Here a roundup of the latest reviews and articles:

COUGAR Panzer Max Full Tower Review
gamescom 2016 coverage with more than 400 pictures
MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z Review
Roccat Sova Lapboard Review
Scan 3XS Z170 Performance GTK4 Review
Shuttle SH110R4 Mini PC barebones
Silverstone SX700-LPT
SteelSeries Rival 700 Optical Mouse Review
The Portable Workstation: Dell's XPS 13 + 32" UltraSharp UP3216Q
Windows 10 Anniversary Update - Not too bad
Windows 10 vs. Linux Radeon Software Performance
Zalman Z9 Neo Mid-Tower ATX Gaming Case Review

COUGAR Panzer Max Full Tower Review

The how much popular games like Battlefield and Call of Duty are is very easy to see just by checking their online following or even their sales numbers so as expected from two so successful series of video games there are many people out there who'd really like to have peripherals and components in general that look the part. Now although in the past several manufacturers did their best to cater to the needs of that particular segment of the market lately things haven't been as good so we haven't really seen many gaming peripherals and components in general designed with the military in mind. Still thanks to manufacturers like COUGAR this may actually change sooner rather than later since they recently released a very promising full tower which they named Panzer Max.

COUGAR products are designed by COUGAR GERMANY, a professional R&D engineering team and COUGAR is part of the “HEC/COMPUCASE” Group. The unique combination of the world-famous German skills of designing the best products worldwide and HEC/s power and long-time experience to produce the best high quality products created innovative masterpieces in PSU history. The PC upgrading and DIY market is changing rapidly and is growing more and more. Professional user are asking for more than only stable and silent PSU/s, they want efficient and energy saving products without compromises in quality. COUGAR GERMANY created such products! COUGAR GERMANY combines the features of innovation and evolution to create efficient, powerful and unique products like “COUGAR POWER”. The purpose of COUGAR GERMANY is the satisfaction of the customer, reaching it by creating most valuable, advanced products. COUGAR – YOUR POWER!

The Panzer Max obviously took its name from the German word Panzer which means armor but in all likelihood most of you will know it from the Panzer tanks Germany rolled out during World War II. Because of that and its very high build quality the case looks and feels a lot like an armored vehicle although the curved corners dressed with carbon fiber seem a bit off (still it's a nice touch). The Panzer Max has enough room inside for E-ATX/L-ATX/CEB/ATX/Micro-ATX/Mini-ITX sized motherboards, up to four 390mm long graphics cards, 170mm tall CPU Coolers, 8 fans and/or 4 radiators and a total of six 2.5" inch drives (or four 2.5" and two 3.5" ones). Other features include a 3-speed fan controller, headphone hook/holder (you need to mount this) and a top area designed in such a way that you can mount your keyboard inside when not in use (of course not all keyboards can fit there). So the time has come for us to check and see whether or not the latest Panzer Max full tower is "the ultimate computer case" like COUGAR markets it.

Read full article @ NikKTech

gamescom 2016 coverage with more than 400 pictures

From 17th to 21th August 2016, one of the most important European gaming fairs again took place in Cologne, Germany. Of course we attend gamescom as well and published a gamescom report with more than 400 pictures of current games, latest gaming hardware, VR headsets, DCMM casemods, Cosplayer and a lot of more interesting stuff on 14 pages at OCinside.de. It is available in German only, but it is worth watching the pictures with or without a translation tool to discover the latest gaming and gaming hardware trends – you should not miss that.

