Asus N551JX

Great design and powerful components, but the screen mars an otherwise labs

winning effort

The Asus N551JX’s powerful internals place it at the non-portable end of the spectrum. It’s 32mm thick and weighs a wince-inducing 2.7kg, even without its large power adapter. You won’t tip over backwards if you sling it into a backpack, but it will definitely alter your centre of gravity.

D-Link PowerLine AV2 2000 Gigabit Network Kit

Most impressive performance

While Wi-Fi hardware vendors continue to make bold claims about ever-increasing speeds of wireless connectivity, a rival method of setting up a SOHO network has continued to quietly evolve in the background. Ethernet over Power, or EoP for short, uses your home or o€ffice’s electrical wiring to deliver data between two power points. In the early days of EoP, reliability and performance were both extremely lacking, but these issues have long since been solved. D-Link’s newest EoP kit is a prime example of how far the technology has come, promising to deliver Gigabit speeds if your home’s wiring is good enough.

Asus PG279Q

Built for super-human speeds

We’re all familiar with CPU, GPU and memory overclocking, but over the last few years another PC component has been at the heart of a niche group of tweakers. It turns out that several very a fordable Korean monitors are highly overclockable, with the ability to run refresh rates almost double that of their official standard. Asus has taken note of this trend, and has applied a factory overclock to its latest gaming display, the PG279Q. With an out-of-the-box refresh rate of a rather insane 165Hz, it’s the fastest gaming display ever officially sold at this speed. But how fast is too fast?

MSI GS40 6QE Phantom

MSI stitches up value mobile gaming

When it comes to gaming laptops, one company in particular seems to have the market stitched up. MSI has easily the widest range of gaming laptops in Australia, which is probably also why they tend to offer the best value. The new GS40 is a 14 incher that balances mobility with performance, and comes with the latest hardware from both Intel and NVIDIA.

Epson WorkForce ET-4550 EcoTank All-in-One Printer

Epson kills the ink cartridge scam

The only sure things in this life are death, taxes and the need to buy new printer ink cartridges every few months. Buying a set of new ink cartridges nowadays usually costs more than the price of the printer, and their low life span is the bane of every home office user’s existence. Epson has come to the rescue with its revolutionary range of EcoTank printers, of which the ET-4550 is the flagship model. As you’ll soon see, the days of ink cartridges are numbered.