Table of contents for Special Issue 2015 in PC Powerplay

We mightn’t always love every single product from Thermaltake, but the company releases so many value-oriented offerings that there’s usually a diamond or two hidden amongst the rubble. This year it showed off a couple of rather interesting peripherals offering features unique to the brand. POSEIDON Z PLUS SMART KEYBOARD AND THERON PLUS SMART MOUSE These might look like a standard Poseidon Z Plus keyboard and Theron Plus mouse, but the inclusion of a Bluetooth 4.0 module inside each product gives them an ability quite unlike any other. The Bluetooth is used to pipe statistics about the user to Thermaltake’s monitoring software, showing the keystrokes per minute, actions per minute, total mouse movement and other assorted stats. This can then be uploaded to the Thermaltake site to see how the…

The opening speech at Cooler Master’s behind-closed-doors product reveal sounded more like a Scientology induction than the introduction to a new range of items, with a level of hyperbole rarely seen at technology events. Thankfully the goodies that were unveiled were impressive in their own right, with Cooler Master taking a bold new step when it comes to case customisation. COOLER MASTER MASTERCASE At the core of Cooler Master’s new range of products is the motto “Make it yours”, and it applies perfectly to the new Master Case line. There are three cases in the series, starting with the entry-level MasterCase 5, which is a relatively standard Mid-tower design. It’s a rather attractive case considering the suggested price of US$109, and comes with a raft of premium features. The dual…

PRICE $460 www.intel.com Welcome to PC PowerPlay’s favourite gaming CPU. Sure, it’s also one of the most expensive, but what’s $100 between friends? It might not be a massive improvement over a trust old i7 2700K overclocked to 4.5GHz, but there’s no denying that this is the fastest gaming CPU on the market. Built using Intel’s Haswell design, the remarkable feature about this chip is that it has the fastest Turbo frequency of any product Intel has launched. When the going gets tough, each of the four HyperThreaded cores within will clock themselves at a blistering 4.4GHz, which is more than enough to decimate even the most demanding game. The K at the end of the model name signifies that this chip is also aimed at overclockers, as it includes…

PRICE $315 AND $285 www.amd.com In the good old days, the frequency of a CPU was a great way to measure how fast it was, but those days are long gone. In case you needed any proof, the AMD FX 9590 is it. With a top speed of 5GHz and quad-cores, we wouldn’t blame you for thinking it’s going to be a killer CPU, but the benchmarks show otherwise. The 9370 is simply a slower clocked variant of the 9590, with a top speed of 4.7GHz. Both CPUs are based on AMD’s AMD3+ socket, and use the Vishera core. This is built on a rather archaic 32nm process, which could explain why both CPUs are extremely hot. With a TDP of 220W, they’re almost twice as hot as Intel’s cooler…

PRICE $409 www.asrock.com If money is no obstacle, and you really want one of Intel’s Extreme Edition Socket 2011-3 CPUs for your systems despite our advice not to, this premium board from ASRock is intended for you. ASRock has endowed this expensive board with a raft of high-end features, but it’s still not quite up there with our favourite X99 models that cost just a little more. Three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots support three-way GPUs from either NVIDIA or AMD, but it’s one short of the four offered on similar X99 boards. There are only two more PCIe x1 slots, along with a single M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 connection. A mini-PCIe slot is also included, suitable for Mini-PCIe WiFi cards or similar. Both Intel and Killer Ethernet is provided, though…

PRICE $245 www.asus.com.au Powered by Intel’s premium Z97 chipset, the Maximus VII Ranger delivers an exceptional range of features at an excellent price point. In fact, it’s one of our favourite Z97 board on the market, and here’s why. For starters, there’s an excellent range of PCIe slots, with twin PCIe 3.0 x16, one PCIe 2.0 x4 and three PCIe 2.0 x1 slots up for grabs. This board can support both SLI and CrossFire, with up to three cards in place (the third will use the PCIe 2.0 x4 slot). Full overclocking support is also included, and we absolutely adore ASUS’ beautiful UEFI BIOS, which spells everything out cleanly and clearly. ASUS doesn’t advertise the power phase design of this board, which suggests it’s not quite as impressive as competitors.…

PRICE $155 au.msi.com MSI has an excellent reputation when it comes to value for money, and the H97 Gaming 3 is its attempt at putting together an affordable option for Intel gamers. Being based on the H97 chipset it obviously doesn’t support SLI, but that doesn’t stop it from being a capable little home for your system. Like other H97 boards, we’re pretty sure this one also supports K-series overclocking, but that’s off the record ;) It shares a very similar PCIe/PCI slot configuration to the ASUS board in this roundup, with twin PCIe x16 slots for graphics cards, twin PCIe x1 for smaller peripherals, and triple PCI slots for legacy products. Again we have to question if any users will make the most of these three PCI slots, especially…

AMD and NVIDIA might be behind today’s gaming graphics cards, but it’s extremely rare for them to sell full-blown graphics cards to consumers. Instead they’re the folks who create the Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU, that lies at the heart of your graphics card. Their teams of engineers create the design of the GPU, and then farms it out to microprocessor fabricators to build the chips, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited currently used by both the Red and Green teams. So AMD and NVIDIA design the GPUs, as well as the basic Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and cooler design they’re going to be hosted on, which is called the “reference” design. The GPUs are then manufactured by TSMC, and then it’s the turn of the third party manufacturers to…