Read full article @ OCInside

MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z Review

The 1070 has been a hit ever since the its release a while ago. Funky stuff, and that is testimony to the fact that you guys have been waiting very long on the new graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia. It's for good reason, the graphics card industry, or the GPU industry has been on hold, waiting for a smaller GPU fabrication process to become viable. Last generation GPUs were based on a 28 nm fabrication, an intermediate move to 20 nm was supposed to be the answer for today’s GPUs, but it was a problematic technology. Aside from some smaller ASICs the 20 nm node has been a fail. Therefore the industry had to wait until an ever newer and smaller fabrication process was available in order to shrink the die which allows for less voltage usage in the chips, less transistor gate leakage and, obviously, more transistors in a GPU. The answer was to be found in the recent 14/15/16 nm fabrication processors and processes with the now all too familiar FinFET + VLSI technology (basically wings on a transistor). Intel has been using it for a while, and now both Nvidia and AMD are moving towards such nodes as well. Nvidia is the first to announce their new products based on a TSMC 16 nm process fab by introducing Pascal GPU architecture, named after the mathematician much like Kepler, Maxwell and Fermi. That stage has now passed, the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 have been announced with the 1080 slowly becoming available in stores as we speak, the 1070 cards you'll start to see selling by next week (June 10th 2016). Both cards are equally impressive in it's product positioning, though I do feel the 1070 will be the more attractive product due to it's price level, the 1080 cards really is what everybody want (but perhaps can't afford). The good news though is that the board partner cards will sell for less opposed to the Nvidia reference / Founder Edition cards. Obviously the higher-end all customized SKUs will likely level with that founders edition card price level again, but I am pretty certain you'd rather spend your money on a fully customized AIB card that is already factory tweaked a bit opposed the the reference one. The GeForce GTX 1070 is all about that Pascal GP104 GPU, yet for obvious reasons had to be slowed down a bit opposed to the 1080. The GeForce GTX 1070 might have the same GP104 GPU housed on it's PCB as that 1080, however it is a cut-down version of the GPU as Nvidia stripped away some segments. Where the GeForce GTX 1080 has 2560 shader processors, the GeForce GTX 1070 has 1,920 shader processors. This means it is has 15 out of the 20 SMs active (15 streaming multi-processors x 128 shader cores). In order of magnitude, the secondary biggest change is the memory type being "regular GDDR5" memory and not the new and hip GDDR5X. That memory is clocked at 2,000 MHz which is 8 GHz (GDDR5-effective) at a memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s. The two differences are responsible for a performance drop from 9 TFLOP/s Single-precision floating point performance for the GeForce GTX 1080 towards 6.45 TFLOP/s for the GeForce GTX 1070. .

You will have noticed that MSI is to release a regular Gaming and then an X and a Gaming Z model. The regular Gaming model (no X or Z) will not have the backplate and configurable RGB LED light system and basic clock frequencies. Then there are the X models, these are released in the initial launch and come with a backplate and RGB system and are clocked a notch higher. Then the Z models will be the most high-end SKU, even further overclocked with all the benefits the X model has as well as a RGB LOGO on the backplate. The Gaming Z gives you all the features of the Gaming X, but with higher clock speeds. Right with that explained, the cooling perf has been improved and combined with a new generation fans, the airflow is improved whilst remaining silent. Up-to 60 Degrees C the card will even stay in passive mode, e.g. the fans will not spin. The TWIN FROZR cooler is now intensified by a red GAMING glow piercing through the cover, while the MSI GAMING dragon RGB LED on the side can be set to any of 16.8 million colors to match the LED lights in the color-tone of your PC. The GTX 1070 GAMING Z 8G comes with MSI's traditional Military Class 4 components and holds both an 8- and 6-pin power connector. At the backside you'll spot a nice matte black solid backplate. Both versions do have TwinFrozer VI as wel as a memory cooling plate and a PWM heatsink. You'll receice configurable Boost Clock / Base Clock / Memory Frequencies that can be setup by the Gaming APP.

Read full article @ Guru3D

Roccat Sova Lapboard Review

With the Sova Lapboard, Roccat has new product in its portfolio, for all those want to play from their bed or couch. Featuring a gaming TKL keyboard, with a hard plastic mousemat and a palm rest and some comfy cushions this could be an interesting option. Apart from that the Sova is availabe as a rubber dome and as a mechanical version.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Scan 3XS Z170 Performance GTK4 Review

Bolton, UK-based Scan's latest machine uses the new AMD Radeon RX 480, which is one of the market's best mid-range cards, and the GPU is paired with an overclocked Core i5 processor. Scan reckons it's ideal for 1080p and 1440p gaming, and we're loathe to disagree. The 3XS Z170 Performance GTK4 starts at $1,444 (about £1,090, AU$1,907).Gloss dropThe GTK4 is built inside the pleasing NZXT Source 340 chassis. Its front is a solid slab of glossy black metal, and its roof and rear panel are similarly subtle. The main side panel is decorated with a huge window. Build quality is reassuring, and there's not much size difference between the Scan and the Overclockers Titan Virtual Force – the latter system is only a few centimetres bigger.

