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In case you missed our recent review of the Core i7 5960X, Intel's first consumer eight-core CPU is an all-round powerhouse with strong overclocking potential to boot. So what better way to analyse ASRock's X99 OC Formula motherboard than by pushing our 5960X as far as we can take it? …

About a month ago Advanced Micro Devices unveiled several new FX-series eight-core microprocessors that featured either increased performance, or lower power consumption compared to previously released chips. Apparently, since then the company has also quietly rolled-out a new affordable eight-core chip that costs $125 now in the U.S. The AMD …

ARM Holdings and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. on Thursday outlined some details regarding transition of chip production to 10nm FinFET manufacturing technology. The company’s reaffirmed that risk production of chips made using 10nm FF fabrication process will start in late 2015. The two companies agreed to work together on 10nm FinFET …

Samsung Electronics has lost exclusive chip manufacturing contract with Apple, but a new report claims that that the company has managed to land orders from Advanced Micro Devices and Qualcomm. ZDNet reports that Samsung is projected to begin producing application processors (APs) for clients such as Apple, AMD and Qualcomm …

In the recent couple of years solid-state drives got significantly more affordable then they were four or five years ago. Still, they are considerably more expensive than hard disk drives on cost-per-gigabyte (or the cost-per-bit) basis. According to Toshiba Corp., this is going to change by 2025, when SSDs will …

Kingmax, a well-known supplier of premium memory modules, on Thursday introduced its first DDR4 memory solutions with up to 3.20GHz effective clock-rate and also said that the adoption of DDR4 will rise in 2015. The family of Kingmax's DDR4 memory modules includes (or will eventually include) 288-pin DDR4 unbuffered DIMMs, …

Today we are going to take a look at the NZXT Kraken G10 GPU Water Cooling Bracket. While a ‘bracket’ may not sound particularly exciting, the G10 is an interesting proposition. Essentially, it is a mounting kit which lets you use an existing all-in-one CPU water cooling unit to cool …

Although Intel Corp.’s success on the market of application processors for smartphones deserves to be better, the company managed to become the world’s second largest supplier of system-on-chips for tablets, according to Strategy Analytics. The only company that ships more SoCs for slates is Apple, which only “ships” them to …

Nvidia Corp.’s recently unveiled GM204 graphics processing unit and GeForce GTX 980 graphics card have proven to be excellent performers and also great overclockers. This week an enthusiast from Sweden managed to boost clock-rate of the GeForce GTX 980 graphics processing unit to whopping 2.20GHz, a new world’s record. Elmor, …

EVGA this week quietly introduced what could be the world’s highest-performing graphics card based on Nvidia Corp.’s GeForce GTX 980 graphics processing unit. The EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Classified ACX 2.0 graphics board utilizes custom printed-circuit board (PCB) that is designed with overclocking in mind. The EVGA GeForce GTX 980 …

ARM Holdings and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. on Tuesday unveiled the world’s first heterogeneous multi-core microprocessor made using 16nm FinFET (16FF) process technology. The chip, which integrates the ARM Cortex-A57 and the ARM Cortex-A53 cores, is designed to showcase that ARM’s designs and TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process technology are compatible …

Asetek, one of the world’s largest suppliers of liquid-coolers, on Tuesday announced that in September it sold its second millionth liquid-cooling solution (LCS). It took the company more than ten years to sell two million LCS devices. Asetek unveiled its first sealed-loop liquid cooling solution in 2003. Since then the …

Advanced Micro Devices yet has to unveil its Radeon R9 285X graphics card known as the code-named “Tonga XT”, but certain unofficial sources indicate that the new graphics solution could offer much higher performance than originally thought. The code-named Tonga graphics processing unit from Advanced Micro Devices seemed to be …

Nvidia have been selling GTX970 and GTX980 cards by the truckload since the very successful launch earlier this month. We have already reviewed a handful of GTX970 partner cards and today we supplement our findings by analysing the latest Asus GTX980 Strix OC. This card features a hefty cooling system …

When your gaming rig is so small that it won't hold 0.9 litres of liquid, then what are the chances that you can upgrade? Having taken us around the outside of his company's latest foray into the world of micro-gaming-on-steroids, Gigabyte's Andrew Ditchburn now opens up the Brix for a bit …

