January 2016

New lineup for 2016 Before leaving Las Vegas and saying goodbye to this year’s CES, we met up with Origin PC to see what it has on tap for 2016. One of the rigs it showed us is its new mini ITX Chronos system, which supposedly rocks the world’s smallest chassis for the amount of…

There can be only one Eurocom has been a routine purveyor of high-end—nay, extreme—notebooks for several years, and last year they announced their new Sky X9 offering. Hot on the heels of that beast comes the new Eurocom Sky DLX7, which is sort of the slightly less monstrous version of an incredibly high-end notebook. The…

Tricked out motherboard Just ahead of CES, Asus announced a new flagship motherboard for Skylake builds, the Maximus VIII Formula. We got a chance to see one in person before zipping out of Las Vegas, along with some of the company’s other products. If it’s an LED light show you’re after, the Maximus VIII Formula…

Keeping your cool Digital Storm has a new rig in its stable, the Aventum 3, and it’s not just a minor revision of the previous model. When we met up with Digital Storm’s Darren at CES, he told us that the Aventum 3 was built from the ground up to accommodate the company’s HydroLux Pro…

Let there be light Waterblocks aren’t overly interesting, not outside of their function, anyway. But with so many parts of a build getting blinged out by manufacturers, it was only a matter of time before a company gave the same treatment to a waterblock. That company is Zotac. Inside Zotac’s booth at CES, we had…

Why not? For those of you who remember Home Improvement, you’ll recall that Tim “The Toolman” Taylor never once asked why he should mod a lawn mower into a hot rod, instead living by a philosophy of ‘Hey, why not?’ And so it is with DeepCool, which brought a liquid cooled power supply to CES….

Up close with a Predator HyperX brought its new Predator NVMe SSD to CES. It’s HyperX’s first NVMe drive and it’s fast — the drive was posting read and write speeds of 2,585MB/s and 1,354MB/s, respectively, at HyperX’s booth. HyperX isn’t revealing too many details about the drive just yet, such as what NAND flash…

Smaller than mini ITX If you thought mini ITX builds were small, wait until you see ones built around the new mini STX form factor. To give you a glimpse of where things are headed, we coaxed ECS into letting us film and post information about an announced motherboard based on the new tiny form…

Swappable sensors, cables, and more SteelSeries brought a pet mouse to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. It’s called the Rival 700, and unlike every other mouse out there, this one sports a customizable onboard OLED display to track things like headshots and other stats. It’s just one of many unique features. Customization is the name…