Here a roundup of todays reviews and articles:

AMD is working on K12, brand-new x86 and ARM cores
ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer Preview
Best Headphones money can buy 2014
Bitfenix Ronin Case Review
Cooler Master V Series Platinum 1200 W
Cooler Master V1200 Platinum Power Supply Review
Corsair Obsidian Series 450D & Carbide Series Air 540 Case Review
Corsairs AX1500i Released: A 1500W 80 Plus Titanium PSU
Creative Sound Blaster Omni Surround 5.1 USB Sound Card Review
Diamond USB Xtreme Sound XS71HDU Review
Intel 730 Series 480GB SSD Review in RAID
ioSafe 214 Fire and WaterProof NAS Video Review
Mach Xtreme DIY Series SATA-DOM 32GB SSD Review
NVIDIA Tegra K1 Compared To AMD AM1 APUs
Plextor M6M 256GB mSATA SSD Review
SanDisk launches 4TB SSD, promises 8TB next year
Seidio Ledger Case for Samsung Galaxy S5 Reviewed
Sentey Crimson Pro Gaming Keyboard Review
SteelSeries 9H Gaming Headset Video Review
Steelseries Rival Review
Synology DS214se & DSM 5.0 Overview
Titanfall Review
Why Windows XP Users Should Switch To Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr

AMD is working on K12, brand-new x86 and ARM cores

At a press event just now, AMD offered an update on its "ambidextrous" strategy for CPUs and SoCs. There's lots of juicy detail here, but the big headline news is that the company is working on two new-from-scratch CPU core designs, one that's compatible with the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set ISA and another that is an x86 replacement for Bulldozer and its descendants.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer Preview

ASRock's gaming motherboards are meanwhile well known for coming with a really decent feature mix and apart from that also the price should be on a really reasonable level. At a first glance it looks like ASRock sticks with this receipe offering for instance a SATA Express port as well as an M.2 Slot. Other than that this board looks really nice and we're rather curious what else ASRock has to offer with this motherboard.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Best Headphones money can buy 2014

KitGuru invest plenty of time into analysing and reviewing headphones, but they are generally ‘gaming grade’ products, priced between £30 and £100. But what if you have a lot more cash on hand and want a set of headphones that will reveal every single detail from your precious vinyl, compact discs or high resolution audio files?

Read full article @ KitGuru

Bitfenix Ronin Case Review

We recently tested two smaller cases from Bitfenix, the mini-ITX-case Phenom and the m-ATX/mini-ITX Prodigy M-case, and found them very good. Today though we are looking at a more normal case, the Bitfenix Ronin which is a regular midi-tower with space for up to ATX-motherboards. The expectations we have for a good mid-tower are pretty high in 2014. We want a case that can handle the most high-end components regardless of length or height, we want good cooling, lots of room to hide the cables as well as space for lots of drives. both SSD’s and regular 3.5″-drives. Can the Bitfenix Ronin live up to those expectations? Read on to find out.

Read full article @ Bjorn3D

Cooler Master V Series Platinum 1200 W

Cooler Master decided to unleash a big beast onto the PSU market by again teaming up with Seasonic and releasing their V series flagship, the V1200. It not only comes with a high capacity, but also sports Platinum efficiency, a fully modular design, and a hybrid fan mode option that turns this unit into a silent beast at low loads.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Cooler Master V1200 Platinum Power Supply Review

2014 has been an incredible year for top grade, high wattage power supplies. We have reviewed the Super Flower Leadex Platinum 1,000w, The Antec High Current Pro Platinum 1,300w and the Corsair AX1500i Titanium – all of which have claimed top awards. Today we look at the latest Cooler Master V1200 Platinum, a fully modular power supply created in partnership with top OEM Seasonic.

Read full article @ KitGuru

Corsair Obsidian Series 450D & Carbide Series Air 540 Case Review

We've explored many unique PC cases over the years, most recently having reviewed the Silverstone Raven RVZ01, In Win tou, and Xigmatek Nebula so far in 2014, yet one model has continued to elude us. First unveiled at Computex 2013, Corsair's Carbide Air 540 employs an interesting dual-chamber design.

The Carbide Air 540 was first released in black but white and silver versions have been available for a few months now and we are finally going to check both of them out. Along for the ride is Corsair's Obsidian 450D, another mid-tower case that the company announced on March 25 of this year.

