Home Archives for 05/29/16

Mesh Elite Skylake PCA Skylake gaming PC review





MESH ELITE SKYLAKE PCA SKYLAKE GAMING PC REVIEW
It may not resemble a gaming PC at first glance, but the Mesh Elite Skylake PCA exudes quality. Its tower case comes with a matt black finished that’s soft to the touch, giving it an expensive feel, while at the top an illuminated display shows the current CPU temperature in a variety of colours which can be altered at the push of a button. Also see: Best gaming PCs 2015/2016.
Unlike most of the gaming PCs we review, the case has no transparent side panel. It’s a real shame in this case, because the Mesh Skylake PCA is by far the most impressive-looking inside. The case is spacious, with plenty of available drive bays and the Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 3 motherboard features attractive red and black details. Most impressive though is the Raijintek Triton 250mm high performance all-in-one CPU cooler, its two transparent pipes fat and filled with striking blue coolant. There’s also a blue downlight which illuminates the desk surface from the bottom of the case. We’d say the build quality of this case is considerably higher than most, certainly a tier above those from Cyberpower and Chillblast.
Under that fancy cooler lurks an Intel Core-i5 6600K Skylake processor, overclocked from 3.5GHz to 4.4GHz. This yields a decent boost in performance without pushing components to the absolute limit. It’s coupled with 16GB of 2400MHz DDR4 RAM – a little faster than the base 2133MHz stuff found in lower-end systems and comes with a 250GB Samsung SSD backed by a 1TB Seagate hard drive. Although the SSD uses one of the two M.2 ports on the motherboard, it’s using the SATA interface, rather than PCI-E so it can’t match the raw performance of the Samsung 128GB SM951 used by Chillblast. However it does perform very well and its extra capacity may well prove more beneficial than extra speed. See all PC reviews.
Mesh has opted for the ever-popular Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card in the Elite Skylake PCA, and in this case it’s a Palit-branded model running at standard clock speeds, rather than the boosted speeds found in some competitors’ systems.

Mesh’s chosen motherboard doesn’t just look good, it’s also designed specifically for gaming and comes with a selection of features not found on lesser models. Not only does it support USB 3.1, but it also supports USB 3.1 Gen 2 which allows for speeds of up to 10Gb/s and up to a claimed 16 Gb/s using Intel’s USB 3.1 controller. It also supports both USB Type-C and Type-A connectors.
Audio quality has also been boosted, claiming 115dB signal to noise ratio and featuring support for the Sound Blaster X-Fi MB3 audio suite. The OP-Amp chips have also been made user-upgradable, so if you want the very best sound quality, you can swap them out for higher-fidelity alternatives of your choice. See all gaming

Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury review


Powerful gaming PCs commonly come with big, beefy graphics cards requiring correspondingly cumbersome and unwieldy system cases which really don’t look good in a typical living room. If you want something closer to the size and convenience of a console system, you will usually have to make large sacrifices when it comes to graphics power - which would probably negate one of the main reasons to go with a PC system in the first place.
Chillblast’s Nano PCs have for a long time offered a good balance of size and performance, by making use of small form factor Mini ITX components: The system case, motherboard and graphics card are all considerably smaller in size than in a desktop PC, making them easier to transport to LAN parties, or to tuck away next your living room TV.
What you gain in compactness, you often lose in terms of reduced internal expansion room, fewer motherboard slots, and crucially for a gaming system, a limit on the size of the graphics card you can fit in the case. Previous high-end models have used the popular GeForce GTX 970 from Nvidia (see last year's Chillblast Fusion Nano review), which optionally comes in a Mini ITX format, but the GTX 970 is a few steps down from the top of the ladder when it comes to performance.

With the new Fusion Nano Fury, Chillblast has replaced the GTX 970 with the R9 Nano from AMD - a graphics card packed with AMD’s top tier R9 Fury graphics technology, but specially re-engineered to fit into small form factor PCs. The result is a Mini ITX PC capable of previously unheard-of gaming performance, although it does come with a 38 percent price premium of the Nvidia-based model. That means it will cost you £1379.99 from Chillblast's website.

That sort of money can buy you a lot of traditional desktop PC, or a gaming laptop. So you really need a good reason to want a compact gaming PC, as you'll get better value from a full-size machine.  Don't forget that the Fusion Nano Fury is backed by Chillblast’s five year collect and return warranty, the first two years of which cover both parts and labour.
It's also available in various colours: red, blue, black, green, gold and silver/grey.


What is WESA and what WESA means for eSports

The gaming scene is growing at a rapid pace and in Counter-Strike a new association has been formed, the World Esports Association (WESA). In this article we explore what WESA is, the implications and benefits it brings to all stakeholders and the outlook of eSports.

WESA in eSports: what is WESA?
WESA stands for the World Esports Association and was announced to the world on 13 May 2016 and currently only covers teams which play professionally in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The association aims to help professional players have more of a stance in their respective teams and ensure there's a better revenue split among teams - at least that's the aim.
The WESA brings together some of the biggest teams in Europe:

Fnatic
Natus Vincere
EnVyUs
Virtus.pro
G2 Esports
FaZe
Mousesports
Ninjas in Pyjamas
However, some big teams have been omitted from the initial announcement, such as Astralis from Denmark and all the other major teams which reside outside of Europe, such as Luminosity Gaming, Tempo Storm, Liquid to name just three out of the many non-European teams.
The omission of key teams has a lot of people baffled and somewhat angry at the way the WESA has been set up.

MYFOX HOME ALARM & SECURITY CAMERA REVIEW: DESIGN AND BUILD

Visually, both the MyFox home alarm and security camera look gorgeous – it’s the best looking security system we’ve used so far. In fact, its won awards due to this point, namely the iF Design award and the Red Dot Product Design Award. Both the home alarm system and the camera are made from what looks like high quality aluminium and white plastic, which brings a great unity between the product family.
It’s very sleek and understated and will blend into your home environment, which is exactly what you’d want a modern security system to be – you don’t want a huge clunky camera system, as it’d be easily spotted in any kind of home break-in.

The home alarm is a pretty large, circular unit with built in LED’s around the rim and two speakers on the bottom for its incredibly loud 110db siren – but we’ll talk more about that siren a bit later on. It has to be plugged in for a constant supply of power, but in the case of a power outage or a burglar switching off the plug, the alarm has a battery back-up that’ll keep it singing for long enough to deter any intruders.
The design of the camera is more impressive to us though, and it’s primarily because of two relatively simple design features. The first impressive design feature is its privacy mode, which uses a mechanical shutter to cover the security camera when you want privacy in your own home. Some people aren’t comfortable with the idea that a camera is recording them in their own living rooms 24/7, so the option to quickly close the camera shutter via the MyFox Security app is a better option than physically having to turn the camera away.
The second great design feature of the MyFox security camera is its use of magnets with its dock. MyFox has designed both the security camera and home alarm to be attached to walls and brackets for a more secure system – but what if you’re unable to secure it to a wall? MyFox provides a great curved dock for the circular security camera that uses magnets to allow for finite control over the angle of the camera. It’s such a simple feature to have, but one that makes the MyFox Security camera that little bit better than its competition.



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