Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

Alienware Aurora R5 Review: Small Stature, Big Performance
Alphacool NexXoS Cool Answer 240 DDC XT Kit
AMD Extends Polaris Line-up With Mainstream Radeon RX 470 And Radeon RX 460
AMD reveals the full specs of the Radeon RX 460 and RX 470
Cyberpower Luxe Xtreme Review
Gigabyte X99-Ultra Gaming Motherboard Review
Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming graphics card reviewed
IPVanish Review
MSI GTX 1080 GAMING Z 8GB Review
PowerColor Radeon RX 480 RED DEVIL Review
REEVEN Steropes Low-Profile CPU Cooler Review
Sapphire Nitro Radeon RX 480 4GB Video Card Review
Synology DiskStation DS916+ 4-Bay SMB NAS Review
Synology DS916+ 4-bay NAS
Thermaltake Suppressor F31 Mid Tower Case Review
Thermaltake Water 3.0 Riing RGB 240 AIO Cooler Review
Windows 10 Version 1607 driver signing changes

Alienware Aurora R5 Review: Small Stature, Big Performance

The Alienware brand is as venerable a name as any in the gaming space. As Alienware celebrates over twenty years in business, its computers have become instantly recognizable thanks to distinctive, out-of-this-world styling, and science-fiction references. Dell purchased Alienware in 2006 to complement its own competing line of XPS-branded gaming machines. But Dell has kept a largely hands-off approach, allowing Alienware to grow its own business and continue meeting consumer's expectations.

Alienware currently maintains three desktop families from the small-form factor Alpha to the monstrous Area-51. The subject of today's alien autopsy: the new Aurora R5. The Aurora R5 is the most mainstream offering of the trio, but it is anything but ordinary.

Read full article @ HotHardware

Alphacool NexXoS Cool Answer 240 DDC XT Kit

Alphacool, the long-established German liquid cooling company, knows exactly how tough it can be to select the correct components to build a custom loop for a PC. Their answer lies in a selection of 18 different kits in a product line called Cool Answer that offer radiators ranging from 120mm to 480mm in a variety of sizes along with a choice of different pumps.

The specific kit we have on review here is the Alphacool NexXoS Cool Answer 240 DDC XT which employs a 240mm copper radiator that is 45mm thick (that’s the XT part of the name) along with a Laing DDC pump (yup, also in the name), a NexXoS XP3 CPU block and a 5.25-inch bay reservoir.

Read full article @ KitGuru

AMD Extends Polaris Line-up With Mainstream Radeon RX 470 And Radeon RX 460

Although we were made privy to some details on AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 470 and Radeon RX 460 graphics cards earlier this month, the company today is officially announcing its newest, mainstream members of the Polaris family.

AMD is touting the RX 470 as a perfect companion for 1080p resolution gaming, offering 60+ FPS performance (with anti-aliasing enabled) on popular game titles. The RX 460, on the other hand, is based on Polaris 11 architecture, which has more budget-minded performance profile. However, if all you’re looking for is a highly efficient, yet capable eSports gaming card, then the RX 460 still has you covered.

Read full article @ HotHardware

AMD reveals the full specs of the Radeon RX 460 and RX 470

AMD's Radeon RX 460 and RX 470 are the next salvos in its battle to regain a foothold in the sub-$300 graphics market. We examine their full specs and take some educated guesses as to the price points these cards will occupy when they hit store shelves.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

Cyberpower Luxe Xtreme Review

Happen to have £4,399 lying around? Here's what you could buy in the world of ultra PCs. The level of integration on modern CPUs and chipsets, coupled with wide availability of increasingly efficient, off-the-shelf components, has made it easier than ever to put together your own performance PC. It's a satisfying experience and some will argue that building your own is part of the fun, yet if you're aiming high and willing to spend thousands of pounds, there's a lot to be said for the peace of mind that comes with a pre-built, overclocked and fully-guaranteed system.

Choices are plentiful at this end of the market, with prices ranging from considerable to abominable, and Cyberpower is hoping to lure the ultra enthusiast with a new addition dubbed Luxe Xtreme.

Read full article @ Hexus

Gigabyte X99-Ultra Gaming Motherboard Review

Not that long ago Intel released their Broadwell-E high-end desktop (HEDT) processor family. Broadwell-E makes use of the same chipset and same socket as Haswell-E so can use the same X99 motherboards that were launched back in 2014. Of course since then we have seen improvements and features added to motherboards. So with that many companies have launched a second round of X99 motherboards that add these new features. One such company is Gigabyte and today we have their X99-Ultra Gaming motherboard. This motherboard is part of their G1 Gaming line and features ambient surround LEDs, RGB LED headers, quad-GPU SLI/CrossFire support, Killer E2400 gaming networking, NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 U.2 and M.2 support, PCIe Gen2 x4 USB 3.1 support, and much more! Let’s take a look and see what this motherboard is all about!

