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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 13 May 2015 16:58
So a lot of people might not know it but the new M.2 SSDs are actually very versatile. You can run them as a direct PCIe drive with a x2 or x4 connection or you can even run a standard SATA drive on M.2. It wasn’t long ago that I took a look at the Patriot Ignite SSD, well it just so happens Patriot send over another Ignite SSD. This time they sent over their brand new Ignite M2. The Ignite M2 is a SATA based M.2 drive. In other words with this being a SATA drive we still work under the limitations of the SATA interface but with that we keep costs down. Where this comes in handy is in builds where not having to run a 2.5 inch drive is best. So we know this is up my alley, not having to pack in a 2.5 inch drive would save a lot of trouble in some of our LANrigs! So let’s see what the Ignite M2 is all about and then run it through our standard benchmark suite.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Friday, 08 May 2015 11:31
I sometimes feel a little like a broken record when talking about LANRigs. While we have been doing them for years here at LanOC, over the past few years the small form factor builds have really come into their own. The introduction of parts has helped a lot and frankly I think a lot of people are starting to see that you can get amazing performance out of a small PC if it is built right. This makes taking your PC to LANs much easier and even for those of you who don’t do that, they take up a lot less space in your office. Well when Asus recently introduced a new all in one PC called the ROG GR8 I was a little surprised. They were promising a PC that is a fraction of the size of a normal SFF gaming rig but you could get it with an i7 and a dedicated video card. I had to check it out. Over the past few months we have been lucky enough to pack it up and use it at multiple LANs, today I’m going to talk a little about the GR8 and our experience with it. While we are doing that I’m going to try to keep our only GR8 (Great) reference to right here in the introduction.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Tuesday, 05 May 2015 21:54
Last week I took a look at Kingston’s latest HyperX SATA SSD the Savage. Now today I have the chance to look at their flagship SSD the Predator. The Predator is an M.2 x4 drive that is available with and without a PCI Express card to M.2 adapter. For our testing today I will be using it with the adapter to see what everyone can expect for performance, but if your PC supports a x4 M.2 slot you can save yourself a lot of space and keep a PCIe slot open by running the drive through it. M.2 is the replacement for mSATA. Running the drive over M.2 gives a direct connection to the CPU and when run in a x4 configuration it gives us up to 20GB/s bandwidth. In other words for the first time in a long time we aren’t limited by the SATA connection. With that I’m extremely excited to see what the Predator is capable of!
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Friday, 01 May 2015 12:22
A few months ago I took a look at one of Cougars new mechanical gaming keyboards as well as one of their mice. The 700K was a surpassingly good keyboard, I was caught off guard by a fairly new company that had clearly put a lot of time into developing the 700K. Well today here I am again about to check out another Cougar keyboard, this time though this is a little more of a budget focused keyboard. This is the 200K. Cougar swapped out the Cherry key switches for scissor key switches and cut back on the features. Today I’m going to check it out and see if it still has the pedigree of the 700K and find out if this is worth a look when looking for a cheap gaming keyboard.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Tuesday, 28 April 2015 17:34
When it comes to SSD shopping you have to consider your budget, speed requirements, and also your brand preference. For me personally, I have been using Kingston drives in basically all of my builds as well as all of our test benches for a few years now. This is partly because Kingston has always been great about supporting us but it is also because when I visit their offices and their US manufacturing I watched them jump through hoops testing and retesting their Memory. I realized that they take their quality very serious and for me more than anything else I can’t afford to have my SSD die. So while there have been other drives that are faster, I stuck with them. Why am I telling you this today? Well that is because today I will be taking a look at a MUCH needed new SSD in their product line called the Savage. The Savage line from HyperX isn’t new, they have a nice set of RAM under the name already but today they officially introduce the new SSD. So kick back for a few while I dig into the HyperX Savage SSD and see what it is all about.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Friday, 24 April 2015 21:17
When it comes to picking out a mechanical keyboard there are nearly as many options as there are people. When it comes to what keyswitch you prefer most of you think of just the color options that Cherry switches have but more and more other keyswitch types have been coming into the picture. With that you need to look at the switch type before even getting into colors. A good example of this are Topre’s. We covered a variation on them with the Novatouch but today I’m going to be taking a look at a Topre keyboard directly from Topre, the Type Heaven. This is one of those weird situations where this specific keyboard is considered an entry level Topre keyboard when compared to other Topre keyboards, but that puts it up with higher end Cherry keyboards. So today I want to check out what it is all about and see if this is an option that you should be looking at when shopping for a new mechanical keyboard.