PRICE $589 www.galaxstore.net This is one very expensive GTX 970 when compared to the cheaper versions produced by the likes of Gainward. Heck, even Galaxy has a cheaper version which goes for just $449. So why has the same company released another version of the same GPU for a whopping 31% extra? It’s all about the overclocking baby… This has to be one of the most striking graphics cards we’ve seen of late. The stunning white design of the cooler sits over the custom-designed PCB, which is equipped with an 8+2 phase power system. Twin 80mm fans sit either side of a single 90mm fan, delivering plenty of airflow to keep the GPU cool. A myriad of features are aimed at serious overclockers, from the ten-layer PCB to the premium…

PRICE $349 au.msi.com Like all of the cards in AMD’s new R9 300 series, the R9 380 is actually a rebadged variant of an earlier product. In this case it’s the R9 285, as it uses the same Tonga-design GPU within. Thankfully this is a newer GPU design than the one found in the R7 370, as it’s built upon the GCN 1.2 architecture. All of AMD’s flagship GPU features are supported by this design, so there’ no fear that you’ll miss out on FreeSync, full DX12 compatibility or hardware accelerated video above 1080p. Looking at the specs, it appears that the R9 380’s GPU is absolutely identical to the R9 285, with one small exception. Likely as a result of maturing processor manufacturing, AMD has been able to increase…

PRICE $999 www.philips.com.au Sometimes size does count, and no where is that more apparent than PC gaming displays. The bigger the screen, the more immersive the experience. Well, that’s the gist of it, but many big screen displays lack the crisp resolution necessary to deliver a crystal clear experience. And those with ridiculously high numbers of pixels are often priced accordingly. Which is why this whopper from Philips is such a steal - not only is it massive, it’s also got the pixels to back up its size, all with a price point that won’t send your wallet running. This is a true 4K display, packing in 3840 x 2160 pixels. Here at PC PowerPlay we’ve been very hesitant to jump aboard the 4K hype train, as it usually arrives…

PRICE $999 www.asus.com.au Asus has somehow pulled off the impossible with this brand new gaming display. Until now, low pixel response times were the domain of TN panels, but their narrow viewing angles and slightly average colours were less than amazing. On the other hand, IPS panels have become the preferred choice of colour purists, and their wide 178 degree viewing angle makes them perfect for larger displays and those who need to share their screen with other viewers. As such, IPS is now seen as the premium panel type, but its benefits come with a severe cost - high pixel response times. To put it bluntly, these beautiful screens have more motion blur than a V8 supercar photographed by a crappy camera. Yet ASUS has magically endowed its new…

PRICE $399 www.ocz.com OCZ was the dominant force in SSDs for a while, after overtaking Intel to become the fastest SSD makers around, but the company hasn’t led the race for quite some time. The OCZ Vector 180 aims to close that gap, while also coming in at a competitive price. The keynote feature of the Vector 180 is its power-loss protection. Known as Power Failure Management Plus, it will protect any data that has already been written to the flash memory, but data stored in the buffer at the time will be lost. This level of protection is pretty standard for consumer SSDs at this price point, but is backed up by a very generous 5 year warranty. A Barefoot 3 M00 SSD controller handles the heavy lifting, and…

PRICE $669 www.kingston.com/en/hyperx Kingston has had a tough time of it of late, with its SSDs failing to match the performance of the memory juggernauts such as Samsung and SanDisk. The Predator is the company’s latest SSD, and we’re happy to say that the company has finally released a drive that is as impressive as the HyperX brand used to be. It mightn’t be cheap, but it’s one helluva speed demon. This drive uses a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface, which gives it a huge leg up over SATA 3 and PCIe 2.0 x2 drives. It’s actually an M.2 SSD mounted on a PCIe card, and removing it from said card is a cinch… but doing so will void your 3 year warranty, which is a shame. Thankfully it’s possible to…

PRICE $249 www.asus.com/au/ Almost the polar opposite of the ATH-R70x headset, the ASUS Strix 7.1 comes with all the bells and whistles you associate with gaming headsets. There are lights, EQs, an attached mic and a flashy design that makes the headset look something akin to a giant owl that is disappointed with your chosen lifestyle, no matter what it might be. To say the headset is huge is something of an understatement. It weighs in at 350g minus the cable and has huge ear cups, complete with giant orange “eyes” that can be set to breathe or simply glow orange. The size of the headset makes sense when you take into account everything in it, however. The Strix 7.1 headset provides real, not virtual 7.1 surround sound, and you…

PRICE $139 www.turtlebeach.com Even when not using one of the preset audio profiles – gaming, cinema or music – and setting the EQ to flat, the Earforce Z60 headset still has some really impressive bass. The massive 60mm driver in each large, comfortable ear cup deliver a wide range of high fidelity low range tones, making explosions, engines and bullets really satisfying. Unfortunately even with the EQ set to flat, the high ranges are a bit muted. Even with the music setting chosen, the high range sound quality is a little disappointing. Set to cinema mode, the headset concentrates on the mid ranges making sure that dialogue is front and centre and not drowned out by the soundtrack of effects. The gaming mode is most satisfying when playing something explosive,…

PRICE $99/$149 www.steelseries.com Similar in design to the great Steelseries Siberia V2 headset as well as the pricier V3 Prism, the V3 headset features two large ear cups connected with a structural band and a floating head strap that sits the headset lightly and comfortably in place. As far as design goes, the Siberia V3 is a winner. It looks great and is extremely comfortable to wear. It’s also equally good when it comes to sound quality. Like the V2, the Siberia V3 has a flattened EQ which means that there isn’t the bass enhancement you find in the majority of gaming headsets. The 50mm drivers provide excellent audio through the mid to high ranges but lack a little bit of oomph when it comes to the bass. For the…