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming graphics card reviewed

Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming is the first custom-cooled version of Nvidia's biggest, baddest graphics card we've tested. We find out whether it does justice to Pascal's world-beating performance.

Read full article @ The Tech Report

IPVanish Review

While many VPN providers try to stand out with their free plans and cheap commercial products, IPVanish talks more about service quality. It's "the world's fastest VPN" says the website, boasting 40,000+ shared IPs, 500+ VPN servers in 60+ countries, unlimited P2P traffic, five simultaneous connections and more.Clients are available for Windows, OS X, Android and iOS, and the company also has setup instructions for Windows 10 Mobile, Chromebook, Linux and routers.Maintaining a quality network costs money, of course, and IPVanish is significantly more expensive than most other VPNs. The starter price for a month is $10 (£7.69, AU$13.46), three months starts at $26.99 (£20.50, AU$36), or you can pay $77.99 (£60, AU$105) annually.

Read full article @ Techradar

MSI GTX 1080 GAMING Z 8GB Review

As I gradually whittle my way through the stack of GTX 1080’s I have in front of me, something is becoming increasingly obvious: for all their differences in branding, NVIDIA’s board partners have precisions little differentiating their GPU designs from one another. Everything from overclocking headroom to cooling performance to even out-of-box clock speeds seems to have quickly reached a plateau. Also, like underglow was all the rage with import car tuners during the Fast & Furious heydays, LEDs are everywhere now and no, they don’t add horsepower.

MSI has realized that even with such powerful graphics cards within NVIDIA’s stable, their little corner of the market runs the very real risk of stagnation. What could possibly set their wares apart from the G1’s, Superclockeds, AMPs and STRIXes of this world? As it stood last time around, not all that much and MSI’s market share took a small dip.

Read full article @ Hardware Canucks

PowerColor Radeon RX 480 RED DEVIL Review

Join us as we review the PowerColor Radeon RX 480 RED DEVIL, we test the model fitted with 8GB graphics memory. This dark spawn from PowerColor is a mainstream graphics card series that will allow you to play your games in both the Full HD 1080P range as well as gaming in WQHD (2560x1440) range. And all that at a rather reasonable price of 269 USD. The RX 480 is a graphics card series that will allow you to play your games in both the Full HD 1080P range as well as gaming in WQHD (2560x1440) range. And all that at a very reasonable price as well. See, the 4 GB variant will start selling at $199 / 220 EURO whereas the price will be $239 / 260 EURO for today's tested 8 GB model. Honestly, 4GB we feel is plenty as standard for the aforementioned resolutions. Does that mean that AMD is back with a very good price versus performance product series? Follow us into this review where we'll look at temperatures, noise, performance and go with the latest game titles on the globe. It's been a somewhat wild ride for the past few months, AMD created a couple of viral moments on the web and announced stuff prior to the actual release. Hey, who can blame them. Today is all about Polaris 10, a code-name indicative of the mainstream to high-end products (but not enthusiast). Polaris 11 will see the light of day as well in the entry-level range. Though today's release is about the Radeon RX 480, Polaris 10.

For the time being, what you see above will be the product stack starting with today's availability of the Radeon RX 480. The Radeon RX 480 graphics card will be made available in 4 and 8 GB versions, you will also spot both reference and tweaked SKUs from the board partners. The GPU used in this puppy is based on Polaris 10 (XT), an Ellismere (codename) GPU based on 4th generation GCN architecture. The 14 nm FinFET+ process based Radeon RX 480 will push the product to well over 5 TFLOPS. With its 150W TDP it has 36 CUs (cumpute units aka shader clusters) x 64 shader processors per CU = 2304 shader processors). The card will be available in both 4GB and 8GB versions and has 256-bit GDDR5 memory which offers an effective 8 Gbps / GHz much like the GeForce GTX 1070. The card will run in the 1267 MHz range on its boost clock. Expect board partner cards to run a good 50 MHz faster. The GPU retains technologies of the Radeon GCN lineup such as DirectX 12, FreeSync and XDMA for CrossFire support. The GPU with its 2304 shader processors are tied towards 32 ROPs with 144 texture memory units. The initial consumer graphics card based on Ellismere (XT model) is the Radeon RX 480, the PRO model will get 32 compute units and thus has 2048 shader processors. The Radeon RX 480 is based on a much smaller 14nm fabrication process, as such you will see many enhancements in efficiency and that shows in power consumption, the reference cards will use just one 6-pin power PEG (PCI Express Graphics) header to give the the card its power. The reference boards have a 6-phase VRM power supply design and display output wise the new cards have seen an upgrade as well, including three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors and one HDMI 2.0b. AIB partners may release SKUs with a DVI connector as well, the reference PCB shows SMT traces for a DVI connector. Overall the specs show a very potent card to play the latest games with whilst offering a good memory size versus price in the 1920x1080 and even 2560x1440 monitor resolutions.

