Aliencraft Armageddon G11

Power Logic adds new collection of gaming mause i.e  Power Logic Aliencraft Armageddon G11. Aliencraft G11 gaming mouse comes with a glossy brown color design and black color on both sides are made from rubber side grips, with the overall function of the buttons can be custom fit with the user desires.

Klipsch Mode M40

Around these parts, we've generally had favorable opinions of Klipsch's audio products. Whether it's been something as small as its S4 line of smartphone oriented in-ears or grand speaker systems like its AirPlay-enabled G-17 Air, we've usually ended up awarding the brand our highest praise. If you'll recall, it was little over a year ago that Klipsch introduced its $150 Image One on-ear headphones -- the company's first set ever that weren't of the intra-aural variety, and a favorite of our own James Trew.

Genius DX-ECO Wireless Mouse

Hip on recharging your wireless rodent every single day? How about if it only takes three minutes? A single day's juice per charge might be unacceptable for most peripherals, but we're ready to make an exception for Genius' DX-ECO wireless mouse. This adjustable 800 / 1600 DPI clicker swaps out a recharge battery for a "gold," or electric double-layer capacitor -- you may know it as a super, or ultracapacitor. A step towards a battery-free existence not enough for you? Fine, bask in the knowledge that the DX-ECO also features a carpet, marble and sofa friendly "BlueEye" sensor.

AMD’s Memory Brand

We discussed the availability of AMD branded memory modules earlier this month, but today AMD is officially unveiling information on their memory platform. There are a few major questions many will have: why is AMD entering the memory market at all, and what do they hope to offer that we can’t already get from other vendors? Let’s take those in turns.

PogoPlug Series 4 Introduced

Yes, it looks like an Apple TV or Roku box, but think network-attached hard drive instead: this device plugs into your router via Ethernet, and it comes studded with ports that accept any variety of storage devices. Two USB 3.0 ports are on the back and an SD card slot is on the side, and under the removable top is an additional vertical USB 2.0 port and a SATA port for 2.5-inch laptop hard drives, or for compatible devices like the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex series of portable hard drives. It's an expanded version of the Pogoplug Mobile, a nearly identical-looking $79 device that debuted a few months ago with only a single USB 2.0 port and an SD card slot. I'd gladly pay the extra $20 for what's offered here, instead.

The top port lets you pop a hard drive right in and turn the device into a mini-NAS of sorts. USB flash drives, SD cards, additional USB hard drives: all can be plugged into the Pogoplug, in nearly any format. Pogoplug's software comes in several versions: a Web portal guides newcomers through an easy first-time setup and can be used to view and share media, but Mac, Linux and Windows users can also mount a remote Pogoplug like a regular hard drive for drag-and-drop use, just like you can with Dropbox, for instance.

Seagate 2nd Generation Momentus XT (750GB) Hybrid HDD

To say I liked the original Momentus XT would be an understatement. While Seagate had the lofty goal of negating the need for an SSD with its first mass-market hybrid HDD, the reality was the Momentus XT ended up being the best 2.5" hard drive on the market. In many cases, it was fast enough to be better than 3.5" desktop hard drives as well.

Seagate earned this praise by combining a small amount of of SLC NAND (4GB at the time) with a traditional 7200RPM 2.5" hard drive. A separate NAND controller was introduced to handle caching of frequently accessed data to the NAND. By acting solely as a read cache (only read requests to the drive are pulled into the cache), Seagate skirted the complicated issue of effectively building an on-board SSD by only caching reads from the hard drive and not writes to it.

ASRock X79 Extreme4-M and X79 Extreme4

In our series of X79 reviews, the next boards to face scrutiny are a pair of ASRock boards – the X79 Extreme4-M, one of the first mATX solutions to X79, and the X79 Extreme4, a full size ATX model.  The main interesting point to consider starts with whether the power consumption and heat generation are applicable to the Sandy Bridge-E platform in a mATX format.  With the socket and quad channel memory taking up serious PCB real estate, it is interesting to see how ASRock have tackled heat dissipation issues.  We also compare the Extreme4-M to the Extreme4, its bigger brother.  Both boards offer amazing value in X79 land, coming in at a recommended retail of $224.99 and $234.99 respectively. 

Intel DX79SI

Reviews of Intel manufactured boards are something of a rarity.  They are not marketed in the same way other motherboards are – almost not at all in comparison.  It could be argued that reviews are only seen coming at the start of a chipset release, coinciding with what we as reviewers get in our media kits from Intel itself.  However, to an enthusiast, it is strange to say that they sell well – consumers or system builders wanting to pair a processor with a board without hassle can go straight in at an Intel motherboard/processor combo.  The question is with an enthusiast platform such as X79, would you really want to deal with an Intel board? 