While sales of PC desktops continue to flounder like the Liberal’s budget in the parliament, there’s one segment that is experiencing strong growth – gaming laptops. The confluence of shrinking hardware sizes, better battery life and more efficient silicon has finally delivered on the promise of gaming laptops that can play more than just Clash of Clans. We’ve taken a look at four of the biggest brands to see how their unique approach to this market; while some favour ultra-portable machines that can be plugged into powerful GPU docking stations, others have delivered massive high-powered monstrosities only slightly more portable than a bar fridge. BUYING A GAMING LAPTOP The most important aspect when buying a gaming laptop is the dedicated GPU found inside. Ignore the marketing material – a GeForce…

PRICE $2081 www.metabox.com.au This kick-arse gaming laptop shares many of the same specs as the Aorus laptop in this roundup, but instead places them inside a larger chassis dictated by its 15.6 inch display. As a result, Metabox hasn’t needed to get too tricky with squeezing such powerful hardware into a tiny space, which is probably why the Metabox is significantly more affordable. It’s no behemoth though, tipping the scales at just 2.5kg, making it relatively portable despite its size. Once again we see NVIDIA’s excellent GTX 970M handling the graphics load, while Intel’s i7-4720HQ is even better than the CPU found in the Aorus, with its top speed of 3.6GHz. This potent pairing should smash through most of today’s games without issue. A whopping 24GB of DDR3 memory is…

PRICE $279 www.steelseries.com Rather than opting for one of the popular Cherry mechanical switches, Steelseries has instead forgets its own path, designing their own mechanical switch called the QS1. The switch for the most part feels like a slightly softer Cherry red but has a few features that make it stand out from the better known brand as well as make it feel quite unique in its own right. The QS1 switches have a shorter actuation length than the Cherry switches – 3mm rather than 4mm – and while this doesn’t sound like much, it makes for a very different feel, especially when combined with the low profile key caps of the M800. When it comes to twitch gaming, the low profile keys, short actuation and 256 key anti-ghosting are…

PRICE $69 www.turtlebeach.com As the name suggests, the Turtle Beach Grip 300 gaming mouse kit is more than just a mouse. The budget priced kit also features a rather excellent mouse mat. As nice as the included mouse mat is, the mouse itself is the real star of the show. It’s pretty bare bones, as you would expect for the price point, but the overall build quality and included features far outstrip the damage it will do to your wallet. The mouse is a little wide for some hands, but we found it very comfortable. As the name suggests, the entire surface is covered in a nice rubberised grip surface – not the best if you’ve got sweaty hands but otherwise very appealing. The left and right buttons are nice…

PRICE $39 www.roccat.org OK, you got us. The Roccat Apuri is neither a mouse nor a keyboard, but it definitely is deserving of space on your desktop. A combination powered four port USB hub and mouse bungie, the Apuri has quickly become a much coveted favourite desktop adornment in the PCPP bunker. Why? It’s useful and also looks pretty damn neat. The Apuri looks something like a three legged scorpion creature with some glowing blue highlights. For those not familiar with the term, a mouse bungie is a device that holds a mouse cord in an elevated position ensuring that the cord doesn’t get snagged or tug. The soft rubber bungie on the Apuri is excellent and even proved useful with a wireless mouse, as we could drape the wireless…

01 MSI AX24 Available: 2015 • RRP: TBA It’s hard to sell people on the gaming viability of All in One systems, but with the AX24, MSI has a good chance of doing just that thanks to the upgradability of the platform and the fact that it makes a feature of the fact it can hold a full sized videocard. The 24” display is a little lacking in frills – it’s only 1920x1280 in the current model – but a large shoebox style enclosure for the back mounted GPU shouts out the unit’s potential power. MSI also says they are considering building a version of the AX24 with dual videocard support. If that doesn’t sell gamers on the possibilities of AiO systems, nothing will. 02 ASUS RoG G20 Available: Now…

It turns out we’ve been pronouncing this company’s name wrong since its inception, but luckily you’ll never know this (turns out it’s “Aww-russ”). The sister company to Gigabyte is renowned for delivering some of the finest gaming laptops that money can buy, and it took this year’s Computex as an opportunity to introduce us to the key new product in its range, the X5. AORUS X5 Welcome to the winner of the Computex Best Choice Award, Aorus’ stunning new slimline gaming laptop, the X5. Aorus claims this is the world’s most powerful lightweight gaming laptop, and it uses not one but twin GeForce GTX 965M GPUs running in SLI mode to accomplish this. The use of twin low-powered GPUs has allowed this 15.6 inch laptop be just 0.9 inches thick…

Unlike AMD, who chose to launch its new graphics cards two weeks after the world’s biggest PC hardware show (Not! Happy! Jan!), NVIDIA used Computex to launch and announce several new products. Best of all was its new flagship consumer graphics card, which offers most of the goodness of a Titan X at a much more palatable price point. GEFORCE GTX 980 TI We all knew that NVIDIA had a Ti variant of the GTX 980 waiting in the wings, but nobody expected it to follow so closely in the footsteps of the bank-busting Titan X. The biggest change is in the amount of onboard memory, with the GTX 980 Ti shaving the Titan X’s 12GB down to a mere 6GB. Yes, we’re being sarcastic, as 6GB is still a…

