Samsung XP941 High end M.2 performance

Despite being last year’s model (and originally an OEM drive), the XP941 is still one of the faster PCIe M.2 SSDs available. The drive is sold in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB (as tested) models, and uses the standard 2080 M.2 form factor — no PCIe slot adaptor is included. The XP941 is an AHCI SSD, using four lanes of PCIe 2.0. The drive features Samsung’s own 64Gbit 19nm MLC NAND, with the S4LNO53X01 controller. We tested the 512GB model and not surprisingly, performance was excellent. Peak sequential read and write speeds were 1,075/ 875MB/s — easily outpacing the fast SATA drives as well as some of the PCIe competition. 4K random read and writes were also solid, at 29/102 MB/s, respectively. Samsung rates the drive at 122,000/72,000 IOPS for random 4K read and writes. Performance is degraded on the 256GB and 128GB versions of the SSD, though it’s the write speeds that suffer the most. The drive is rated to 400GB of data writes a day, with a three-year warranty. One boon for laptop users is that the XP941 has a 0.08W low-power idle state that will help your battery last longer. However, check your compatibility, as not all laptops or desktops can boot from the SSD. The 128GB model is available for around $165, while the 256GB will set you back $320. The 512GB model at $640 offers a gigabyte per dollar ratio comparable to other M.2 SSDs.

Plextor M6e Black Edition Besting the SATA 6Gbps competition Review

Hidden under a sleek black cover, with standout red heatsink, the M6e has a rather standard AHCI PCIe M.2 SSD. With the integrated cooling solution clamped over the drive (and a ‘warranty void if removed sticker’ adorning the screws) plus an extra SATA power connector, it’s more than just a PCIe slot adaptor. But still, if you have a suitable PCIe M.2 slot on your motherboard, the SSD could be plugged in directly. This is handy, as it means you could use the drive without taking up an extra PCIe slot if you upgrade your motherboard. Our test SSD had a 256GB capacity, made up of Toshiba MLC NAND coupled to a Marvell 88SS9183 controller working through a PCIe x2 interface. Sequential read and write speeds of 637MB/s and 556MB/s are a cut above SATA SSDs, but not by a huge margin. It’s worth noting that the lower-capacity SSDs have slower write speeds, while the larger ones tend to give a performance boost. The Plextor SSD comes with a Turbo software tool that can use 25% of your system RAM as a drive cache to boost performance. It also supports AES-256 data encryption, but no endurance fi gure is given. The smaller 128GB Plextor SSD costs $220, which isn’t a particularly good deal over the $349 for the 256GB version we tested. The larger 512GB M6e is hard to fi nd, but offers a slightly better price per gigabyte ratio at $660. All the Plextor drives offer a full fi ve-year warranty

Google Now Launcher Make your phone Pure Android.

Most phone manufacturers place their own software ‘skins’ over each Android handset they release, often changing the OS experience (most notably the launcher) for the worse. Thankfully, Google Now Launcher is here to purify your Android phone. Possibly the most exciting app that Google has released in a while, Google Now Launcher brings a Nexus-style purity to your phone, providing it with a stock Android launcher. You can now enjoy an experience that’s previously only been available on the Nexus 5, so long as your device is running Android 4.x or above. The Google Now Launcher also makes Google’s personal assistant a core part of your phone. It’s a Google service that offers personalised information ‘cards’ that you can reach by swiping left on your home screen, in order to choose what you want to receive notifi cations about. It also provides always-on voice capability, which you can reach by saying “OK Google”, and then asking it a question.

YoVivo

With so many cloud storage solutions available, it’s highly likely that you have your documents, images and videos spread out all over the place, making it very di cult to track down a speci c le. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have access to all of your clouds in the one place? That’s exactly what YoVivo! does. Once you’ve given it access to your Camera Roll, social networks (including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram and more) and cloud storage accounts (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and more are supported), your les will be accessible from within the app, so you won’t have to go on a scavenger hunt every time you need to nd something. Its user-friendly interface lists all of your services together for easy browsing. There’s even an easy-to-use slideshow creator that lets you drop in images, videos, music and text from any of the les you’ve linked to the app, with further editing options like lters and emoji livening things up further. YoVivo! is useful and fun. Stephen Lambrechts

BitTorrent Shoot

Eager to get away from its reputation as a piracy tool, BitTorrent has gotten into the habit of releasing apps that show a number of positive uses for its P2P protocol. First its storage solution BitTorrent Sync, then its completely private messenger app BitTorrent Bleep, and now comes BitTorrent Shoot, an app that uses P2P technology to send and receive large photo and video batches to your friends super fast. Simply enter Select mode to start picking the les you want to send, then hit ‘Send Selected’ to produce a QR code. Your friend (who must also have the BitTorrent Shoot app installed) can then scan the code, transferring the les directly onto their Camera Roll. The app lets you receive an unlimited amount of transfers for free, though an in-app purchase of $2.49 if you want to send your friends stu after your third batch. BitTorrent Shoot is a fast and easy-to-use app that makes sending multiple les to another device an absolute breeze

Photoshop Mix Adobe is mixing things up a bit on iOS (and Android) tablets.

Adobe’s latest app for tablets is a slick, touchbased tool for compositing simple double-layer images in a way that’s very reminiscent of what the full version of Photoshop offers. Admittedly short on features, Photoshop Mix is nevertheless a responsive and attractive package that could do with some fi ne-tuning. Dropping in and out of its various tools can feel a little confusing, and we’d appreciate some additional refi nement functionality, but for the most part, Photoshop Mix does a decent job of guiding you through its various areas. The integration of Creative Cloud tools allows you to save your compositions as Photoshop .psd fi les on your Camera Roll, so you can pull them back and keep on working on them. You can also apply various Looks and Enhancements to your images, though don’t expect Photoshop Mix to be a retouching tool — for that, we recommend the previously released Photoshop Touch app. Free and straightforward, Photoshop Mix makes for a fi ne addition to your stable of Adobe apps.

