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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Friday, 04 April 2014 13:22
With so many keyboard options on the market these days it’s really surprising that there hasn’t been very much competition with Logitech’s gaming line of keyboards with their display screens on them. This past year Logitech went through and refreshed their gaming lineup including the G19s with its full color screen. Having a screen on your keyboard can be a little gimmicky but considering how popular they have been for Logitech I was excited to see what they did with the G19s.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Wednesday, 02 April 2014 12:58
Everyone has their short list of preferred gaming mice for various reasons and we rarely step outside our comfort zone with these choices, which is why I was excited when Wes offered me the opportunity to take a look at a gaming mouse from ROCCAT. It was an opportunity to take a look at something different from a company we have heard encouraging things about as of late and try out a gaming mouse that offered nearly infinite customization. Join me as I take a look at the Kone Pure and see if its deserving of joining our personal short list.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Monday, 31 March 2014 08:05
Even though it seems like the mechanical keyboard market has been blowing up. It might surprise some of you when you think about the fact that the mechanical keyboard switch market hasn’t changed a bit. The closest thing to change was a few companies putting to use a few rarer keyswitches from Cherry, the manufacture of nearly all of today’s mechanical keyswitches. If you don’t have a lot of knowledge about mechanical keyboards, Razer’s introduction of their latest Blackwidow keyboard may not of caught your attention. But they did something no one else on the market is doing. They introduced a keyboard with their own mechanical keyswitch design. At first glance the switch looks a lot like a standard Cherry switch, but today I’m going to take a closer look to see what it’s all about and how it compares to what everyone else is running.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Friday, 28 March 2014 14:44
As we get farther away from the initial launch of AMD’s lineup they have continued to fill in the blanks with a few other cards. One of those is the R9 280 that sits in between the R9 280X and the R9 270X. Sapphire sent over one of their overclocked models for me to check out. I have been extremely impressed with Sapphires product line this generation but this will be the first of their Dual-X cards to come in the office so I will reserve my judgment until we see how well it performs in our test suite.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Monday, 24 March 2014 15:21
External enclosures have always been useful in turning veteran hard drives from old machines back into useful storage mediums but lately they have been making a comeback with more and more focus being placed on mobility and flexibility. Today we take a look at a new form of external enclosure with performance on its mind. The Blizzard series external enclosure from Icy Dock promises to give use the mobility we desire with not swap and plug-n-play functionality with the ability to keep our drives icy cool during operation.
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Category: Editorials
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Published: Monday, 17 March 2014 19:07
A week ago at the time of this writing, we were within hours of LanOC v14.0 coming to end, though things certainly showed no signs of winding down. We were right in the middle of two tournaments with plenty of spectators watching over shoulders, attendees and staff alike roaming the floor to take a final look at the case show-off entries, and our network gear receiving no reprieve from the remainder of over 130 gamers in their title of choice. Before we revisit the final wrap-up of the event, let’s start back at the beginning of LanOC v14.0, which truly started the day before.
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Category: Audio
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Published: Tuesday, 04 March 2014 13:59
Most of you are familiar with most of Logitech’s product line at this point from having owned one or knowing someone who uses Logitech products. For the most part their product line has stayed the same, with just a few exceptions and with small refreshes like what they did this past year. One area where they expanded their product line this past year though was their audio line. Before they just had the G35 and the G930, but they have now added the G430 and the G230. You may have seen them with their funny commercials during LCS this year. Today I am going to find out how the G430 compares to the G930 and gaming headsets from their competition.
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Category: Power Supplies
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Published: Wednesday, 26 February 2014 13:58
When I think of XFX their video cards are the first thing to come to mind. But they have actually been in the power supply market for a long time now. They have done a good job of standing out in a very crowded market by coming up with unique PSU casing designs when most of the market has just done the same thing over and over. Today is actually the first time I have had an XFX power supply in the office to check out. We don’t technically review them (read more to see why), but today I’m going to take a quick peak at the new XFX XTR 650 watt to see what sets it apart from the competition.
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Category: Games
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Published: Friday, 21 February 2014 20:04
Full disclosure, I typically loath doing game reviews. Testing hardware typically can be done along side of me working on something else, for example, I can test the comfort of a headset while benchmarking a video card, while also writing when tests are running. Games on the other hand require days and sometimes weeks of gameplay for testing. I know some of you might think I’m crazy, because playing games and getting to call it work sounds amazing. But when we have to publish multiple articles a week, it’s just impossible. That being said, a new game called Banished launched just a few days ago and has so far had been extremely popular on steam (it is as I write this the top selling game over a half priced Call of Duty: Ghosts and a whole bunch of games that are 75% off from Ubisoft) and Reddit. I have been playing it non-stop and many of you hit me up on Facebook and on steam asking for my thoughts on the game. Why not put it all together for everyone to see!
