After a crazy 2014, the Hound is back taking care of business and boy did he have some catching up to do. On this episode, he covers a nuclear reactor disguised as a CPU cooler, some important features on Windows 10, and most importantly, new GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD. So sit back, enjoy the show and get excited because great hardware news is always good news!

Intro and Honorable Mentions With 2014 having come and gone, I’m sure all of us are greatly looking forward to amazing hardware coming in 2015. But one thing we get to see a lot of is the “Best of” everything that happened in 2014. So even though 2015 is looking very promising, we thought it would be great to look back through the year and do our very own “Best of 2014.” We decided on 5 news pieces, and 10 reviews that were considered to be the cream of the crop. Are you ready for the picks? Before we go into our official list, something always gets left out that just couldn’t be squeezed in with the leaders of the pack. Due to the overwhelming guilt we felt on a couple of really good articles that we just didn’t want to leave out, we decided to have some Honorable Mentions. Our first one comes from the news category, The Hardware Hound Presents: Windows 10, a Gamer’s Perspective. Honorable News http://www.pureoverclock.com/2014/10/the-hardware-hound-presents-windows-10-a-gamers-perspective/ Windows 10 made a big wave that increased the more that details about the upcoming OS were released. Windows 8 had become a pretty big disappointment and 10 was poised to fix many of those problems. Then Microsoft released the tech preview. The Hardware Hound took it upon himself to give Windows 10 a full blown try, and the results were surprisingly satisfying. Windows 10 made a good first impression and as such, Pure Overclock was ab...

  Welcome to PureOverclock’s Annual Winter Giveaway for 2014! Week 4 AKA Grand Prize Week!!  12/28-1/2 Drawing on 1-3-15  Please Read Terms and Conditions below before entering. SHIPPING TO US ONLY. INTERNATIONAL ENTRANTS WILL HAVE OPTION OF PRIZE BEING SHIPPED TO US ADDRESS.. The last three weeks have been an absolute blast for us at PureOC. Because of our amazing sponsors we were able to crown 64 lucky people as winners during this holiday season, taking home over 100 individual prizes. This is a bar that will be hard to top in the years to come but with a community such as PureOC I think we can do it. However for now, we have sadly reached the fourth and final week of the Winter Giveaway. This is the Grand Prize Week and boy is it Grand!! Never before have we be able to award such an awesome Grand Prize. One lucky soul will finish up the Holiday season with a brand new Gaming rig sponsored by AMD, ThermalTake and Kingston Technology, a collection of high-end parts and assembled by PureOC. We are not leaving everyone else out in the cold to drool over the gaming rig. We will be award three epic runner up prizes as well from our other sponsors Primochill, Phanteks, Kingston and Gigabyte. These prizes will set you on the path of gaming and custom build glory which we expect to witness in a PureOC build log. Make sure you check out the forum post for details.   We want to thank all of our sponsors for making this possible. Without them we would not have be...

Biostar has announced a deal with AMD to launch a new FM2+ motherboard featuring an exclusive chipset, the A70M, designed to offer competitive features to the A68H and A58 chipsets at a lower price. Available exclusively on Biostar’s latest A70MGP motherboard, the A70M chipset packs in the most commonly-required features of its more expensive equivalents. Full support for quad- and dual-core FM2+ and FM2 processors, including both the AMD A-series and E2-series accelerated processing units (APUs) is featured as well as the Athlon II X4, along with support for 32GB of DDR3 memory across two DIMM sockets, four SATA 6Gb/s ports and two USB 3.0 ports at the rear. The board itself, meanwhile, uses a compact micro-ATX form factor. Before getting too excited, be aware that the new chipset does come with a few corners cut. The internal headers are USB 2.0 only, while the board features neither a DVI nor an HDMI connector for on-chip graphics; instead, users are forced into using an analogue VGA connection or installing a dedicated graphics card on the board’s PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. Interestingly, this slot is joined by both a PCI-E 2.0 x1 slot and a legacy 32-bit PCI slot – a commitment to older peripherals which is continued with an internal RS232 serial port header and externally-accessible PS/2 port above the rear USB 2.0 ports. Pricing for the new board has yet to be confirmed, but it is expected to launch for less than its rival A68H chipset systems. Full...