It wasn’t too long ago that SSD manufacturers ranked themselves solely on the basis of read/write speed rather than overall performance, durability and reliability. As OCZ demonstrated on the Computex show floor, this is something they are getting away from. It is true that the storage maker has released a 240 - 960Gb PCIe SSD dubbed the RevoDrive 350 with an incredible max bandwidth of 1800MB/s, but far more important is the support the manufacturer is throwing behind their products. The entire OCZ range, from the budget ARC 100 series all the way through to their extremely expensive RevoDrive 350 comes with at least a three year warranty, going all the way up to five years in the case of the Vector 180 series. The performance difference between value SSDs…

Compared to the headlong race towards photorealism that today’s GPU makers are engaged in, the CPU battle has become a rather tedious affair. While AMD and Intel used to go neck and neck in the past, today the CPU wars are dominated by Intel, as its chips simply outperform AMD in nearly every regard. Every year we see AMD release a refreshed, updated version of its major CPU families, and every year we see it fail to match Intel’s effort from the previous year. With absolutely no pressure to deliver exciting performance improvements, Intel has instead continued to release new CPUs that are only slightly faster than the last model, which is just enough to keep them well in the lead. So why bother upgrading? That’s a darn good question.…

PRICE $159 www.intel.com Considering this cheap is even more affordable than many of AMD’s range, there’s got to be a catch, right? And there is, although it’s one that will only arise in the most recent of games, say those released in the last year or two. Intel has cut costs by making the i3 4350 a twin-cored CPU, which means it will truly struggle to run games that rely heavily on multithreading, such as Battlefield 4. On the other hand, it’s fine to run older titles that only utilise a single CPU core. Being built on the Haswell architecture, this CPU is made using the 22nm process that is soon to be replaced by Broadwell’s 14nm process. Despite only having twin cores, it comes with Intel’s Hyperthreading technology, which,…

PRICE $179 www.amd.com The A10 series shows how AMD is choosing to differentiate itself from Intel. In raw CPU vs CPU performance, it simply can’t keep up, and has been losing this race for several years now. However, AMD has the Radeon brand and team up its sleeve, which it has cleverly employed on its APU series of processors, and the A10-7850K is a great example of the end result. On the CPU side, this is uses a quad-core CPU based on the Kaveri architecture. The maximum Turbo speed tops out at 4GHz, and when combined with the relatively low core performance of AMD products, explains why this product didn’t fair too well in our benchmarks. However, this APU also has integrated graphics, just like Intel’s latest products, but with…

PRICE $199 www.asrock.com Sourcing an AMD motherboard is harder than finding a gamer who agreed with Steam’s attempt to commercialise mods; after reaching out to the big four, we had to beg several times for them to include an AMD board. In fact, we got this ASRock board not from ASRock, but from AMD itself, who supplied it with one of its CPUs for testing. As the name suggests, this board uses AMD’s premium 990FX chipset, which enables overclocking and SLI support. While the specs claim this board supports quad-SLI, a cursory glance at the board itself reveals this to be impossible, as it only has three PCIe x16 slots, limiting the board to three cards. A single M.2 socket is included, but it’s only of the PCIe 2.0 x2…

PRICE $135 www.gigabyte.com.au This Micro-ATX motherboard from Gigabyte is priced just right for an affordable mini-SFF gaming rig, and has packed a surprisingly large number of features into its tiny dimensions. Based on the H97 chipset it obviously has a few limitations, but they’re arguably irrelevant to SFF builders anyway. We doubt many HTPC builders want to overclock their CPU or install multiple GPUs, but the latter option is indeed possible if you stick with AMD. As an aside, it turns out this board can indeed overclock K-series CPUs, but you didn’t hear that from us, as Intel is none too happy about mobo vendors enabling this. That’s because this tiny board still retains twin PCIe x16 slots (only one runs at full speed though, with the other limited to…

PRICE $189 au.msi.com The Z97 chipset is intended for premium gaming and overclocking boards, but MSI has shown that it’s possible to get the price down to almost H97 levels in the form of the Z97 Gaming 5. Considering it’s only $30 more expensive than some H97 boards, it represents tremendous value, but did MSI have to cut many corners to do so? With full overclocking support delivered courtesy of the Z97 chipset, you probably won’t find a cheaper platform to tweak your K-series CPU. It’s also got full SLI support, delivered over the three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots. Another four PCIe x1 slots provide plenty of scope for adding extras, while six SATA3 ports deliver a decent amount of storage space. Killer’s gaming solution has been used instead of…

PRICE $1069 www.asus.com.au Paying over a grand for a graphics card based on the GeForce GTX 980 is a very, very hard sell now that the GTX 980 Ti has been released. It made perfect sense when this product was first released, as ASUS has delivered the best darned GTX 980 on the planet, with performance that left other GTX 980s eating its dust, but it’s now facing off against a more powerful GPU that sells for the same price. Can the changes ASUS has made to the GTX 980 make it competitive with the Ti version of the same GPU? ASUS has equipped this card with 14-phase power, enabling incredible overclocking capacity. It’s also got a defroster feature for LN2 overclockers, along with a clear BIOS button in case…

PRICE $1099 www.gigabyte.com.au Pity the poor Titan X owners. No sooner had they spent $1500 on their imposing new benchmark-slayer than NVIDIA released the affordable version of the same GPU in the GTX 980 Ti. This is for all intents and purposes a Titan X with less onboard memory, with just 6GB of GDDR5 compared to the Titan X’s 12GB. At the heart of the GTX 980 Ti is the same GM200 GPU found in Titan X, but it’s had a slight trimming. The total number of CUDA cores drops from 3072 to 2816, while the Texture Units also drops, from 192 to 176. Yet in every other area it’s basically identical, including the 1000MHz base speed and 1075MHz Boost Speed. Gigabyte has gone one better though, increasing the base…

