Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

AMD FX-8370E 95W Piledriver Octa-Core Processor Review
ASRock Fatal1ty Z97X Killer Intel LGA1150 Motherboard Review
Attitude One Rapira Elite Gaming Mouse
Blackberry Passport hands-on review
Corsair Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 256GB Flash Drive Capsule Review
Diamond Dual Band Wireless 802.11n Range Extender Review
DOOGEE DAGGER DG550 Smartphone Review
Elementary OS Freya Beta Review
Euclideon preps voxel rendering tech for use in games
EXT4/Btrfs/XFS/F2FS Benchmarks On Linux 3.17
Lenovo Y40 Review
Libratone Loop (AirPlay speaker) Review
Metro Redux Review
MSI GT70 2PE Dominator Pro Laptop Review
MSI Nightblade Z97
MSI Z97 MPOWER Review
Palit GeForce GTX 970 Jetstream Review
Samsung PM853T SSD Review (960GB) - Enterprise Excellence
SanDisk Ultra II 240GB SSD Review
Switching away from Outlook or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gmail
Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate Water Cooling System Review
Use Microsoft Office Templates To Captivate Your Audience & Efficiently Deliver Information
Why Apple iPhones Are So Expensive

AMD FX-8370E 95W Piledriver Octa-Core Processor Review

The 32nm “Vishera” processors from AMD have been around for a long-while; since October 2012 to be exact. Vishera was AMD’s Zambezi successor with Vishera being based on the Piledriver architecture and Zambezi on Bulldozer. Since the first release of Vishera, AMD has continued to refresh its FX product stack with new CPUs based on the same architectural design and AMD’s most recent releases maintains that trend. On September 2nd 2014 AMD officially revealed three new CPUs for the FX line; the FX 8320E, the FX 8370 and the FX 8370E. We are looking at the FX 8370E processor which is AMD’s attempt to tame the high TDP of their 8 core FX line down to 95W; previously the standard TDP stood at 125W.

There are two other releases which we will not be reviewing today. First is the FX 8370 (4/4.3GHz) which is a new flagship part which sits under the FX 9370 (4.4/4.7GHz) and FX 9590 (4.7/5GHz), but improves slightly over the FX 8350 (4/4.2GHz) in clock speed. Secondly is the FX 8320E which is an energy efficient variant of the already-released FX 8320 which is a 3.5/4GHz part. All of the FX 8XXX and FX 9XXX parts sport 8 Piledriver cores divided over four modules.

Read full article @ eTeknix

ASRock Fatal1ty Z97X Killer Intel LGA1150 Motherboard Review

Especially enthusiasts and gamers will be happy to read this review about the latest ASRock Fatal1ty Z97X Killer motherboard on OCinside.de.
The Fatal1ty Z97X Killer motherboard based on the Intel Z97 chipset offers especially for gamers a great basic equipment with three PCIe 3.0 graphics cards slots, Qualcomm Atheros Killer E2200 Gigabit LAN port, Fatal1ty Mouse port, Purity Sound 2 with DTS Connect, digital sound output via optical S/PDIF output, XXL aluminum alloy heatsinks, three more PCIe 2.0 slots, up to eight USB 3.0 ports, six SATA3 ports, SATA express port, the new ASRock HDD Saver function, M.2 slot, DVI-D, HDMI output, and much more features, which will not only makes gamers happy.
In this review, we take a look at these great features and overclock this LGA 1150 motherboard to the limit.

Read full article @ OcInside

Attitude One Rapira Elite Gaming Mouse

Attitude One's newest laser sensor equipped gaming mouse dubbed the Rapira Elite gets put to the test. It features the Avago ANDS-9800 sensor which guarantees good tracking performance on pretty much any surface imaginable. Priced at €59 MSRP it is far from as expensive as other high performance gaming mice we recently tested.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Blackberry Passport hands-on review

Square smartphone is unlikely appeal to many. THE BLACKBERRY PASSPORT made its debut on Wednesday, with the firm claiming it outperforms rival devices including the iPhone 6 and Galaxy S5 thanks to its physical keyboard, square-shaped screen and "market-leading" battery life.

However, while it might outperform rivals on paper, its marmite design is likely going to divide opinions, as will the handset's cumbersome size.