The ASUS P9X79 PRO

It seems that every few months or so, we get a new socket and a slew of new chipsets from Intel. If we go back as far as 775 (mainstream), in consumer land, we have covered 1366 (enthusiast), 1156 (mainstream) and 1155 (mainstream). This is in contrast to AMD’s backwards compatibility progression of AM2/AM2+ to AM3/AM3+ (if you ignore Llano and Fusion).

Information has been flying around about the new X79 enthusiast platform for some months now, especially when looking for a replacement for X58. Needless to say, X79 aims at high end and high price. There are the main changes that everyone knows and cares about – quad channel memory and 40 PCIe lanes strike high on anyone’s list about X79. Does that mean the chipset is really for those who want >16 GB of memory, or 2/3 way GPU action?

Above is a block diagram of the routing of the LGA 2011 socket and the X79 Platform Controller Hub (PCH), taken from Intel’s DX79SI motherboard information, which will be reviewed in due course. A few points are specific to that board (dual LAN controllers, USB 3.0 implementation), but it covers the basics of most X79. As we can see, the GPU PCIe lanes are split through multiplexers and switches for x16/x8 or even x4 speeds, depending on the motherboard in question. The connection via DMI from the CPU to the PCH gives the motherboard most of the functionality – PCIe x1, SATA, Legacy IO, TPM, USB 2.0, Audio, Ethernet etc. Most of these features are obviously adjustable by the motherboard manufacturer, in terms of quantity (decrease or increase through controllers), or manipulation, for example ASUS’ SSD Caching, as explained in the ASUS review later.

ADATA S107

If you are the type of person who is more at home roaming the trails than sitting in your living room, then make the S107 your partner in adventure. Precision engineered by our award-winning industrial design team, the S107 boasts a distinctive rubber exterior that enhances durability and handling comfort. The drive’s shock and waterproof qualities meet military specifications, and the streamlined arc shape and bright colors differentiate it from others by highlighting your unique taste and thirst for adventure. 

Samsung Announces PM830

With each subsequent generation, Samsung's SSDs have been getting noticeably better. Two years ago its drives were unrecommendable, but just this year we met the Samsung SSD 470. While still slower than the competition, the 470 was fast enough to at least consider. It's biggest selling point? Reliability. The OEM version, the Samsung PM810, is used by many large manufacturers. In fact, one of the two SSD options in the 2011 MacBook Air uses a custom version of the PM810.

Optimus Polaris Keyboard

Optimus Polaris, Multifunction Keyboard

Art Lebedev, an electronic studio of the Russian designer has just launched its newest product designs, namely Polaris and Optimus Keyboard Optimus Mini Six. Both have multi-function keyboard and come up with a cool look and colorfull.

The first is the Optimus keyboard Polaris. This keyboard has almost all kinds of buttons, except the numeric keypad, similar to a keyboard on a laptop. Furthermore, this keyboard can display a variety of layouts, language or symbols. From cyrilic symbols, ancient Greek, Arabic, musical notes, numerals, codes, math functions, images, symbols and other special. Even the keyboard Lebedev himself called it as “a million keyboards in one”.

Seagate Momentus XT Review

Seagate has just launched the Seagate Momentus XT, a 2.5” HDD (hard disk drive) that comes with a twist: Seagate claims that it can be as fast as an SSD (solid state drive) “in the real world”. First, why would it be so fast, and how did they manage to do that?

You may have guessed: the Seagate Momentus XT does come with a small amount of Flash memory, so in a way, it is a hybrid HDD/SSD drive. This is not new, but the this time Seagate has improved how it manages the 8GB of Flash memory present in the 750GB Seagate Momentus XT that we have in the lab. This new Flash management technology is called Fast Factor Management and Flash Factor boot.

Core i7 3960X & MSI X79A-GD65 Review

Hey everybody and welcome to our Intel Core i7-3960X (Sandy Bridge-E) and X79 platform preview. A rather uncommon and slightly unexpected article to write alright, as the architecture behind both, the X79 chipset and the Sandy Bridge-E processors really (initially) were intended for the server platform, but somehow its finding its way towards the consumer channel.

Intel launched the P67/Z68 chipsets and accompanying four core Sandy Bridge processors like the Core i5 2500, Core i7 2600 and recently released Core i7 2700 as mainstream products. That means that the enthusiast segment has a gap that needs to be filled as an X58 with a Gulftown processor like the 980X/990X is already two-three years old. It's exactly there where Sandy Bridge-E and X79 comes into play.