Welcome to PureOverclock’s Annual Winter Giveaway for 2014! Week 3  12/21-12-26 Drawing on 12-27-14  Please Read Terms and Conditions below before entering. SHIPPING TO US ONLY. INTERNATIONAL ENTRANTS WILL HAVE OPTION OF PRIZE BEING SHIPPED TO US ADDRESS.. Those that participated in Week 2 were showered with 21 prizes from our great sponsors Primochill, Enermax\Lepa, ThermalTake, VisionTek, Bitfenix an Sapphire Technologies. We all thank you for supporting PureOC and the community! Now on to Week 3. Should we go even bigger? DUH!! Of course we should! We want as many members as possible to take something home to rub in their friends faces for not being a part of PureOC. You tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. This week we are bringing back more goodies from DeepCool, Primochill, and Gamdias. We also will have some spectacular prizes from NZXT, XSPC, Antec and Phanteks. We will be crowning 28, yes we said 28 winners in week 3! A couple of important announcements before you enter. Hope you’re reading this! 1. Be sure to actually read the rules. Many of you are missing the posting on the thread section. Don’t follow, Don’t win. Simple. 2. There will be an mega size announcement coming later this week in our first PureOverclock Newsletter. We are super excited to finally get this off the ground so what better way to let all of our followers in on what we have in store for you. Trust me you will want to read it. So make sure you registe...

2014 has almost passed and the year 2015 is quickly coming upon us. I used to be more excited about Christmas while dreading the new year in light of the stark reminder that gift anticipation was over and school was about to begin. Now, I’m an adult, Christmas means only one day off, and the upcoming GPU news makes 2015 a much more exciting prospect than that sock-shaped present under the tree. In recent days some performance numbers have leaked for not only the new AMD flagships, but NVIDIA has some mentions of their upcoming monster graphics cards as well which give us some gaming and power performance comparisons. Spoilers and speculation ahead! The first, and probably most, enticing info that was leaked were charts that showed the performance of the new GPUs with not only their older counterparts, but also showed tests that compared both manufacturers together. The first tests involved a compilation of 20 games followed by a single comparison of Battlefield 4. The next tests picked out several singular titles at 4k resolution. Without going into too much detail, the end result looks to have the AMD flagship card (Bermuda XT / R9 390X) taking the lead with the NVIDIA flagship (GM200 Full-fat) not far behind. This is amazing news because the green side has managed to hold on to the single GPU performance lead for some time. Red has countered with some impressive pricing structures, but with this kind of tight competition, we are bound to see some GPU wars that wil...

  Source: DigitalTrends December is traditionally the time of year we grow closer to our families and friends, relax a little after many months of hard work, and feast on the rumors about what’s going to happen in the PC industry next year.   The latest teaser coming from the “Red Team” camp invokes an imminent APU and GPU fabrication process shift, pretty much quashing hopes for seeing 16 nanometer FinFET designs hit the mainstream in 2015. In the suggestive words of AMD’s very own Chief Technology Officer, Mark Papermaster, “we have our FinFET designs well underway, but we won’t be the first user, the bleeding edge of any new technology node.” In other words, the company’s designs are unlikely to start using the newest 16nm FinFET production process until 2016. It’s an understandable statement. AMD products have yet to hit 20nm, never mind 16nm, so they need to cross the former milestone first. The company isn’t far behind the curve in this regard, as GPU competitor Nvidia hasn’t hit 20nm yet, either, and many mobile SoCs are still built on a 28nm production node. But this does put AMD far behind big fish like Apple, Intel and Qualcomm.   Mark Papermaster emphasized 28 and 20-nanometer AMD products are in the works for 2015 releases, but sadly, mentioned nothing specific of rumored Caribbean Islands GPUs or revamped Carrizo APUs. We only heard that Carrizo is “very, very power optimized, with very, very efficient CPU and graphics”...

Welcome to PureOverclock’s Annual Winter Giveaway for 2014! Week 2 2 12/12-12-19 Drawing on 12-20-14  Please Read Terms and Conditions below before entering. SHIPPING TO US ONLY. INTERNATIONAL ENTRANTS WILL HAVE OPTION OF PRIZE BEING SHIPPED TO US ADDRESS. Week 1 was awesome! Congrats to all of the lucky winners that will be taking home prizes from all of the fantastic sponsors. Give a big interwebz hug and thanks to Primochill, Gamdias, Silverstone, DeepCool, Noctua, and In-Win for being great supporters of PureOC. There was so much interest in our Winter Giveaway we gained an additional sponsor, Please welcome Antec to the party! We will be seeing more from them in Week 3! It is hard to out do yourself but we are sure trying in Week 2 with a sponsor list containing our premier partner Primochill again, and all of our friends from Enermax\Lepa, Thermaltake, VisionTek, Bitfenix and Sapphire Technologies! Week 2 will make a total of 21 lucky people winners by the end of the week. All you have to do is use the app below and comment on the Week 2 Giveaway Thread in the forum. Easy as pumpkin pie! mhmmmm Pie! I know we will have a lot of people joining the giveaway and that is fine with us. Everyone needs to remember this is a FORUM Giveaway first and foremost. To say thank you to those that are part of the community. We welcome new faces as as we thank those we know. Happy Holidays and Good Luck to you all! PureOverlcock’s Winter Giveaway! Week 2

