Skylake Deep Dive

Intel’s latest architecture is finally here, so we got investigating

Well, here you have it folks. Skylake hath cometh to the people, and with it comes the absolute pinnacle of Intel’s microprocessing technology. Let’s just forget about Broadwell. Its short life time has been invaluable to us PC enthusiasts, but alas, it was never meant to be.

Scythe Ninja 4

Stealthily lives up to its name

Scythe’s fourth-gen flagship CPU cooler – successor to the highly successful Ninja 3Rev. B – has just launched, and it’sabit of a whopper. But while measuring in at 130 x 130 x 155mm, and weighing 900g (with a fan), it still manages to be some 180g lighter than its predecessor.

Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti Arctic Storm

A low-temp, low-noise, beauty

At this point, we’re probably all aware of the power wielded by the GTX 980 Ti. It’s a graphics processor sitting somewhere between polygon perfection and a trip to your local loan shark. Granted, it’s quite a bit cheaper than a Titan X, and contains only half the memory and a couple of hundred fewer CUDA cores. Yet, with a kick in the overclocking chops, it’ll easily keep pace, if not outperform that juggernaut when push comes to shove. So what gives? Why are we looking at this card again? After all, it’s already in this month’s group test.

Asus STRIX R9 Fury Direct CU III OC

A flagship card oozing silent gaming fury

AMD has fallen short in the last month. With many of us hoping the red team would finally pull back a win from the boys in green, it was with disappointment that we witnessed those Fury X benchmarks come through. All in all, the battle seemed lost. The war was over. Until now.

Gigabyte P55K V4

Two chips. One laptop. What’s that remind us of...

OK, maybe not. But the Gigabyte P55K in this revised v4 format does come with plenty of interesting newness. Don’t let its familiar threads fool you. For starters, the fancy Core i7-5700HQ CPU debuts Intel’s new Broadwell architecture in quad-core format for laptops. In outright performance terms, it’s not a dramatic step forward over older Haswell models.