PRICE $1189 www.amd.com This is one of the very few graphics cards that AMD actually sells to consumers, and there’s good reason for it. Tucked away beneath that imposing cooler are not one but two GPUs, each of the R9 290X variety. These are potent processors in their own right, each pumping out 250W of TDP, which is why AMD has had to mount a custom Allin-One water cooler to this card, which is enhanced further by an air cooler mounted in the middle of the heatsink. With another fan spinning on the external radiator, it’s no surprise that this card clocked the loudest in our sound test, measuring at a very noticeable 55dB. This was outside of a case on an open testbench, so we’d guess it gets even…

PRICE $565 www.aocmonitorap.com/v2015/au NVIDIA’s G-Sync technology really needs to be seen to be appreciated, but it’s taking a lot longer to reach affordable pricing than NVIDIA promised. The issue is the proprietary scaler that must be included in each G-Sync display, which bumps up the price by at least $100. With most prospective buyers having never seen G-Sync in action, paying extra for a bullet-point on the box is hard to justify. Thankfully we’re slowly seeing prices drop though, and this display from AOC is one of them. While it costs a little more than most 24 inch gaming displays, the price difference isn’t massive, and the benefit of G-Sync makes the extra cost easy to justify. The 24 inch panel used within has a native resolution of 1920 x…

PRICE $549 www.apacer.com This might be a PCIe-based SSD, but it’s a great example of how all PCIe drives aren’t created equal. The giveaway this isn’t quite the performer it claims to be is in the type of PCIe interface it uses; while other drives now take full advantage of PCIe 2.0 x4 lanes, the Thunderbird is limited to a PCIe 2.0 x2 lane. It’s also apparently a RAID product, with twin SSD drives on the card set up in RAID 0 mode. This meant that testing this drive threw up some very strange results. Due to the all-in-one RAID 0 configuration, there’s no need to mess around with fussy drivers, and it can even be used as a bootable OS drive. At $2.14 per Gigabyte, it’s easily the most…

PRICE $379 www.sandisk.com.au SanDisk is a little like Samsung in that it’s one of the world’s biggest Flash memory makers, which can’t hurt when you’re building a product that is comprised primarily of said memory. This is possibly why the Extreme Pro comes with such a competitive price, of only 79 cents per Gigabyte. The good news is that performance hasn’t tanked with the price, but yet again we see another drive that fails to live up to the 850 Pro’s heights. Like the 850 Pro, this drive is now over a year old, but it hasn’t held up to the test of time quite so ably. It uses the company’s own SanDisk 2nd Generation 64Gbit 19nm MLC, but they’ve had to tap Marvell to provide the SSD controller, this…

PRICE $1499 www.intel.com Intel might have led the SSD market when consumer drives first became affordable, but the performance of its drives has played second fiddle to its reliability in recent years. Simply put, Intel drives weren’t as fast as the competition, but they were renowned for being basically indestructible. With the new 750 drive, Intel hasn’t just caught up to the rest of the pack – it’s left them eating its dust. This is thanks to the employment of Non-Volatile Memory Express technology, known as NVMe for short. It’s a new method of accessing the memory on the drive, and makes the most of the parallelism found in today’s SSDs. Where today’s AHCI drives only allow one command queue, with 32 commands per queue, NVMe boosts this exponentially, up…

PRICE $149 www.audio-technica.com.au Much cheaper than the ATH-R70x, this headset still shows off Audio Technica’s skill at making truly excellent headphones. As with the R70x, the M40x are a pair of headphones pure and simple. There are no in line controls, no mic, no flashy effects, just excellent sound quality and comfort. The design is simple but solid, with a single padded headband holding the two comfortably cushioned, hinged ear cups, each featuring a rare earth 40mm audio driver. The build quality is excellent and feels sturdy. The headband could afford to be a little more padded for added comfort but even with the current level of padding you can wear the ATH-M40x for hours with no problems. The simple design also makes them perfect for use on the go,…

PRICE $59 www.steelseries.com As soon as you take them out of the box you can tell that the Raw Prism is the budget little brother of the rest of the Siberia series. The build quality isn’t near that of its more expensive siblings, but that doesn’t mean it’s shoddily put together, just that it has been designed with the idea of keeping costs down to a minimum. Rather than the usual head band and floating strap design of the rest of the Siberia range, the Raw headset instead uses a single cushioned plastic headband to hold the large, cloth padded ear cups. Rather than a boom mic that snakes from the left ear cup, the Raw instead uses a discrete mic built into the ear cup, making it a little…

PRICE $6299 au.msi.com Welcome to the biggest, baddest gaming laptop money can buy. With a huge 18.4 inch display, it’s big enough to fit a full-sized SteelSeries mechanical keyboard, and it’s great to see MSI has used Cherry MX keys. Weighing a hefty 4.5kg it’s not exactly portable, but the specs inside more than justify its weight. The powerful Intel i7-4720HQ processor’s quad cores hit 3.6GHz under load, and MSI has paired it with not one, but two GeForce GTX 980M GPUs in SLI mode. Even The Witcher 3 will run like a dream on this configuration, with all settings maxed, which has to be a first for a gaming laptop. 16GB of DDR3 memory is plenty, while longterm storage is well catered for with 485GB of RAID 0 SSD…

