| Build Your Own Mini-ITX Marvel (Part 1) |
| With the CPU cooler attached to chip and board, you’re ready to attach the cables for the power supply. Do this without the PSU attached to the mains just so you can ensure that everything is plugged in first. You will need to make sure the wide motherboard cable is attached, as well as the 4/8-pin CPU power cable. I |
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| Be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 750W |
| We’ve always had a fondness for power supplies that offer variety when it comes to cabling, such as cables of different lengths and lots of options for SATA and Molex connectors. So when we saw the unprecedented assortment of cable options that be quiet! includes with the partially modular Dark Power Pro 10 750W, we geeked out a little. |
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| Aerocool Dead Silence 120mm/140mm Fans |
| Best-case scenario, most enclosures you buy today will include one intake fan installed in the front panel and an exhaust fan in the rear panel, with some foregoing the intake fan entirely to reduce the price tag as much as possible. |
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| WD Black2 Dual Drive Don’t Call It A Hybrid |
| Although prices of SSDs have fallen substantially in the past year or so, they still cost more than their mechanical counterparts. A regular 2.5-inch 1TB hard disk drive today will cost around $110, whereas an SSD of similar capacity will set you back $800. |
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| Supertest MSI Z87I 2013 |
| One of our biggest problems with the rise of the mini-ITX motherboard is the price premium that always seems to come with them. In exchange for removing slots and features, manufacturers seem to want to charge you for waste removal, too. |
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| EVGA Z87 Stinger 2013 |
| EVGA has done very well at making the Stinger an attractive mini-ITX board, all red and black detailing and I/O shielding, but if we thought the RoG board was pricing itself out of the test, EVGA has just gone a step further. |
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| Gigabyte F2A85XN-Wifi 2013 |
| This well-specced A85X board from Gigabyte is just $130.6, and when you pair that up with the top A10 APU available, the A10-6800K, it’s still barely a tenner more expensive than just the Asus Impact on its own. When you factor in an i5-4670K chip on top of the cost of the RoG board, that’s immediately another $281.1. |
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| Intel NUC D54250WYK 2013 (Part 2) |
| Anyway, on the front you get a pair of USB 3.0 ports. You’ll find another two on the rear, along with a LAN port, a mini-HDMI and a mini-Display-Port. The latter, incidentally, supports 4K resolutions, which is the first hint at the latest NUC’s all-round performance prowess. |
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| Intel NUC D54250WYK 2013 (Part 1) |
| In reality, that’s just not true. The PCs we care about – such as gaming and performance-focused PCs – are in a state of rude health. High-end GPUs, which make for a very handy metric, are practically flying off virtual shelves. |
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| NZXT G10 GPU Bracket |
| NZXTS G10 Bracket is a unique GPU cooler that takes advantage of one incontrovertible fact of today's liquid-cooling market: Most of the coolers out there are designed by Asetek. This snazzy adapter lets you take any Asetek CPU cooler (yes, we said CPU cooler) and bolt it onto your GPU to deliver a level of cooling performance that is simply not possible with an aftermarket air cooler. |
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| NZXT H440 Semi-silent-themed Case |
| We love the fact that NZXT bills this semi-silent-themed case as a "hassle-free experience.” We wonder if the company was using the same case that we were, because we encountered quite a bit of hassle building a standard configuration into this smaller-than-usual chassis. |
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| Micro ATX Motherboard Gigabyte F2A88XM DS2 |
| Either way, it’s probably performance that’s going to make or break the Gigabyte F2A88XM-DS2 as a budget proposition. Perhaps not surprisingly, this isn’t a great overclocking board. All the options are there in the bios, but we hit the wall at 4.1GHz – well down on the 4.5 GHz achieved with the same APU by ASUS’ full-ATX A88X-Pro. |
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| Mini-ITX Motherboard ASRock FM2A88X-ITX+ |
| Board space is at a premium, obviously, but ASRock has still managed to squeeze in six SATA ports. You could argue that you’re not going to be hooking up huge numbers of SATA devices to such a tiny board, but it’s far better to have the option, and it gives this Mobo desktop credibility. |
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| Mini-ITX Motherboard Gigabyte F2A88XN-WIFI |
| There’s one in every test – the review sample that’s not quite right. Actually, during our recent CPU super test, if felt like every other component was made of pure Bork, such was the failure rate. If the Battle of the some involved hurling broken motherboards at the Germans, the result would have looked a lot like the PCF test bench after day two. |
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| Gigabyte G1.Sniper M5 2013 |
| The G1.Sniper M5 is the biggest of all the motherboards we’re looking at in this test, and it still feels strange to be saying that about a micro ATX board. |
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| High End Motherboards Shootout New Socket, New Motherboards (Part 2) |
| The Gigabyte Z87X-OC boasts what Gigabyte dubs Ultra Durable 5 Plus, similar to Durathon technology featured on the ECS motherboard. Gigabyte’s entry features voltage regulation module components like the black solid capacitors, as well as the use of PowIRstage ICs (single-package, single-silicon design MOSFETs). |
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| G.Skill Tridentx 3,000MHZ 2013 |
| And so here it is, the highest-clocked RAM that has ever sat And so here it is, the highest-clocked RAM that has ever sat in one of our test machines. And we can’t help but feel a little disappointed. |