Read full article @ The Inquirer

Corsair Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 256GB Flash Drive Capsule Review

The rise of USB 3.0 as a high speed interface for PCs and the increasing affordability of flash memory has led to some very interesting products. USB flash drives are a dime a dozen, but there is scope for manufacturers to differentiate themselves. Corsair's Flash Voyager GTX series brings SSD controllers to the flash drive market. Coupling it with a SATA - USB 3.0 bridge allows them to set benchmark records for their product line. More importantly, it brings some unique features. The rest of the review will present the DAS (direct-attached storage) benchmark numbers from our evaluation of the 256GB version, along with a few observations.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Diamond Dual Band Wireless 802.11n Range Extender Review

Diamond Multimedia isn't one of the mainstream names we hear concerning computers, but yet they have an impressive portfolio of AMD Radeon graphics cards, USB video solutions, audio and sound solutions, TV tuners, video capture devices, docking stations, networking and tablet accessories. The product that started it all was the TrackStar, a PC add-on card which emulated Apple II computers. This was way back in the 80s. Diamond Multimedia was in fact one of the major players throughout the 1990s in the 2D and 3D graphics card market.

Diamond has provided some of their current products for review, the Wireless Range Extender (model # WR600NSI).

Read full article @ Neoseeker

DOOGEE DAGGER DG550 Smartphone Review

DAGGER DG550 is a low-cost but highly-acclaimed smartphone from DOOGEE, integrating a 5.5 inch (720P resolution) screen and an octa-core MTK6592, which is paired with 1GB of RAM. The terminal runs on Android 4.4.2 and has some bits and pieces customized by the manufacturer; the back camera is 8MP and the Selfie frontal one is 2MP. In the review we will carefully analyze the product and at the same we would like to announce the fact that for a limited time at GearBest this model can be acquired at a much lower price.

Read full article @ Madshrimps

Elementary OS Freya Beta Review

elementary OS (yep, its spelled with a lowercase e) is a Ubuntu-based desktop distribution thats been under development for quite a while now. The first article about it on this website was back in November of 2012 (elementary OS Luna preview). After the Luna edition, the next developmental edition was christened Isis, after an ancient Egyptian deity.

Read full article @ LinuxBSDos.com

Euclideon preps voxel rendering tech for use in games

We first heard about Euclideon back in 2011, when the company posted a video of a voxel-based rendering engine designed to enable environments with unlimited detail. This month, the firm made headlines again with a new video—and even more boisterous promises.

Read full article @ the Tech Report

EXT4/Btrfs/XFS/F2FS Benchmarks On Linux 3.17

With the Linux 3.17 kernel due out soon, here's our routine file-system benchmarks we do each kernel cycle to see how the popular Linux file-systems have evolved between kernel releases.

Read full article @ Phoronix

Lenovo Y40 Review

Deciding between performance and style is the unavoidable, brain-racking step during the otherwise exciting time of buying a laptop. The tighter the budget, the more difficult the struggle, as the luxury of finding a machine that performs well and has some style at a decent price isn't too common.The Lenovo Y40 is the smallest and most affordable option in Lenovo's high-performance Y series of gaming laptops. This rig aims to sit pretty in the sweet spot for those seeking a fairly capable and well-made machine at a good entry price.Starting at just $699 (about £426, AU$790), the Y40 boasts several brag-worthy features inherited from the 15.6-inch Lenovo Y50 and 17-inch Y70, also in the Y series. With sharp design, fantastic battery life and JBL audio that absolutely kills it, it's clear that the Y40 is a chip off the block, at least in some regards.DesignThe Y40 echoes the style of the Y50 throughout with its slick, yet modest clamshell design. The matte plastic lid (with crosshatch texture) and underside are a noticeable downgrade from the Y50's metal accents, but it's nothing to knock the Y40 for. The crosshatch design looks deluxe and also did a good job deflecting my fingerprints, too.Flush with its lid is an embossed Lenovo logo. On our review unit, the logo's adhesive began to peel, causing it to stick out a bit.

Read full article @ Techradar

Libratone Loop (AirPlay speaker) Review

Today we take a look at an interesting product in the wireless speaker marketplace in our Libratone Loop Review.

Read full article @ HardwareHeaven

Metro Redux Review

The Metro franchise is considered by many to be one of the better first-person-shooter, action franchises of recent memory, and if you read the Metro 2033 4-Years Later Review and Metro: Last Light Review, you will know that I agree with that, having recommended both games.

Why are we looking at the Metro franchise again though, if both games have already been reviewed? As stated in the beginning of the Metro 2033 review, publisher Deep Silver announced that new Redux versions of both titles were to be released. As these Redux versions promised to contain numerous tweaks and enhancements, especially for the older title, I felt it would be best to return to the metro once (twice?) more to review both Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux.

