If you recently purchased or built a new PC, or upgraded an older PC, the most important thing to do aside from stress testing is to benchmark. Whereas stress testing helps ensure the PC is completely stable not only during idle but also during heavy load, benchmarking will help ensure that the PC is operating at the appropriate level of performance for the components installed. As simple issues such as an outdated driver or an improperly configured component may significantly degrade performance, benchmark testing will allow you to quickly catch any issues and to fix them immediately so you can take full advantage of the new hardware that you’ve spent your hard earned [...]

One of the most important pieces of software to have in any PC is some sort of hardware or system monitoring tool. While many think this is only necessary for overclockers who push their hardware to the absolute limits, it’s really not. I simply can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people ask me why their computer is running so slow or why their laptop is shutting down randomly because they had no idea that a fan died in their system and the system was overheating.

Lucky for you, this won’t happen to you because you’ll have a hardware monitoring tool which will help you diagnose any problems before handing your computer over to a [...]

As we live in a more and more connected world, being able to conduct an internet speed test and subsequently interpret the results is one of the most important computer skills to have.

This is important for many reasons as it’s not only the first thing to do when troubleshooting a connection issue, it’s also necessary to determine if you’re getting the correct internet speeds you’ve paid for from your ISP.

Before we begin, let’s first discuss bandwidth and latency, which are the two components that make up “internet speed”.

Bandwidth, which is most commonly [...]

So you just spent days on days researching, purchasing, and/or building the perfect new gaming or workstation PC. You’ve gone the whole nine yards making sure the entire system is cable managed to a tee, your bright RGB LEDs are installed in just the right spots, and there’s plenty of airflow flowing through the entire system.

You power on your new PC and it seems to be working fine, but you want to make sure it’ll also be perfectly fine when the system has Battlefield loaded at the highest settings while streaming to Twitch for hours on hours.

In order to ensure that there’s no hidden problems, the most important thing to do after buying [...]

When we think about a PC in general, most of us give a lot of weight to the CPU, RAM, and GPU when it comes to discussing performance. However, one of the most important components is actually the HDD or the SSD inside as it’s the device that’s responsible for storing all your data such as the operating system, applications, games, and more.

With the increasing prevalence of SSDs in the market, the importance of the storage subsystem has really returned to the spotlight as SSDs have highlighted the effects of having slow storage. For those who own a SSD or have experienced what it’s like to use one, you’ll know that slow storage can easily drag down an [...]

It would be a fair assumption that AMD named its new GPU after one of the brightest stars in the night sky because to them, that’s exactly what this new GPU is. Huge strides have been made in its engineering, including a brand new architecture based on the new Samsung/GlobalFoundries 14nm FinFET process.

Over the past few years, AMD has been making aggressive pushes into the mainstream PC gaming market. With an all-new ad campaign entitled “The Uprising”, which encourages gamers to join the “Radeon Rebellion” – this Rebellion, of course refers to the fact that AMD has decided that instead of debuting an all-new [...]

EVGA is a company known for selling top-notch enthusiast hardware such as graphics cards, power supplies, and motherboards. The subject of this review is centered around one of its top motherboard branded under the ‘FTW’ moniker. The ‘FTW’ branding stands for “For The Win”, which our young whipper-snappers would tell you symbolizes a nod of approval on the internet. More than just an internet slang, EVGA’s FTW branding is part of EVGA’s penultimate performance tier, of which the Classified brand reigns supreme.

Despite such a winner’s naming scheme, the EVGA X99 FTW actually represents the [...]

Two months ago, we had the opportunity to be one of the first reviewers to take a look at the Crucial MX100 SSD. At the time, we came away very impressed with the drive as it delivered great performance, great features and is backed by Crucial’s fantastic track record for reliability while still being one of the least expensive SSDs on the market.

Unfortunately, Crucial only sent us the 256GB version of the MX100 at the time, which is a lower performing drive than the 512GB version of the product. While were more than happy to review the more commonly purchased 256GB capacity, the smaller capacity drive is at a substantial disadvantage when we [...]

Late last year along with the unveil of AMD’s flagship Radeon R9 290X graphics card, AMD also unveiled a lower cost offering, the Radeon R9 290, which promised only slightly lower performance at a significantly lower price.

Since then the Radeon R9 290 has been extremely popular, and due to high demand and a shortage in components, we haven’t really seen any custom designed Radeon R9 290’s on the market until late last January.

That said, today we’ll be reviewing a the MSI Radeon R9 290 Gaming 4G, which is MSI’s latest custom designed graphics card based off AMD’s Radeon R9 290 GPU. Given that the Radeon R9 [...]

As a GPU reviewer, I spend a ton of time testing both AMD and Nvidia GPUs using a variety of GPU drivers. Because I generally only use one testbench for testing so that benchmark results can be compared between different GPUs, I’m constantly faced with the need to properly uninstall old AMD or Nvidia GPU drivers.

While many of you simply uninstall your graphics driver in the Programs and Features menu in the Control Panel (and this is fine in many cases), removing drivers in such a way leaves behind extra registry keys and drivers in the driver store, which may sometimes cause issues such as blue screens, driver install hangs, weird display bugs, unusually low [...]