Although Apple is not the world’s largest supplier of personal computers, smartphones or tablets, it sells so many products that by 2015 it will consume 25 per cent of LPDDR memory produced in the world, according to analysts from TrendForce. At present Apple uses LPDDR3 memory inside its iPhones, iPads and MacBook …

Failure rate of consumer-class hard disk drives is a point of concern for many, if not all computer enthusiasts who build PCs themselves. Apparently, failure rate of hard disk drives heavily depends on manufacturing processes of particular manufacturers. Last week a report from Backblaze, a cloud-storage provider that uses consumer-class …

Intel Corp. has already started to ship its Core M microprocessors based on the Broadwell micro-architecture for ultra-low-power notebooks, 2-in-1s and tablets. According to a new media report, the company will introduce its Core i3/i5-i7 central processing units made using 14nm process technology for mainstream mobile PCs at the Consumer …

As model names go, the MSI 970 Gaming sends a direct message in no uncertain terms. This motherboard uses an AMD 970 chipset that supports socket AM3+ and is aimed at punters who wish to build a PC using an AMD FX processor. The Gaming part of the name comes …

Intel Corp. and Tsinghua Unigroup, a China state-owned limited liability corporation, confirmed that they have signed an agreement under which Intel will acquire 20 per cent stake in the Chinese holding company, which controls two developers of mobile system-on-chips (SoCs), for $1.5 billion. It is believed that that the SoC …

Even though earlier this year it was reported that the talks between GlobalFoundries and IBM over the latter’s semiconductor business collapsed, a new media report claims that the two companies have finally come to an agreement. The Big Blue reportedly agreed to pay the contract maker of semiconductors for taking …

Backblaze, a cloud-storage provider that uses consumer-class hard disk drives and extensive replication mechanisms to store data, has published a new hard drive reliability report. It is not a secret that many consumer-grade HDDs are not very reliable, but what is surprising and alarming is that failure rate of certain …

Nvidia Corp. on Friday told KitGuru that it will focus solely on its proprietary G-Sync technology and not on a potentially competing Adaptive-Sync, which will become available sometimes in 2015. According to Nvidia, G-Sync-enabled graphics cards and monitors are available today, which is why it is natural to concentrate on …

If you are building a new Mini ITX system then the graphics choices can be limited. Two of the leading solutions on the market right now are the MSI GTX760 Gaming Mini ITX and the Sapphire R9 285 ITX Compact. Both of these diminutive cards ship in a moderately overclocked …

Samsung Electronics said on Thursday that it has started to mass produce new NVMe PCIe solid-state drives based on 3D V-NAND flash memory. The new SSDs are designed for enterprise servers and feature improved reliability, performance and up to 3.2TB capacity. The Samsung SM1715 solid-state drives will be available in …

Although HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., introduced its 10TB hard disk drive earlier this month, the company has never revealed when it plans to release the product commercially. This week a representative for HGST finally said that the company will start mass production of behemoth HDD in early 2015. …

FOLLOW UP: Nvidia: We will focus on G-Sync, not Adaptive-Sync Although Nvidia Corp. is trying to promote its own proprietary G-Sync technology, it will also eventually support the industry-standard Adaptive-Sync tech, the company said recently behind closed doors. Nvidia introduced its G-Sync technology that enables the display to dynamically match a …

While the X99 platform and its plentiful PCIe connectivity form a strong gaming foundation, the cost of an LGA2011-3 motherboard, DDR4 memory, and the Haswell-E CPU will put a considerable dent in any buyer's pocket. So when we see a gaming-orientated motherboard offering 3-way graphics capability, eight-core CPU support, and …

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. on Thursday said that it has built the world’s first many-core networking processor for next-generation wireless communications and routers using 16nm FinFET fabrication technology. The ultra-thin manufacturing process will allow the many-core chip to deliver high performance and rich feature-set while consuming low amounts of power. …

ARM Holdings this week introduced its new Cortex-M7 processor that promises to double the compute and digital signal processing (DSP) capability for high-end embedded applications used in next generation vehicles, connected devices (including the so-called Internet-of-things devices), and smart homes and factories. The ARM Cortex-M7 core is based on the …