about power management, upcoming IBM CPUs, upcoming Intel CPUs, upcoming NVIDIA SoCs and the final talk of the final day is from AMD, discussing Zen in even more depth than the previous week. While we were unable to attend the event in person, we managed to get some hands-on time with information and put questions to Mike Clark, AMD Senior Fellow and Chief Design Engineer on Zen.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Cooler Master Devastator II Keyboard and Mouse Combo Reader Review

Today, a new reader review has been published on OCinside.de. After the recent Cooler Master Devastator II unboxing video, lion149 has now written the detailed review of the keyboard and mouse combo. The Devastator II Gaming Keyboard and Mouse Combo was one of the Cooler Master devices, that could be seen on CeBIT 2016. For people who like mechanical keyboards and are looking for a new illuminated one together with a mouse at a low price could find this one interesting. There are three different types of this combo: Red, green or blue. We have tested the blue one.

Read full article @ OCInside

Cooler Master Masterkeys Lite L Combo Review

Today, Cooler Master has sent us their brand new Masterkeys Lite L Combo to take a look at. This is a mouse and keyboard combo with some seriously powerful LED technology. At the small asking price of only $60, this is one fantastic bargain.

Read full article @ TechnologyX

Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite L Combo RGB Keyboard/Mouse Set Review

Cooler Master takes what they have done well with their original combination sets, and adds rainbow lighting to add some flair with the MasterKeys Lite L Combo RGB

Read full article @ APH Networks

Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite Review

When you are building a gaming PC one of the last pieces of hardware you really think about is the keyboard and mouse. Getting a decent keyboard and mouse at a good price is not that easy as both of these accessories can add another $200 on to the total cost of your build. We have seen inexpensive gaming combos in the past, Cooler Master actually sent us their Devastator II gaming combo not that long ago. Today they are releasing the MasterKeys Lite, which also gives you a gaming-grade keyboard and mouse in one package much like the Devastator II. Cooler Master is stepping things up with the Master Keys Lite which has a much better keyboard with zoned RGB backlighting, a more solid design, and Cooler Master mem-chanical switches. The mouse features an infrared Avago 3050 sensor, Omron switches, and two-zoned RGB lighting. At $59.99 this combo seems to be the perfect thing for a gamer on a budget, let’s take a look.

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Cooler Master MasterLiquid Maker 92 CPU cooler review

We review Cooler Master MasterLiquid Maker 92 CPU cooler, a new and innovative compact AIO liquid cooler that will soon be available. This rotating model has looks like you have never seen before.

The LCS AIO cooler arena is big. For every segment and budget you can find something you need. The market stabilized and within the entire range and scope of heat-pipe and AIO liquid based coolers there's a certain comfort zone with a corresponding product at any budget available. As a result, most of these coolers available on the market are all adequate at the very least. There are always exceptions to this, there's a handful of manufacturers out there that offer the really interesting stuff, the kit and gear that really stand out from the cooling crowd, the hardware you and me crave and need so badly... that is in the high-end domain of gaming hardware. So, perhaps you have noticed (or not), but Cooler Master has had a bit of beef with Asetek. Anything that is liquid cooled these days is being monitored. Asetek holds patents on liquid cooling design in which a pump and water-block are merged. Up-to blunt irritation this has been plaguing Cooler Master and many others for a long time as many patent breaches have even reached court. In the end, anything that resembles the Asetek patent is expensive, as Asetek requires 5 to 10 USD per sold liquid cooling unit. Asetek has placed a rather nasty stamp on the liquid cooling industry for the PC component market. Cooler Master slowly but steadily has been moving away from designs that conflict with their patents whereas with other models you are going to need to cough up the patent fee, (as in the end the consumer is the one that pays). And albeit this is unconfirmed, we do think that the product as tested today is an example of innovation and a design change that is very different from any AIO liquid cooler you have ever seen. Kudos to Cooler Master for that, what we test today is unique. Before we begin with the photo-shoot, have a peek at the product below.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Cooler Master ‘MasterMouse Pro L’ Review

We review a lot of gaming mice at KitGuru and while many of them are impressive, we don’t get to see too many with hardware customisation options. Today, we are taking a look at the Cooler Master ‘MasterMouse Pro L’, a true ambidextrous mouse with modular covers for the body and side grips, allowing users to make physical changes to the mouse to better suit them. Pair that with RGB lighting and a 12,000 DPI sensor and we are left with a mouse that sounds very impressive on paper, but how does it perform?

