Saturday 17 October 2015

Oblivion Gladiator

Oblivion Gladiator

Newcomer Oblivion has opted for an eye-catching black and orange colour scheme for the Gladiator, and it looks attractive with its large swathes of colour and little details. The pipes that flow down from the Raijintek Triton’s 240mm reservoir are filled with orange coolant. Meanwhile, the Gigabyte motherboard mixes its black PCB with orange heatsinks, and the trio of intake fans and single exhaust spinner have all been replaced with orange-bordered Alpenföhn models. It’s a great effort at colour coordination.

Box Cube Predator

Box Cube Predator

This system from Birmingham-based builder Box is one of the largest PCs we’ve ever seen. The Corsair Graphite 780T weighs 11kg on its own and stretches 637mm from its base to its roof – and those dimensions, and the black and white colour scheme ensures it will stand out like a monolith in any room.

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano

Chillblast Fusion Fury Nano

Chillblast’s Fusion Nano might be small, but it uses the stupendous AMD Radeon R9 Nano to cram an unprecedented amount of power inside its tiny case. The R9 Nano uses the Fiji GPU core that underpins its Fury X cards, and the use of 4GB of highbandwidth memory on the GPU package, rather than big GDDR5 chips, has enabled AMD to use a pint-sized PCB too.

CM Storm Quick Fire XTi

CM Storm Quick Fire XTi

Most keyboards with complicated macro and lighting customisation options manage these features through software. There are a few exceptions, however, and adding itself to that list is CM Storm’s Quick Fire XTi. This new keyboard offers multi-colour per-key backlighting, five on-board profiles and programmable macros for almost every key, yet it’s also fully plug-and-play with no need for software.

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

Asus Z170i Pro Gaming

We’re expecting a bunch of new mini-ITX offerings to land in the next few weeks as well, from Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock, as well as the highly anticipated Maximus VIII Impact from Asus. For now, though, the Z170i Pro Gaming is one of few options available if you’re looking to build a mini-ITX Skylake system.

EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified ACX 2.0+

EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified ACX 2.0+

EVGA has ten GTX 980 Ti cards in its roster, and the Classified sits at the top, at least until the K|NGP|N edition is released. With a price of £620 inc VAT, however, it needs to prove itself.

AMD Radeon R9 Nano

AMD Radeon R9 Nano

AMD has taken the Fury X’s Fiji GPU, put it in a dualslot card that’s just 6in long, and is claiming it’s cool, quiet and capable of high-detail 4K gaming. All of the R9 Fury X’s 4,096 cores, 256 texture units and 64 ROPs are enabled in the R9 Nano. It also has the same 4096-bit wide memory bus, which is connected to 4GB of HBM. HBM has a far smaller physical footprint than GDDR5, as it’s integrated onto the same ASIC as the GPU, which is the key enabler of the Nano’s size.

Thecus W2000

Thecus W2000

Thecus’ W2000 distinguishes itself from much of the usual dual-bay competition by using Windows Server 2012 – essentially a massively cut-down copy of Windows 8, instead of an in-house OS. In fact, the OS is so cut down that you have to install many services to even be able to create shared network folders.