Perfect Tube

There are plenty of YouTube clients on the Windows Phone platform, including a YouTube app published by Microsoft itself, so the fact that Perfect Tube is worth a mention speaks for itself in a way. It’s clear that this third-party YouTube app, developed by Perfect Thumb, was built from the ground up for the Windows Phone platform. The video player has a full set of large controls that are intuitive and discrete. Changing the volume or skipping through a video is navigated by swiping up/down or left/right, respectively, making the controls a lot less ddly than nding little icons or dragging a miniature toggle. However, it isn’t just the controls that are useful — the app also facilitates the full range of video interactions if you sign in, and the home page features your subscriptions page and a ‘popular local clips’ section. Unfortunately, you can’t comment on videos, which may turn some users away, but if you can live without that social element, Perfect Tube is a great YouTube app for Windows Phone

Gestimer

If you thought reminders were sown up by Apple’s own app and the likes of Wunderlist, then this menu bar app for Yosemite will make you think again. Gestimer says it’s for those ‘little reminders’, which is something we sco ed at, but after just a few days you’ll begin to see the truth in it, and how Gestimer can work alongside your existing reminder apps, rather than replacing them. To set a new reminder, you click and hold on the app’s menu bar icon and then drag it down to the centre of the desktop. As you drag, the time for that reminder increases. Let go and you can enter your reminder text and click ‘add a description’ to set it. Gestimer is perfect for quick reminders when you’re in the middle of something because its dialog boxes are unobtrusive. We found ourselves using it for things we wouldn’t normally bother adding to Reminders. You really won’t bother jotting down last-minute things on paper now!

Plextor M6e A no-frills M.2 2280 option

Using the PCIe 2.0 x2 interface, rather than SATA 6Gbps, the Plextor SSD comes in 128GB (as tested), 256GB and 512GB models. It uses the standard M.2 2280 form factor, measuring in at 80mm long, 22mm wide, 3.8mm thick and weighing 13g. The drive doesn’t include any accessories — you’ll need a compatible PCIe M.2 slot or PCIe adaptor card to use it. The Plextor M6e SSD uses the Marvell 88SS9183 controller to drive Toshiba 19nm MLC NAND and has a 256MB DDR3 DRAM cache. Performance is faster than what the limited SATA 6Gbps interface can handle, with sequential reads hitting 659MB/s. Write speeds are limited in the 128GB model and only manages 329MB/s — the larger-capacity drives should hit 500MB/s plus. The M6e performed well at random 4K reads and writes and on par with the Plextor Black Edition SSD. The 128GB M.2 is rated for 96,000/83,000 read/write IOPS. Plextor doesn’t provide an endurance rating for the drive, though the company does back it with a fi ve-year warranty. The SSD comes with a suite of software, such as PlexTurbo, which can use some of your system RAM as an SSD cache to further boost performance as well as increase lifespan. The M6e supports 256-bit AES encryption and can run as a boot device.

OCZ RevoDrive 350 Can this older tech drive take on the new comers?

Launched last year, the 480GB OCZ RevoDrive 350 takes full advantage of your PCIe slot for high-end AHCI performance. Inside the SSD is a collection of Toshiba 19nm MLC NAND chips and four SandForce SF-2282 controllers. Internally it’s arranged as a SATA 6bps RAID array coupled up to a PCIe x8 interface. On the outside you get a sleek aluminium heat spreader to help keep the drive cool. What all this means in the real world is an impressive 1,700MB/s read speed, backed up by 900MB/s writes. If you write a lot of the data, the 50GB a day endurance over three years is decent, but not outstanding. It’s also good for 140,000 IOPS and 90,000 IOPS writing and reading, respectively. It’s worth noting that the RevoDrive is full-height (though half-length) PCIe card. It’s also slightly power-hungry at idle, drawing 9.5W. It’s also AES-128 compliant, for those who want to encrypt their data. The problem with the RevoDrive is the price — an eye-watering $1,200 for 480GB. While few other drives are as fast, there are still better options for less money. If you want a smaller drive, the 350 also comes in a 240GB fl avour, though it will set you back a hefty $600 and is signifi cantly slower. Jumping up to the 960GB version is the other option, but it doesn’t get any cheaper per gigabyte and you’ll need to pony up a massive $1,800

Kingston HyperX Predator The latest high-performance SSD from a well-known name.

Rather than being an all-in-one PCIe card unit, the Predator is simply a standard 2280 PCIe M.2 SSD plugged into a halfheight adaptor card. You can get it in both 240GB and 480GB options, and the actual M.2 SSD itself can be simply unscrewed and removed if desired. It’s also possible to buy the M.2 drive itself without the adaptor, but prices are about the same, so there’s not much point. The SSD uses the 2820 M.2 form factor, measuring in at 80mm long and 22mm wide. The HyperX uses the second-generation Marvell 88SS9293 controller, 1GB of DDR3 cache and Toshiba A19 NAND feeding back through a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface. Performance is excellent, with fast 1,287/ 1,011MB/s read and write speeds. Compared to older PCIe SSDs that only just outpaced SATA 6Gbps, this is a very noticeable step up in performance. 4K random read and write speeds are also excellent, at 31/ 109MB/s, respectively. The 480GB model is rated at 882TB over the threeyear warranty, or a massive 800GB per day. The Predator SSD is bootable too, but is quite a power-hungry drive, so it’s best suited to desktop rather than laptop use. The 240GB model costs $339, while the 480GB will set you back $649. While it’s not the cheapest PCIe M.2 SSD on the market, the fast speeds mean the HyperX still offers strong bang for buck.

Intel SSD 750 Series 1.2TB For those who want the best of the best… and can afford to pay for it

Unlike the other drives we tested, the Intel 750 uses NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) rather than AHCI (adaptive host controller interface). The new interface is the way of the future and will let SSDs continue to push performance as the technologies evolve. The 750 isn’t some M.2 SSD strapped into an adaptor either — it’s a half-height PCIe slot only drive that uses x4 Gen 3.0 lanes. The Intel 750 comes in two different capacities: 400GB or 1.2TB, as tested. The SSD in our Labs uses Intel 20nm MLC NAND, with 4GB of cache RAM and an Intel CH29AE41AB0 controller buried under a large heatsink. Not surprisingly, it’s fast. Crazily fast. We managed 2,276/1,285MB/s sequential read and write speeds — way in excess of any other SSD tested. 4K read and write tests stand out too, at 34/ 250MB/s, respectively. For random access, the drive is spec’d at 440,000/290,000 IOPS, reading and writing. While the sequential read speed is great, these numbers show that the 750 also excels at high queue depths. The 400GB model is a little slower (especially on writes), but it’s not a huge gap. Intel backs the SSD with a fve-year warranty, and rates it at 70GB of data written a day. At $1,349, the Intel 750 is an expensive SSD, but actually gives the best cost per gigabyte, though the $549 400GB version isn’t as good. Still, if you want high-end performance then there is currently no better option available.

G.Skill Phoenix Blade How much are you willing to pay for performance?