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| Cooler Master Nepton 280L Review |
| In the world of CPUs, closed-loop liquid coolers (CLCs) seem to be standard-issue for enthusiasts these days. They give you higher overclocking headroom than even the most expensive and beefy air coolers, and they can operate more quietly. |
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| Full-ATX ASRock FM2A88X+ Killer |
| ASRock used to be all about bargainous, but frankly pretty batty motherboards, but more recently it’s delivered a nice line of more conventional high-end mobos. The ASRock Fatal1ty FM2A88X+ Killer falls into the latter category. |
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| Full-ATX Motherboard ASUS A88X-Pro (Part 2) |
| That’s because several remits are at play when it comes to any motherboard, and especially if we’re talking about a board for AMD’s latest Kaveri APUs. That’s because it’s easy to imagine using Kaveri for anything from a super-thin client box for streaming to a cheap gaming rig, to a home theatre or console-like living room box sitting under your telly. |
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| Full-ATX Motherboard ASUS A88X-Pro (Part 1) |
| ASUS truly is the Borg of motherboards. So consistently good are its efforts, it usually feels like resistance is futile. Sure enough, one glance at our benchmark results and the shiny PCF Picard pate seems at risk of becoming the dull slaphead of locutus. |
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| Cooking Up A Killer Kaveri Rig (Part 3) |
| In some ways, that makes sense. After all, as more and more features migrate onto the CPU or onto the APU die itself, the chipset becomes less critical. For example, with an APU based AMD rig, it’s the APU that houses the PCI express controller. Still, digging up any information on Kaveri supporting chipsets is difficult to say the least. They simply don’t appear on the main AMD chipset web page. |
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| Cooking Up A Killer Kaveri Rig (Part 2) |
| For starters, Kaveri marks the beginning of a new approach to computing for AMD, and maybe the PC in general. The buzz term here is HSA, or Heterogeneous System Architecture. We’ve been through this in PCFs passim, but the basic idea is the ability for software to run in parallel and seamlessly across both the CPU and GPU. |
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| Cooking Up A Killer Kaveri Rig (Part 1) |
| Has AMD forsaken performance PC processors? That’s a very good question. Interestingly, AMD’s latest CPU architecture – known as Steamroller – is nowhere to be seen in its FX line of high performance CPUs. |
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| AMD Radeon R7 260X 2013 |
| AMD gives a card a new naming convention, everyone hopes it’s a brand new GPU and then everyone is disappointed because it’s the same thing people have been buying all year. |
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| Asus RoG Maximus VI Impact |
| The positioning of this Republic of Gamers board at the head of our list seems almost prophetic. It’s certainly the best of the five we’re testing out this issue, sitting at the top of the table across the entire benchmarking suite we’ve laid out for them. |
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| Asus God Raidr Express 03_2014 (Part 2) |
| The 240GB RAIDR can be used as a cache, making it one of the largest cache drives on the market, perfect for speeding up systems with several Terabytes of mechanical storage. |
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| Asus God Raidr Express 03_2014 (Part 1) |
| Like an R35 GT-R with its turbos removed, today’s SSDs are being held back from reaching their true performance potential. The high-speed memory inside is bottlenecked by the motherboard’s SATA interface, which is used to feed data to and from the drive - yes, even the fastest SATA 3 interface holds these drives back. |
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| And The Winner Is… MSI Z87I |
| What are you looking for in a small form factor motherboard? Well, the first thing to consider has to be the size of the board itself. Most of the motherboards we’ve been checking out this month are in the burgeoning mini-ITX segment, but we also included one of our favourite mATX mobos in the Gigabyte G1.Sniper M5. |
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| Zotac GeForce GTX Titan Black |
| The GTX Titan Black, which outright replaces the GTX Titan, seeks to rectify this issue by pairing a fully enabled GK110 GPU with 6GB of VRAM and full-speed double-precision performance, and some clock speed bumps too. |
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| Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti |
| For the first time, Nvidia is launching a new GPU architecture in a mass-market product, rather than a top-end one. The GTX 750 Ti costs $179.23, a fraction more than the Radeon R7 260X and $33.19-41.19 less than the GTX 660 and R9 270. |
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| NAS Box : Zyxel NSA325 v2 |
| The NSA325v2 is Zyxel’s effort at making a full-fat NAS box more affordable than the QNAP and Synology boxes. It sports 512MB of DDR3 memory, a front USB 3 port and rear USB 2 ports, although it only has a single-core 1.6GHz Marvell Kirkwood 88F6282 CPU, while many of the latest NAS boxes offer dual-core CPUs. I |
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| LGA1150 Motherboard Gigabyte GA-Z87-HD3 |
| In our Media Benchmarks, there was little to distinguish the GA-Z87-HD3 from more expensive motherboards. Its image editing score of 2,072 was on par with MSI’s Z87-G45 Gaming, which scored 2,081, and its video encoding score was only a little off the pace at 3,596 compared to 3,661 for the MSI board. |
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| CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H105 |
| The H105 adds to Corsair’s expansive range of closed-loop coolers. Like the H100i, it uses a dual 120mm radiator, but it’s 11mm thicker. This gives it more surface area from which to dissipate heat, although it requires more room to install – not all tower cases will have enough room for it, even with just a single set of fans. |
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