Welcome to PureOverclock’s Annual Winter Giveaway for 2014! Week 1  Please Read Terms and Conditions below before entering. SHIPPING TO US ONLY. INTERNATIONAL ENTRANTS WILL HAVE OPTION OF PRIZE BEING SHIPPED TO US ADDRESS. It has been another exciting year in the PC Technology and Gaming industry, new toys and new games for us all. Our viewership has grown and our community has never been better. Helpful, intelligent and all around awesome. If you are not a part of the forum then you are missing out on a lot of intelligent conversation and fun. We have seen some nice projects from members of PureOC and we want to keep things like this going. So we teamed up with our partners to bring you the most exciting Winter Giveaway ever. Don’t believe me? Stick around to find out if I’m right! I know we will have a lot of people joining the giveaway and that is fine with us. Everyone needs to remember this is a FORUM Giveaway first and foremost. To say thank you to those that are part of the community. We welcome new faces as as we thank those we know. Happy Holidays and Good Luck to you all! PureOverlcock’s Winter Giveaway! Week 1

Maxwell did an amazing job of bringing the graphics card industry to a whole new level. Honestly, the architecture involved is quite amazing and we haven’t even seen the “Big Daddy” Maxwell card yet. (The 980 is by no means the top dog coming from Nvidia.) This put AMD under a lot of pressure to deliver something that could compare. The good news is that not only does AMD have a response, but if the leaked specs combined with HBM is true, the R9 390X could be as big of a game changer as Maxwell was a month ago. First, let’s take a quick peek at some of the more prevalent specs. The 390X is slated to sport 4096 GCN Cores. When compared to the 2816 Cores of the 290X, that leap seems pretty massive. It looks like we’re still showing 4GB of memory with a 1Ghz boost clock speed, but the next interesting fact about the Fiji architecture is the Manufacturing Process. These will be the first chips to feature the TSMC 20nm node which should help with efficiency and performance. The tiny taste of Tonga last month showed that AMD was heading down the path of better efficiency with better performance. However, outside of major architectural advantages that while extremely possible have not been seen yet, the improvements here may not seem out of this world. That is until we take a closer look at the memory being used. Some of you may have heard of HBM before but others may be scratching your heads. HBM stands for High Bandwidth Memory and sounds very much...

(Reuters) – Nvidia (NVDA.O) on Thursday posted higher fiscal third-quarter revenue that was above Wall Street’s expectations, fueled by the company’s latest graphics chips for personal computers as well as processors for data centers and cars. Revenue in the fiscal third-quarter ended Oct. 26 was $1.225 billion, up 16 percent from the year-ago quarter, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $1.202 billion. For the current fourth quarter, Nvidia said it expects revenue of $1.20 billion, plus or minus 2 percent. Analysts on average expected fourth-quarter revenue of $1.198 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Third-quarter net income was $173 million, or 31 cents a share, compared to $119 million, or 20 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per share were 39 cents. After struggling to compete against larger chipmakers like Qualcomm (QCOM.O) in smartphones and tablets, Nvidia has increased its focus on using its Tegra chips to power entertainment and advanced navigation systems in cars made by companies including Volkswagen’s Audi, BMW and Tesla (TSLA.O). In the third quarter, revenue from Tegra chips for automobiles and mobile devices jumped 51 percent to $168 million. Nvidia’s much larger PC graphics chip business expanded 13 percent to $991 million. Shares of Nvidia rose 1.34 percent in extended trade, after closing up 0.45 percent at $20.22 on Nasdaq. Source (Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Ch...