Available in 480GB (as tested) or 960GB fl avours, the Phoenix Blade was launched late last year to bring high-end performance to your PCIe slot. The half-height drive doesn’t use M.2 at all, so it’s relegated to desktop use. Like the OCZ RevoDrive, the Blade uses a PCIe to SATA controller, essentially running four SSDs in RAID 0 on the board. Each of the four 128GB banks use Toshiba MLC NAND coupled to a SandForce SF-2281 controller. The whole kit and caboodle is covered by an aluminium heatsink to keep the components cool while handling your data. The result is a sleek PCIe 2.0 x8 SSD that offers high-end speed, albeit with a hefty $999 price tag. In testing the Phoenix Blade offered excellent sequential read and write speeds of 1,825/989MB/s, besting the more expensive RevoDrive. Still, the G.Skill is still slower and more expensive per gigabyte than the more advanced Intel PCIe setup. Random 4K read and writes are worse than the better competing M.2 PCIe drives, at 25/91MB/s, respectively. The Blade is rated for 90,000/245,000 read write IOPS, which is quite good. The Phoenix is rated for a massive 1.4TB of data written per day over the three-year warranty period. This fi gure is actually very important because for those who need to write a lot of data, the Blade is a clear winner. You can also pick up the G.Skill SSD in a 960GB version for $1,649.

Apacer Thunderbird PT910 An all-in-one PCIe RAID solution

Even as drive manufacturers are releasing PCIe SSDs in both M.2 and slot form factors, some are sticking to well-worn tech. The Thunderbird PT910 couples SATA SSDs into a half-height PCIe card — no native PCIe or M.2 capabilities are included. Instead, the Thunderbird uses a Marvell 88SS9220 controller to couple two 128GB chunks of Intel MLC NAND (running SandForce SF-2241 controllers) to a PCIe interface. The result is a PCIe SSD that runs RAID 0 internally — no user setup required. Unlike almost all the other SSDs on the market, the PT910 actually becomes more expensive per gigabyte if you opt for the $1,149 512GB model. Because the PT910 only uses a x3 PCIe 2.0 connection, throughput is limited to a maximum of 1,000MB/s. The result is speeds that easily best standard SATA SSDs, but fall short of the faster PCIe offerings. With sequential read/write speeds of 701/ 522MB/s, respectively, the PT910 has similar performance to the Plextor SSDs, which also use a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface. When it comes to 4K random data, the Apacer SSD’s RAID setup is a little better, especially with a higher queue depth. The Thunderbird is rated at 100,000 read/write IOPS, and managed a 24/91MB/s read write speed with 4K random data. The result is an SSD that isn’t quite fast enough or cheap enough to effectively compete with the rest of the competition. Keep your eyes peeled, though — Apacer has promised some new M.2 PCIe later this year.

SSDs level up

Forget SATA for SSDs – there’s a new breed of solid-state storage that blasts through old bottlenecks thanks to PCIe.

As computer hardware becomes more powerful, access to data has become a problematic bottleneck that solid-state drives (SSDs) have helped open up. SSDs have now hit something of a speed limit themselves, however, because most of the PC’s existing storage interfaces were originally designed for older mechanical hard drives and are already too slow for SSDs. The majority of mainstream drives can already max out the SATA 6Gbps interface, and even the newer upgraded SATA Express is too slow for some. PCI-Express (PCIe) is the answer, with an x16 slot able to provide up to 32GB/s of bandwidth and thus giving plenty of scope for performance growth. It’s only been recently that fast PCIe SSDs have been available to general consumers, but even these have faced issues with cost and performance. In the last year or so, the M.2 interface has helped small form-factor SSDs drop in price and has become a popular option for both desktops and laptops. M.2 drives can use the SATA interface, but when doing so are limited in bandwidth like any SATA SSD. On compatible motherboards, however, M.2 can also plug into the PCIe interface directly, letting SSDs run to their full speed potential without any bandwidth bottlenecking. For desktops without an M.2 socket these drives can be plugged into a PCIe slot adaptor board, and there’s also a smattering of dedicated PCIe card-based SSDs on the market. Even within PCIe SSDs, there are a variety of speeds available, depending on which controllers, NAND and PCIe interface is used. Of course, being new, these nextgen SSDs have a tendency to be more expensive than their more common SATA brethren – usually at least double the cost per gigabyte. But then, with most PCIe SSDs more than doubling the performance of their SATA counterparts, they’re arguably also worth the higher prices.

LABS TEST RESULTS

UNTANGLING THE STORAGE WEB

Digital storage is a more diverse area than ever, so to accompany this month’s superguide, we’ve put together a short and sharp guide on which options to use where in your storage matrix.

SOLID-STATE DRIVES
With their higher cost per gigabyte, SSDs are internal storage disks that are best used in high-demand situations: as your OS drive and where you install your games and other applications. If you have multiple SSDs, use your fastest one for your OS; additional units can be used as secondary drives for apps and games. SSDs come in multiple types: there are models that connect to the Serial ATA (SATA) interface and look much like 2.5-inch internal hard drives, but there are also newer types that connect directly to a desktop computer’s PCI-Express (PCIe) slot, or plug into the newer M.2 socket in a similar fashion to RAM. You’ll need to carefully check what connectivity options your PC has before buying one.

INTERNAL HARD DRIVES (MECHANICAL)
The most common form of storage for desktop and laptop PCs, mechanical SATA drives come on two main physical forms (known as 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch) and these are best used for general storage: for media fi les and other large space-consuming content. Of course, they’re also perfectly serviceable if you want to run your OS, apps and games from them — but doing so will result in a less responsive experience than on an SSD.

EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES (MECHANICAL)
External hard drives take two main forms (portable and desktop) and are often just internal hard drives wrapped in a USB enclosure. Most commonly, they use the USB 3.0 interface, with the odd unit offering Thunderbolt or FireWire connectivity. They’re good for moving around very large fi les, performing system backups (if you don’t have a NAS) and you can even work on fi les directly from them if your PC doesn’t have much onboard storage, though doing so will generally be slower and less responsive than on an internal drive

WIRELESS HARD DRIVES
This newer category typically combines a portable external hard drive with a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot and battery, meaning you can take it on the road with you and connect directly with a laptop, or via dedicated apps for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. In the latter two cases, the app is often what defi nes exactly what you can and can’t do on your mobile device — that can range from syncing your photos to streaming music and movies from the device.