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Category: Motherboards
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Published: Wednesday, 22 April 2015 17:53
So what is now years ago Adam and I were at a press event for Gigabyte at CES. At that event I spent some time playing against a pro gamer and we also had the chance to see them introduce their new games series of motherboards. At the end of that speech they slipped in a quick sneak peak of a new line of overclocking motherboards with an orange theme that they called OC Orange. Now I think everyone knows just how much I love orange and OC orange to me is LanOC orange, a color that we have used on the website from nearly the start. At that time Adam wrote that he imagined that I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I got my hands on one of the boards. Well it has been a long few years, but today is finally the day. Gigabyte sent over their new X99-SOC Champion flagship overclocking board and today I’m going to dig into it and see what it is all about. Oddly enough now that I can sleep, I want nothing more than to stay up and see what sets the board apart from the competition.
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Category: Audio
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Published: Friday, 17 April 2015 05:06
When it comes to headsets, just about every company you can imagine makes their own. You can find them in all different shapes and with countless features. That said I can’t honestly say that anything out on the market is the end all be all gaming headset. That is because everything about them is subjective. That said when a company like Asus puts out what they market as a high end gaming headset, I take notice. In just about everything they do they do an amazing job, especially on the audio front. So when the Asus Strix 7.1 gaming headset came in I couldn’t wait to test it out.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Friday, 10 April 2015 15:02
One of the best things about keyboards is there is a keyboard for nearly any situation and any personality. You have the choice to go mechanical or rubber domes and then after that you can pick from wireless and wired and even the keyboards focus. Being LanOC we do cover a lot of keyboards that have a big gaming focus but aren’t limited to just gaming keyboards. Today I’m going to take a look at a keyboard from Cherry, yes the Cherry that makes the Cherry MX keyswitches that everyone loves. Today I’m taking a look at the Cherry MX-Board 3.0, a non-backlit keyboard with a standard office focus. I’m excited to see what Cherry has to offer and to find out if the MX-Board 3.0 is the way to go when looking for a quality non-backlit mechanical keyboard.
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Category: Networking
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Published: Wednesday, 08 April 2015 17:33
While a lot of us still run wired networks at home, you really can’t avoid running a wireless network in your home or office. There are just to many devices that only use wireless like mobile phones, tablets, portable game consoles, and a lot of today’s thin laptops as well. Hell in our house in addition to the regular devices you will also see a printer, at least one IP security camera, and even our whole house humidifier. This is all of course in a house that is completely wired as well, imagine how many devices you might see on a house that runs completely on wireless. With that the move to wireless AC becomes more and more important. The additional bandwidth it allows on wireless is huge, especially when a lot of households are actually getting faster internet than their wireless can provide to their devices. So today I’m going to take a look at a wireless AC adapter from Netis that allows you to hook up that PC all the way on the top floor to your new AC router or if you want you can even use it to run your own wireless network.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Thursday, 02 April 2015 18:55
You may not know it, but over the past few years we as gamers and enthusiasts have been smack dab in the middle of a bit of a revolution. Sure games don’t seem to push hardware as much as they used too and the focus has been on higher resolutions. But on the storage front performance has been improving with leaps and bounds. Here at LanOC our first hard drive review came about around the same time that the first consumer SSDs were hitting the market. When tested that hard drive saw an average read speed of about 75MB/s. Our first SSD review a few months later put down an impressive 214.6 MB/s. After that we saw speeds increase to 300 and then recently to around 550 MB/s. PCIe drives have performed better than that but none of them promise to put down numbers like todays review. Today I’m going to check out Intel’s first consumer focused PCIe drive that happens to also use NVMe.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 01 April 2015 18:39
Even after our LAN this weekend I’m not burnt out on all of the storage talk, so it is only fitting that I continue our streak of SSD reviews. Today I have a drive from Patriot in the office. Specifically their new Ignite in a 480GB capacity. The Ignite is one of three recently introduced drives from Patriot with this being their flagship drive. The Ignite features the same Phison's quad-core, eight-channel PS3110-S10 controller that we also saw on the Mushkin Striker last week so we know just how well it can perform. This is fitting because both Patriot and Mushkin focus on bringing the best possible performance at the best possible price. So today I’m going to run the Ignite though our benchmark suite and see how it compares to everything I have tested recently and then see how good of a deal the drive is as well. Could this be the SSD for your next build? Let’s find out.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Wednesday, 25 March 2015 15:30
Last week I took a look at Mushkins new flagship SSD. Well it just so happens I also had another Mushkin SSD floating around the office to review. This one isn’t anything like the Striker. The Chronos is a little older but with that it is also a little better value when you are shopping. Our sample is the big guy with a 480GB capacity but it is priced to compete. So today I’m going to see what is inside of the Chronos and most importantly I am going to figure out if the aging Sandforce controller is still fast enough to justify a purchase for someone who is on a budget.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 20 March 2015 23:28
This year at CES Mushkin introduced their upcoming lane of SSDs called the Striker. Up until now, most of their SSDs have been in the Chronos product line. A change in name along with performance improvements are welcomed. The Striker series of SSDs run a quad core 8 channel Phison controller with Micron's 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. In the case of our sample, it has an impressive 480GBs of storage. They suggest that the drive will have read speeds up to 565MB/sec and write speeds up to 550MB/sec so today I am going to put it through our benchmark suite and find out if that is really the case. Before then though I am also going to dig inside and see what is inside as well. Enjoy!