Read full article @ Techradar

Shuttle SH110R4 Mini PC barebones

The last time I saw a Shuttle barebones was back in 2009, at a time when LGA775 and Core 2 Duo were the flavours of the month. The Shuttle SH110R4 barebones we have on review today is bang up to date, sporting an Intel H110 chipset with support for a Skylake LGA1151 CPU and DDR desktop RAM yet it looks pretty darn familiar.

Read full article @ KitGuru

Silverstone SX700-LPT

So over the past few years and especially in the past few months I’ve had the chance to take a look at a variety of SFX form factor power supplies from a few different manufacturers. So far all of them have fit the standard SFX form factor, but recently Silverstone introduced a few power supplies that are SFX-L. The SFX-L form factor is the same size as other SFX power supplies in most dimensions, but they are slightly longer. This extra length squares off the SFX form factor and allows for a much larger fan to fit inside. The extra space and cooling also allowed Silverstone to up the power a little up to 700 watts. This is exciting because it finally allows for proper SLI and Crossfire setups in the SFX form factor. So today I’m going to take a look at the SX700-LPT and see what is different than Silverstone’s other SFX power supplies.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

SteelSeries Rival 700 Optical Mouse Review

Force feedback is now available on your mouse to keep you informed with Tactile Alerts: The SteelSeries Rival 700 is an incredible mouse with cutting edge performance, maximum comfort, and a great feature list.

Read full article @ APH Networks

The Portable Workstation: Dell's XPS 13 + 32" UltraSharp UP3216Q

Dell recently came knocking with a simple proposition: they would send us their XPS 13 ultraportable and the 32-inch UltraSharp UP3216Q 4k monitor to play with and see how we liked it to replace one of our editor's workstation desktop PC. Being able to give away the bundle to one of our readers post-experiment was the icing on the cake.

Read full article @ Techspot

Windows 10 Anniversary Update - Not too bad

You may like this review of Windows 10 Anniversary Update Build 1607, covering installation and system changes, look & feel, privacy and telemetry tweaks, Windows Store, Edge and browser extensions, Linux subsystem and Bash, other features, overall impression, and more. Take a look.

Read full article @ Dedoimedo

Windows 10 vs. Linux Radeon Software Performance

As alluded to earlier and on Twitter, the past few days I have been working on a fresh Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics/gaming performance comparison. This time it's looking at the latest Radeon performance using an R9 Fury and RX 480. Tests on Windows were obviously done with Radeon Software Crimson Edition while under Linux were the two latest AMD/RTG Linux driver options: the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver and the fully open-source driver via Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev.

Given all the progress of particularly the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack this summer and the recent RX 480 Polaris launch, I figured it was a good time to do a fresh comparison of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux on the red side. Windows 10 Pro x64 had all available updates and was running Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.8.2. On the Linux side was Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS x86_64 with all available updates. Tested first on the Linux side was AMDGPU-PRO 16.30.3-315407 followed by the open-source driver. For the open-source driver tests was the Linux 4.8 Git kernel along with Mesa 12.1-dev. The Mesa 12.1 Git packages were obtained from the Padoka PPA that are also built against LLVM SVN for the latest AMDGPU compiler back-end.

Read full article @ Phoronix

Zalman Z9 Neo Mid-Tower ATX Gaming Case Review

The Z9 Neo represents Zalman’s latest attempt to conquer the gaming value market by enhancing features and quality. Our performance analysis puts its low price into a value perspective.

Read full article @ Toms Hardware