NAS BOXES
A network-attached storage (NAS) device is something we reckon every home and small offi ce should have: it creates a convenient and affordable central storage location for sharing and backup. Accessed through your network (either wired or wireless), today’s NAS boxes can actually do far more than just store fi les — they can download from the net (and even BitTorrent), stream media fi les to your TV or games console, and some will even let you run your own cloud services, like remote photo backup or document editing. These are incredibly fl exible and powerful options, perfect for multi-user environments.

CLOUD STORAGE
Online (aka cloud-based) storage is great for quickly sharing small fi les, allowing anywhere access to critical content and backing up your photos on the go. Most services offer a small to medium allotment of free gigabytes (anywhere from 2GB to 100GB), then options to pay a subscription fee to add more. The limited upload speed of most Aussie broadband connections means that cloud storage is less fl exible than local options (uploading multi-gigabyte fi les through a 1Mbps ADSL uplink can take days, for example), so you do need to approach how you use it with that limitation in mind.

Nemo Free

 

Some people think of Nemo as a submarine captain, others as a ridiculously cute clown sh that’s lost, while every Linux Mint user knows that it’s actually a le manager. Nemo 2.6 was released recently together with the whole Cinnamon 2.6 desktop environment; however, it can also be used as a standalone le manager in any desktop of virtually any distro. Nemo history starts in 2012 when developers behind Linux Mint forked the Nautilus 3.6 le manager in order to save it from a Gnome’s attempts at simplifying everything. Since then, Nemo has become recognised as a GTK3-based le manager that supports desktop icons mode, compact view, full navigation options and lots of great con guration options — a lot more than can be found in Nautilus. The most notable feature of Nemo 2.6 is a plug-in manager, which allows the enabling and disabling of Nemo actions, extensions and scripts with a few clicks. The plug-in manager is available as the Plugins entry in the Nemo’s menu. Once the manager is launched, it shows the list of available actions, extensions and scripts with a checkbox in front of each. Linux Mint also runs a separate project (github.com/ linuxmint/nemo-extensions) to port the available Nautilus extensions to Nemo, such as le name repairer, image converter, sharing extensions and some others. Besides new plug-ins, Nemo enables bookmark sorting, toggling of the location bar to a path-bar and putting le operations in a queue (this is the default behaviour in 2.6). Thanks to this, the le manager combines the simplicity and elegance of Gnome-styled applications with a feature set very close to Dolphin. The Nemo le manager comes with Linux Mint by default, but there’s also a separate PPA for Ubuntu where you can install Nemo without Cinnamon dependencies (ppa:webupd8team/nemo). Outside of that the availability of Nemo is quite limited: it’s o ered for Fedora, OpenSUSE and Arch/Manjaro, while you’ll nd that the lesser-known distros are left out in the cold.

digiKam Powerful and free photo management for Linux.

Most of us shoot photographs and store them on a hard drive of some kind, whether that’s just our smartphone snaps or more sophisticated RAW fi les from a DSLR camera. Since it doesn’t take long for the amount of photos to get out of hand, most of us need a way to store, sort and organise them. In the world of Linux photo managers, digiKam is the most advanced and solid application for this job. This splendid and heavyweight open-source application shows very robust development speed, delivering good news every few months. The 4.x series is constantly updated with maintenance releases, bringing scrupulous bug fi xes as well as better multi-monitor support, improved geotagging, face recognition, colour management, extra key strokes and lots of many minor goodies. In digiKam, photos can be organised into albums, which can be sorted chronologically, by directory layout or by custom collections. Each photo can be assigned with one or many tags, so you can view and browse tagged images all at once, despite the photos being spread out across multiple directories. Besides tags, custom comments and star ratings can be added to each photo and altered in future. All this is stored in a robust and reliable SQLite database. digiKam makes use of KIPI (KDE Image Plugin Interface) plug-ins for lots of added functionality and shares some image effect plug-ins with other KDE-related applications, such as Gwenview and Krita. There are tons of features in digiKam and the most prominent ones are its gorgeous photo-importing dialog; its automatic facial recognition and sorting; its powerful editor for playing with colours and exposure; batch queue manager; and light table for comparing similar shots. digiKam also features Marble integration for showing maps and a very useful fuzzy search tool for coping with ‘nearly identical’ shots. digiKam is included with almost any distro, so the only question left is where to get the latest release. Users of Ubuntu and Mint can get it from dedicated ppa (ppa:philip5/ extra), while Arch/Manjaro users can always turn to AUR.

Microsoft InstaNote

One thing about having an operating system created by Microsoft is that there never seems to be a shortage of note-taking apps. Despite the plethora of options already available to Windows Phone owners, chances are you’ll likely still want to take a look at this new o ering from Microsoft’s edgy DIY innovation centre: Microsoft Garage. Yes, on top of note-taking, InstaNote also has an audio recording feature, although this app’s audio capture method is a little di erent to most. Instead of the usual start-and-stop recording, this app has a button that will capture the last 30 seconds of audio and run it through Bing, where all that audio will be transcribed into a succinct set of notes. The idea of having the most important chunks of a lecture, meeting or interview transcribed for you sounds like a dream come true, but admittedly, InstaNote is a little tricky to use at rst and it doesn’t always awlessly transcribe notes. That said, in the worst-case scenario, you still have all the audio snippets of the most important info.

TextExpander 5

TextExpander enables you to de ne phrase shortcuts that, when typed, it replaces with some other content – that can be a spelling correction, emoji, a multiline address, a snippet of code, or a combination of text and images. You might set ‘;esig’ to expand to your email signature, or use ‘rrecycle’ to write the Unicode character for the universal recycling symbol. Advanced snippets include operators and placeholders, so you can use a shortcut to enter today’s date, or boilerplate text with placeholders you quickly complete in a oating window. The app’s performance proved solid and snappy throughout testing, boosting productivity, which this release aims to boost with suggestions. It monitors your input and noti es when you could have saved time by using a shortcut; it also suggests new snippets. The former is great, but the latter too often recommends very short, commonly-used phrases, which we didn’t nd that helpful.

Howzat

Even if you’re not into cricket, chances are you’ve been out to bat in one of the many variations of Stick Cricket since the fi rst web browser version came out in 2006. Though it’s been available on Android and iOS for a while, Microsoft is pushing it as a drawcard launching on the Windows 10 for Mobile platform. The game’s actually compatible with Windows Phone 8.1 and up, so there’s no need to wait for the new smartphone OS to launch here. Stick Cricket Premier League might trick you into thinking that this game is simple — the only controls are a left and right shot — but the bowlers get progressively slower and somehow that actually makes hitting the ball exceptionally hard. The base app is free, but in order to build your own team with decent players you’re going to have to fork out for some in-app purchases, of which there are many — something to be cautious of if kids are playing. Other than that, it’s a worthwhile app for Windows Phone.