Read full article @ Guru3D

REEVEN Steropes Low-Profile CPU Cooler Review

It may not be the most silent low-profile CPU cooler in the market today but the just 60mm tall Steropes by REEVEN performs extremely well for its size and comes at a bargain price.

Read full article @ NikKTech

Sapphire Nitro Radeon RX 480 4GB Video Card Review

The Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 480 4GB video card is finally here! Forget the woes of the AMD Radeon RX 480 reference design as this custom card could possibly solve all the GPU cooler and power concerns may had. The Nitro Radeon RX 480 solves the high temperature and loud noise levels by featuring a large GPU cooler with three copper heatpipes and dual fans. The board designers then placed an 8-pin PCIe power connector instead of a 6-pin to ensure the Pascal GPU on the RX 480 is getting all the power it needs and then some. At $20 more than the reference design ($199) it looks like Sapphire’s Nitro Radeon RX 480 was a God send and could be the Radeon RX 480 to own...

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

Synology DiskStation DS916+ 4-Bay SMB NAS Review

Sometimes you need a NAS for simple file sharing and other times you need one that packs a lot more punch, features, and expandability. Today I’m taking a look at the latter as I got Synology’s DiskStation DS916+ 4-bay NAS in the test area and I’m going to show you both its features and performance. The DS916+ is available in two version, one with 2GB memory and the one that I’m testing today that comes with 8GB memory out of the box. The NAS is targeted at small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and IT enthusiasts alike, but that doesn’t mean that anyone else couldn’t get a lot of use out of this NAS.

The DS916+ is powered by an Intel Pentium N3710 quad-core processor that comes with native AES-NI hardware encryption engine. That should provide you with a great performance even when dealing with encrypted storage pools. The CPU has a base clock speed of 1.6GHz and a burst speed up to 2.56GHz when that extra power is needed. That doesn’t sound like a lot in desktop terms, but for a NAS, that’s a lot of power to have. It isn’t just great at dealing with encrypted data, it also provides outstanding performance when it comes to real-time transcoding of 4K Ultra HD source contents.

Read full article @ eTeknix

Synology DS916+ 4-bay NAS

The DS916+ is mostly for professional users, or enthusiasts who can afford it. It is powered by a capable quad-core Intel CPU with good performance and low power consumption even when taxed heavily.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Thermaltake Suppressor F31 Mid Tower Case Review

Late last year I had the pleasure of reviewing Thermaltake’s Suppressor F51 mid-tower case. The Suppressor F51 came with two external accessible drive bays and two internal 3 HDD/SSD cages that could be removed, making for a highly customable configuration and great air flow when set up with a variety of fan or liquid cooling options. Now I have the Thermaltake Suppressor F31 mid-tower case for review which shares many attributes with the Suppressor F51, though the Suppressor F31 does have some major differences.

The first actual difference is physical size with the Suppressor F31 measing 28mm lower and 62mm less deep, but also 20mm wider to allow for easier reach of the I/O ports and external accessible drive bays. Although the lower height allows for only one internal drive bay cage, the Suppressor F31 still has two external accessible drive bays and the option to mount three HDD/SSDs within the cable management area thanks to the wider footprint.

Read full article @ Neoseeker

Thermaltake Water 3.0 Riing RGB 240 AIO Cooler Review

Thermaltake has a solid reputation for their high-end AIO water coolers, with the Water 3.0 in all its variants being one of the most popular on the market today. Now things are about to get even better with their latest model, the Water 3.0 Riing RGB 240. Packing various tweaks and improvements on their previous designs, such as the new fan controller system and the hugely upgraded Riing RGB 120mm fans, we’re really looking forward to seeing what the latest Water 3.0 from Thermaltake can really do.

“Designed to meet the demands of enthusiasts, Thermaltake releases the latest Water 3.0 Riing RGB Series, a RGB 256 colors all-in-one liquid cooler with dual 120mm powerful high static pressure fans and a smart fan controller. Choose from: 240mm and 360mm highly-efficient radiators to control any escalating CPU temperatures. The new All-In-One LCS Water 3.0 Riing RGB is designed to exceed user expectations.” – Thermaltake

Equipped with a copper water block, durable 326mm long rubber hoses (with braided coverings), a 240mm radiator, two high-quality fans, as well as support for all major sockets from the Intel and AMD camps, all the basics are present and accounted for, so let’s jump in and take a closer look at what it has to offer.

Read full article @ eTeknix

Windows 10 Version 1607 driver signing changes

Microsoft announced recently that the upcoming version 1607 of Windows 10, known as the Anniversary Update, will only load kernel mode drivers that are digitally signed by Microsoft. The change won't affect all systems however the company notes, as only new installations are affected in the beginning.

Read full article @ gHacks