Given how great the Core i5-2500K and i7-2600K perform, it is easy to forget that the current Sandy Bridge LGA1155 processors are part of Intel’s mainstream series, not their high-end one. Therefore, it is more than due time for us to test out some of the lower priced offerings. Although we would love to try [...]

After Corsair released their highly acclaimed Obsidian series of cases, many knew that it would be only a matter of time until less expensive yet smaller variants became available.  Those predictions came true and today Corsair has a full sable of cases from the high end Obsidian to the entry level Carbide series.  The one [...]

With the wait time between the present and upcoming graphics card generations becoming longer and longer, pre-overclocked graphics cards are seen by many board partners as a way to keep the buying public interested in their products.  HIS has recently introduced a pair of unique AMD cards: the  HD 6970 IceQ Turbo and HD 6950 IceQ [...]

When it was released a few short months ago, OCZ’s Vertex 3 became one of the fastest SSDs on the market.  However, OCZ is now trying to one-up themselves with a drive series that promises even higher performance than its forefather.  Dubbed the Vertex 3 Max IOPS, it is supposed to offer groundbreaking real world [...]

During this year’s CES, Samsung debuted their Central Station technology which promised to combine an all in one connectivity and networking hub into a high performance monitor.   This centralized approach will surely appeal to notebook, tablet and netbook users since it can expand screen real estate while eliminating the need to attach unwanted wires  to an [...]

Passive cards are hard to come by these days and finding one that can provide decent in-game framerates is next to impossible.  PowerColor is looking to change this with the newest addition to their Silent Cooling System 3 family:  a HD 6850.  Sporting the Barts GPU core, an impressive looking heatsink and 1GB of GDDR5 [...]

We’ve been hearing about it for years but AMD is finally launching their Fusion architecture into the mid-range desktop market with the Lynx platform’s A8 and A6 processors alongside A75 and A55 motherboards.  These accelerated processing units (or APUs) integrate a quad core CPU, 400 shader GPU and fully functional Northbridge onto a single die [...]

SSD firmware updates.  We’ve all heard about them but is there any tangible benefit to actually upgrading your SSD with the latest firmware?  In this article we take a look at two identical Vertex 3 drives; one of which is a pre-retail sample with beta firmware while the other is a retail version sporting the [...]

When they were introduced, the RV01 and RV02 far surpassed the size of many other ATX cases on the market and the budgets of most buyers.  However, Silverstone’s engineers went back to the drawing board and have reformulated their award winning Raven formula for a much smaller form factor and a price point of about $160. [...]

In the last few months it has seemed like custom GTX 580 cards are being launched at a nearly breakneck space.   Amid the hoopla surrounding some high profile launches from MSI, Gigabyte and ASUS, EVGA silently introduced their own “upgraded” GTX 580 which sports 3GB of GDDR5.  While it shuns higher clock speeds and [...]