Inputting+

Ever wanted to have undo, redo, clipboard or ‘ nd and replace’ functionality for text when using your smartphone? That’s exactly what Inputting+ provides. Once enabled, the app places a bubble on your screen whenever text input is available (don’t worry, you can make the bubble small and transparent) that lets you undo what you’ve just written with a single tap, and redo it with a second. Unlocking the Pro version of Inputting+ (for a ~$1.35 fee) will provide you with a timeline of collected text inputs from every app, so you won’t lose anything you’ve written due to a crash or poor reception. If you’ve ever had that happen to you, enabling Inputting+ should be a no-brainer. While you do have to give the app access to monitor your text inputs, it doesn’t have web permissions, so your texts won’t be collected and read by anyone online. If you’re cool with this, you’ll nd Inputting+ to be a very useful addition to your Android arsenal. Stephen Lambrechts

FREE WITH MICROSOFT ACCOUNT OFFICE 365 SUBSCRIPTION UNLOCKS MORE FEATURES

For many workers, Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps have been the cornerstone of modern productivity for over two decades, but until June of this year, Microsoft had held o releasing its o cial O ce products for Android phone users. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case and, on the proviso you’re willing to set up a free Microsoft account, you can now use your Android phone or tablet to edit and view documents to your heart’s content. That Microsoft account really is the key to the kingdom here, because if you don’t have one — or you’d prefer not to set one up — then you’ll only be able to read O ce les. Once you’re in though, the O ce apps are clean and well-designed, allowing you to do all the basics you’d expect (and more than most users probably need). That includes opening and saving documents through your OneDrive account, or even syncing the apps with Google Drive and Dropbox. As far as Android productivity apps go, O ce is pretty great, but considering how well-established apps like Google Drive already are on this platform, it might not be enough to convert the masses.

Reflector 2 Get your iOS and Android device displays mirrored on your Mac’s screen

Refl ector bills itself as “the last receiver you’ll ever need”, enabling real-time mirroring of iPhone/iPad displays, and Google Cast-compatible Android devices. We quickly got four devices (iPad Air, iPhone 5S, Nexus 4 and Hudl 2) working simultaneously. By default, connected devices are surrounded by a ‘frame’ representing their hardware, which differentiates mirrored content. Refl ector rescales virtual devices, so all can be shown at once, but annoyingly overlays other apps (these settings can be adjusted). A single device can be ‘emphasised’, shrinking others, or you can show/hide specifi c items. Full-screen mode shows all devices, rather than just one. Performance was great with little or no lag, even when playing games, but getting content across from broadcast media apps seemed impossible. Refl ector can also record any device and add a voiceover from a mic input. Output was mostly fi ne during testing, bar the odd dropped frame, but videos are restricted to TV-oriented outputs. Still, ease of use makes this one of our favourite device receivers.

Quite RSS

Instead of sur ng through endless tech news sites, it’s much better to use some dedicated aggregation software. Since 1995, RSS has proven to be the most comfortable method of delivering news and articles. It’s grown from Rich Site Summary in the early days to Really Simple Syndication at present. Many websites make their own RSS feeds, which are designed as custom XML pages on speci c URLs. Though the contents of an RSS feed can be viewed in any web browser, it’s primarily designed to be used with RSS clients, and there are plenty of them about, both for web-based and standalone use. QuiteRSS is one of the latter. It’s feature-rich, yet it doesn’t get in the way unless, of course, you want it to. The top-left pane shows the list of feeds and a toolbar to add new feeds or modify existing ones. Just below there’s a tree of coloured labels, which let you mark feeds and then easily nd them. The main part of the window resembles an email client and displays the list of news from the feeds and shows the contents of the currentlyselected news item. The lower pane presenting the contents is a fully featured web browser – you’ll notice that once you click on any link in the body of the news. It has the AdBlock extension and enables you to switch whether images are displayed, though it won’t let you go to a custom web address in the input bar. Instead, you can use the ‘globe’ button on the toolbar to open the URL you’re at in your default web browser. QuiteRSS has a very clean and easy-to-use interface, it supports classic and newspaper viewing modes, advanced searching tools (including searching in links), several selection methods (such as stars, labels and ltering) and lots of precise controls over the way the noti cation messages work

Pale Moon A speedy web browser that’s m ore than just a Firefox clone

Nearly every web browser aims to strike a balance between features and speed, and provide a more robust and responsive interface and rendering engine. Yet Pale Moon is very special, and in many ways unlike other lesser-known browsers. That’s due to the fact that it was forked from Mozilla Firefox in 2009, in the 3.6 version era, and since then it’s claimed to be faster and more secure than Firefox. Reading the published FAQs and other materials on the project’s website takes time to discover in what particular way Pale Moon is better, because both advertise themselves in a similar way to each other. It boils down to Pale Moon being a Firefox clone with some signifi cant improvements, with most of them focused on speed, such as discarding support for ancient CPUs for the sake of in-depth use of SSE2 and other modern features available since the late Pentium IV (with 64-bit support). It also cuts out accessibility input options, tabs grouping, WebRTC, parental control, PDF reader and some rarely used APIs. The end result is a speedy web browser for general use, which looks like classic pre-Australis Firefox (before v28), but that still supports many Firefox extensions. The Pale Moon developers do try to maintain compatibility with parent extensions, despite Pale Moon drifting more and more away from its Mozilla origins. Pale Moon even provides its own sync server, which, it claims, provides a more secure approach to synchronizing data, without a focus on the “future commercial endeavours of the Mozilla Corporation”

LG G4 The G4 combines technology and leather into one sleek package.

An elegant and attractive fl agship phone, the LG G4’s main point of difference is its detachable leather backing, which makes it instantly recognisable among the increasingly identical horde. The G4 also packs a longer battery life, improved camera and upgraded screen over its G3 forebear. And, if leather’s not your style, it comes with an alternative polycarbonate back, too. The G4’s battery is also removable, which explains the need for a plastic cover (easier to remove and less likely to break than a metal one). Its gorgeous QHD 5.5-inch LCD screen is exceptionally clean and even-toned, and vies for top spot with Samsung’s Galaxy S6 as the best on the market. LG’s making a big deal about the camera prowess of the G4, and rightly so: there’s a 16MP snapper on the rear, and it’s fused with a f1.8 aperture that’s designed to deliver spectacular lowlight shots. On top of that, LG has added in a huge amount of control to the camera. Quite frankly, it’s up there with the best we’ve tested. In our benchmark tests, the LG G4 performed quite admirably, but it’s a little behind other fl agships. This is by no means a slow device and it’ll handle anything you can throw at it, although there are faster options. Battery life is also impressive, and when you add in the ability to switch the G4’s battery out for a spare, you shouldn’t fi nd yourself running out of juice too often. Sexy and sophisticated, this handset is sure to turn a few heads.

