Tuesday 22 September 2015

Super Flower Leadex Platinum 850W

Super Flower Leadex Platinum 850W

The Leadex Platinum 850W boasts 80 Plus Platinum certification for just £123 inc VAT. This PSU has a single-rail design, delivering 70.8A on the 12V rail. It can also run in semi-passive mode by switching the ‘Eco’-button on the back. Meanwhile, the many connectors are mounted on flat cables that are more than long enough for any system. Unlike the other 850W models on test, the Super Flower ‘only’ has four PCI-E graphics connectors, but realistically, you’re very unlikely to need more from an 850W PSU anyway.

SilverStone Strider Gold S 750W

SilverStone Strider Gold S 750W

SilverStone’s Strider Gold S is reasonably priced at £96 inc VAT, and offers pretty much everything you could want in the features department, including four PCI-E graphics connectors and plenty of SATA and Molex plugs, as well as long, flat cables and a fully modular design. The enclosure is surprisingly small too, measuring just 141mm long, so it will fit in plenty of cases.

Fractal Design Edison M 750W

Fractal Design Edison M 750W

Swedish brand Fractal Design is represented in this segment by the Edison M 750W, an 80 Plus Gold unit with modular cabling, denoted by the ‘M’ in the model name. The unit distinguishes itself visually through Fractal’s signature white fan, which is visible underneath the grille.

EVGA SuperNova G2 750W

EVGA SuperNova G2 750W

EVGA’s entrant in this segment is the SuperNova G2 750W, and like EVGA’s 550W PSU on test, it comes in at a very tempting price. What’s more, the low price of £87 inc VAT doesn’t seem to have had any impact on the feature set. It has a fully modular design and a lot of attractive, long, sleeved cables. The cable set includes four PCI-E graphics plugs, which is plenty for a PSU in this class and, remarkably, the SuperNova G2 measures only 140mm long, meaning you can fit it into just about any case.

Corsair RM750i

Corsair RM750i

Corsair’s RM Series justifiably won a lot of praise when it entered the market, bringing 80 Plus Gold-rated PSUs to a new price point, and performing well in all departments. One aspect of the range kept haunting the company, though, at least with demanding users: its use of Taiwanese rather than Japanese capacitors, as the latter are perceived as being superior.

Dirt Rally

Dirt Rally

It’ll leave skid marks on more than your screen

Three years ago, Codemasters’s smoothrunning Dirt series hit a filthy great pothole, otherwise known as Dirt: Showdown. Sure, this wasn’t necessarily the greatest disappointment in racing game history—it’s up against Need for Speed: ProStreet and Test Drive Unlimited 2 for that honor—but it marked a low point in the series’s decline from rally simulator to arcade smash-‘emup. So, just as any movie or game franchise still worth a buck inevitably gets a reboot, Codemasters is back to repair the damage.

Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X

Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X

While all the spotlight is on the latest AMD Fury line of graphic cards, AMD has also updated a bunch of their other cards to cater to the much more demanding mid to uppermidrange market. This includes revamping their existing cards, namely the Hawaii chipset to get more out of them. Paired with the released of Microsoft’s latest OS, Windows 10, it should squeeze out more performance out of a reliable baseline. One of the refreshed GPU is the R9 390X. Rated just below the Fury range of graphic card, would this card prove you can still teach an old dog new tricks? Let's find out.

LG 55EC930T Curved OLED TV

LG 55EC930T Curved OLED TV

We tech enthusiasts like to cover many and various things, but there are some that we really don't encounter much of, like televisions. TVs are something we don't get much chances to review and to be fair, aren't products that people consider buying regularly. However, because an individual might only think of getting a new one every few years, it's probably even more important that we review TVs so that consumers can make informed decisions. Of course, when LG asked if we'd like to review one of their newer models we jumped at the chance. Here's what we thought of LG's latest Curved OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) TV.

Acer XR341CK

Acer XR341CK

Curved monitors have been coming in one after another, which is great for us since we get to test it first. This time around, we've gotten our hands on the Acer XR341CK that is also a 34-inch 21:9 aspect ratio curved monitor. In this review, I'll mention what Acer has done differently compared to some of the other curved monitors, and how it performs.