For mission critical business systems, UPSes are a critical necessity as a single brown out, power surge or power outage could easily cost thousands of dollars worth of lost time, lost data and damaged equipment. Despite the fact that UPSes are an obvious necessity, it’s always a surprise to find many businesses that rely on nothing more than a simple surge protector or PDU to power their servers and workstations.

Today we’ll be reviewing a business class UPS, the APC Smart-UPS 1500 (SMT1500). Unlike typical consumer grade UPSes, business class UPSes offer longer run-times and typically also offer pure sine-wave power output to [...]

AMD launched their newest Ryzen CPUs to great fanfare back in March and while we found performance to be good in our launch review of the Ryzen 1700, we noted that there were quite a few growing pains that needed to be fixed before Ryzen could really shine against Intel. As such, rather than publishing another review of Ryzen on motherboards using incomplete BIOS firmware and badly optimized Windows, we decided to wait it out until AMD and its motherboard partners roll out the badly needed updates to allow Ryzen to really shine in all its glory.

As such, today we’ll be finally reviewing the AMD Ryzen 7 1700X and 1800X, the flagship AMD [...]

With the explosion of mobile and IoT, Wi-Fi demands in the home have increased exponentially in the past few years causing many people to realize just how bad home Wi-Fi is. As a solution to home Wi-Fi issues, mesh Wi-Fi has exploded in popularity over the past year prompting almost every networking company to scramble to release some sort of mesh Wi-Fi offering.

Coming a bit late into the game is TP-Link, which recently launched the Deco M5 that we’ll be reviewing today. Like many of the mesh Wi-Fi systems on the market, the TP-Link Deco M5 is designed with performance, range and ease of use in mind however, what TP-Link has also done [...]

Recently, we were given the opportunity to test some of Nixeus’s peripherals starting with the Nixeus Moda Pro mechanical keyboard which was an excellent keyboard that’s easy to use, durable, and came in at a reasonable price. Today we’ll be reviewing one of their gaming mice, the Nixeus REVEL, which is Nixeus’s sole gaming mouse offering thus far.

The Nixeus REVEL is a relatively basic gaming mouse designed for eSports gamers in mind. There’s no fancy programmable RGB funtionality or macro functionality to speak of, but what it does have is top notch hardware where it counts. The sensor onboard is the PMW 3360 [...]

Corsair recently updated their budget case lineup with the new Carbide SPEC-04, the successor to the Carbide SPEC-03. The Carbide SPEC-04 brings an overhauled design and some extra features yet maintain its budget price point.

For our review today, we received the Corsair Carbide SPEC-04 in black however, it will also come in red and yellow as well. Corsair’s Carbide SPEC case series has always had the design language that screamed gaming, but the fourth iteration of the series, the SPEC-04, is quite a bit different. Whereas previous generation SPEC series cases featured an ultra-aggressive design, the new SPEC-04 features a design that’s a bit more [...]

With mechanical gaming keyboards being all the rage, you’d be hard-pressed to find a gaming peripherals company without a mechanical gaming keyboard. One company that hasn’t offered one until recently however, is Kingston’s gaming brand, HyperX, which recently came out with their HyperX Alloy FPS gaming keyboard, officially marking their first entry into the mechanical gaming keyboard market.

Like many of their other gaming products, HyperX developed the Alloy FPS based on testing and feedback from the numerous eSports teams they currently sponsor. As a result, the Alloy FPS is a relatively basic keyboard without many of the [...]

In the premium dashcam product category, one of the most well known manufacturers is Thinkware, an innovative Korean company which has been in the automotive electronics business since the late 1990’s.

Currently their primary product line is their dashcams and today we’ll be reviewing the Thinkware Dash Cam X550 which is a new premium dashcam from the company sporting not only high quality video, but also a few more features such as parking mode recording and some innovative driver assistance features as well.

Let’s take a closer look.

A few weeks ago, AMD launched the Radeon RX 500 series, which is mostly a refresh of the previous-generation RX 400 series they launched less than a year ago. Mostly because the Radeon RX 500 series is based on the very same Polaris architecture as its predecessor, albeit on a slightly more mature process. Whatever your stance on rebadges, it’s clear that AMD has decided to double-down on its Polaris architecture in 2017, at least for the midrange and entry-level segments until its RX Vega GPUs appear later on to cover the high-end market. So like it are not, Polaris is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Today, we’re going to take a look at [...]

If you own a PC and you’d be quite bummed if it died because your utility company sucks, a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) is practically a must. This is especially important if you’ve spent thousands of dollars for the best system possible since at the end of the day, it really only takes a single surge, brown out, or power outage from the utility company to wreak havoc on your precious semiconductors.

Today we’ll be reviewing two UPSes from CyberPower, the CyberPower CP1500 AVR LCD and the CyberPower CP1500 PFC LCD, both of which are designed to protect PCs and other sensitive electronic equipment from common issues in the power [...]

Last year, I reviewed the Creative Roar 2 portable wireless speaker which has quickly become my favorite Bluetooth speaker of all time. Along with great sound quality, the Creative Roar 2 is portable, has a long battery life, is an extremely good looking speaker, and is a good value for the price. Since then, Creative has released the next generation of their Roar speakers, the first of which is the Creative iRoar launched early last year.

Following up on the iRoar, Creative also launched a miniaturized version of the iRoar, creatively titled the Creative iRoar Go. The new Creative iRoar Go promises the same powerful [...]