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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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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Friday, 24 January 2014 09:00
As someone who tries to make it out to as many LAN events as possible, small but powerful LAN rigs have been saving my back for years. Even though to some the LAN scene has been shrinking, the industry has really started to take notice of the small LAN rigs recently. We have seen smaller console like builds from boutique builders and Valves recent interest in steam boxes has gotten everyone in a frenzy as well. Because of that, I was happy to see MSI dive into the Mini ITX gaming market with their new GTX 760 Gaming ITX video card and the ZZ87I Gaming AC motherboard. Given our previous experience with similar products, MSI sent over the motherboard and video card combo to see what we thought about the two. Let’s see what they are all about.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Wednesday, 22 January 2014 12:10
If you’ve been around PC gaming long enough you recognize the Func brand from their award winning mousepads which all but defined the industry. Func is back again and this time they aim to bring that functional styling to an entire range of gaming peripherals. Today we take a look at the KB-460 mechanical gaming keyboard which aims to be the perfect blend of gaming performance and functionality. Will this fresh look serve Func well or are they destined to be a one hit wonder? We'll find out.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Friday, 17 January 2014 12:43
We’ve reviewed our share of high capacity, mobile power banks for travelers and those on the go but today we take a look at the Energy Mouse from Genius which is a mobile power bank and so much more. While we’ve seen models that simply concentrate on the largest capacity possible and others that add in little extras like and LED flashlight, the Energy Mouse is well, a fully functioning wireless mouse that can charge your phone. We’ll be taking a look at both aspects of the device today. First as a functional wireless mouse and then as a mobile power bank.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Wednesday, 15 January 2014 12:57
Although all of the R9 270X’s and R9 280X’s that we have covered have been extremely exciting, especially the Toxic cards, to date we hadn’t had a chance to take a look at the newest cards from AMD. Today we finally have that chance. Sapphire sent over their R9 290 Tri-X for us to put through our tests. The Toxic cards have dominated in our other reviews so I am extremely interested in how well the 290 Tri-X will perform with it sharing a very similar cooling design. With high expectations, let’s jump into it and let the numbers do the talking.
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Category: Storage
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Published: Monday, 13 January 2014 09:36
The last time we took a look at a full SSD I was extremely impressed. That drive was the new Vector drive from OCZ, at the time a departure from what they had been doing. Around the same time as our review, OCZ introduced their new Vertex 450 drive that shares a lot with the Vector that I was especially impressed with. The 450 is designed to give you the same Barefoot Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller in the same aluminum shell but with 20nm MLC NAND rather than the 25nm MLC NAND that the Vector has. Let’s find out if the Vertex 450 is as impressive as the Vector.
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Category: Power Supplies
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Published: Thursday, 09 January 2014 15:42
Cooler Master offers a wide variety of power supply solutions, and understanding the multitude of series and product families can be a bit daunting. The units essentially break down into four main categories, gaming being an intermediate solution between enthusiast and entry-level units. The GX, or “Game Xtreme”, line of power supplies have recently been re-introduced with a few improvements that blur the lines between enthusiast, gamer, and their self-entitled silent demographics while continuing to pay mind to budgets of a crowd torn between a software library and the hardware required to support it. Today we have the 650W version of the new GXII PSU family, and we’ll take a look at what new offerings it brings to the table.
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Category: Video Cards
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Published: Friday, 03 January 2014 19:16
Over the past few years, there is one video card company that had really caught my eye with a couple unique products. PowerColor introduced the Devil 12 and has followed up with various Devil cards that have been really sharp. It’s always exciting to see a video card manufacture really step up. When PowerColor offered to send over their new R9 270X I jumped at the chance, excited to see what their PCS+ cooling is all about.
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Category: Editorials
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Published: Wednesday, 01 January 2014 18:57
The past year has been full of up and downs like every year. Here at LanOC we have been chugging away like always. In the past year we hosted two awesome LAN parties, revamped the entire website, and survived two big launches from Intel, a launch from AMD on the CPU side, and big launches from both AMD and Nvidia on the video card side. Last year when I did my recap we had published 116 reviews for the year. For 2013 we bumped it up to an impressive 158 reviews thanks to a helpful staff and great companies. To start the New Year, I wanted to revisit the products that I gave my personal seal of approval on with the Editor’s Choice award to see if they are still my personal picks.
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Category: Input Devices
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Published: Friday, 27 December 2013 21:20
When it comes to mice, SteelSeries over the past few years has basically stuck with a single design that they have used on multiple mice. We first saw it with the Xai and later the Sensei but they have also used it on various branded mice and a smaller version on the Kinzu as well. When SteelSeries announced that they were bringing out a new mouse design with the Rival I was very interested, but also a little worried about messing with a good thing. After a short wait, we finally have the Rival in hand and can put it through its paces and see how the new design performs.
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Category: PC Cases
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Published: Tuesday, 24 December 2013 16:28
Just in time for Christmas we have a mid-tower for you, this time from Cougar. The MX500 promises to be a case with a gaming centric design and the capability to handle just about any ATX/mATX setup you could want to throw at it with an array of possible drive setups. With the promise or flexibility and expandability the MX500 looks to target gamers and ever since we got our hands on their Vortex PWM fans we knew Cougar was capable of making quality products. Let’s see if they can continue to impress us.
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