This week Corsair unveiled the company’s first ever fully built gaming PC, the aptly named Corsair One. While the One does represent a venture outside of Corsair’s usual product lineup, it is not necessarily outside of the company’s comfort zone as enthusiast gaming has been in Corsair’s DNA since the very beginning. With that said, the Corsair One is an impressive piece of engineering and design.

The small-form-factor tower packs quite a bit inside, featuring not one, but two ultra thin, 240mm closed-loop water coolers which cool down both the CPU and the GPU and are supplied air by the tastefully designed ventilation holes at [...]

Gaming hardware has traditionally held a reputation for being bulky and intimidating. Gaming PCs are often visualized as huge towers decked out with flashy lights and sports car inspired paint jobs. While that would’ve been accurate just a few years ago, performance PCs are no longer confined to just “big”. Thanks to ever increasing tiny hardware that pack a serious punch, SFF, or Small Form-Factor, gaming systems are significantly growing in popularity.

Today we’ll be reviewing one tiny, budget-focused graphics card that can fit almost anywhere yet provide decent gaming performance for the casual gamer, the [...]

WD recently launched the HGST branded Ultrastar SN200 and SS200 series Enterprise NVMe SSDs.

The Ultrastar SN200 series, which is available in HHHL or SFF 2.5″ form factors will be offered in capacities of 800GB to 7.68TB. What’s most impressive here is performance as the flagship drive features sequential read performance up to 6.1GB/s and random read performance up to 1.2 Million IOPS, a massive 100% increase in sequential reads and 61% increase random reads over their last generation drive.

In addition to the Ultrastar SS200 series, WD is also introducing the HGST branded Ultrastar SS200 SAS Enterprise SSDs. Available in the SFF 2.5″ [...]

At Flash Memory Summit, Samsung recently unveiled a new 32TB 2.5″ SAS SSD making it the world’s biggest in the 2.5″ form factor. Although Seagate also recently introduced their own massive 60TB SSD at the show, Seagate’s solution utilizes the SFF 3.5″ form factor which is significantly larger than Samsung’s drive.

In order to achieve such capacities, Samsung is leveraging their all new 4th Generation 3D V-NAND which now features 64-layers, a whopping 30% increase in cell density over their previous 3rd Generation 48-layer 3D V-NAND. Samsung’s new 64-layer product utilizes 3-bit per cell (TLC) technology to achieve [...]

MSI officially starts shipping its Vortex Gaming PCs decked out for VR gaming.

The MSI Vortex miniature PC features a design similar to a upward-facing jet engine. The cylindrical case draws air from the bottom and pushes it out the top. The components sit vertically inside the chassis and are distributed across three sections, saving space while packing tons of hardware. MSI touts that this design features superior upgradability and expandability.

Up to a pair of Nvidia GTX980s can be fitted into the case along with an Intel Core-i7 6700K CPU, 32GB of DDR4 RAM and SSDs in Super Raid 4 configuration (AKA having 2 PCIe SSDs in RAID 0). Surprisingly, despite [...]

This week the motherboard and graphics card manufacturer Gigabyte unveiled two new high-end graphics cards, each from both major graphics companies. The first of the new cards is the all-new Radeon R9 Fury WindForce, which up until now has been delayed for quite some time due to supply constraints with AMD’s Fury GPUs. AMD has recently announced that these constraints have been alleviated and Gigabyte’s R9 Fury WindForce is the one of the first of what should be many new R9 Fury GPUs to be launched this quarter.

The R9 Fury WindForce features GIGABYTE’s signature triple-fan WindForce cooler, which is similar if not identical to the solution found [...]

AMD has officially announced the Radeon R9 Nano, which is the latest — and possibly final — release to be based on their high-end desktop Fiji GPU with High-bandwidth memory (HBM). The Radeon R9 Nano will be available for purchase starting September 10th, and will be priced at $649, which matches that of the R9 Fury X.

Measuring only six inches, the R9 Nano is targeted towards the small form-factor and mini-ITX markets. The incredibly small form-factor of the R9 Nano is achieved with the aforementioned High-Bandwidth Memory. Compared to traditional planar GDDR5, HBM uses stacked memory that’s more power power efficient and has significantly [...]

For FMS 2015, Seagate recently introduced a full lineup of Nytro SSDs including the Nytro XP6500, Nytro XM1440 and the Nytro XF1440.

Nytro XP6500

The first product is the Seagate Nytro XP6500 accelerator card which is designed for application acceleration. Powered by a ROC based controller capable of supporting a PCIe Gen 3 x8 interface and up to a 4GB DRAM cache, the Seagate Nytro XP6500 is capable of performance up to 4,000/2,000 MB/s sequential reads/writes and up to 300,000/100,000 IOPS 4K random reads/writes with latencies of just 14μs.

The Seagate Nytro XP6500 will be available in capacities of up to 1.5TB or 4.0TB either [...]

FMS was a huge show for Toshiba this year and at their booth, they showed off several new NVMe-based PCIe and SAS SSDs for both their client and enterprise storage lines.

The Toshiba XG3 SSD family is designed for high-performance notebooks and PCs. Utilizing a Toshiba branded controller (likely a jointly developed controller with Phison) along with Toshiba 15nm MLC, the XG3 is capable up to 2,400/1,500 MB/s sequential reads/writes thanks to its PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe interface. As usual, Toshiba also brings their proprietary QSBC (Quadruple Swing-By Code) ECC algorithms.

Maximum capacity on the XG3 is 1TB with a dual sided M.2 2280 form factor drive. [...]

At FMS 2015, Samsung not only took the crown for introducing the highest-capacity 2.5″ SSD in the industry, but they also took the crown for introducing the highest performance SSD as well. Designed for enterprise customers looking for high performance solutions, the Samsung PM1725 is capable of reaching a staggering 1 million IOPS in a single drive making it the fastest SSD in the world. In order to do this, Samsung is utilizing their new Samsung EPIC SSD controller along with their latest 256Gb 3-bit MLC 3D V-NAND technology.

The Samsung PM1725 will come in two varieties – the HHHL and the 2.5″ SFF form factor. Performance on the different form [...]