Asus Z170-A

Asus augments its Z170 chipset series with something affordable

Since I covered the Skylake processor and its associated platform, I’ve been hunting for a motherboard that delivers an optimal intersection of price and performance.

Cheap H110- or H170 motherboards are good, but they lack overclocking features and PCIe lanes, among other things. The answer is the Z170 chipset, but the price puts many people off, with a few designs being well over £300.

But the Asus Z170-A costs less than £120, uses the same chipset and has many of the more desirable high-end features. So is the Asus Z179-A a bargain or are you missing out in some subtle way with it?

Tales From The Borderlands

As the series comes to an end, can we consider it a tale worth telling?

Over the last 11 years, Telltale Games has made a name for itself by producing pointand-click adventure games that adhere to many of the traditions of this genre. The episodic nature of these games differs from self-contained adventures of old, but the puzzle solving element is the same, especially in the titles that resurrect names like Sam & Max and Tales of Monkey Island. You find objects, talk to people and try to work out what’s required from you to progress. Sometimes, a walkthrough is your only hope.

Movie Edit Pro 2015

Get some mileage out of all those digital photos you have lying around

Hands up those who have thousands of digital photos lying around. Keep your hand up if none of them have ever been printed or even looked at since they were taken? Well, I guess the forest of hands would indicate that it applies to most of us. If you still have your hand up, one solution would be to pick out the best of them and turn them into a slideshow or, if you’re more adventurous, some sort of multimedia extravaganza.

DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/93 loudspeaker

John DeVore has gained a great reputation of late. His company’s simian-infused loudspeaker range has attracted the right sort of attention from a wide range of audio enthusiasts. The Gibbon series, for example, picks up a lot of plaudits from the Rhythm Kings in search of the perfect partner to tidy-sounding Brit-Fi system. Meanwhile, the combination of a wide front baffle, paper-cone bass driver, soft-dome tweeter, and high efficiency has made the DeVore Fidelity Orangutan the perfect choice for Single-Ended Triode users.

Entotem Plato media player

Entotem is not your average hi-fi start-up. Rather than the one man and his dog in the garden shed that has been the traditional beginning for many in this business, Entotem consists of 10 men with a background in data storage who decided to combine their skills. Their goal was a product that did everything: ‘one box to rule them all’ if you like. It’s not hard to see the appeal of such a device in an age where space is in short supply but stuff seems to multiply. Audio enthusiasts are rare in being savvy enough to know that more is never enough when it comes to equipment, but our number is not growing. Entotem therefore set out to build a one-box solution for the modern age and, at the Bristol show in February 2015, showed Plato in prototype form, but that prototype was surprisingly close to the final production version.