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.

Razer headsets are some of the best looking gaming headsets on the market, but one problem is that they don’t have a proper place to sit once it’s off your head. While you could purchase a third party headset stand, there’s simply nothing worse looking than having an unmatched set of peripherals on your desktop.

Luckily, Razer feels your pain as the company recently announced their new Razer Base Station Chroma, a new gaming headset stand that not only features Razer’s unique design language and color theme, but also features Chroma lighting allowing you to sync all your peripherals for that extra sexy look.

For those who want [...]

At SIGGRAPH 2017, PNY announced that they’ll soon be jumping into the mobile workstation market with their latest PNY Prevail Pro P3000 and Prevail Pro P4000 mobile workstations.

The new mobile workstations which are just 0.78-inches thin and weigh in at just 4.8Lbs, feature up to a 15.6-inch 4K UHD(3840×2160) display, an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor, up to 32GB of DDR4 2400MHz RAM, and Nvidia’s Quadro Mobile P3000 for the Prevail Pro P3000 and the Quadro Mobile P4000 (Max-Q) for the Prevail Pro P4000. Storage options include up to 512GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs and up to a 2TB HDD.

I/O options include a [...]

The USB 3.0 Promoter Group which includes numerous major tech companies including Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and others, has announced the pending release of the USB 3.2 standard.

The USB 3.2 standard will bring features that takes better advantage of the USB Type-C ports. Traditionally, USB host and devices are single lance solutions. With the Type-C connector, multiple lanes can be hosted over a single connector. USB 3.2 allows device and hosts to be designed with up to two lanes of 5Gbps or two lanes of 10 Gbps devices. The lanes can operate simultaneously, boosting theoretical bandwidth to 2GB/s over a single USB connection.

To take advantage [...]

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 [...]

Microsoft announced the Surface laptop and Windows 10 S during its #MicrosoftEDU conference today.

Windows 10 S is an overhauled version of Windows RT designed to compete against Google’s Chrome OS. All software for Windows 10 S must be downloaded via the Windows Store, meaning that 3rd party applications won’t be able to run unless they’re approved by Microsoft.

Are the flashbacks of Windows RT haunting you? Don’t be, Microsoft has enhanced Windows 10 S in several ways to avoid a repeat of the same mistake.

The biggest challenge for a single software distribution source is its ecosystem. During the [...]

Thought you had something special with your puny 32″ 4K monitor? Think again.

AOC recently announced their new C4008VU8 monitor for those who want the ultimate immersive experience. Spanning across a massive 40-inches, the C4008VU8 is one of the most full featured monitors on the market featuring a 4K UHD resolution, 10-bit color, and MVA panel technology capable of reproducing 85% of the NTSC wide color gamut. Unfortunately for gamers, refresh rate is capped at the standard 60Hz.

Key Features

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 offers [...]

With AMD’s Ryzen CPUs launched several months ago, there’s currently some major competition in the high end desktop CPU space which Chinese tech publication Benchlife claims may have prompted Intel to push forward the launch of their next generation HEDT platform, codenamed Basin Falls, to the May/June Computex timeframe. This is well ahead of its original Q3 or Q4 launch schedule.

According to the article, Intel is poised to show off its X299 Basin Falls platform at Computex along with its upcoming Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X CPUs.

Based on a new Socket R4 (LGA 2066), the new X299 platform is a major update to the X99 platform bringing [...]

Mechanical keyboards have become fairly ubiquitous in today’s market. Likewise, RGB peripherals are pretty much a dime a dozen with pretty much every component company RGB-ifiying everything in their product lineup. From the typical RGB keyboards and mice, to the not so common RGB power supplies, RGB is everywhere, and it is likely here to stay. So, with that said, it’s probably not surprising that pretty much every new “gaming keyboard” does little but combine RGB lighting with mechanical key switches and call it a day. Offering little, if not nothing actually unique to gamers. I mean, what else is there to do?

Well, [...]