Components

By Parker Wilhelm Western Digital and SanDisk are in the final steps of becoming one, as the digital storage giants announced today that they have all the a-okays needed to complete their merger. WD began plans to buy SanDisk back in October of last year, offering up a cool $19 billion for the flash-memory manufacturer.…

By Darren Allan Turtle Beach has launched a new gaming headset aimed at eSports pros, with the company having worked on this fresh design for the past few years. The Elite Pro Headset boasts 50mm Nanoclear speakers which Turtle Beach claims deliver crisp and clear audio, and there’s a pro gaming microphone with TruSpeak technology…

By Kevin Lee After a mountain of rumors and a big revealing leak, Nvidia’s next generation Pascal graphics cards are here at long last. Nvidia pulled with wraps of two graphics cards, introducing the GTX 1080 to replace the current Nvidia GTX 980 Maxwell card that rocked the 2015 PC gaming world. Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder…

By Darren Allan We’re all set for the launch of Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards later on, but ahead of that imminent reveal some alleged benchmarks of the GeForce GTX 1080 have been leaked. The benchmarks come from Videocardz, and in the 3DMark11 Performance test, Nvidia’s GTX 1080 managed to clock up a result of 27,683.…

By Jamie Carter Introduction and eye in the sky 360 degree photos and video are most associated with virtual reality, but 3D modelling is now being used to faithfully reconstruct – and even 3D-print – ancient monuments and artefacts. Palmyra in Syria is an UNESCO World Heritage Site, a 1,800-year-old Roman monument all but destroyed…

By Mary Branscombe Introduction and N-Series VMs Whether it’s Photoshop filters, JavaScript in the browser or machine learning, increasingly GPUs are as important to computing performance as CPUs, but you haven’t been able to take full advantage of that with virtualisation or in the cloud. Windows Server 2016 will let you get full access to…

By Darren Allan AOC has announced the first offering from its new Agon range, which is a premium 27-inch gaming monitor that will be on sale soon. The AG271QX has a TN panel with a resolution of 2560 x 1440, and it makes a play for super-smooth frame rates with a 1ms response time and…

By Darren Allan When it comes to storage, there are many different mediums, but Microsoft has taken a bold step on this front with plans to store data in DNA. That doesn’t mean we are about to see hard drives or SSDs inside our PCs get replaced by lumps of ‘meat’, because these are just…

By Darren Allan Want a really big monitor for your gaming? How does a 43-inch display sound, because if you’ve got the pennies, that’s the size of the latest 4K offering from Philips. The Philips BDM4350UC boasts a resolution of 3840 x 2160 and has a 10-bit IPS panel with viewing angles of 178 degrees…

By Darren Allan AMD has announced that it’s now bundling its popular Wraith Cooler with more processors. The good news is that the AMD FX-8350 and FX-6350 CPUs will now come with the Wraith to allow for quieter running and more overclocking potential out-of-the-box, compared to the previous stock cooler. The FX-8350 with Wraith will…

By Darren Allan Corsair has revealed a collection of new gaming keyboards all of which are the first to benefit from a new type of linear mechanical switch to enable quicker reactions in fast-paced games. The company’s three new Rapidfire keyboards use the Cherry MX Speed switch, a linear (i.e. there’s no tactile ‘click’) mechanical…

By Kevin Lee PC gaming on the couch is still a working struggle especially if you want to do it properly with keyboard and mouse. Now Razer believes it has come up with the perfect solution with the Turret, a completely wireless lapboard. The Razer Turret is one long, board-shaped peripheral that combines a full-sized…

By Drew Turney The 3D revolution has been in full swing for a while now, but to date a lot of the focus has been onthose little 3D printed desk toys and 3D printed body parts. But another trend that’s only now taking off is the industry of one-off custom products tailor made for your…

By Darren Allan Asus has unleashed a trio of new monitors aimed at gamers, comprising of a pair of 24-inch displays and a larger 28-inch model. Let’s start with the big fella, the Asus MG28UQ which offers a 28-inch display with a 4K resolution (3840 x 2160) giving a pixel density of 157 ppi. It’s…

By Kane Fulton INTRODUCTION What the port Gods giveth, they taketh away – so the saying goes. USB-C is the newest port on the block having found a way into everything from Apple’s 12-inch MacBook to Dell’s XPS 12 and even gaming desktops and smartphones. It’s a jack of all trades that rolls power, output…