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NZXT Havik 120 Review

Posted 08/31/2012 at 4:30am | by Nathan Edwards

NZXT’s second air cooler, and they still can’t spell ‘havoc’

NZXT DIDN’T ENTER the CPU cooling game until quite recently. We reviewed its first cooler, the skyscraper Havik 140, in December 2011. The Havik 140’s dual 14cm fans helped it power to the top of our air-cooling charts, though the slightly cheap-feeling mounting bracket kept it from Kick Ass Award status. NZXT’s second air cooler is the smaller, less expensive Havik 120.

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Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo Review

Posted 08/30/2012 at 8:39am | by Nathan Edwards

What, this old thing? Cooler Master’s Hyper 212 Evo is the new‑and‑improved version of our standby CPU cooler. It’s just $35 and offers performance far exceeding other coolers in its price range, so it’s the first thing we reach for when we build a new budget-conscious rig. Given that LGA2011 CPUs don’t come with heatsinks, the Evo is the closest thing we have to a stock cooler, and it will be the standard against which all other Sandy Bridge-E coolers are judged.

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Corsair Vengeance K60 Gaming Keyboard Review

Posted 06/04/2012 at 12:42pm | by Alex Castle

A straightforward, rock-solid keyboard for FPS gamers

CORSAIR IS aiming at the very top of the gaming keyboard market with its Vengeance line—two boards with exquisite build quality and luxury price tags. The FPS-oriented K60 may be the cheaper of the two, but it still comes in at more than $100 MSRP, and will never be accused of feeling cheap.

In fact, the primary draw of the K60 is its elegant, simple design. The keyboard’s thin, heavy foundation has a brushed-aluminum face, and houses the mechanical Cherry MX Red switches in a unique non-recessed configuration that leaves no place for dust and crumbs to collect. The nicely spaced keycaps are rugged-feeling with a very light texture. We prefer the clicky Cherry MX Blue switches for typing, but the smooth Reds only require a light touch and provide an excellent, highly responsive gaming experience. Interestingly, Corsair seems to have opted to save money by using membrane switches for the function and navigation keys, giving the keys a non-uniform feel.

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Asus GeForce GTX 680 Review

Posted 05/30/2012 at 11:47pm | by Loyd Case

Asus has been coming on strong in graphics cards for several years now, though it never offers quite the variety of versions as companies like XFX and EVGA. Typically, Taiwan-based Asus will ship a reference card under its main brand, and then a custom-built, high-end card under its DirectCU brand. At a later date, the company might ship a super-high-end card using the company’s Matrix or Mars sub-brands. Price differences between Asus’s high-end and standard versions are wider, too, so it’s a little easier to figure out which card really is the premium version.

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EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Review

Posted 05/30/2012 at 11:05pm | by Loyd Case

Consider the bog-standard reference-card design. Enthusiasts often sneer at the thought, but the GTX 680 reference design is efficient, quiet, and fast. You often have to spend extra for higher clocks and more fans—and more moving parts and heat often equate to a higher probability of failure.

The EVGA GTX 680 we’re reviewing here is a standard reference card, but EVGA equips it with one of the best overclocking software tools we’ve tested.

You can use Precision to tweak the base clock, Boost clock, voltage, fan settings, and more. The GTX 680 GPU itself offers good overclocking headroom, so a few quick tweaks using Precision should get you 5–10 percent pretty easily.

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Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 Review

Posted 05/30/2012 at 4:43am | by Nathan Edwards

Finally, a 4TB hard drive. That’s one more than three!

MOST OF US DON'T NEED 4TB hard drives. Most of us don’t even need 3TB drives. Unless you create, edit, or store lots of high-definition video; have backups of all your machines; have a massive lossless audio library; or…. You know what? Maybe we do need 4TB drives. After a couple of years making do with puny 3TB drives (like animals!), it’s time to get 25 percent more stuff into our 3.5-inch drives. Though other drive makers offer 4TB external drives, Hitachi GST is the first drive maker to give you 4TB on the inside. And didn’t your mother or mother-equivalent teach you that it’s what’s on the inside that counts?

We’ve been expecting 4TB drives since Seagate’s 1TB/platter 3TB drive in the January 2012 issue, but the four-platter 4TB 7,200rpm drive we’ve been dreaming of isn’t here yet. Instead, we get Hitachi’s Deskstar 5K4000, which packs a full four terabytes into a standard 3.5-inch drive, but on five platters, not four. The platters have a maximum areal density of 443Gb per square inch. The 5K4000 has 32MB of cache, a 6Gb/s SATA controller, and a spin speed of 5,400rpm.

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Apple iPad Review

Posted 05/30/2012 at 3:29am | by Susie Ochs

One giant high-res step forward for tablets

APPLE DIDN'T CALL the newest iPad the iPad 3 or the iPad HD—just the iPad. And that’s fitting, because while it’s a handsome upgrade to the best tablet on the market, it’s not a huge leap forward. If you’ve used any iPad for more than 10 minutes, this won’t blow you away—the revolution was two years ago. Now it’s time to iterate.

Yes, it’s a little bit thicker: 9.4mm, compared to the 8.8mm iPad 2. And it’s a skootch heavier: 1.44 pounds, or 1.46 pounds if you get Wi-Fi + 4G; the iPad 2 ranged from 1.33 pounds for Wi-Fi to 1.35 pounds for the AT&T version of the Wi-Fi + 3G. We bet you won’t notice. What you will notice is the 4G/LTE speed and the Retina display.

The bright 9.7-inch display’s dizzying resolution is now 2048x1536, or 264ppi. That’s four times the pixels on the 1024x768 iPads of yore, and the best screen we’ve ever seen on a hunk of electronics. It’s got a million more pixels than a 1920x1080 HDTV, plus better color saturation than the iPad 2.

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