Monday 21 December 2015

Geil Super Luce DDR4 Memory 3000MHz (2 x 4GB)

Geil Super Luce DDR4 Memory 3000MHz (2 x 4GB)

DDR4 done right, done cheap

Now that Skylake and its hunger for high-speed DDR4 memory is here, it’s time to ditch those shabby old DDR3 modules and upgrade. The thing is, at Skylake’s default memory speed of 2133MHz, it’s not actually that much faster than DDR3 in real world scenarios. Enter kits like this one from memory masters Geil, which promises an easy 3000MHz frequency, without costing the Earth.

Samsung Galaxy Gear S2 Classic

Samsung Galaxy Gear S2 Classic

Wearables are the latest trend with many smartphone manufacturers. The Galaxy Gear S2 Classic is Samsung’s fourth wearable, taking over from the Galaxy Gear S. But is it a big improvement?

What Samsung is going for here is to convince you that you don’t need that classy Omega. I mean all it does is tell the time and has that tachometer you’ll probably never use. Omega also does watches that work in space, yet again we ask, are you going to use that feature regularly? What Samsung has here is a watch that is much more practical, with a less jarring price. The wearables market is just coming to form, with the past couple of years being formation years. You know when a trend is serious when Apple decides to join in, having only released the Apple watch in April this year. Samsung has been in the wearables game longer, so will the Gear S2 Classic display its wisdom in the wearables game?

Gigabyte Geforce Gtx 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming Waterforce

Gigabyte Geforce Gtx 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming Waterforce (GV-N98TXTREME W-6GD)

The best just got even better 

Our current favourite high-end GPU is undoubtedly Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 980 Ti. It’s basically as powerful as a Titan-x GPU for $500 cheaper, whips AMD’s Fury x into a bleeding little pile of chunks, and does it all without sounding like there’s a hairdressing salon in your PC. One of our favourite versions of the Gtx 980 Ti is Gigabyte’s Windforce 3, but they’ve just released a new model that goes one better – the horribly named GV-N98TXTREME W-6GD. Let’s see why this is quite possibly the sexiest graphics card for those with money to burn, yet a fetish for water.

Asus Strix Raid Dlx sound card

Asus Strix Raid Dlx sound card

Despite onboard motherboard audio advancing in leaps and bounds, we still think that a dedicated sound card is a worthy inclusion for those who really care about their audio. Obviously the sound outputted by your system is going to be highly reliant on the speakers or headphones you use, but there’s no point pairing a $350 set of cans with a low-end motherboard audio codec. With a street price exceeding $300, the new Asus Strix Raid Dlx is obviously targeted at the upper end of the audiophile spectrum, and demands a quality set of speakers or headphones to go with it.

Powercolor Devil 13

Powercolor Devil 13

This speedy devil gets hot and bothered

When a graphics card includes a special mounting bracket to stop it shrugging free of the shackles of its PCIe slot, you can rest assured it’s a behemoth. The new Devil 13 from Powercolor is one such heavyweight, with a slightly absurd weight of two kilograms. There’s a good reason for all this extra baggage though, as hidden beneath the frankly gigantic heatsink is not one, but two AMD Radeon R9 390 processors. No wonder it costs so darn much.

Razer Mamba Laser Gaming Mouse RGB

Razer Mamba Laser Gaming Mouse RGB

Ouch. $220 for a gaming mouse. That’s got to be a record, but it’s no surprise to see that Razer is the company behind this ultra-elite gaming mouse. It’s claimed to be the world’s most advanced gaming mouse, but can Razer really justify such a stratospheric price when $100 mice seem to be perfect already?

Hard West

Hard West

Ready your turn-based six shooter...

The difficulty in designing a turnbased game is that the little details have to perfect in order for it to stand out from the crowd. With plenty of time to digest what’s happening, and with an intelligent approach the best means of success, the player has every incentive to fully understand even the most unassuming of design choices. It’s not a genre that allows developers to hide from their audience. Everything contained within that digital packet will be picked up, spun around and observed in extreme detail.