Biostar Z97W Gaming

Welcome to the year 2005

What can we say about Biostar? As a company, some of us weren't even aware it existed until a month ago. That was until it debuted a new range of rather interesting consumer Z170 boards at Computex, boards with a strange ability to swap between using two sticks of DDR3 or two sticks of DDR4, depending on your budget. The Taiwanese manufacturer, of course, has actually been around for decades, but has traditionally leaned more toward business-to-business sales, as opposed to the enthusiast end of the market. So, what can be said for its Z97 gaming motherboard?

The High-Bandwidth Bomb

The PC platform, and motherboards in particular, are about to drop a bomb on your desktop

In the future, motherboards will be all about bandwidth. Actually, they already are. That’s because the big news for the PC is a whole bunch of new interconnects. And they’re all about boosting bandwidth. They’re also borderline baffling. Firstly, there’s the crazy nomenclature. Whoever thought that "SFF-8639" was a keeper needs to be strung up with SATA cables. More on that later. The confusing naming, that is, not death by middling-bandwith cable connects.

Acer V17 Nitro Black Edition

This mainstream gaming notebook

A name like V17 Nitro Black Edition inspires images of fast cars and powerful engines. Acer, not normally a company associated with high-performance systems, might be trying to change its image, it seems. And indeed, on the surface, the V17 packs some decent hardware, such as a gimmicky 3D RealSense camera. But while some parts are good choices, others leave us wanting.

Dial M for Android

Android M will usher in a new era of smartphones. Darren Yates investigates Google’s next-generation Android OS and the major advances we’ll see

Android has come a long way in a relatively short space of time since its launch in the HTC Dream in 2008. With Google’s popular I/O conference having come and gone for another year, the search giant has pulled back the curtain on its next Android release, for now called ‘Android M’. Not only will it pick up where Lollipop left off in terms of power management, it’ll coincide with some impressive new features such as faster charging speeds, thanks in part to the arrival of new USB hardware. Here’s a taste of what we can expect to see later this year.

Boot Linux faster

Neil Bothwick goes back to the start of Linux, even before root existed

When you boot your computer, the bootloader only needs two pieces of information: the path to the kernel and the location of your root filesystem, which is then passed to the kernel. In Grub, this would look something like:

linux /boot/vmlinux-3.19.0 root=/dev/sda1