Read full article @ Techspot

Corsairs AX1500i Released: A 1500W 80 Plus Titanium PSU

Shopping around for a power supply on a tight budget can be a bit of an ordeal. On forums, everyone will have their own opinion of what constitutes a good power supply, and similarly to mechanical HDDs, a single bad experience can put a user off a brand forever. My golden rule, unless you need a specific feature/amperage on the power lines for unique GPUs, is to take the total power draw of your system and add 40%. My analogy is thus – a car whose top speed is 80mph will squeak and rattle if you run it every day at 70mph, whereas a car whose top speed is 130mph will hum along nicely at 70mph. Others may disagree, but I find this is a nice guideline when building systems for family and friends.

Most desktop systems bought and sold today are often very basic, with integrated or a low end graphics card, making power requirements very low. However the extreme is also true, with users wanting to make the most out of three or four end GPUs with a heavy deal of overclocking. If you can recall our Gaming CPU article from April 2013 we used a 24-thread dual-processor system with four 7970 GPUs, lightly overclocked, which drew 1550W at load. This is why power supplies north of 1000W exist, and it can be very frustrating to get these units to be very efficient. To that end, Corsair is releasing today their AX1500i, a 1500W model certified with 80 Plus Titanium qualifications.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Creative Sound Blaster Omni Surround 5.1 USB Sound Card Review

Sound Blaster Omni Surround 5.1 USB card from Creative is a nice addition on systems which not support installation of internal solutions, being available on both Windows and OS X platforms. Even if the device has a small footprint, we do get connectivity for 5.1 systems, optical, but also integrated dual-microphone array along with an extra 3.5mm jack Mic-in and Line-in.

Read full article @ Madshrimps

Diamond USB Xtreme Sound XS71HDU Review

Late last year, we reviewed the DIAMOND Xtreme Sound 7.1 XS71HD, and found it to be a suitable replacement for onboard audio for a good price using a PCI-E slot. However there are certain cases where an internal upgrade isn’t feasible. Perhaps you don’t have the room for it due to existing hardware, or you simply couldn’t be bothered to get in there and install a PCI-E card. A USB audio upgrade may be worth considering -it can even provide its own advantages over an internal upgrade as we’ll see.

The product we’re looking at today is Diamond USB Xtreme Sound 7.1 XS71HDU, and while it has a very similar SKU to the former model, it has a quite a few different aspects which make it unique.

There are plenty of USB audio options out there, ranging from $4 to $400. Obviously you usually get what you pay for, and the products that pack the same impressive spec sheet as the XS71HDU are few and far between (and these are the ones that sit in the $400 range). The XS71HDU features 7.1 channel analog output, as well as digital input and output, and line-in and microphone ports. The impressive thing – especially at this price range – is that each input and output is fully capable of 24-bit 192 kHz audio. Until now, the only other options you had to achieve this kind of connectivity was to install an internal soundcard, or buy a very expensive one.

Read full article @ HCW

Intel 730 Series 480GB SSD Review in RAID

There once was a time, not so long ago, where an Intel SSD was the gold standard against which all other consumer SSDs were measured. That didn’t last long as other drive makers improved quickly and a handful of third party controllers emerged to level the playing field to anyone willing to put out a drive of their own. Since then, Intel has kept pace, mainly with third party controllers, but slowly invested more interest into the enterprise market. Now, Intel’s work in that area along with the hardware is being made available in a consumer drive with the 730 Series. Intel took has taken the DC S3500/S3700 drives from enterprise space and moved them down into the enthusiast market space and that is how the Intel 730 series was born...

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

ioSafe 214 Fire and WaterProof NAS Video Review

ioSafe send us their latest Fire and Waterproof NAS based on Synology DS214 device. This 2-Bay storage device is meant as safe haven for your data. Let's start the trial by fire!

Read full article @ Madshrimps

Mach Xtreme DIY Series SATA-DOM 32GB SSD Review

Today’s review is of the Mach Xtreme DIY series 32GB (MLC) SATA-DOM, a SATA II (3.0GB/s) miniaturized SSD designed for high-read, low-write usage scenarios that only require a small operating system; such as NAS enclosures, routers, set-top boxes, point-of-sale devices, hand-held devices, gaming machines, etc.

Mach Xtreme Technology is a Taiwanese producer of high-performance solid state storage products for both industrial applications and for power users. Mach Xtreme has a strong presence in the European markets, but has yet to gain a significant foothold in North America. That could easily change with a unique offering such as the DIY series of SATA-DOMs.

Read full article @ The SSD Review

NVIDIA Tegra K1 Compared To AMD AM1 APUs

This weekend when publishing preview benchmarks of NVIDIA's Tegra K1 from the Jetson TK1 development board, there were numerous requests by Phoronix readers to see this high-end ARM SoC pitted against the new AMD AM1 APUs. In this article are some benchmarks of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on all of the AM1 Athlon and Sempron APUs compared to the Tegra K1 Cortex-A15 SoC.

