Ivy bridge articles

Intel Ivy Bridge-E Debuts: Core i7-4960X Review

Haswell has been out in the wild for 3 months now, while Sandy Bridge-E has remained Intel's "ultimate" desktop platform for almost 2 years. However Intel is now ready for a refresh of its Extreme platform, but they won't be skipping the Ivy Bridge architecture and moving straight to Haswell.

Enter the Core i7-4960X which still features 6 cores, 12 threads, 15MB L3 cache, quad-channel DDR3 memory and is supported by the same aging X79 chipset. This doesn't sound very exciting, so what's new?

Building a Thin Mini-ITX PC: Small and Silent Performance

The idea behind the Thin Mini-ITX form factor, besides the obvious which is to create seriously compact computers, is also to allow for DIY all-in-ones (think of little PCs you can attach to the back of your monitor). Having that said, we don't fully intend to go the all-in-one route in this article, but are aiming to build a powerful Thin Mini-ITX system that can be used in the office or at home as a media PC.

This is what our finished system should look like: extremely compact, powerful, and near silent operation, as in no-moving-parts silent. For less than $700 including a 256GB SSD, we believe you'll love what the final product will look like.