Category: Review
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Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite Review: Part 1
The EdgeRouter Lite is Ubiquiti’s latest router with some pretty high-end features at an entry-level price. The tagline is “The world’s first sub-$100, one million-packets-per-second router” – US dollars, of course. It retails for around $140 Australian. The first part of the review is going to focus on the actual unit itself,…
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Intel i5-3470 vs i5-3570
The above two CPUs are often shortlisted for entry/midrange gaming builds that aren’t overclocked; so how do they compare? Both are quad-core CPUs without hyperthreading, so they offer 4 cores and 4 threads. The i5-3470 is clocked at 3.2GHz while the i5-3570 is 200MHz faster at 3.4GHz, and both CPUs feature Intel’s…
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Intel E3-1245 V2 vs. Intel E3-1275 V2
We were asked to spec a customer build the other day who was torn between the above two processors. Here’s our thoughts on them. E3-1245V2: Quad core, 8-thread, 3.4GHz -> 3.8GHz Turbo E3-1275V2: Quad core, 8-thread, 3.5GHz -> 3.9GHz Turbo All other specifications are equal apart from the 100MHz clockspeed difference. At this…
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Intel X520-T2 Visual Overview
There’s not a great deal to say about these cards apart from that they allow you some crazy network speeds, if you have the disk speed to keep up. They can certainly alleviate network bottlenecks if gigabit is holding you back! This particular card has a fan to keep the chipset cool; it’s not going…
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Silverstone FT-03 Mini Overview or Mini Review
With the massive increase in how useful mini-ITX boards are has come a corresponding increase in chassis to fit them, all of which are challenged by dissipating a full-sized-desktop CPU worth of heat in a small space. Add in a GPU and other components and you have quite a difficult proposition – getting the right…
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Fractal Design Define R4 Review – Part Two
As promised, here’s part two of our review! We’re building one of our standard test systems using this chassis and the following components: Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe motherboard Intel i7-3770K CPU @ 4.5GHz 8GB G-skill Ares 2133MHz RAM (2x4GB) Corsair H100 self-contained liquid cooling Crucial M4 SSDs Seasonic X-560 PSU AMD HD6450 Click through…
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Fractal Design Define R4 Review – Part One
If you’re in the market for an understated, quiet case that performs well and leaves plenty of room for expansion the Fractal Design Define series is quite likely to be on your list of cases to investigate. The latest revision of the case is R4, which draws upon user feedback on the R3…
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Asus Z9PE-D16 review: Part One
Up for review today we have one of Asus’ dual-socket-2011 server motherboards – the Z9PE-D16. Hit the break to find out what it’s all about and why you might care about it even if you don’t need to run two CPUs…
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Noctua NM-I2011 mounting kits
One of the better tower coolers which fits inside a 4U server chassis is the Noctua NH-U12P SE2, but by default they only ship with Socket 775/1155/1156/1366 and AM2/2+/3 mounting gear – leaving anyone who wants to use the baby Noctua cooler with their Socket 2011-based server out in the cold. Fortunately, Noctua have…
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Western Digital Red Drive Performance Numbers: Sequential Read/Write
As a follow-up to our review (found here), we’ve finally finished testing the new Red drives and compared them to the equivalent Green drives.