Like this weekend's tests, the benchmarks in this article are primarily CPU bound as I'm still ready some ARM-compatible graphics and OpenCL tests. Those should be ready soon along with some power consumption numbers. Thus in this article it's mostly a comparison of the AM1 APUs with their dual and quad AMD "Jaguar" x86 cores compared to the Tegra K1 with its quad-core-plus-one Cortex-A15 configuration.

Read full article @ Phoronix

Plextor M6M 256GB mSATA SSD Review

The near-constant influx of new solid state storage solutions has shown no signs of letting up. In the last few weeks alone, we have looked at new drives from Micron/Crucial, ADATA, Intel, Samsung, OCZ and SanDisk, and today we’re going to cover something a little different from Plextor, the new M6M series.

Plextor’s M6M series of products are mSATA-based drives, designed for mobile devices or small form factor systems. These new drives are the follow-up to last year’s popular M5M series, though the M6M series is built around a newer controller and NAND flash memory...

Read full article @ HotHardware.com

SanDisk launches 4TB SSD, promises 8TB next year

Late last week SanDisk launched its Optimus MAX Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD) with a capacity of 4TB. This was heralded as an industry first and as the "first true replacement for Data Centre HDDs delivering SAS features and performance," on offer at a "breakthrough price point".

Right now it's quite common for computer users to employ a combination of SSD and HDD drives as the cost per GB of HDDs is so much better and we all need quite a bit of backup storage for ever larger games and high resolution media files. However with the kind of storage capacity growth and cost per GB decline forecast by SanDisk we could be seeing the majority of users going 100 per cent solid state in a few years. For now this 4TB Optimus MAX drive represents an enterprise solution.

Read full article @ Hexus

Seidio Ledger Case for Samsung Galaxy S5 Reviewed

Hello and welcome, today I am reviewing a case for the beautiful Samsung Galaxy S5. In this fast paced world we live in, a case is a necessary investment when you buy a phone. It’s an important item I feel we all need. Cases these days have become multipurpose and this case I will be reviewing has several uses. As we all know, cases also add a level of protection and style that is necessary these days, this where this particular case comes in. This case comes from the company Seidio, “a company by professionals for professionals.” This is the Seidio Ledger Flip case with Kickstand. It is I think, sleek and stylish. Take a look and see.

Read full article @ TestFreaks

Sentey Crimson Pro Gaming Keyboard Review

Although they’ve been around since 2001, Sentey Inc. isn’t on many enthusiast’s radars. Established in 2001 and based in Doral, Florida, Sentey manufactures a range of cases, keyboards, mice, power supplies, headphones, and other items that appeal to the enthusiast and gamer. Today we have the Sentey Crimson Pro mechanical gaming keyboard– part of their Professional Gamer Series– in house for some testing.

Read full article @ Benchmark Reviews

SteelSeries 9H Gaming Headset Video Review

DaveChaos takes a look at a stalwart of the eSPORTS arena, find out his thoughts in todays video review from HardwareHeaven.

Read full article @ HardwareHeaven.com

Steelseries Rival Review

Rival is the first gaming mouse from Steelseries that we review since a long time. It features a PixArt PMW3310 optical sensor with a maximum resolution of 6500 DPI. The software is simple but at the same time offers a lot of options. Rival is a mouse with a classic and simple shape. So let's find out what this mouse is all about on the following pages.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Synology DS214se & DSM 5.0 Overview

Synology knows how to create good and affordable products like the DS214se we will evaluate today. Along with it, we will also take a detailed look at the company's new DSM 5.0 operating system that introduces many new, interesting features and upgrades over its predecessor.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Titanfall Review

One of the best things about Titanfall, and why I feel I can recommend the game, is that it's quite balanced. Sure there are some things I'd like to see changed (like throwing satchel charges a hundred yards, making them better grenades than grenades), but for the most part, there's no one weapon, ability, or tactic that dominates the game. And the one primary weapon that is above average at all distances, the R-101C Carbine, is available at level one, so every single player always has access to it. Furthermore, and arguably most impressive, is that Respawn somehow managed to balance pilots and Titans.

Read full article @ OCC

Why Windows XP Users Should Switch To Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr

Ubuntu 14.04 “Trusty Tahr” is here, and this isn’t an ordinary release – this is an LTS (long-term support) release. This means that the release will be supported for a full 5 years, which is great piece of mind after support for Windows XP ended.

In fact, if you’re still trying to dump Windows XP but haven’t found an alternative yet, Ubuntu 14.04 is a great choice. Let’s take a look at what makes it awesome, and why it’s a great choice for Windows XP refugees.

Read full article @ MakeUseOf