We evaluate two new flagship Z77 motherboards targeting different price points - ASUS's P8Z77-V Premium billed as a feature packed, four-way GPU capable workhorse while MSI opted for a more understated approach with their Z77A-GD80. Both of them feature a debuting Intel 'Cactus Ridge' Thunderbolt controller, which we will cover quite extensively in this piece.
Corsair has always been a company close to gamers and hardcore enthusiasts. Although the company is primarily focused on delivering high speed RAM modules, SSDs and power supplies, today we are going to have a look at two products which literally place the company in direct contact with the gamers; the Vengeance series K60 mechanical keyboard and the M60 gaming mouse. Although they are sold separately, both products are specifically developed for hardcore first person shooter (FPS) gamers. We will closely examine both of Corsair’s latest additions to the Vengeance series in this review.
CPU coolers come in all shapes and sizes. For the obvious reasons, here in VR-Zone we usually review cooler capable of delivering very high thermal performance and/or excellent acoustics. Today however we will have a look at the Samuel 17, a product from Prolimatech designed with a different purpose in mind; to be capable of delivering the highest possible overall performance while being only 45mm tall. How does Prolimatech’s David compare against the numerous Goliaths currently available? We will find out in this review.
During the Emerging Companies Summit at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, we spoke with several startups and experienced companies, seeing an interesting emerging pattern.
Patriot Memory is one of the leading US based RAM and SSD manufacturers. Today we are going to have a look at their fastest consumer SSD drive, the Pyro SE. The Pyro SE 120GB drive is a Sandforce SF-2281 based SSD, boasting speeds up to 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write. How does it compare against other popular drives already out in the market? We will find out in this review.
During the GTC 2012 opening keynote, NVIDIA announced two Tesla cards, K10 and the K20. While the K10 is effectively a 8GB Tesla-version of the GeForce GTX 690, the K20 brings the monster silicon - 7.1 billion transistors.
AMD has gained considerable market share in the budget computing segment since last year's launch of the Llano APU, with "good enough" CPU performance balanced with entry discreet level graphics to boot. After the uncompetitive showing of Bulldozer with their FX enthusiast chips and Opterons, followed by harrowing departures of historically key personnel, the remaining team went back to the drawing board and made a few tweaks to their 32nm BD core architecture. Their efforts resulted in Piledriver, which will debut with the 2012 Trinity Mobile APUs today and then feature in server and desktop product refreshes later this year. Is this the light at the end of the tunnel or just another epic facepalm for AMD?
CoolerMaster is a highly popular company among enthusiasts, with their reputation coming from their extensive line-up of computer chassis, power supplies and cooling solutions. However, lately CoolerMaster has been adding a lot of new products to their Storm series, their gaming peripherals line-up. Today we will have a close look on the latest mechanical keyboard from CoolerMaster, which the company baptized the “Trigger”, which is clearly aiming towards hardcore gamers and mainly of the FPS kind.
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We've been covering the GTX 680 since day one with our reviews of several different cards. Today we're doing something a little different. We're going to have a look at the competitive scene benchmarking performance of the GTX 680 using a cascade cooled Ivy Bridge i7-3770K on an ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe. Zotac have kindly provided a sample for our benchmarking.
Intel has as yet to launch all of its mobile Ivy Bridge chipsets, as we're still waiting for a couple of business-end chipsets, but VR-Zone can now exclusively reveal Intel's next generation mobile chipsets for the Haswell CPUs. Interestingly, Intel has cut back from no less than seven chipset for Ivy Bridge to a more acceptable five chipsets for Haswell, or the same amount of options as it offered for Sandy Bridge.
Nvidia's newest GK104 (Kepler) powered GeForce GTX 670, positioned to go against the HD 7950, is simply a GTX 680 with one of eight SMX units disabled and reduced core clock speed, retaining everything else like the 256-bit GDDR5 memory bus and 32 ROPs. We review GIGABYTE's non-reference take on the new US$399 entrant that really doesn't differ much from their flagship model.
Recently, NVIDIA introduced its current king of the hill product in the form of two GK104 GPUs placed on the same board and called the part GeForce GTX 690. In the next couple of days, we will see the launch of GTX 670. We'll dig a bit deeper and see the consequences of recent strategy moves.
We address one of the most pertinent question that is on the minds of new Ivy Bridge platform shoppers - is the hyperthreading capable / 2MB more L3 cache i7-3770K (US$313) worth the almost 50% price premium over the i5-3570K (US$212), especially when both chips are overclocked at 4.8GHz?
Back at IDF Beijing 2012, Intel unveiled its enterprise data centre/cloud computing oriented 910 series "Ramsdale MLC" PCI Express Solid-State Drive, available in 400GB ($1,929) and 800GB ($3,859) capacities. We do a quick preview of the new 25nm HET MLC based card before putting it through some heavy duty real world tests over the next few weeks for a formal review.
With more Ultrabooks coming to the market, consumers may be confused between them and the thin and light notebooks. HP had unveiled the stylish ENVY 14 Spectre at CES this year, but is this portable machine as good as it looks? VR-Zone finds out.
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