Others/Mice & Keyboards
by stefan
@ 2024-11-17
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We are more into casual gaming rather than competitive, but we always like to take a spin in The First Descendant, SMITE 2 or more relaxed games such as Alan Wake 2, New World Aeternum, Throne and Liberty or Diablo IV. The mouse feels great thanks to the low weight, powerful sensor, while the smooth, matte surface offers quite a bit of grip, without the need of using the extra tapes. The smaller footprint does accommodate with ease smaller hands as well, the docking station is a quality-of-life improvement (we can use the BIOS option to have USB ports enabled while the computer is off and charge it overnight) and the battery life is great!
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Memory
by stefan
@ 2024-11-10
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The Crucial Pro Overclocking 64GB (4x16GB) DDR5-6000 White setup is behaving the same as the black one we have looked in the past and our test system succeeded to run both XMP profiles without any stability issues or requirement of extra voltage increase. The 4-module configuration succeeds in some cases to perform even better in terms of performance versus a 2-module setup and thanks to the included sinks, heat accumulation is not an issue even if all motherboard slots are occupied.
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Others/All-in-one PC
by stefan
@ 2024-11-03
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The DS50U7 barebone from Shuttle did impress us in terms of performance, considering we are talking about a fanless design. PL1 is limited to 15W, while PL2 is limited to 17W, while in the case of the ECS LIVA Z5 Plus with active cooling and the i5-1335U SoC, we noted PL1 set at 20W and PL2 set at 39W, which is considerably higher; despite that, we see the i7-1355U winning in some cases, due to the implementation of DDR5 memory, higher boost on the iGPU clock, more execution units, but also a higher boost on the CPU, helping quite a bit in low to medium loads, a situation which is frequently found when using the device like 90% of the…
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Others/All-in-one PC
by stefan
@ 2024-10-27
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The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H based on the Meteor Lake architecture does come with quite a unique core architecture, with 4 Redwood P-Cores, 8 Crestmont E-Cores and 2 LP E-Cores for a total of 18 total threads (P-Cores feature HT), does integrate a dedicated NPU for supporting the latest AI platforms, while the GPU is based on Intel Arc Graphics with 7 Xe cores supporting the latest technologies including Ray Tracing. As we have noted from the test results the ECS LIVA 7 Plus is topping our charts in terms of performance and one of the main reasons would be the lack of aggressive power capping other models do employ to accommodate less elaborated cooling systems.
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Storage/SSD
by stefan
@ 2024-10-20
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Thanks to the large storage capacity, the Ace A55 can be successfully used as a secondary storage drive where transfer rates are not crucial. The drive is equipped with a healthy amount of pseudoSLC cache, so we needed to fill over 1TB of data for noticing drops in write speeds, while the TBW rating is set at 2000 for the 4TB SKU.
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Audio/Others
by stefan
@ 2024-10-16
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We have tested ARA in games such as The Crew Motorfest, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, Dustborn but also Diablo 4; the EQ this product does use results in clear highs, balanced mids, while the bass is not overpowering the whole experience. The offered volume is impressively loud, meaning we never felt the need to use it over 50%, while the overall low weight of about 311g is ideal not to notice you are wearing the headset after longer gaming sessions. ARA is constructed from good quality plastic so it won’t creak during adjustment process.
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