As both titles have already been reviewed and the changes to them are more of a technical and mechanical nature, this review is going to leave out the Story section. You can check out the previous reviews for details on that. Also because the two Redux games now share much in terms of graphics and gameplay, they are being reviewed together in this one article. Basically if something is true for one, it is true for the other, so why repeat myself with two reviews?

Read full article @ OCC

MSI GT70 2PE Dominator Pro Laptop Review

The MSI GT70 2PE Dominator Pro is a high-end gaming laptop computer with a fourth-generation Core i7-4810MQ processor, 32 GiB of RAM, 17.3" Full HD screen, three SSD units in RAID 0, a GeForce GTX 880M video card, high-end Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi controllers, and much more. Let's analyze this powerful machine.

Read full article @ Hardware Secrets

MSI Nightblade Z97

Every time I cover something Mini-ITX I talk about how great it is that we can build these monster PCs in such a small form factor. Even so, considering how sensitive they are to heat and bad wire management it’s not for everyone. If you don’t know about every single part on the market it can be a little harder to pick out your components for a LAN rig as well. You don’t know what will fit with what, larger builds are a lot more forgiving on all of these things. Well MSI might just have the answer to all of those issues. They have put together a Mini ITX barebones for gamers who know they want a small easy to carry rig. Their Nightblade comes with a variation on their Z97i Gaming AC motherboard that I recently reviewed, a case, slim DVD drive, and 600 watt power supply. You just need to bring your SSD/Hard drive, CPU, heatsink, and video card. The question is, does the Nightblade make things easier and also how well does it perform. Today I’m going to take a closer look and put it through a few tests to see what it’s all about.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

MSI Z97 MPOWER Review

t goes without saying that overclocking has vast become a popular practise for devoted hardware enthusiasts. In recent times hardware vendors have been specifically designing their products to be tweaked in this fashion and today we are to take a look at a motherboard which fuses these advanced overclocking tools with affordability.

MSI has had a strong presence within the overclocking scene – backing a number of professional Overclockers and projecting them to modification stardom. Their OC division of motherboards has built a prominent name in this industry. Z97 MPOWER is one such offering from the OC series which, as its name suggests features the Intel Z97 chipset.

Read full article @ Vortez

Palit GeForce GTX 970 Jetstream Review

Palit is back in da house as we review their GeForce GTX 970 Jetstream edition. The product comes factory overclocked with an impressive boost clock of 1304 MHz. The product has a custom and rather small PCB, it's the Jetsream cooler that makes it lengthy in a more regular fashion. Talking about that Jetstream cooler, Palit had a mission, and it was to make the product as silent as possible, that they certainly achieved. The card has 4 GB graphics memory, is energy efficient and comes factory overclocked for you.

The PC market is interesting, it has been on a decline for sure, but here at Guru3D.com we've noticed an opposite trend, gaming PCs are getting more and more popular, much like an American muscle car or should we say card. We all want a beast of a gaming rig as, let’s face it, PC gaming as an experience is just so much better than anything else out there. Roughly a year and a half ago it became apparent that Nvidia was brewing a new GPU architecture under codename 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 20nm by the time their high-end product would be released. It is now September 2014 and it is abundantly clear that the 20nm nodes are not yet viable for volume production of wafers with huge transistor counts. So Nvidia pretty much had to go with plan B and stuck with 28nm, this makes their silicon sizable, in relative proportions of course. None the less, Nvidia has moved forward and today the 2nd Maxwell based products (GTX 750 was actually the first trial) are being released as GM204 based GPUs. Yes, correct, GM204 and not GM210, meaning Nvidia is once again using the ‘high-end’ and not ‘enthusiast class’ chip to empower the product series we are about to review. Armed with voltage, power and load limiters Nvidia these days can harvest massive performance out of chips when you think about it. They did the very same with Kepler really, GK104 versus GK110 anyone? So Nvidia certainly is doing something right. Today is testimony to that as we see two products performing in the GTX 780 Ti range of performance, but both will consume much less power. That’s actually a primary feature design target for Maxwell, more performance with less power consumption. The GPU used thus is the 28nm GM204, the two derivatives created from it are the GeForce GTX 970 and 980. Ah, you noticed? Yes, correct, Nvidia decided to skip the 800 series to avoid confusion with some of their rebranded mobile parts. Maxwell is a new and sound architecture and as such it is released with a new series name. In this article we will have an extensive look at the architecture behind Maxwell, we will look at gaming performance from Full HD to Ultra HD, we will look at power and thermal characteristics and will serve you that on a silver platter with a nice photo-shoot here at Guru3D.com of course.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Samsung PM853T SSD Review (960GB) - Enterprise Excellence