Fractal Design Defi ne S Has liquid cooling support in spades

We know what you’re thinking. Yet another Fractal Design Defi ne mid-tower case looking just like all the others. Well, before you nod off, the Defi ne S has a few tricks up its sleeve. From the outside, it may look like its siblings, but on the inside, Fractal has designed the internal layout with liquid-cooling support in mind. For a start, there are no conventional drive cages; instead, there’s three drive trays housed on the rear of the backplate. Each tray supports either 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives, while there’s also two dedicated 2.5-inch trays to the rear of the motherboard tray. Where the drive cages would normally be found, there’s a big, empty space. At least until you look closer. The backplate has been drilled for mounting a liquid-cooling reservoir (mounts are included) and the base can support many different types and sizes of pump units. As for radiators, the Defi ne S can support the odd one or four, and it features Fractal’s ModuVent covers on the top panel. All of the covers can be removed to allow fans to be fi tted. Unfortunately, there are only two USB 3.0 ports in the I/O bay and there’s no integrated fan controller. A nice design touch is the small hole at the bottom of the motherboard backplate, close to where the audio header is situated — it means the front audio cable runs neatly behind the backplate, along with all the other cabling. Luckily, despite the lower price tag, the Fractal Design attention to detail and superb build quality remain as high as ever.

Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ATX A feature-packed modder’s dream

This Evolv ATX is pricey, but then you take a look at what’s included and the stunning build quality that’s been achieved, and you begin to appreciate what Phanteks has pulled off at this price. The case is made up of solid 3mm-thick aluminium panels situated on top of an all-steel chassis to give it a hefty, solid dependability. There’s little to no fl ex in any of the panels (including the windowed side panel), all of which have sounddampening foam on the joins, preventing any excess noise from vibration. The case is incredibly modular. Supporting up to seven 3.5-inch drives (fi ve with the included brackets) and four 2.5-inch drives (two included), it’s neatly partitioned into two separate compartments for your motherboard and power supply, with plenty of room for cable management, including some Velcro cable straps and a multitude of tie-down points as well. There’s even a sliding radiator bracket in the top that you can remove for easy installation of all-inones or radiators, hinged and removable side-panel doors, and support for water-cooling components. As far as negatives go, the front I/O consists of two USB 3.0 ports and a mic and headphone jack. It would’ve been nice to have seen an additional two USB ports here. Additionally, while the perforated fl oor separating the power supply from the motherboard allows for ample airfl ow, it would’ve looked a lot cleaner if the panel was solid. All in all, it’s defi nitely worth buying for those who want a premium case with plenty of room inside.

Razer Mamba Tournament Edition Setting a new bar for sensitivity

This latest Mamba proves, there’s more to customisation than how big a mouse is. It’s not too different from the original, albeit with a slightly less fl ared design and it’s wired, with a 2.1m USB cable. The Philips laser sensor boasts precision up to a stunning 16,000dpi, which can be adjusted in 1dpi increments. You can also confi gure from three to fi ve different precision levels and fl ick between them using the two buttons that sit behind the mouse wheel. The Synapse software enables you to change the polling rate as well — to either 125,500 or 1,000 times a second — as well as confi guring separate X and Y sensitivities. There are 11 buttons that can be assigned to various actions using Synapse. The mouse wheel is home to fi ve of these, as it rocks left and right, scrolls up and down — and you can click it. The Mamba TE’s sports RGB illumination on the left and right sides of the main body, on the Razer logo and on the scroll wheel. You can independently set any of these to the colour of your choice, set up animated waves or have it fl ash when you click a button. We found the Mamba TE to be an impressive gaming mouse. It’s a little lighter than we usually prefer (and there’s no way of adding bulk), but we soon got used to it. It’s smooth and precise, and we found it comfortable after long gaming sessions. Which is all very glowing, apart from the price. Yes, $180 is a lot for a mouse, but the Mamba TE is well worth considering.

OCZ Trion 100 960GB Does OCZ’s affordable new SSD stack up in a cut-throat market

OCZ’s new budgetoriented SSD comes in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB fl avours, with the latter in our Labs this month for testing. Notably, its OCZ’s fi rst fully Toshiba-based SSD since it was acquired by the Japanese company last year. While Toshiba does the building, OCZ performs the testing and validation. The Trion uses second-gen 128Gbit A19 TLC NAND fl ash, coupled to a Toshiba TC58 controller. The drive uses the standard 7mm thick/2.5- inch form factor, as well as the SATA 6Gbps interface. We tested read and write speeds with AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark. Sequential read and writes are fast at 539/516MB/s, but essentially capped by the SATA interface, like most modern SSDs. The Trion is rated for 90,000/54,0000 (read/write) IOPS, but random 4K performance isn’t quite as good as you see on MLC-based SSDs. Still, it’s real-world performance is solid overall for a budget SSD. As is typical, read and write speeds are slightly slower on the low-capacity drives. Endurance on the 960GB Trion over the three-year warranty period is excellent at 240TB total, or 219GB a day, though the smaller drives offer less. The Trion 100 does support low power state idle, but no hardware encryption. While it offers acceptable bang for buck, there’s nothing here that really stands out from the crowd. Hopefully prices will drop a little to make it more competitive. The 960GB model will set you back around $480, the 480GB is $249, the 240GB $129 and the 120GB just $79.

