Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

ADATA SP550 240GB SATA SSD Review: $0.25-per-GB Reality
Hands On with Windows 10 Redstone Build 14342
nonda ZUS Smart Car Charger Review
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 ref PCB and custom cooler pictured
Oculus Rift virtual reality headset full review
QNAP TBS-453A Review
Samsung Galaxy TabPro S Review: A good first attempt at a Surface Pro rival
Tested: 71 case fans of 140 mm: round-up big fans
Windows Repair Toolbox Review
Windows XP - April 2016 report; sign of life?
With Pascal Ahead, A 16-Way Recap From NVIDIA's 9800 GTX To Maxwell

ADATA SP550 240GB SATA SSD Review: $0.25-per-GB Reality

With current storage controllers having no problem saturating the SATA interface, a different kind of race emerges; one that is unusually focused towards the bottom with an eye on delivering the lowest per GB cost. The previously reviewed ADATA SX930 with its 4-channel JMicron JMF670H controller paired with 16nm Micron MLC NAND is fairly affordable already at $0.33-per-GB, but using … Read more.

Read full article @ Modders-Inc

Hands On with Windows 10 Redstone Build 14342

Apparently the red button was inadvertently pushed last night and allowed Windows 10 Build 14342 to start arriving for Windows Insiders ahead of time.

Read full article @ WinSupersite

nonda ZUS Smart Car Charger Review

Ever find yourself wandering around a giant parking lot filled with a seemingly endless metallic sea of vehicles without a clue as to where your car is actually parked? Or maybe you’ve gone out to the woods for a day of trail hiking only to emerge from a different trailhead feeling mostly clueless as to where you left your ride home? These and many other situations have been the torment of motorists for years. It only makes sense then that when a crowd funding project for a device named ZUS appeared it was fully funded. ZUS is a 12V two port car charger, made by Palo Alto, CA based startup nonda. ZUS links to a smartphone app and then serves as a GPS locator for your car. Are the days of wandering the sweltering asphalt of your local mall gone or should you just work on getting better with directions and skip ZUS altogether? Follow along as we find out!

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 ref PCB and custom cooler pictured

The Galax custom cooler looks rather bland. The pictures show the GTX 1080 reference PCB (above and below) to have a 6-phase VRM using DrMOS chips, taking power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. Cleverly Nvidia's reference design leaves room for AiB partners to add an extra power connector nearby. The card's 16 nm GP104 is flanked by 8 memory modules front and back, says VideoCardz. Both the GPU and memory chips are seen to be smaller than on the earlier generation (28nm GPU, DDR5 based) GTX 980 graphics card.

Read full article @ Hexus

Oculus Rift virtual reality headset full review

After many years of talking, speculating and trialing pre-release hardware, we finally have our hands on the first consumer grade virtual reality headset in the world: the Oculus Rift CV1. Packing a pair of 1,080 x 1,200 pixel OLED displays behind a pair of custom-made fresnel lenses, Oculus hopes to take home the VR crown by opting for a traditional gaming focus over that of its big rival, HTC.

The headset itself is ergonomic and lightweight, with a unique strap system and built in headphones. It’s tracked by a standalone USB powered infrared camera and is bundled with a wireless Xbox One control and a small remote.

Read full article @ KitGuru

QNAP TBS-453A Review

Today we are checking out a very nice product from QNAP that changes the NAS game, something the company has been working towards over the past year it seems. It is becoming common place to find not one but two HDMI outputs on QNAP’s NAS products, allowing them to support dual monitors, and when combined with their HybridDesk Station they essentially become Linux based computers...

So how exactly does the TBS-453A change the NAS game? Essentially it does this by being so much more than just network attached storage. In fact, more than that the TBS-453A looks nothing like a traditional desktop NAS and despite being extremely powerful, it is small enough to fit in a bag designed for an Ultrabook. This is no doubt why QNAP refers to it as a NASbook and like an Ultrabook you can take it with you wherever you go.

Read full article @ Legion Hardware

Samsung Galaxy TabPro S Review: A good first attempt at a Surface Pro rival

Over the past few weeks I've been using the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S. The name isn’t catchy, but there’s a lot to like about the hardware in this slim 12.0-inch Surface competitor, including the AMOLED display and fanless Core M CPU on the inside. Samsung also bundles a keyboard cover with this device, because these sorts of key accessories should be included in the purchase price.

Read full article @ Techspot

Tested: 71 case fans of 140 mm: round-up big fans

The market for case fans offers a lot of choices, but this makes the search for an appropriate case fan even harder. We tested 71 140mm case fans to clear up the situation.

Last year, we tested 103 120mm case fans. This year, the 140 mm models are up for assessment. The advantage of bigger fans is that, on average, they need fewer rpm than smaller fans to create the same air flow. Because of this they should be less noisy with the same airflow and are thus more efficient. So, if your case supports 140mm as wel as 120mm fans, the choice will be a no-brainer.

Besides the pros, there are cons: cases often have less positions for 140mm fans than for 120mm fans. So, it is smart to check the number of positions for 140mm fans your case has before buying new fans.

Read full article @ Hardware.Info

Windows Repair Toolbox Review

Windows Repair Toolbox is a free program for Windows devices that provides you with access to third-party repair and troubleshooting tools. The application itself comes as a 2 Megabyte download which requires the Microsoft .Net Framework and is compatible with all versions of Windows from XP onward.

Read full article @ gHacks

Windows XP - April 2016 report; sign of life?

Not a typo. Tested in April 2016 indeed, posted in early May, all good. So here we have a neat little article discussing the practical and security implications of using Windows XP in the month of April, year 2016, exactly two years after its official end-of-life date, focusing on availability of software, security tools like SuRun and EMET, performance, other considerations, and more. You might like this.

Read full article @ Dedoimedo

With Pascal Ahead, A 16-Way Recap From NVIDIA's 9800 GTX To Maxwell

All of the tests happened from an Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with MSI C236A Workstation motherboard with 16GB of RAM, 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, and running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Ubuntu 16.04 has the Linux 4.4 kernel, Unity 7.4 desktop, and X.Org Server 1.18.3 as the key components during graphics testing. With my tested Fermi hardware and newer was the NVIDIA 364.19 driver as the latest currently available driver for Linux users/gamers. For the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX testing I had to use the NVIDIA 340.96 driver as it was the last release stream supporting the GeForce 9 series.

With the sixteen graphics cards, first up I ran a variety of Linux OpenGL tests at 1080p in order to provide comparable results to the GPUs going back to the 9800 GTX. Following the 1920 x 1080 results, on the newer (Kepler and Maxwell) graphics cards I conducted 4K benchmarks for these higher-end graphics cards capable of playing Linux games at 3840 x 2160. I also did run some OpenCL compute benchmarks in a similar manner, which will be saved for a follow-up article on Phoronix.

During all of the graphics card testing, the AC system power consumption was monitored using a WattsUp Pro power meter that's automatically polled via our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. In addition to monitoring the power usage on a per-test basis, the Phoronix Test Suite was also logging the reported GPU temperature as well as calculating the performance-per-Watt for each of the benchmarks.

Read full article @ Phoronix