PRICE $4,585 FOR REVIEW CONFIG, STARTS AT $2,999 www.alienware.com.au If you’re looking for something that inhabits the mid-ground between our $2400 systems and the rich-man’s Origin Genesis X99, the Area 51 from Alienware is surprisingly good value. Our sample was priced at around four and a half grand, which is about what we’d expect to pay for a high-end system packing dual GPUs and a premium CPU, and that’s exactly what the Area 51 delivered. We love Alienware’s proprietary case, which uses a very unique triangular layout to make it look quite unlike every other PC on the market. Slick strip-lighting on the exterior makes it look like a prop out of Tron, and the colours can be customised to match your interior design. It’s not just a good-looker though;…

PRICE $152 www.asus.com/au The ASUS Strix Tactic Pro is a huge keyboard. It’s both wide and deep but all of the real estate is used. To the left of the keyboard are a double row of programmable macro keys, under the space bar are another three thumb activated macro buttons and the function keys also double as programmable macro buttons, making for a rather formidable 21 macro buttons in all. The Tactic Pro keyboard we reviewed featured Cherry brown switches, but unlike many other mechanical keyboard manufacturers using Cherry switches, ASUS offers the full range of switch colours, so the keyboard is available with red, brown, blue or black switches. With the brown switches and their slightly tougher actuation than the reds, the Tactic Pro keyboard feels nice and solid,…

PRICE $79 www.asus.com Malky uses a RoG Gladius to lay out PC PowerPlay. That should be enough of a recommendation for most people, but if you need some more convincing as to the quality of this mouse, read on. While most gaming mice seem determined to impress by flashing up big numbers for polling and DPI, RoG seems to have taken a leaf out of the mechanical keyboard handbook when it came to designing the Gladius. The mouse still boasts up to 6400 DPI and a 2000hz polling rate, but the most interesting features of the mouse are literally under the surface. The top of the mouse can be easily removed to give access to the left and right button switches, each of which can be easily removed and replaced,…

We’d like to thank CORSAIR and GIGABYTE for sponsoring our trip to Computex 2015 CORSAIR BULLDOG In a year where exciting product announcements were harder to find than a sweat-free journalist in Taipei’s sauna-like humidity, Corsair’s big reveal stood head and shoulders above the pack. The Bulldog DIY 4K Gaming PC is a Small Form Factor, barebones machine designed to squat inside your home theatre AV rack, and comes packing a bunch of features that make this the top dog in town. We’re not too sure about the claims of it being 4K-ready, but it’s definitely the most impressive basis for a small gaming PC we’ve seen. While we don’t have the exact dimensions on hand, it’s slightly larger than the slim-line HTPC cases usually associated with the living room,…

Last but not least is the giant manufacturer of all things PC, ASUS. As usual it had one of the biggest booths at the show, yet surprisingly didn’t reveal too much about its upcoming range of new Intel motherboards. The Republic of Gamers area also didn’t have quite as many new reveals as we’ve seen in the past, suggesting ASUS is holding its cards close to its chest about imminent product launches. FREESYNC IN THE HIZZOUSE Two key products on display in the red-zone, aka Republic of Gamers, were ASUS’ new gamer focused displays, the MG279Q and MG278Q. Both ship with AMD’s new FreeSync technology, while also updating at the stupidly fast rate of 144Hz. They’re also both WQHD panels, with a resolution of 2560 x 1440, but the MG279Q…

Peripheral maker Roccat didn’t have a huge amount to show in their small meeting room in the Taipei Hyatt, but what they did have was quite impressive. NYTH MOUSE Labelled as an MMO mouse, but in reality a mouse suitable for anyone interested in customising their experience, the Nyth not only features interchangeable sides to make it wider or thinner depending on your preference, it also features space for up to 16 side buttons that can be swapped, moved or removed entirely depending on need. The new Roccat Swarm drivers and software suite finally unifies the driver/software package, and from what we’ve seen, setting up button and user profiles in the software will be a breeze, with a simple drag and drop system allowing users to choose button placement and…

PRICE $1419 www.intel.com.au Welcome to the granddaddy of Intel’s range of CPUs. Priced at more than triple that of its nearest Intel brethren, this is as expensive as it gets… but you’d be slightly insane to part with your moolah for this brute. The reason it costs so much is that it’s Intel’s first eight-cored CPU for the consumer market. It’s built on Intel’s 22nm process, and is comprised of 2.6 billion transistors. Unlike all of Intel’s other consumer chips, it uses the LGA 2011-3 Socket design, which is currently tied to the X99 chipset. Sadly this means upgrading from your old i7 2700K to this CPU isn’t possible without buying an entirely new motherboard, and X99 also requires DDR4 memory, making this one painfully expensive upgrade process. While having…

As the backbone to your PC, the motherboard can make or break your build. Yet with dozens of different motherboards on offer, all with confusing names and wildly intimidating lists of specifications, choosing the right one isn’t a simple affair. We’re here to point you in the right direction, looking at eight motherboards designed from the ground up for gamers. Before we look at each board, we’re going to give you some helpful pointers to understand the myriad of jargon associated with motherboards, helping you to decipher exactly which features you need, and which are a waste of money. MOBO JARGON 101 CHIPSET: this is the silicon that powers the motherboard, and Intel currently has two chipsets compatible with its Core series of processors. The H97 is a budget oriented…

