Hardware

Check Out The HighPoint Rocketstor 5212 at Amazon! The Thunderbolt interface has been out for some time now and doesn’t seem to have caught on as many might have hoped.  Considering that it provides a significant performance boost (10Gb/s vice 5Gb/s) when compared to USB 3.0, performance over price was the hurdle that many believed could be overcome.  Marketability and …

THE DILEMMA It wasn’t so long ago that an upgrade to a 27″ 2560×1440 pixel monitor couldn’t be done for under a $1000 and these were considered the highest of niche displays for the gamer and PC enthusiast.  Today, value priced Korean units can be found  at $319 or lower, realizing at least a 50% savings when compared to current …

If you are in the hunt for a 24″ or below dual monitor desktop mount you are in luck as they have always been pretty easy to find.  Such has not been the case for dual 27″ monitors where, although one or two have been available, there has always been concerns with respect to appearance or construction, much less price …

When we received a tour of Cooler Master’s suite at CES this year, one of the most intriguing showcases were the new keyboards. Previously, Cooler Master was not known as a company dabbling too much into gaming. This time around however, the gaming peripherals and hardware were endless. One of the biggest surprises was the CM Storm Trigger featuring Cherry MX …

It is no secret that the popularity of mSATA SSDs is being pushed around just a bit by M.2 PCIe design.  M.2 SSDs may even tempt us with a great deal more power for the punch and capacity down the road.  What M.2 doesn’t have, as of yet, is just about every popular ultra book in the world in their …

We have received a few e-mails about a specific piece of hardware in one of our Test Benches so I thought I might post some pictures and my thoughts on it; it is the RocketU 1144C 4-Port USB 3.0 PCI-Express HBA.  Long story short, the 1144c increases my USB 3.0 count by four but it does so much more as …

The mid-tower PC case market is a very crowded segment, so differentiating yourself from the competition is what is going to be required in order to become a successful product.  Even the sub-category of “gaming” mid-tower PC case is becoming populated with dozens of choices.  When we drill even further down to the sub-sub-category of “budget” “gaming” mid-tower PC case, …

With the rapid progress of technology from one day to the next, concepts, ideas, inventions, and reinventions suddenly turn from wishful thinking into reality. In the case of solid-state drives the burning question was whether we would see a viable external solution. Conventional hard-drives already go their external variant primarily thanks to USB 2.0; with the raw speed and performance …

It seems as if the newest trend coming out from peripheral-based companies are a plethora of mobile companions. Starting off as battery-backup units, these devices have evolved further into capable media streamers, card readers, cloud storage clients, and wireless extenders/routers while still retaining their original purpose as a powerbank. We can effectively call them ‘mini-NAS’ units at this point. Now …

When SSDs first started to appear back in 2007, their top capacity was 32GB and pricing soared to well over $3000; such is the price of new technology.  Even today, it seems incredible that we could fit 128GB of memory into a secure digital memory card.   Capacity in a SD card is nothing without performance and today’s media enthusiasts are …