Samsung 850 Pro 2TB Large and agile ? Samsung takes a brave step forward for the future of SSDs

Performance or capacity. That’s been the dichotomy that’s dominated data storage since the first SSDs appeared. But now Samsung has launched the first consumer 2TB SSDs. The 850 Pro combines the speed of solid-state flash with the multi-terabyte mass storage. How has Samsung done it? It’s largely down to its 3D V-NAND memory, the trailblazing flash memory tech that sees memory cells stacked atop one another, giving it the ability to squeeze much more capacity into a given area. Using multiple layers of memory cells also takes the pressure off the need for each layer to absolutely max out capacity. Where Samsung’s previousgen 840-series drives sported NAND memory with tiny 19nm transistors, the 850 series uses 40nm tech. real-world peak performance of 550MB/s. That’s simply a function of the 6Gbps limitation of the SATA interface. If you’re upgrading an existing system, that shouldn’t be a problem. You may not have any M.2 slots in your PC, anyway. But as the storage solution for a new PC you’re building, or for an existing system with M.2 support, the limitations of SATA are more of a problem. Compared with the near-2GB/s of bandwidth of M.2 drives, the 550MB/s top whack of a SATA drive makes even this 2TB drive look old hat. Samsung’s figures are borne out in testing as well. In terms of raw sequential throughput and random access performance, it’s simply bouncing off the SATA interface limitations. More interesting is the fact that the 850 Pro clocks in To achieve the 2TB capacity, Samsung had to create a new controller chip, as it says its existing MEX controller had limitations when it comes to really high capacities. Consequently, the new 2TB has a new controller, the MHX. Samsung’s performance claims suggest the increased capacity doesn’t incur any performance downsides, with 550MB/s sequential reads, 520MB/s sequential writes, plus 100,000 read and 90,000 write IOPS. Where things get really interesting is durability. The 2TB absolutely does not disappoint. Samsung provides a mega 10-year warranty, along with expectations of 300TBworth of writes. Wow. However, the elephant in the room is that the 850 Pro is a plain, old SATA drive, which means it’s limited to a with probably the fastest time we’ve seen for a SATA drive in our real-world 5GB file compression test. How you view this drive’s performance ultimately comes down to whether you’re in the market for an M.2 or a SATA unit. It’s great for SATA, but it can’t get close to a drive built around the latest standards. But if you need the biggest and best SATA SSD, it’s a killer.

ASUS MG279Q Behold, the messiah of gaming monitors

ASUS’s new MG279Q ticks a lot of boxes. It’s a 27-inch IPS model, with 2,560 x 1,440 pixels, 144Hz and adaptive syncing. It’s not a super-wide panel with 3,000-plus horizontal pixels. Nor is it a 4K box. But 2,560 x 1,440 pixels is arguably where the sweet spot is right now in terms of matching pixel grids with GPU power – 4K panels are marginal for smooth rendering on a single GPU. Intriguingly, you get all this for $100 less than ASUS’s familiar RoG Swift monitor. That’s similar in many regards. It’s 27 inches, 2,560 x 1,440 pixels at 144Hz and with adaptive sync. But it differs critically in two regards. The RoG Swift’s adaptive sync is Nvidia-fl avoured G-Sync tech and its LCD is a TN item. This screen sports AMD’s competing FreeSync tech and rocks an IPS panel. When it comes to image quality, this new IPS model whips the Swift raw with the spiky end of a DVI cable. The MG279Q is actually a good display to get to grips with the problem, thanks to a wide range of adjustment for the overdrive setting, which is accessed via ASUS’s excellent OSD. Set it to minimum and there’s little to no ghosting, but a fair bit of blur. Crank it up to max and the ghosting is utterly grim. Around the 40% setting cuts the blur nicely and doesn’t add any noticeable ghosting. Next up, the FreeSync in this implementation is also limited to a maximum refresh rate of 90Hz. That’s enough to get much of the smoothness benefi t of high refresh rates, but not all of it. Of course, you could argue that once you’re up over 100Hz, the benefi ts of adaptive sync are marginal. So if your graphics card is up to it, running with FreeSync disabled and the panel set to full 144Hz reheat could be the answer. Casting a shadow over all of this is the fact that you’ll need an AMD GPU to run FreeSync, while G-Sync It’s an absolutely gorgeous screen. The colours are as good as we’ve seen pretty much anywhere on any screen. It’s a delightful combination of accuracy and saturation, at the same time as seeming perfectly natural and not remotely forced, the latter being a routine issue with VA panels, which often look punchy but thoroughly OTT. Where things get complicated, both in terms of the comparison with the Swift and in terms of actual technical implementation, is when it comes to adaptive sync tech. Adaptive sync means aligning the refresh rate with the output of your graphics card for improved smoothness and an end to screen tearing. We know AMD’s FreeSync technology is a little rough around the edges, and unfortunately, that remains the case here. For starters, FreeSync doesn’t currently play nicely with response-enhancing overdrive tech,and you get some nasty inverse ghosting with FreeSync enabled. screens like the Swift need Nvidia graphics. Given that monitors are generally pretty long-term purchases, that makes for a potential GPU vendor lock-in that leaves us more than a little bit uncomfortable. Not that this is ASUS’s fault. However, it’s certainly worth bearing in mind. That said, you’re not really paying extra for the FreeSync capability. So view the ASUS MG279Q as mainly a 144Hz IPS panel and it’s still a very appealing proposition. The best gaming monitor yet? Very possibly

MSI GT80 Titan It’s certainly epic, but is this ‘titan’ really god-like, or closer to the ill-fated Titanic

Any way you slice it, it’s hard to call MSI’s GT80 anything but utterly ridiculous — though not in a derogatory sense. MSI calls this the world’s ‘slimmest 18.4-inch gaming notebook’ — but at 4.9cm thick and weighing 4.5kg, that claim doesn’t really add up to much. It’s hard to call it a ‘lap top’, let alone portable. This is a gaming machine through and through, with a brightlybacklit keyboard, blackand- red colour scheme with giant dragon decals and twin GeForce GTX 980Ms under the hood, this one’s got plenty of l33t gaming cred (if you’re looking for that sort of thing). While the mechanical keyboard (with brown Cherry MX switches) is the most-obviously ostentatious feature pretty much everything else is over the top, too. Even a little experimental in places. The whole keyboard deck, for example, is oddly designed. It Performance on this machine is, as you’d expect, top notch. CPU performance, driven by a Core i7-4820HQ is almost at desktop levels, and the four-drive RAID 0 storage system gives you a fantastically-responsive experience, with very fast loading times. (There’s also a secondary 1TB mechanical drive for storage duties.) And those two 980M GPUs deliver some of the fastest framerates we’ve seen on a portable. While SLI doesn’t always deliver twice the performance — sometimes there’s no increase — it does mean you’re getting 100fps+ framerates in most games at Ultra settings. Battery life was better than expected around 2 hours for typical day-to-day tasks and watching video. The GT80’s thermals were better than we’ve seen in other gaming laptops, but there’s still room for improvement. The GPUs peaked at 70ºC and 84ºC respectively. The hotter GPU sits closer to the CPU, which itself can get up to 92ºC. So puts the mechanical keys right at the front and wedges a portrait orientation trackpad next to it. That trackpad can also switch to a backlit numpad, so you’ve essentially got a full-sized keyboard. Also of note is that there’s no left Windows key — potentially great if you’re a gamer, not so much if you’re used to keyboard shortcuts. The tall trackpad is a bit problematic in use. It’s so narrow the sensitivity needs to be up quite high in Windows 8. We constantly found ourselves accidentally swiping open the charms menu. But then, with this behemoth, the assumption is that you’ll probably have a mouse plugged in anyway. The GT80’s display is a 1080p matte-fi nish job (you can’t get higher-res laptop panels at this size yet) and it’s quite good for gaming, keeping refl ections to a minimum and delivering great contrast. Colours on our test unit were good — fairly neutral, with a very slight yellow/green cast. where does that leave us, on the whole? At $5,500 and over 5kg including charger, it has a narrow potential market (children of onepercenters?). It largely lives up to its on-paper potential, however, and MSI’s about to refresh this model with a 5th-gen Core i chip (the i7-5950), double the SSD storage and upgrading the DVD writer to a Blu-ray one. Those additions make for a much-more well-rounded offering, one we’d recommend waiting for.

