Reviews

Placed in confined spaces, a compact cooler has to rise to the occasion. Although hopefully not too much as height restrictions also apply. This is why the C-type heatpipe design is popularly used for CPU coolers destined for small-form factor enclosures. This type of cooler has its own set of design issues it must overcome to be a viable solution, ...

EVGA is in the business of providing gaming solutions in the form of video cards and motherboards so it should not come as a surprise when they decided to branch out to offering gaming peripherals. They are also prone to marching to the beat of their own drum so expectations are high whenever they make a product announcement as they ...

CPU Coolers come in various shapes and sizes but these variants are not all done purely for performance reasons. For instance, since memory manufacturers continue to use unnecessarily tall heat spreaders on their modules, CPU cooler makers have begun designing  heatsinks to maximize compatibility. Phanteks, specifically with their latest PH-TC14S CPU cooler, incorporates two main design ideas to ensure it ...

Sapphire has long been AMD’s leading partner in the GPU arena. With the growing popularity of 1440, 2K and 4K gaming, manufacturers have been taking “liberties” with the GPUs such as factory overclocks, higher power delivery, and more memory (VRAM). The Sapphire Vapor-X 290x is slightly different from other 290x’s as it houses 8 gigabytes of RAM vs. 4 Gigabytes ...

Don’t you hate that when you are camping with a sniper rifle and all of the sudden some one sneaks up behind you and puts a knife through your head? Of course! We have all been there. Don’t you wish you heard that guy who was sneaking up on you? Maybe then you could have switched to a Desert Eagle ...

At CES 2013, we were pulled aside during one of our meetings and asked if we had seen the new Origin PC case. At that time, we had not. We were then introduced to the folks over at Origin. We heard the story of the Origin Genesis PC case. The case was kept top secret from the rest of the ...

There is one thing I love more than anything in the PC industry. It is almost literally a sickness with me. I LOVE PC Cases. To me, they are more than just a box to house your hardware. On top of being a blank canvas, the case is what gives your RIG its character and attitude. Do you want a ...

The $200 segment of the video card market  is where the bulk of the mainstream PC gaming buyers run towards. It is a safe market to aim for just for the sheer number of interested parties, yet oddly enough the variant offerings introduced with the latest NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 video card are far from predictable, milquetoast and boring, especially ...

In September 2014, Nvidia launched the second take on the Maxwell GPU architecture. This latest version of Maxwell promises better performance, lower power consumption, and more advanced rendering features. Gigabyte’s flagship video card is the Gigabyte GTX 980 G1 Gaming. Gigabyte claims their GPUs have been selected to ensure the best overclocking and the 600-watt cooler that sits up top ...

Noctua’s NH-D14 and NH-D15 dual-tower coolers are excellent CPU coolers because of their size but many overlook the fact that part of their effectiveness also lies in their design. As a dual-tower solution, the NH-D14 and NH-D15 have the convenience of further spaced-apart heatpipes compared to a single tower heatsink where they bunch up closer together. This means heat is ...