Zotac ZBOX CI662 nano Fanless mini-PC Review: Second Stab at Silencing Succeeds

Zotac is one of the major players in the SFF PC space, having marketed ultra-compact form-factor machines even before the NUCs took off. The growth in that segment has...

16 by Ganesh T S on 1/5/2021

ASRock DeskMini H470 Review: A No-Frills LGA 1200 mini-PC Platform

The mini-STX form-factor was introduced by Intel in 2015 to provide additional options in the burgeoning small form-factor (SFF) PC space. Since then, vendors such as ASRock, ECS, and...

26 by Ganesh T S on 12/29/2020

Intel's Maple Ridge (JHL8540) Thunderbolt 4 Controller Now Shipping

Following the launch of Thunderbolt 4 earlier this year as part of Intel's Tiger Lake CPUs, the next piece of the TB4 hardware stack has dropped this week with...

79 by Ganesh T S on 12/23/2020

ECS LIVA Z3 Plus Review: Compact Comet Lake NUC Clone Cuts Corners

ECS is a well-known OEM in computing circles, known for building motherboards, computers, and industrial / embedded systems for other vendors. Some of their motherboards and small form-factor PCs...

15 by Ganesh T S on 12/22/2020

Hands On: ASRock 4X4 BOX-4800U Out-of-Band Management using Realtek DASH

Many computing use-cases require out-of-band management. For example, rack-mounted servers have dedicated LAN ports that connect to a baseboard management controller (BMC) chip for this purpose. PCs used in...

9 by Ganesh T S on 12/16/2020

Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q USB / Thunderbolt 3 Dual Mode External SSD Review: Yin and Yang

The external storage market has shown renewed vigor in recent years, thanks in part to growth fueled by bus-powered flash-based storage solutions. The introduction of 3D NAND, coupled with...

14 by Ganesh T S on 12/14/2020

QNAP Launches QHora-301W: An Affordable Wi-Fi 6 Router with Dual 10GBASE-T Ports

QNAP is a well-known manufacturer of network-attached storage (NAS) units. Recently they have been testing the waters in allied areas such as switches and Wi-Fi expansion cards. As a...

33 by Ganesh T S on 12/1/2020

ASRock Brings Zen 2 NUC : 4X4 BOX-4800U Renoir Mini-PC Reviewed

AMD-based ultra-compact form-factor (UCFF) systems are slowly gaining market acceptance, with the Zen architecture slowly catching up with Intel on both the performance as well as power consumption front...

53 by Ganesh T S on 11/25/2020

Sabrent Rocket Nano Rugged IP67 Portable SSD Review: NVMe in a M.2 2242 Enclosure

Portable bus-powered SSDs are a growing segment of the direct-attached storage market. The ongoing glut in flash memory (and the growing confidence of flash vendors in QLC) has brought...

11 by Ganesh T S on 10/30/2020

Akasa Turing Fanless Case Review: Unrivalled Noiseless NUC

Silent computing systems are preferable for a multitude of use-cases ranging from industrial applications (where dust and fans make for a troublesome configuration) to noiseless HTPCs (particularly for audiophiles)...

28 by Ganesh T S on 10/26/2020

Crucial Portable SSD X6 and X8 2TB Review: QLC for Storage On-the-Go

Bus-powered portable flash-based storage solutions are one of the growing segments in the consumer-focused direct-attached storage market. The emergence of 3D NAND with TLC and QLC has brought down...

22 by Ganesh T S on 10/21/2020

Test Driving SPECviewperf 2020: A Look At The Latest In Workstation GPU Benchmarks

Over the years, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's SPECviewperf benchmark has become the industry standard for workstation GPU benchmarking. Owing to the fact that, unlike video games, there's little...

27 by Ganesh T S on 10/16/2020

Samsung PRO Plus and EVO Plus SDXC UHS-I 128GB Memory Cards Capsule Review

Samsung had last revamped their SDXC cards lineup back in 2014 to delineate them into the standard, PRO, and EVO categories. Since then, the company slowly phased out the...

21 by Ganesh T S on 10/14/2020

ASRock Industrial's NUC 1100 BOX Series Brings Tiger Lake to UCFF Systems

Intel's introduction of the Tiger Lake U-series processors with support for a range of TDPs up to 28W has resulted in vendors launching a number of interesting systems with...

13 by Ganesh T S on 10/13/2020

USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 State of the Ecosystem Review: Where Does 20Gbps USB Stand in 2020?

USB has emerged as the mainstream interface of choice for data transfer from computing platforms to external storage devices. Thunderbolt has traditionally been thought of as a high-end alternative...

81 by Ganesh T S on 10/5/2020

SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2 and WD My Passport SSD (2020) Review

External bus-powered storage devices have grown both in storage capacity as well as speeds over the last decade. Thanks to rapid advancements in flash technology (including the advent of...

7 by Ganesh T S on 9/30/2020

Western Digital Unveils USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 SanDisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD v2

The SanDisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD released in 2019 has been one of the top performers in the external flash storage market segment. Putting a high-end WD Black SN750-class...

14 by Ganesh T S on 9/30/2020

GIGABYTE Unveils BRIX PRO Mini-PCs with Tiger Lake-U

Intel's Tiger Lake launch was focused on ultrabooks and notebooks, as various SKUs with TDP ranging from 7 to 28W were launched. The performance of Intel's low-power parts (U-...

43 by Ganesh T S on 9/29/2020

Patriot PXD 1TB M.2 PCIe Type-C External SSD Capsule Review

High-performance bus-powered direct-attached storage units have become very popular, thanks to the advent of high-speed interfaces and technologies such as USB 3.2 Gen 2, NVMe, and 3D NAND flash...

5 by Ganesh T S on 9/29/2020

MinisForum Unveils EliteMini H31G: 65W CPU & 75W GPU in a Compact Mini-PC

MinisForum has been making some interesting moves in the last few months with their computing platforms, ranging from the DMAF5 based on the Ryzen 3000H-series SoCs to the Ice...

3 by Ganesh T S on 9/29/2020

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