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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

If you’ve got an ADATA SSD and you’ve been desperately waiting for years for a SSD software suite, it’s time to rejoice as ADATA has recently launched their very own SSD Toolbox Software!

“ADATA SSD Toolbox allows for the monitoring of drive health and remaining life through Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) attributes. It also lets the user keep track of the current operating temperature, capacity, and total space used. The drive utilities include SSD security erase, which wipes all data from the drive and restores the drive to its factory default, firmware update, and SSD Toolbox update. For achieving best [...]

If you haven’t heard already, over the past couple weeks AMD has been on a graphics card launch frenzy launching a number of new graphics cards including the Radeon R9 270X, R9 280X, R9 290X and the R9 290. While impressive, with the exception of the R9 290X and the R9 290, most of the R9 200 lineup that’s been launched already is still based off AMD’s last generation GPU technology with the R9 280 series based off the Tahiti GPU found in the Radeon HD 7900 series and the R9 270 series based off the Pitcairn GPU found on the Radeon HD 7800 series. Given that AMD is expected to launch around eight GPUs for the R9 200 series before [...]

Last year, I had the opportunity of reviewing the original Samsung 840, which I felt was a good effort on the Samsung’s part. Despite the challenges of being the first to market with a TLC NAND based SSD, the Samsung 840 was a decent product and catered very well to its target audience – the general consumer. While the Samsung 840 was a strong product for its intended audience, it wasn’t without its drawbacks – the biggest of which was the write performance.

Now, when it comes to the SSD market, no other SSD vendor out there is making as much noise as Samsung these days and less than 10 months after Samsung’s initial unveiling [...]

It’s been a long time coming, but it seems like Samsung has finally gotten around to releasing the Magician 4.0 and Data Migration 2.0 software, which were promised all the way back in September of last year when the Samsung 840 and Samsung 840 Pro SSDs were launched.

The Samsung Magician 4.0 software is Samsung’s latest SSD utility which supports all Samsung SSDs to date. The Magician 4.0 software offers tons of features in an easy to use, redesigned software interface, which at the moment is the most full featured SSD utility on the market. In addition to all the features offered on the Magician 3.0 software, The [...]