Read full article @ KitGuru

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Performance Analysis

Deus Ex Mankind Divided has just been released today. We bring you a performance analysis using the most popular graphics cards, at four resolutions, including 4K, at both Ultra and High settings. We also took a closer look at VRAM usage.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

HTC One X9 Review

The One X9 is a classic example of a mid-range handset. It has marginally better hardware than budget offerings - a 5.5-inch 1080p display, a Helio X10 SoC, 32 GB of storage, a 13-megapixel camera with OIS, and a metal build - but it just doesn't do enough for the price. It's not a terrible phone, but it's simply too expensive.

Read full article @ Techspot

Jonsbo UMX4 Review

The UMX4 is an elegant and classy case from Jonsbo. In order to also make ATX users happy, Jonsbo introduced yet another UMX series case, since the UMX3 and UMX1 are compatible with mATX and mini-ITX motherboards. The UMX4 is made from aluminum with two solid tempered glass side panels. Apart from that this case is available in black or silver and with or without the glass panels.

Read full article @ ocaholic

MSI Unveils the X99A Workstation Motherboard

Last week MSI introduced its new X99A Workstation motherboard, part of the X99 refresh weve seen over the past couple of months following the launch of the Broadwell-E processor line. Despite the name workstation, this board is based on the consumer-grade Intel X99 PCH rather than the server oriented parts, and as a result it supports overclocking. Part of the Workstation feature set means that it has qualified support for NVIDIA Quadro PCIe cards, compatibility with ECC memory, and a U.2 connector for storage. The manufacturer claims that the mainboard uses special components that can improve the endurance of the board, although the warranty is still listed as three years.

Typically, workstation-class motherboards for Intel Xeon E5 v3/v4 processors in LGA2011-3 packaging are based on the Intel C612 PCH, which has the same I/O features as the desktop-class Intel X99, but also supports a number of additional capabilities, which are important for business environments, such as vPro, RSTe, SVT and so on (you can read more about Intel’s 612 chipset here). When it comes to professional workstation vendors that supply machines to large corporations, those technologies make a lot of sense and are generally welcome. However, for prosumers and for many professionals working in small/medium businesses, these options might not be required, which is why a lot of motherboard manufacturers offer Intel X99-based workstation-class mainboards that fully support overclocking but continue to have numerous workstation features (such as support for ECC, when Xeon CPUs are installed). This is the focus of the X99A Workstation.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Project build: Lunchbox 4 - Part 2

So yesterday I went through and spoke about each of the components I went with for Lunchbox 4 and why I went with them. Today's the day we dive into customizing the build to make it stand out a little including adding that all important carrying handle. Then after that, I benchmark the build and figure out how the new build compares to our last Lunchbox build. Does it fit our goal of always going smaller and faster? Do I have any regrets with the new build? Well I talk about that in the last section, so don’t forget to check that out as well.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

Quick Tips for Windows 10: The Master List

Sometimes, it's the tiniest tasks that make the biggest differences. Here's the index page of all the Quick Tips we've run to help you improve your Windows 10 experience.

Read full article @ WinSupersite

SanDisk X400 1TB SSD Review

SanDisk designed its X-Series products primarily for business notebook upgrades. SanDisk has an aggressive strategy and retail partners in place to aid businesses making the transition from disk to flash. Like the X300 Series it replaces, the X400 has become so attractive that the channel and end-users have adopted the drive as a low-cost alternative to Samsung's 850 EVO.

