For more than a decade tech-savvy users on a budget would commonly buy a sub-$100 CPU and achieve performance comparable to $200-$300 chips by overclocking. These days Intel locks down its lower end parts, but to mark the 20th anniversary of its Pentium brand, they've released a fully unlocked dual-core Pentium G3258 for $72 -- just what the overclocking community has been waiting for. We'll put it through its paces in a couple of builds of our own.
While we've long moved away from the early days of the mainframe and thin clients, there are some areas of computing where we're seeing a push back to similar architectures. We'll take a look at some of the more common advantages and disadvantages of virtual desktops, offer our general impressions on using them, and make some educated guesses as to whether virtual desktops truly are the future of computing or if they will likely remain a niche technology.
Silverstone's Raven RV01 caught our attention back in 2008 with a unique chassis layout that turned the motherboard upward so its I/O panel was on top of the enclosure instead of behind. Called the "stack effect," the design was highly original and more importantly, extremely effective for cooling. 2014's RV05 sticks to this layout but Silverstone claims to have eliminated much of the wasted space in previous models while bringing one of its better looking designs so far.
Shopping for a new enthusiast GPU? Assuming you want the best value, your pick will be between the Radeon R9 280X and the GeForce GTX 770. To us the former is a better value so the decision is more about sifting through a handful competing brands. To make that process a little easier, we're going to compare what we think are the best five R9 280X cards.
Much of the ECC versus Non-ECC argument comes down to speed versus reliability. The reliability argument at least is easy to validate, but to settle the question of whether ECC actually lowers system performance, we ran a series of benchmarks with standard RAM, ECC RAM, and Registered ECC RAM that all run at the exact same frequency, timings, and voltage.
