Tag: Hardware

The main question is, do you really need a dedicated sound card. Depends on the motherboard you’ve selected. With the ASUS P8Z77-V (a PC Magazine Editors Choice), you get onboard full 7 channel sound including an optical SP/DIF output and analog RCA jacks, so no need for this

Well power supplies don’t seem to have changed much. People are still using ATX connectors and so forth. In fact I have a relatively quiet 750W ATX power supplly around somewhere from five years ago and it seems like it should work. But Tom’s Hardware and SilentPCReview.com did a overview of the issues there which are…

The biggest issue with cases is having something that is small but big enough to work in. And if you are going to liquid cooling, something that can actually handle a huge radiator. Tom’s Hardware did a great review of full sized ATX cases that are actually big enough to put a three fan radiator…

I’ve always wanted to build a watercooled case. A few years ago, I wanted to build a silent PC and loved silentpcreview.com, but now with water cooling becoming much more turnkey, it makes some sense to go all water cooled and make your machine silent overclockable. Tom’s Hardware has a pretty good guide, but the…

Time once again to learn the in’s and out’s of memory which right now is SDRAM DDR3, but the basic facts are that you can overclock memory a little and in most benchmarks, once you go from vanilla DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2133, you have had a huge improvement in performance at a relatively low cost. If…

Well this is a huge area encompassing both the system ram and also the disk. Right now it feels like going solid state on everything is the way to go, so we are thinking just get a 500GB SSD or maybe a pair and put the rest of the stuff on a NAS somewhere. I…

Well, the world is turning back a little. For the true gamer, you can either get a keyboard full of extra keys for macros or go old school and get mechanical keys. These are the old IBM Selectric or original IBM PC keyboards (I wish I kept mine). They go clack, clack, but they feel…

There are lots of them out there but some quick review at Tom’s Hardware. The unit you get depends a little bit on what you want to do. The big decision is whether to go water cooled or not. If you do then a pair of PNYs (as described by overclocker.com)will really help make a…

Well the big news is that you fit this monster Core i7-3770K in just a tiny motherboard based on the Z77 or you can a big board with room for 4 graphics processors all based on the same firmware. The summary is the size of the board depends on how many graphics cards you will…