PRICE $165 www.asus.com.au It mightn’t be mentioned on the packaging, but ASUS has enabled overclocking of Intel’s K-series CPUs on this H97-powered motherboard. This fact alone puts it at a bit of an advantage, but even if you weren’t thinking of overclocking it delivers a very value-packed board for the price. Twin PCIe 3.0 x16 slots are provided, yet it can only handle AMD’s CrossFire (no SLI support here), but this probably isn’t a great concern to those building a budget gaming rig. Interestingly ASUS has equipped the board with three legacy PCI slots, and another two PCIe x1; while this is great for owners of older PCI peripherals, we have to question whether it’s worth sacrificing so many PCIe slots for them. The M.2 port is a welcome addition,…

PRICE $399 www.gigabyte.com.au Now this is what we expect from an X99 board – check out the four full-length PCIe lanes, ready to swallow your quad-GPU setup. One of the biggest strengths of X99 is the number of PCIe lanes, so it’s nice to see Gigabyte make full use of them. Like the ASRock X99 board, Gigabyte has endowed its X99 beast with a single M.2 port, and it’s only of the x2 variety. Another SATAe port is included, while a whopping ten SATA 3 ports deliver enough room to mirror all of Pirate Bay if you have enough spare drives. Up to eight USB 3.0 and another eight USB 2.0 ports are available, provided all of the internal headers are utilised. Gigabyte is still the only company to use…

PRICE $299 www.gainward.com It might house one of the slower GPUs in our roundup, but that doesn’t stop this card from being an absolute behemoth. Looking like a portable refrigerator, the GTX 960 Phantom has one of the most unique cooler designs we’ve seen; unlike other coolers that mount the fans on top of the cooling fins, Gainward has instead tucked the fans away inside the cooling fins. It seems to do a damn fine job, as this card posted one of the lowest fan noise results in the roundup, but that could also have something to do with the relatively cool GPU running within. With a TDP of just 120W, the GTX 960 GPU is easily the coolest chip in our roundup. Thankfully Gainward has made the twin fans…

PRICE $269 au.msi.com Welcome to AMD’s latest budget graphics card, the R7 370. It might sound like a new product thanks to the flashy new title, but in reality it’s actually a rebadged version of an older graphics card that was a rebadged version of an older graphics card! The Pitcairn processor used in this product was originally released as the Radeon HD 7850, and then re-released as the R90 265, with a few minor adjustments along the way. It now has 1280 Stream Processors compared to the prior two products’ 1024, while the Texture Units have also slightly increased, from 64 up to 80. It comes with just 2GB of onboard GDDR5 memory over a 256-bit memory bus, while the GPU itself is stuck using AMD’s old GCN 1.0…

PRICE $689 www.sapphiretech.com The R9 390X is the top of the line in AMD’s new 300 series, and it’s yet another rebadged product from last year. However, this time AMD has actually made a meaningful change to the product, which should help it outperform its successor. This card is based on the same GPU as that found in the R9 290X, but AMD has increased the memory bandwidth. Instead of using 1350MHz GDDR5, it has endowed the R9 390X with 1525MHz GDDR5, giving it an effective memory speed of 6Gbps. This is large 20% increase over the 5Gbps found on the R9 290X, which should come into play at higher resolutions. It’s also doubled the amount of onboard memory up to a staggering 8GB, more than enough for 4K resolution.…

PRICE $799 www.benq.com.au It took a while to arrive, but AMD’s answer to G-Sync has finally hit our shores. Cheekily titled FreeSync, it’s actually not owned by AMD. Instead AMD did what NVIDIA could, and probably should, have done – it went straight to VESA, the folks who create display standards, and made FreeSync a part of the official DisplayPort standard. This is why BenQ doesn’t advertise the XL2730Z as having FreeSync. Instead, it uses the term “VESA Standard Adaptive-Sync”, which is what the new FreeSync standard is officially known as. VESA added Adaptive-Sync to the DisplayPort 1.2a standard, which means it’s open for any display makers to utilise. More specifically, it’s the creators of display scalers who will leverage the new standard, which should make it much cheaper to…

PRICE $219 www.corsair.com Considering the company has a whopping eight different SSD product categories, we expected the Neutron XT to deliver blazing performance. While it’s no slouch, unfortunately it’s still not quite fast enough to beat the best of the best. A quad core Phison PS3110-S10 powers this SSD, making it one of the only drives on the market to use a Phison controller. This in turn manages the Toshiba A19nm MLC flash memory, and it ships in the standard 2.5 inch form factor, with a depth of 7mm, making it suitable for most laptops. A generous five year warranty is included, suggesting that Corsair has faith in the SmartECC™ and SmartRefresh™ data protection technologies provided by the Phison controller. It also includes SmartFlush™ and GuaranteedFlush™ protection in the case…

PRICE $272 www.crucial.com At a mere 69 cents per Gigabyte, the MX200 is easily the most affordable SSD in our roundup, coming in well below the price of other SATA 3 drives. Crucial has positioned this as the perfect entry-level drive, yet has managed to deliver a budget package that isn’t embarrassingly slow. Marvell has been tasked with supplying the SSD controller on this drive, in the form of the 88SS9189 SATA controller. This is used to control the 16nm synchronous MLC NAND memory used on the drive, and it uses Dynamic Write Acceleration which dynamically switches the MLC memory to SLC on the fly. RAIN and Exclusive Data Defense are two of the techniques used by this drive to stop data corruption, and it even includes 256-bit AES encryption,…