Introduction Weather you are an extreme PC builder or just the average budget-minded consumer, NZXT has develop quite a few well rounded PC Chassis. Just a few years ago the NZXT Switch 810 caught the attention of many water cooling builders. Today, we are going to be looking at another chassis with NZXT’s famous attention to detail; we have the NZXT S340 Chassis on our test bench today. The NZXT S340 chassis has been classified as a mid-range tower, but it offers several features and benefits of a full tower. The S340 includes a full steel frame along with its steel panel construction. Let’s move forward and give you the full review of the NZXT S340 Chassis, but before we do, let’s talk a little bit about NZXT for those who haven’t yet heard of them.     Our People React, adapt and be fearless – we’re a group of young people who aspire to be better tomorrow than we are today. We are driven by the yearning to explore, create, change, and push boundaries. Our culture revolves around having a passion to walk off the well-beaten path, and turn away from the status quo. Our Company Avant-garde and unconventional – NZXT as created because we aspire to make a positive difference for people. We believe that there are companies that ship product, and then there are companies that ship innovation. We routinely re-invest in ourselves, and hope that we can drive a positive influence in the industry. Our Products Think like a beginner &...

  Chipmaker AMD hires Dell senior executive in server push SAN FRANCISCO Mon Oct 27, 2014 5:49pm EDT (Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices Inc said it hired a former Dell Inc [DI.UL] senior executive to lead the chipmaker’s push into microservers and other new markets. Forrest Norrod will be senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s enterprise, embedded and semi-custom business group and report to Chief Executive Lisa Su, AMD said in a news release on Monday. Norrod, 49, was general manager of Dell’s server business and joins AMD as the company develops chips for new low-power servers that might challenge heavyweight Intel Corp in cutting-edge data centers. AMD has been expanding into new markets including low-power “microservers” and game consoles, but progress has been slower than demanded by Wall Street. Earlier this month, Su took over as CEO, replacing Rory Read. Norrod fills Su’s previous position, which she h ad held temporarily since July. Following Su’s appointment as CEO, AMD announced on Oct. 16 it was cutting 7 percent of its workforce to reduce costs. SOURCE   Microsoft Said to Work on Software for ARM-Based Servers Source Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is working on a version of its software for server computers that run on chips based on ARM Holdings Plc (ARM)’s technology, people familiar with its plans said, a move that could help loosen Intel Corp. (INTC)’s grip on the market. The world’s largest s...

Introduction In the last few years, the CLC (Closed Loop Cooler) market has taken a big jump in market share… but we have only seen a few unique designs due to a patent set by Asetek on its pump/block design. This has limited a number of manufacturers from producing similar designs without running into this patent issue. This leaves us with companies that are re-branding their coolers and all while, Asetek hasn’t developed anything new or really exciting recently. We have seen CLC coolers with the same designs ranging with 120mm, 240mm and even 280mm rads with thickness ranging from 25-50mm. While each maker has attempted to add there own flare to each of these designs, these units are all essentially the same or very similar. While the patent still has not changed, we are excited to see that Thermaltake took a leap forward in making a change in this arena and we have the Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate CLC cooler. The first and most notable performance change here is the larger radiator with support of 3x 120mm fans essentially making this the largest radiator of 360mm with a first triple 120mm CLC system. As we continue forward, we are going to give you the full details and we we are excited to see a change and can’t wait to see how it does. But, before we do that… Let’s talk a little about Thermaltake: Our Mission – Delivering the perfect user experience Every myth starts out as a dream, and at the beginning of every legend is a desire. T...

  Introduction   We all know the woes AMD and their fans have been dealing with over the last few years so we will not be hashing that topic again. We will instead focus on the updated line for what they are, a place holder. They are designed to hold the interest of fans, budget shoppers and gamers until further notice. There have been no grand design changes that will suddenly put AMD on top of the performance heap. Instead, this is a product to cover those that have yet to make the switch from an older AM3 or AM3+ CPU or even a lesser CPU in the current AM3+ product stack. There is also a shift in how the FX series chips line up to the competition. We will move right into the overview and benchmarks that cover the new FX-8370 and FX-8370E 8 core CPUs.   Press Release   Introducing AMD FX Optimized for Power and Efficiency Multi-core processing is the future. Game engines are being designed to do more at a time; particle effects, physics calculations, light rays, and shadows are growing progressively more complex by the day. Large-scale computing now relies more on the overall throughput of parallelism than the singular speed of CPU cores. Today, AMD FX-Series CPUs return to push the boundaries of value to the high-performance desktop platform – introducing the speed-optimized 125W AMD FX-8370 and power-optimized 95W AMD FX-8370E and AMD FX-8320E processors. Featuring the “Piledriver” x86 core architecture, all of our new FX solutions feature...