Normally, when we work with SSD manufacturers, the class of product is pretty straight forward. Whether it be enterprise, consumer or enthusiast, we normally have an easy time pinning down the the point of the product. With Samsung, you might need a degree in marketing to figure out what is going on. This has been a point of contention in the past because products were not only differentiated by product type, but also distribution model. At the 2014 Samsung SSD Summit, we got a much clearer picture.

With the release of the 845DC EVO, Samsung released a product in their Datacenter family that would be available in the channel and through distribution. In layman’s terms, you, as an individual or small business owner have a chance of buying one. On the other side of the aisle, you have the enterprise family of SSDs (reviewed in the past), which you will only see if you are a very large OEM customer.

Read full article @ The SSD Review

SanDisk Ultra II 240GB SSD Review

When Samsung released their 840 Series drive back near the end of 2012, it was the first consumer drive to feature TLC (Triple Level Cell) NAND which took everyone by surprise as up until then, MLC drives ruled the consumer roost. The drive proved to be quite popular with decent performance and stellar power usage along with a very modest price tag. SanDisk has decided to drop some TLC NAND into their second iteration of the Ultra series drives which should provide some solid performance numbers along with budget level pricing. Read on to see how it performs.

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

Switching away from Outlook or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gmail

Today I'll refer to how I recently set up my email accounts for best efficiency leveraging one service you probably already use: Gmail, but in a specific context. To combat spam and unify my inboxes everywhere.

Read full article @ Techspot

Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate Water Cooling System Review

If there is any line of products that I would say we here at ThinkComputers.org are most familiar with it would have to be Thermaltake AIO coolers. Over the past couple years we have reviewed nearly their entire line of products. Overall we have found them to be adequate to top level performers. And while their arsenal of self contained water coolers is formidable they have seemed to lack a stand out champion. You know a hands down performance winner across the board. And so I was certainly intrigued when we got our hands on Tt’s newest AIO entry, the Water 3.0 Ultimate. This triple 120 rad AIO is one of the first on the market and the largest AIO we have reviewed at TC. So does size matter? Follow along and find out if this can finally be Thermaltake’s all out performance champ.

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Use Microsoft Office Templates To Captivate Your Audience & Efficiently Deliver Information

Nothing beats a great visual presentation. A template is like a virtual billboard, visually reinforcing text or data. This article offers a basic introduction to templates, giving you a taste of where to find, and how to customise or create your own. Types Of Templates You Can Use Templates are available in Word, PowerPoint and Excel. They range from agendas, calendars, and reports for Word, various presentation backdrops for PowerPoint, to ready-to-use balance sheets, calculators and trackers for Excel. You can choose from thousands of options. Potential Uses Are you hoping to make a lasting impression at an upcoming event or presentation? Perhaps you are compiling a brochure for...

Read full article @ MakeUseOf

Why Apple iPhones Are So Expensive

Whenever Apple releases a new iPhone, it has become inevitable for rabid Apple and Android fans to trade barbs in a childish display of fandom rivalry. In the past few days, Facebook and blogs have been replete with taunts and jeers on both sides. It was not good enough that they didn't like the rival platform, they had to make sure the other side knew how much they hated their platform. Check out some of their work when Apple launched their new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones :

Frankly, the differences between an Apple iPhone and an Android smartphone have diminished in recent years, with both platforms borrowing features and ideas from each other. The gap is set to reduce even further as both Google and Apple make up and cross-license for everyone's benefit. Whatever features that are unique to a particular platform will eventually be introduced in the competing platform, so arguing about who came up with which feature first is nothing more than a pissing contest.

That's what we want because it gives us the freedom to choose between the two platform without worrying about losing some key feature we cannot do without. However, even when both platforms offer the same set of key features, one thing will remain certain - Apple will always price their iPhone models at a premium. That brings us to arguably the most vitriolic opinion that Android fans have about the Apple users - that they are all rich idiots who are getting fleeced by Apple into paying a ridiculously high price for the iPhones especially since they are using "dated" hardware or "older technology".

Read full article @ Tech ARP