System Builds

PCIe 5.0 has made its stand in the PC world and is well on its way to making everything we do faster and more efficient.  Considering data storage, SSD data transfer speeds now stretch above 10GB/s, but other Z790 great features include parallel ThunderBolt 4 and USB 3.2 2×2, as well as CPU speeds well above 5GHz. TBolt 3/4 brings …

It has been some time since we have posted a Test Bench build so we thought we would start the new year off right by introducing the world to our latest and greatest Intel based Test Bench. As much as we hoped this might be our introduction to Gen 5 SSDs and the incredible speed they provide, timing was just …

Much has changed in PC sales through the years, yet much is the same.  Things can be unpredictable.  Looking back, there have been instances of manufacturers selling their own brand laptops and ultra books equipped with competitors SSDs as storage, simply to maximize sales of their own higher cost…and higher performing SSDs. In fact, if you think you are getting …

There was a point when Intel was the undisputed leader of CPUs and their dominance over AMD was solid.  This changed when AMD released its Ryzen PCIe 4.0 CPUs just a little sooner than Intel expected and, over the past year and five months, they have controlled the Gen 4 space exclusively.  That has changed most recently with Intel’s latest …

It’s a good feeling when you build a PC and two of the top PC benchmarks, companies that account for several million comparison tests worldwide, both place you in the 99th percentile of all systems ever tested for certain benchmarks, as well as in the 96% mark over all. To say that I haven’t jumped up, punched my fists into …

One of my favorite pastimes is building computers.  It can be frustrating at times.  And yes, I don’t remember a single build taking less than a weekend to find tune things. My wife will tell you that the world stops when I start the build.  If something goes wrong, good luck pulling me away…and 2am?  I get my second wind …

So you just built a brand new Z270 PC and Intel comes out with the newest X299 ahead of schedule.  Is it worth the bump to have the latest and greatest… or do you stick with the Z?  If you are a media professional or high end user that needs every core you can get, the Intel Skylake-X i9-7900x is a monster with …

Every year or so, we try to upgrade our hardware to stay current with tech trends and bumping our newest test bench up to the new Kaby Lake design was no different.  With Intel’ newest Optane Technology knocking at the door, the Z270 was a must.  If you are wondering whether the boot to Z270 is worth the jump from Z170, …

There is no question that 2015 will be the year of NVMe and we are about to see storage performance increase like it never before has.  Where yesterday several SAS enterprise SSDs would be necessary to reach 5GB/s transfer speed, it is now possible with a single SSD with the inevitability of 1 million IOPS becoming a common performance variable …

A few weeks back, Zotac sent us a ZBox Pico PI320 Mini PCS and, for the life of me, I could find a place to start.  At 115.5mm x 66mm x 19.2 mm, this mini-PC is just about the size of two iPhones on top of one another and has to be the smallest full feature PC available. No matter …