Quiet and Beautiful

AVADirect wasn’t really a systems builder on our radar until late last year when we reviewed their Avant Mini Cube Gaming PC. After extensive testing, we found that the system was well configured, well built, and well priced, quickly propelling AVADirect to the top as one of our favorite custom PC builders.

Recently, AVADirect sent us another one of the systems in their lineup, the AVADirect X370 Quiet Gaming PC, which as its name implies is AVADirect’s quiet gaming PC offering based on AMD’s X370 Ryzen platform.

AVADirect Quiet Gaming PC Specs Desktop AVADirect X370 Quiet Gaming PC Case Phanteks Eclipse [...]

Following Synology’s massive launch of no less than five NAS systems, Synology is announcing yet another in preparation for the holiday season.

The new NAS is a 4-bay NAS Synology calls the DiskStation DS418Play and it’s a slightly upgraded variation of the DS418 which was recently released. Whereas the Synology DiskStation DS418 is equipped with a Realtek RTD1296 quad core processor along with 2GB of DDR4 RAM, the DS418Play features an Intel Celeron J3355 dual core processor paired with 2GB of DDR3 RAM. As a result, the Synology DS418Play will be capable of improved 4K video transcoding compared to the non-Play [...]

 

Coinciding with Gamescom 2017, Linksys recently launched a new flagship consumer gaming router, the Linksys WRT32X.

The Linksys WRT32X is a 802.11ac router based on the WRT3200 platform, but what’s special about it is that it utilizes the Killer Networking Prioritization Engine to ensure that gaming traffic get top priority and are transferred as quickly as possible. According to Linksys, it could potentially shave off 77% in-game latency and the prioritization engine will also intelligently manage traffic when there’s no gaming activity to ensure smooth web browsing experience for all connected devices.

Besides Killer [...]

64-Layer 3D NAND, USB 3.1 Gen 2

Last year I was fortunate enough to be among the first to review the Samsung T3 Portable SSD. The drive was small, durable, fast, available in capacities up to 2TB, and relatively good looking making it not only my favorite portable SSD, but also my most highly recommended as well.

Of course, with Samsung’s annual release cycles, Samsung recently launched the new Samsung T5 Portable SSD which we’ll be reviewing today.

Samsung Portable SSD T5 Specifications Manufacturer Samsung Model T5 Capacity 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB Interface Type-C USB 3.1 (Gen 2), USB 3.0, USB 2.0 Transfer Speed Up to [...]

Over the past few days, Amazon has been running multiple pre-sales leading up to their big Prime Day sales event, but starting at 9PM EST today, July 11, and ending exactly 30 hours later at 3AM EST tomorrow, July 12, Amazon will be hosting their largest sale for the year with deals coming up every five minutes.

We’ve went through the first round of deals and here’s a list of some of the deals to watch out for:

PCs:

SkyTech Omega Gaming PC /w Intel Core i7-7700K, 16GB DDR4, GeForce GTX 1080, 240GB SSD + 2TB HDD – $1,499.99 CyberPowerPC Gaming PC /w Intel Core i7-7700K, 16GB DDR4, GeForce GTX 1070, 128GB PCIe SSD + 2TB HDD – [...]

Synology has released updates to their five and eight bay NAS units, the DS1517+ and DS1817+. Launching in parallel with the new NAS units is the Synology M2D17 M.2 SATA SSD adapter and the DX517 expansion unit.

In order to accommodate the M2D17 adapter, the new DS1517+ and DS1817+ NAS units now feature a PCIe expansion slot. This allows additional expandability or a dedicated cache for those who want to utilize M.2 SSDs. Users can also install an external 10Gb Ethernet NIC or the new Synology M2D17 M.2 SATA SSD adapter. Each SSD adapter can host two M.2 SATA SSDs.

Both units come equipped with the Intel Atom C2538 CPU [...]

Microsoft’s next update to the Xbox gaming console codenamed Project Scorpio was announced at Microsoft’s E3 briefing last year however, little information about the console has been revealed thus far. Besides having announced that it will host a GPU capable of up to 6 TFlops of compute performance and designed for 4K, Microsoft has been keeping things pretty tightly under wraps.

While the launch of the console is still quite a ways away, just like candy there will always be ones who gets to taste it early and YouTube channel Digital Foundry was recently invited by Microsoft to get an exclusive first look at the Scorpio’s guts and what they [...]

Well, this is it ladies and gentlemen. We’ve been waiting anxiously for over a year now for AMD’s latest Processor, after the disappointment of Bulldozer the PC building scene became primarily an Intel favored one for most serious workloads. While AMD’s APUs have found a pleasant place in the budget market and the FX lineup became a decent option for gamers looking for good bang for the buck, AMD remained way behind Intel in technology for what seams like forever. That changes today. Today we will be looking at Ryzen, will it live up to the hype? Will it fall flat on it’s face?

AMD Ryzen Specs CPU Ryzen 1700 Ryzen 1700X Ryzen [...]

Bringing DSM to the Router

Synology is a company well known for their excellent, easy to use NAS systems, and several years ago they decided to enter the router market with the Synology Router RT1900ac which combined their expertise in producing quality, intuitive, easy to use operating systems with a high performance router solution. While we didn’t get a chance to review the RT1900ac at the time, it was very well received by customers and press, which is why when Synology announced the Router RT2600ac, we absolutely had to check it out.

Specifications Manufacturer Synology Model RT2600ac Processor Qualcomm IPQ 8065 Dual Core 1.7GHz Memory 512MB [...]

Introduction

Being an Editor here at Custom PC Review, I’m constantly in need of lots of mass storage. At CES 2017, I took over 1,000 14-bit RAW images using a Nikon D800 camera which generated files somewhere between 40MB-45MB each. After exporting them, another set of images are then created which take less, but still require quite a significant amount of storage space. Tack that onto 50Mbps 1080p video along with the thought of possibly doing 4K video down the road and the need for lots of reliable storage quickly adds up.

Of course, the easy solution is to throw a couple hard drives into your PC because that’s cheap and easy, but I also wanted [...]