Hard Stuff: Razer StarCraft II Marauder review
The Marauder’s like a pair of Air Jordans—they look fantastic, but they’re expensive, and buying them won’t improve your skills at the game you know and love.
Geek toys review: Nanodots
When the carrying pouch is more entertaining than its contents, there’s something amiss. Inside an admittedly awesome yellow drawstring bag—complete with atomic logo emblazoned across the front—lies a handful of magnetic BBs called nanodots. That stick to each other. Awkwardly. That’s all they do. This is sort of like tearing open the wrapping paper off a massive box on Christmas morning only to discover a mouth-guard and a jockstrap within.
Geek toys review: Skitterbot!
The Skitterbot is one of those toys you buy for your kids, but end up hoarding for yourself. It’s that awesome. The stylish body of this six-legged mecha-insect is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and when activated, it scurries around the floor at a speedy one foot-per-second. You can choose from four different colors—red, blue, green, and white—and all of them look fantastic covering the Skitterbot’s armored shell. You control the Skitterbot via an oval remote that also doubles as a USB-powered recharger (via a retractable data port on the remote and a cord that plugs into the Skitterbot’s mouth).
Hard Stuff: Psyko Audio Labs Carbon review
This headset is absolutely massive. I’m talking Goliath-massive. After just two hours of using it, my neck ached as if I was wearing a military-grade Kevlar helmet.
Hard Stuff: Sound Blaster X-Fi HD USB review
The X-Fi HD is something of an oddity. It’s a USB-powered external soundcard designed for laptops—and when it comes to delivering awesome audio, it exceeds expectations. However, the features of the card leave you wondering who Creative had in mind when designing it.
Hard Stuff: Thermaltake eSPORTS Shock review
Getting a headset that rivals your 2.1 external speakers’ sound is tough to do without dropping $200 (or more). And yet, the Tt eSPORTS Shock manages to do just that, and at a very reasonable $80.
Hard Stuff: Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD review
So you’ve got a sweet 5.1 surround sound speaker setup and an awesome gaming library to support it—but if you’re running those speakers via your motherboard’s onboard audio, you may as well be using $20 speakers from your local drugstore. What you need is a dedicated soundcard, and Creative—the pioneer of soundcards for PC gaming—has released its newest flagship warbler: the Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD.
Hard Stuff: Razer Chimaera review
On first glance, the wireless Chimaera’s gloss and flat-black coloring is absolutely gorgeous, but this beauty is tarnished by some quirky design choices.
Hard Stuff: Black Ops|Enix PC review
Ever seen a honey badger? They hunt cobras twice their size and stick their tongues into bee hives. This is much the same with the Black Ops|Enix: it’s short but mighty, and it attacks gaming resolutions of 2560×1600 without fear. Tucked within the rugged metal case (that takes up about as much floor space as a full backpack) are two blazing-fast GTX 580s in SLI, a brand-new Core i7 2600K (overclocked from 3.4GHz to 4.7GHz), 8GB of DDR3 Corsair Dominator RAM, and USB 3.0 support. Digital Storm played it smart by including a Corsair H70 liquid cooler to keep the processor overclock stable. It’s pretty damn impressive how much high-end hardware they’ve packed into such a teensy area.
Maximum PC review: EVGA GTX 470 SC
Our compatriots over at MaximumPC.com have given outstanding marks to Nvidia’s newest mid-range graphics card, which trounces the Radeon HD 5850 in most tests.
“Built on a cut-down version of Nvidia’s high-end, DirectX 11 GPU, this card posted eyebrow-raising benchmarks, pretty much putting it into a class of its own.”
Click here to read the full review and benchmark tests.
GeForce GTX 480 review
Nvidia’s DirectX 11-capable graphics processors, codenamed Fermi, have finally arrived. The Fermi core, also known as GF100, at last pushes Nvidia beyond the first unified shader design it used with the 8800 series almost four years ago.
Ultra Triton SE review
You have to tip your hat to Cyberpower for this one. When PC Gamer asked their engineers to create a gaming PC for less than £500 they pulled a crafty trick I wasn’t expecting. I’ve seen overclocked CPUs sold off the shelf in low cost systems, but hacked CPUs – that’s a whole new one on me.