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Tuesday, 18 February 2014 09:00
It’s hard to believe that Nvidia’s Kepler architecture has been around for nearly two years now. In those two years Nvidia has continued to innovate with Kepler exclusive features like Shadowplay and PC streaming to your Nvidia Shield. Well now it is finally time to take a look at what Nvidia has been working on with its latest architecture, Maxwell. Interestingly enough Nvidia isn’t launching their new architecture with a flagship card, they chose to fill in a gap in their current 700 series of cards down at budget price points. Today they are introducing the GTX 750 Ti and the GTX 750 and I will be putting a GTX 750 Ti through its paces as well.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Monday, 17 February 2014 13:18
When it comes to video cards, there is only so much that a manufacturer can do to set themselves apart from the competition. Cooling, overclocking, and styling are three of the biggest things that can set cards apart. Without exception MSI has done extremely well at this in the past with their Twin Frozr cooling and their Gaming series of cards. Today I have the chance to take a look at their latest model, the R9 290 Gaming. Today I am going to see how well the Twin Frozr cooling performs on the warm R9 290 GPU and also find out if they are still able to stand up to the competition.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Friday, 14 February 2014 16:27
Let’s be honest, not everyone can afford the latest and greatest. The mid-range video cards paired up with a cheap CPU is what most people start with in PC gaming. At our last LAN Sapphire was setup and gaming on a perfect example of a great budget build. When they asked if we would be interested in taking a look at their new R7 260X I couldn’t wait to see what kind of gaming experience you can get without breaking the bank. Let’s dig in and see what the card is all about and find out if it should be in your next budget build!
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Category: Audio
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Published: Thursday, 13 February 2014 10:00
Quality sound and a comfortable fit aren’t exclusive to just PC gaming but for the most part finding the same experience in a console headset can be difficult and expensive. For most, owning a set of quality headsets for both your console and your PC simply isn’t cost effective. Today we take a look at the Ceres 500 from Cooler Master that looks to buck the trend and proved a quality experience to both platforms with the ability to switch between them on the fly. Is this performance too good to be true? We will find out.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Monday, 10 February 2014 10:33
To date I have had the chance to take a look at a few different R9 270Xs. All of the cards have been extremely similar for the most part with most of the differences coming from small overclocks and their different cooling designs. Today I have a completely unique card that stands out from the others. You see the other cards all have 4 gigs of memory where the MSI R9 270X Gaming 4G has 4 gigs of memory. Today I’m going to see how the difference in memory affects the performance in our benchmark suite.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Friday, 07 February 2014 11:14
Out of last year’s AMD cards there was one card that stood above the rest with an all metal custom cooler. That was the double dissipation HD 7970 from XFX. This year there is a lot more competition and XFX has changed their design once again. I’m excited to find out how XFX stands up against the competition this year. With a black and chrome it certainly has the styling needed, but how is the performance? Let’s find out!
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Category: Mobile
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Published: Wednesday, 05 February 2014 09:17
For what seemed like months we have seen commercials for the LG G2 on television. Recently Verizon Wireless sent one over for us to check out and I have been putting it through daily use. For the most part the G2 is a lot like other phones but it does have a very unique placement of its volume and power buttons. Where most phones have the buttons on the sides or top, the G2’s buttons are on the back of the phone. So today I’m going to talk a little about my experience with the G2 and Verizon Wireless’s network.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Monday, 03 February 2014 13:48
If you’re like me you like to back up files, install every game in your Steam library just because and record your favorite TV shows to your hard drive to enjoy them on your own time. This unfortunately takes up a lot of space and more often than not means you need more and more hard drives to sate your unhealthy obsession with storage but what happens when you run out of space to put your drives or even worse, your media PC is in a small mATX case? Icy Dock looks to come to the data hogs rescue with their ToughArmor 6x2.5" SATA HDD Hot Swap Mobile Rack which promises to give us a place to put 6 2.5” drives in a single 5.25” external bay. We’ll find out if this increase in storage is worth your time.
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Category: PC Cases
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Published: Friday, 31 January 2014 18:26
When it comes to small form factor builds our main focus has been on builds that can fit high powered video cards for LAN use. But the truth to the matter is there are a lot more people who are looking to build small PCs for routers, HTPCs, and just to save room on your desk. As someone who has HTPCs all around the house I completely get it. After juggling a few parts around I realized I had a half height Mini-ITX motherboard sitting around and I decided to make use of it. I came across the Silverstone Petit PT13 case and the AR04 cooler from Silverstone as well. Together they should make for a small but powerful PC, let’s see how performs.
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Category: Motherboards
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Published: Wednesday, 29 January 2014 16:10
It seems nearly every motherboard manufacturer took the chance to change things up slightly when it came time for the Haswell launch. I didn’t have a chance to check out a board from Gigabyte at the launch but I did get one in recently, specifically their Z87X-UD4H. It’s not their highest end board, nor is it entry level. It should give us a good idea of what to expect from Gigabyte on the Z87 platform without breaking the bank. With its red styling, you can’t say it’s not a little eye catching, that’s for sure!
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Category: Audio
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Published: Monday, 27 January 2014 09:00
We recently took a look at a gaming mechanical keyboard from an unlikely source, Func. In that review we also made allusions to Func bringing their design focus of innovative functionality without gimmicks to a whole range of gaming peripherals. Today we are here with the final piece of hardware in this new Func collection, the HS-260 Gaming Headset. Will Func continue to impress us with their new line of "Functionality. Perfected." peripherals or will audio prove to be their downfall. Let’s find out as we take an in depth look at the HS-260 Gaming headset.
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