7Review – Page 113 – Home cinema product reviews!

Cougar 2001M Mouse

The build quality of the 200K keyboard is mirrored, unsurprisingly in Cougar’s 200M gaming mouse. It’s a wholly plastic construction, though Cougar did use a good specification braided cable for the USB connection. Like the keyboard there is lighting, but it’s exclusively orange in this case, and the backlit Cougar logo is actually obscured when … Read more

Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide

The world of Warhammer is being invaded by the Skaven, as the dirty ratmen emerge to usher in the End Times…Rat Shark’s offices are being invaded.There are armies on the march, vile Skaven inhabiting showcases, shelves, and desktops. A couple of giants and a band of ogres have taken over the larger meeting room, and … Read more

Lindy USB 3.0 To SATA-3 Drive Adapter

Tired of large external drive caddies? Time for something smaller and fasterWe often have the problem of suddenly coming across an old hard drive, found in the bottom of a drawer, and wanting to know its contents without having to open up a PC case and fit it. Similarly, we have a few spare, smaller … Read more

Acer Aspire Switch 11

Can Acer make the hybrid PC an affordable option?Having recently covered the high-end Dell Latitude 7350, I’ve been interested in seeing a similar concept that doesn’t cost nearly a grand.The Acer Aspire Switch 11 has many design similarities but costs just a third of the Dell. The Acer might be more affordable, but does it … Read more

Zoner Photo Studio 17

Organise and edit your digital camera and phone photosZoner Photo Studio has grown from a simple image organiser into a multi-function toolkit with a wide range of features. The idea is that it’s a one-stop shop for all your photo requirements. This latest version packs in more features than ever, but it has a price … Read more

Ram Mia

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I recently found I was getting hard fault’ memory errors. When I turn on my system there are several minutes where it is unusable. Once it has done that, it operates as normal. My start-up processes are trimmed down to the bare minimum. I believe hard faults are caused by Windows running out of memory … Read more

Asus TUF Gryphon Z97 Armour Edition

Asus’s “The Ultimate Force”, aka TUF, series of motherboards have been around for several years now, and they all share one very unique feature. As you can see from the images, a special “armour” covering is available for the board that covers most of the front of the PCB. This is an optional extra that … Read more

ASRock Z97M Pro4

The ASRock Z97M Pro4 is roughly half the cost of the more expensive boards in this roundup. As such, it’d be unfair to expect the wealth of features found on the premium boards, but ASRock has a reputation for delivering surprising value in its a ordable products. Can the Z97M Pro4 live up to this … Read more

MSI Wind Box DC111

A very cheap mini PCThe MSI Wind Box DC111 is an incredibly cheap mini Windows 8.1 PC that’s roughly the size of a router. Although we’ve seen even smaller mini PCs, this is still impressively compact. The DC111 comes with a stand as it needs to be kept upright due to the cooling vents on … Read more

How soon will we be using robots at home?

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Humans have dreamt about having a mechanical Jeeves for decades, but the current reality is a lot more limited. When science-fiction writers of the Fifties and Sixties imagined what household robots of the future would look like, they typically described a friendly humanoid cyborg who walked and talked much like we do. These were in … Read more

zalMan reserator 3 Max dual

Bizarre looks means Reserator.

this revieWer’s first exPerienCe of a water cooled PC was with Zalman’s original Reserator. It was a huge water tower which stood outside your machine, cycling hot water out and feeding cold water back into the chassis. Since then Zalman has become one of the biggest names in PC cooling; it was a bit of a worry when it s fied for bankruptcy protection in late 2014.

Thankfully Zalman looks to have escaped by the skin of its heatsinks, which is good news given how effective this weird-looking Reserator 3 Max Dual is. Of all the coolers in this test, the Zalman offers the lowest peak temperatures both at stock speeds and with the overclocked i7-4770K. It manages this in a slightly different way, using a heat-pipe/ heatsink combo which looks more vapour chamber than water cooler.

Length or girth? Length please.

the Pair of therMaltake Water 3.0 coolers in this month’s test offer two ways of looking at the whole liquid-chilling process – do you go for a super-long, 360mm radiator or do you plump for a 120mm fat-boy? This here Water 3.0 Pro is that fatboy, offering a radiator that’s getting on for twice the girth of its Ultimate sibling.

And, were it down to pure cooling performance alone, you could easily make a case for this chubby bast. It is the absolute coolest of all the 120mm coolers in the test, and is capably trading blows with the downright chilliest of even the 240mm jobs. It’s not just about the peak cooling performance either – the time to get back to idle temps is impressively quick too, especially for a smaller radiator.