Displaying items by tag: Overclocking

So you bought a beautiful new high-end video card and you want to water-cool it.  What’s that?  It’s a non-reference card?  Chances are you’re tied to a universal GPU-only solution and forced to air cool the other components of the card with additional individual heat sinks.  If you’re very lucky your non-reference card may have an aftermarket version for the VRAM and VRMs, like we saw with the popular MCW60 block from Swiftech.

All that is about to change.  Well-known water-cooling manufacturer Alphacool announced today the beginning of a new service that will customize a water block for your non-reference video card.

Last week we brought you a review of the Pallas low-profile CPU cooler from a new company called Raijintek.  We put it through our torture test and we were actually surprised at how well the little cooler did.  With plenty of clearance, a beautiful finish, a quiet fan and an affordable price, the Pallas passed with flying colors and earned itself the Editor’s Choice award.  Today we have the next installment in our series Raijintek CPU cooler reviews: the Themis Evo.

Competition is one of the cornerstones of innovation, in the tech world and in many other areas.  When we have several different companies marketing products to us that serve the same function, they will each strive to bring us, the consumer, something better than their competition.  Price, performance, appearance - all of those are parts of the equation for value.  Some companies offer what is perceived to be (and very often is) absolute top-of-the-line quality at a premium price.  Others will present their product from the cost-to-performance ratio.  Still others will rely on aesthetics to bring in the consumer.  All are different and valid approaches to the marketplace, and if you’re in that market long enough you’ll likely eventually start to see a trend in certain brands, identifying which ones fit into which category.

CPU cooling one of the prime considerations in any build.  Once a new system builder decides if they’re going to use air or water for the purpose the next step is usually research.  If they’re smart they’ll look at reviews online, from both tech sites like ours and from actual users on sites like Newegg and Amazon to learn what they need to know about the specifics of a potential cooler.  They’ll most likely start with the names that most of us in the game know already, names like Noctua, Cooler Master, Zalman and Prolimatech.  These are all great names in the business and they’ve gotten that way for a reason.  I’ve had the privilege of testing coolers from all of these companies and I was impressed with them all, but once in a while a company comes along that I’ve never heard of and offers their product for testing.

I was recently offered the chance to put the Gamerstorm Lucifer CPU cooler from Deepcool through our torture test.  I had heard of Deepcool but rarely, and never with any fanfare. It turns out they’re a huge name in the business that is only now coming into the U.S. market.  I gladly agreed to abuse their cooler and show you guys the results. First, let’s take a look at the cooler.

In part one of our review of the Gigabyte Z87-UD3H we looked at the design, features and layout of the board. Now in part two we are going to see if those choices were good or bad. Gigabyte has a fairly good history of designing boards that have great performance, but as have also seen boards that fall apart as soon as you push them (overclocking). So far it looks like the Z87X-UD3H has the right components and design to maintain performance for both stock use and also for overclocking. Let’s put that theory to the test shall we?

Gigabyte decided to fulfil increasing demands for higher data transfer speed and today announed official certification of Dual Port Thunderbolt 2 technology which will be implemented in their GIGABYTE Z87X-UD7 TH model motherboard. This technology will allow speeds of up to 20 Gb/s which is 4 times as much as USB 3.0 is offering and twice as much as the regular Thunderbolt. The new controller is codenamed "Falcon Ridge" and allows simultaneous data transfer across two channels per port.

The new motherboard from ASRock that comes with a label FATAL1TY 990FX Killer is made around AMD's chipset (990FX), abd like others in the series has a Killer E2200 LAN network chip.

The X79 chipset is nothing new, in fact in motherboard years it is quite old. However that does not mean that is it obsolete. If anything there are still many people that use the platform for their Sandy Bridge-E CPUs and now that the Ivy Bridge – E is out it is a great option. As we have both of these CPUs in the lab we decided to take a look at a single X79 board and see how it fares with both the Core i7 3960X and 4960X. The board we chose for this is the Gigabyte X79-UP4. Since we have not had this board in the lab before we decided to do the full work up on the X79-UP4 before we dive into the meat of the matter and run both of these CPUs through our gauntlet of tests. So let’s get things started.

Gigabyte is not a company to be left out of any market and they are certainly keeping pace in the motherboard arena. They are one of the companies that not only leads sales, but also helps to drive innovation and performance standards. We have had many Gigabyte motherboards in the lab and almost without exception they have been great performers. Gigabyte has also been able to learn from their mistakes and from feedback, whether it is from consumers or the press. So where does this leave Gigabyte in the Z87 market? Well we happen to have a Z87X-UD3H in the lab, so let’s take a look and see.

So now that we have covered the design and features of the Asus Z87-Expert it is time to dive into how well the board performs. Asus has always been a company that talks up the performance that their products are capable of and, from our initial look, we can understand this. Asus is one of the companies that drives the market in terms of how to build a motherboard and the components used to squeeze as much performance as possible out of them. So with that in mind let’s just how well the Z87-Expert does perform when on the bench.