We are big fans of the mITX form factor, and big fans of the full ATX form factor, but for all those who fancy something a little in between, what about a mATX cube chassis? There are a couple around and the double width internal areas making for interesting system configurations, you'd be a fool to overlook them. Raijintek are a familiar name to most and they have sent over their Aeneas mATX Cube Chassis for review. Good timing, as we are reviewing the EASUS z170M Plus Motherboard and that's an mATX form factor.
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Anyone bought an Intel Z97 motherboard recently? We think it is one of the best Chipsets out there but Intel think it’s time for an upgrade. They recently launched their Skylake range of CPU’s and a supporting Chipset, the Z170. We have a couple of motherboard and CPU samples kicking around the office and we must admit we are already very interested in their capabilities and performance. We love mITX motherboards these days, and though still a compromise on what you can populate them with, there has been a step change from a couple of years ago, making a mini gaming rig possible and a performer too.
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Never being satisfied with the latest and greatest solid state drives, a wonder component a few years ago, Hardwareslave have been looking for something a little bit special. Step in PCIe SSD drives and for most the price isn't going to be achievable, but they are probably the ultimate in gaming storage. What else is there? Well, there is RAID, and we RAID every rig we build, and there is mSATA, but its always going to be bottle necked by the SATA ports. So, it only leaves M.2, a specification that uses PCIe bandwidth to bus your info around without the riser card expense.
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We haven’t reviewed a mouse mat, or surface, in a while. Well the boys and girls at XTracGear have put paid to that and sent over a Carbonic XXL Surface. If you have not heard of XTracGear, you need to check out their website and products, you will no doubt find something there you will like. Also, we have reviewed a couple of XTracGear products and we liked them, so it is nice to see a Carbonic XXL Surface in our mail room waiting for Hardwareslave to use and abuse.
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We are relatively new to All In One Coolers, and being an advocate of water cooling and custom loops, we firmly believe there is no greater challenge than your own custom water cooling loop. That said, we did enjoy the NZXT Kraken X61 AIO CPU Cooler, and so we are going to look at more of these. With EK entering the market, and no doubt a few other big cooling names soon, it’s going to get tough for the mainstream AIO manufacturers to keep up, in the meantime we are going to look at another AIO sample, this time from an even bigger household name, Corsair.
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We have the third flagship class graphics card up for review today, and if you have had your head in the sand for about two months, this one is a little different. Previously we tested the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, the Fury and now the Nano. We didn't really like the Fury X, though we did have a fault with it, and it has been replaced, we will follow the review up with a second part. We then reviewed the Fury, and we liked it, it seemed a lot more focused and graphics card like. Now we have the Nano, and it is nothing like it!
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We were looking around for a chassis for a gaming build we were thinking about and we figured we needed to think about the NZXT H440. We had picked this for a watercooling build but a change of mind pushed us down a different path on that one. So, we figured this would be perfect for the gaming build and something nice and high spec.
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Continuing on from the Noctua NH-C14S review, we have another revision of another Noctua cooler. This time the flagship NH-D15 gets the treatment in the form of the NH-D15S. The Noctua NH-C14S is a really impressive cooler and a typical Noctua design, unusual but sublime in its execution. The NH-D15S is a little different than the NH-C14S with the only real change being only one fan is shipped. This should make it a little quieter and cheaper which should suit some buyers, so let’s find out.
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In 2015 you need to be in the know about CPU coolers, there’s so many of them, you could get lost when choosing a good, compatible and cost effective product. Then add in the unsympathetic nature of the internet, and the trolling and flaming you will receive if you have not chosen the biggest and the best in line with all opinions!
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The X99 Chipset has been around for a while now and it’s about time we had a look at another offering from Intel’s premium desktop chipset. There are not many PC enthusiast motherboard manufacturers these days, with a few of the major players disappearing over the last decade.
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Skylake is here and it’s time for Intel’s Moore’s Law evolution, or is it? Last year Intel released their high end desktop CPU’s in the shape of the Intel Core™ i7-5820K, i7-5930K and the i7-5960X Extreme Edition. They haven’t been replaced and are still very strong, so should you overlook the Haswell-E?
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If you are in the market for a top of the line cooler, you will need to consider AIO or All In One Coolers. Basically the middle ground between the mystery of watercooling and the predictable land of air cooling limitations. Unless you have a large chassis and can cope with a be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 or the superb Noctua NH-D15 then you are going to be need to compromise in some way. Either in the way of overheating or increasing the decibels by pushing more air though the case.
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AMD tried something daring with the Fury X, HBM, heavily compacted PCB design and an AIO cooler. The card is pretty cutting edge and the first of a new generation of designs and technologies centered on shaking off old news such as GDDR5. The launch of the Radeon Fury X caused a lot of stir across the internet, not only because of AMDs balls to push innovation, but because the cards are also in short supply, with some review samples, including our own, having some issues.
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If you watched the AMD R9 300 Series release broadcast, you may have picked up a certain amount of enthusiasm from the AMD presenters. Yeah you could say it was all an act, presentations always are, right? This was a little different, they genuinely seemed excited about what they are dong with their GPU range, and it rubbed off. AMD are trying something different with the Fury X and the internet is a storm of interest about it just now. We have a lot of graphics cards in the office just now, but we have put them aside for the XFX Radeon R9 Fury X, we need to see this for ourselves.
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With the PC graphics world in a fizz about the new AMD Radeon Fury X and our sample being lost in the world shortage, we have turned our attention to one of its main rivals, the Nvidia GTX 980 Ti. Nvidia are not sin free when it comes to shortages at launch, we wrote on our old site of the global shortage on the launch of the GTX 680, and wondered why you would launch something that is not going to be available?
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