It's no secret that SanDisk hit a rough patch in its consumer SSD release schedule; it's been two years since the company released the Extreme Pro, which some regard as the best consumer SATA 6Gbps SSD ever released. Still, premium high-performance SSDs have moved on. SanDisk's tier one (and even tier two) competitors all have NVMe products shipping, and the tier three companies are not far behind.

Read full article @ Tom's Hardware

Supermicro Releases Intel Xeon Phi x200 (KNL) Systems: Servers and a Developer Mid-Tower

Supermicro has released two systems featuring Intel’s many-core Xeon Phi x200 processors: a workstation and an ultra-dense server. The platforms support up to 384 GB of DDR4 memory and are based on the good-old Intel C612 PCH. Due to high TDP of Intel’s Knights Landing CPUs, Supermicro had to use a custom closed-loop liquid cooling for its SuperWorkstation SYS-5038K-i.

Intel officially launched its Xeon Phi x200 many-core Knights Landing platform in June, but the company disclosed most of the details regarding its new processors last year at Supercomputing15. As discussed, every Xeon Phi x200 in LGA packaging has up to 72 cores (based on highly-modified Atom Silvermont microarchitecture) running at up to 1.5 GHz, with up to 36 MB of L2 cache, 16 GB of on-package high-performance memory (MCDRAM), six-channel DDR4 DRAM controller as well as 36 PCIe 3.0 lanes. The Xeon Phi x200 chips in LGA3647 form-factor can run as a host, directly with an operating system on board (including Windows Server 2016) which is an upgrade over the older Xeon Phi parts which only ran as co-processors on the PCIe bus. Moreover, the internal PCIe 3.0 root complex gives the Xeon Phi some PCIe lanes to allow other coprocessors to be plugged in - either additional Xeon Phi accelerators in the card form-factor, or AMD/NVIDIA cards, to maximize the compute horsepower.

Read full article @ Anandtech

The 20 best Chromecast apps for Google's streaming puck

The Best Chromecast AppsYou could spend hours looking for the best apps on Google's Chromecast. You could ... but you shouldn't have to. Despite it being the cheapest way to get your TV connected to the biggest streaming services, Chromecast isn't known for having the most user-friendly content store.Once upon a time that was because the tiny streaming puck didn't have a ton of apps that supported it and the ones that did were sort of tucked away inside the App Store. But, thankfully, over time more and more services have added the ability to cast. Too bad more choice makes finding the good apps harder to find. But that's where we come in. Whether you're looking to stream some of the best Netflix shows or enjoy a veritable cornucopia of music through Tidal or Spotify, read on for our list of the top Chromecast apps.

Read full article @ Techradar

Thermaltake Water 3.0 Riing RGB 240 Liquid Cooler Review

I had hoped to bring you this review of the Thermaltake Water 3.0 Riing RGB 240 AIO (all-in-one) cooler earlier this year, but problems with coordination of a review unit held it back until now. This liquid-cooling package boasts high static pressure 120mm fan operation to provide smooth air flow across a large surface radiator and comes with a highly reliable pump using sleeved tubing for coolant movement, allowing it to meet many users' needs and expectations.

Built with some of the best thermal transfer material, the machined copper waterblock has a surface area of over 188 mm to provide complete contact with the CPU thermal plate. The waterblock is held in place with a mounting system that is very easy to install by following the very clear installation instruction sheet for the CPU socket type of your motherboard.

The two included 120 mm fans have LEDs embedded into a ring mounted in the fan housing that uses a Smart Controller to customize the colors and set the fan speed range to either 800-1500 or 400-1000 RPM, depending on desired noise level during operation.

Read full article @ Neoseeker

Unpacking AMD's Zen Benchmark: Is Zen actually 2% Faster than Broadwell?

At a satellite event to Intels Developer Conference last week, AMD held an evening soiree with invited analysts and press to talk about their new upcoming Zen microarchitecture. This was intended to be a preview of tomorrows Hot Chips presentation, and weve already covered the juicier parts of the presentation in terms of microarchitecture announcements as well as diving deep into the Server-based Naples implementation and what the motherboards told us from memory and IO support. 

Read full article @ Anandtech