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Wednesday, 18 March 2015 21:25
One of the downsides of the increased popularity of mechanical keyboards is that for the most part they are a lot thicker than rubber dome keyboards. That can sometimes lead to more wrist pain. Some manufactures include a wrist rest with their mechanical keyboards but that isn’t an option for everyone. When I switched to a Code keyboard and moved to a new desk I noticed right away that the new desk would dig into my arm, so this put me on the market for a wrist rest that fit my needs. I had seen a few people using Grifiti Fat Wrist Pads previously and knew that the thick padded design would be perfect for my needs. Well when I ordered one from Amazon I actually ran into a small problem and that led to me speaking to Grifiti’s owner and along with replacing mine he sent a whole box of different pads for me to check out. Now that I have been using the Grifiti Fat Wrist Pads for a while now I can finally talk a little about how they perform, enjoy!
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Friday, 13 March 2015 15:12
It’s funny how with everyone introducing their own RGB mechanical keyboards that SteelSeries is actually the last of the big companies to bring theirs out. This is interesting to me because they were one of the first to bring out a full RGB rubber dome keyboard with their first Apex keyboard. That said I do know what took so long. Corsair locked down RGB Cherry switches for the first year leaving everyone to figure out their own design. Razer was able to get to the market quickly with their Kiehl manufactured cherry knockoff switches. Logitech brought out their G910 recently with their new “Romer-G switches” made in partnership with Omron. So SteelSeries took their time designing their own switch as well. Their new QS1 switch is designed with a short throw and center mounted lighting as well and can be found in the new Apex M800 that I’m going to take a look at today.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Wednesday, 11 March 2015 20:13
Of all of the 900 series cards we have covered recently. Oddly enough, we haven’t really gotten any 970’s in. The same can be said for of coverage of Zotac cards, we haven’t heard much from them for a while now. Lucky for us they sent over a GTX 970 so not only do we get the chance to see how well the 970 performs, but I also can see what Zotac has been doing with their cards. This should be especially interesting because the GTX 970 they sent over to review is their AMP! Omega model with its HUGE cooler and a few overclocking specific features that I am excited to check out.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Wednesday, 25 February 2015 22:09
We all have our own style preferences and this is no different when it comes to video cards. So when Gigabyte wanted to send out their GTX 960 I wasn’t about to turn it down enough though we have already covered a few other GTX 960’s. I wanted to see how Gigabytes offering compares to the competition, both with its performance and also with its styling. If we didn’t have variety we would all be running the exact same PC configuration and that wouldn’t be any fun. So today I’m going to put the Gigabyte GTX 960 through our standard benchmark suite as well as take a closer look at what makes it tick to find out if this is the best GTX 960 to pick up for your new budget build.
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Category: Editorials
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Published: Saturday, 21 February 2015 13:06
This weekend we’ll be braving the cold weather headed North to Ypsilanti, Michigan to game in the Grand Ballroom of Eastern Michigan University. The LanOC crew will be a few of the 300+ gamers taking part in the BYOC LAN that is Gamers for Giving 2015, as well as several cash-prize tournaments totaling over $20,000 in prizes. Augmenting the free and competitive play will be other staple activities such as a case mod contest, and an impressive list of industry icons including eSport founders and guest streamers will also be joining the cause. The team behind Gamers for Giving 2015 have done an excellent job teasing us with pictures and posts on their social media over the past few weeks leading up to the event, we’re very much looking forward to it!
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Category: Storage
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Published: Friday, 20 February 2015 17:52
A few years ago only a few people were running an SSD in their computer. These days though most enthusiasts and gamers are sporting one. Why? Because they speed up your computer in areas that even the fastest CPU or video card can’t do. The thing is if you got in on it all early, you are most likely running a small OS only drive. Well if you haven’t noticed prices have been dropping, for what you spent on that 60GB drive you can get the Corsair Force Series LX 256GB. Not only will that hold your OS but now you can installed a few more programs on it as well. In fact you should be able to run everything you need off of your SSD with the exception being if you are like me and install every steam game you own. You should keep some of that on a second hard drive. Today I’m going to take a look and see how the budget focused LX drive performs and find out if it is currently the best deal to be found.
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