PRICE $375 www.samsung.com.au Welcome to the SATA 3 SSD that has hurt the SSD industry like no other. Samsung’s 850 Pro continually sets the benchmark for blistering performance at an excellent price, and it has left its competitors reeling since releasing over a year ago. Considering its age, we’re astounded that this single SSD is still able to teach brand new models a thing or two, proving just how powerful making every component in your SSD in-house can be. Samsung makes every single component used in the 850 Pro, from the 3-core MEX controller to the Samsung V-NAND Flash memory used within. As the biggest manufacturer of NAND Flash memory in the world, Samsung obviously knows a thing or two about building the fastest memory possible, and the V-NAND used…

PRICE $239 www.roccat.org The successor of the Roccat Kave 5.1, the XTD looks all but identical to its predecessor, but crams a lot more functionality into the updated headset for only a relatively small increase in price. The cushioned headband holds two chunky, ear cups, each with an equally chunky faux leather ear cushion. At first glance they look rather uncomfortable, and indeed the cushions are rather stiff for the first few hours of wearing them, but the headset is deceptively comfortable. The microphone is removable but this seems a little unnecessary as the headphones aren’t particularly portable and are connected by four analogue jacks for the audio channels and a USB connector for power so aren’t any use for on the go listening. The big difference between the Kave…

PRICE $255 www.steelseries.com The absurdly massive, overstuffed pads on the Elite Prism make the headset look something like a set of training wheels for your head. They’re huge. On the upside this sheer size does make for some good passive noise cancelling, but it also makes the headset very hot. Ear sweat, and the weight make for some less than entirely comfortable gaming sessions. The design as a whole works, with a nicely padded strap supporting the majority of the weight and each ear cup featuring discrete volume and mic controls. As the premium Siberia headset, the Elite Prism comes with a suite of great extras, including a USB sound card that delivers virtual 5.1 surround and a line out port in the right ear cup for sharing audio with…

PRICE $149 www.kingston.com The simple and chunky design of the HyperX Cloud II headset is all but identical to that of the original HyperX Cloud and indeed the underlying tech is only a slight revision on the original, but thanks to the excellent design and performance of Kingston’s first gaming headset, the Cloud II is as example of a good thing made better through iteration. Two huge 53mm drivers provide excellent sound quality and not just for the price range. The full range of sound is excellent, all the way from the punchy bass through to the clear treble. In addition to the standard 3.5mm jack that makes the Cloud 2 a suitable headset for nearly any audio device, the headset also comes with a USB virtual 7.1 soundcard that…

PRICE $2899 www.aorus.com If you want a highly mobile gaming laptop that packs a decent punch, you’re going to need to shell out some serious dosh to do so. The X3 Plus V3 is one such gaming laptop; weighing just 1.87kg it’s about as small as a real gaming laptop can get, yet it’s got the grunt to handle most of today’s games. It’s also got a price tag that is close enough to three grand that you can smell the pile of 30 $100 notes that it costs. The 13.3 inch display packs in an incredible 3200 x 1800 resolution, and it’s an absolute stunner. It’d require dual GPUs to run games at this resolution, but there’s simply no room inside this laptop for such a solution, so Aorus…

3DMARK Firestrike Score GRID AUTOSPORT SHADOW OF MORDOR…

PRICE $1299 www.alienware.com.au The Alpha is one of the more remarkable pre-built gaming PCs that Aussies can buy. Designed by Alienware to deliver a full gaming PC experience in a form factor around half the size of a Playstation 4, it’s easily the smallest gaming PC money can buy. To make it so small Alienware had to get the help of NVIDIA to create a custom GPU, but can such a small, affordable box really deliver the performance demanded by today’s power-guzzling games? In a word, no. We should highlight just how tiny the Alpha is, as that’s its key selling point. At 55mm high, by 200mm wide and long, it’s frickin’ small. The large external powerpack is about the same size as an Xbox 360’s though, so you’ll need…

PRICE $280 www.cherrycorp.com When it comes to mechanical keyboard switches, German switch manufacturer Cherry sits high on the top of the mountain. All of their switches are in massive demand, so much so that for a while they couldn’t keep up with orders. Considering the popularity of the switches in gaming keyboards and how much technology is crammed into each new product on the market, it’s refreshing to see that the new Cherry MX Board 6.0 is a pretty bare bones affair. It’s a keyboard that features all of the standard keys and little more. This is precisely what makes it such a joy to use. The keyboard is built around two things, the Cherry Red switch and Cherry’s new “Realkey” technology. Those fond of the softer feel of the…

PRICE $89 www.cougargaming.com If you a right thumb spacebar user the Cougar 500k is rendered nearly useless for you right out of the box. Thanks to a split spacebar design, the right half of the spacebar is used as a macro button whereas the left is used for space. You can set the macro button to act as a space bar in the Cougar UIX driver, but having to go online, download and install the driver and then hotkey the G6 macro key to work as a spacebar seems like a pretty big hurdle to jump just to be able to type properly. Although the raised keys make the Cougar 500k look like a mechanical keyboard, it’s actually a hybrid membrane keyboard, with sprung keys pressing rubber nubs for actuation.…

PRICE $50 www.asus.com Designed with input from professional gaming team, Taiwan Assassins, the RoG Sica is a budget, ambidextrous mouse intended for fast clicky games like MOBAs. Its design is austere but appealing, with a simple narrow body separated from the left and right mouse buttons. The buttons are separate to the body to shorten the actuation length and increase the click response time. That’s the theory anyway. We didn’t really experience any increased click response, but then again, none of us are professional MOBA gamers. In keeping with the intended use of the mouse, the rubber side grips are place quite far back, making it more suitable for the claw style fingertip grip favoured by a number of professional gamers. Even so, the ambidextrous design is quite comfortable no…