Gigabyte P55W v4 A top gaming laptop at a reasonable price ? What’s the catch

When it comes to gaming-capable laptops at this price point, the P55W v4 faces some stiff competition. Yet based purely on specs, it certainly gets off to a solid start: it’s about the cheapest 15.6- inch laptop you’ll find that packs a top-end Core i7 CPU, GeForce GTX graphics chip and both an SSD and secondary hard drive for storage. And those aren’t budget parts — they’re basically just a step or two down from the top spec, meaning overall performance is first-rate. The all-important gaming performance was bang on what we’ve seen from other laptops sporting the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M. With Ultra graphics settings at the screen’s native 1080p resolution, you’ll get around 40-50fps in newer titles and 70-80fps in less-demanding games. Those are definitely playable frame rates, and you can often double them by turning down the detail settings to High. consistent. Even the orange ‘racing stripes’ — new to this v4 model — aren’t too ostentatious; they’re enough to give it some personality without screaming ‘I’m a gaming laptop!’ The P55W does have some drawbacks, though we wouldn’t call any of them serious. It’s not particularly portable, for example. You could carry it around if needs be, but at 2.63kg for the laptop and another 700g for the charger, it’s venturing into the ‘pull your shoulder off’ zone. And there are a couple of spots where the P55W’s performance could have been better — specifically, battery life and heat. Unplugged, this unit can stretch to 2.5 hours in lighter workloads (like web surfing), but that drops to under 2 hours when you push it in more demanding tasks. And speaking of, the CPU hits a toasty 95ºC under load, while the GPU reaches 83ºC, so the cooling system here isn’t the most efficient — compare those to the The CPU is one of Intel’s latest fifth-generation Core i processors — the speedy quad-core i7-5700HQ. It outperforms the previousgen i7-4710HQ (as seen in many other laptops around this price) by around 5-10% in CPU-intensive tasks, like media encoding. Even the storage is better than average. While that 128GB main SSD (a wellspecced SATA 6Gbps model) is a little smaller than we’d ideally have liked (256GB would at least give you some room for games, which will realistically need to be stored on the secondary 1TB Hitachi storage drive) just having an SSD at this price really is a bonus — it makes a huge difference to boot time and overall system responsiveness. Although the P55W’s charcoal-grey exterior is entirely plastic, this is still a handsome laptop — and in some ways, it looks a bit better than mixed-finish laptops (sporting metal on the lid and keyboard deck) because its finish is more similar Venom Blackbook 15’s 74ºC and 70ºC, respectively, and there’s a pretty stark difference. Regardless, the P55W v4’s temperature measurements are technically within the spec for those parts, although it’s worth noting that they will also heat up surrounding components. Some shortcomings are to be expected when you’re getting this high-value hardware, of course, and none of these are what we’d classify as deal-breakers. If you’re on a tight budget and you want all the performance you can get, this one’s a solid choice.

HP Spectre x360 A sublimely thin two-in-one laptop that’s almost perfect

The Spectre x360 might be the fi rst transforming laptop to fi nally strike the perfect balance between laptop and tablet. Unlike most other hybrids, this 13.3-inch machine looks like any regular laptop, but in one quick and smooth motion, you can fl ip the screen back 360º to turn it into a fullon Windows 8.1 tablet. If Lenovo and Apple ever had a baby, it would be this. HP has blended the best elements of the MacBook Air’s aluminium body with the rotating hinges from Lenovo’s Yoga series of convertible machines to make a gorgeous computing device. The outside shell is minimalistic with almost no embellishments on its plain, anodised aluminium chassis and it’s only 16mm thick. But while this is one of the smallest hybrid laptops ever made, the weight is still a concern: at 1.47kg, it’s still quite unwieldy as a tablet. That makes it hard to hold for long periods, but once Hands down, the HP Spectre x360 has one of the best screens of any laptop we’ve tested, offering some of the best viewing angles we’ve ever seen — backed up by a wide colour gamut and a very bright panel. While this two-in-one comes with a glossy, glass-fronted display, we had almost no problems using it outside in the sun. This is a rarity and makes it usable in any scenario. Like the little engine that could, the Spectre x360 can deftly take on any generalusage task, from simple web browsing to playing a virtual hand of Hearthstone with the quality settings at their highest. And you can squeeze a surprising amount of battery life out of this petite 13-inch convertible laptop — in PCMark 8’s tough Home test, it managed a solid 4:38hr That said, this isn’t a gaming machine: don’t expect to it to play much more than low-impact indie games. HP and Microsoft have put together one of the you start using them, the fl exibility of the alternate physical confi gurations proves useful. HP has also come up with a hinge design that blends in. So instead of noticing the hinges, your attention is drawn to the unusually wide trackpad. Nearly double the width of a traditional pointing device, the Spectre x360 offers an expansive and smooth surface to glide your fi ngers over. It’s also accurate to a millimetre, thanks to Microsoft’s Precision trackpad software. We did have some issues with accidental taps when using the keyboard, but its palm rejection is generally pretty good. The keyboard follows a traditional layout with a white backlight to help you see the keys in the dark. The keys feel a bit mushy and don’t offer the crisp typing experience of a MacBook, but the typing experience on is more than serviceable, and most users won’t notice unless they’re sticklers for the very best. sharpest-looking two-in-one convertible laptops ever. Without any foreknowledge, most people would think the HP Spectre x360 was nothing more than an attractive, all-aluminium laptop. Thanks to a pair of well-engineered gear hinges, the transforming element of this laptop adds almost no extra weight, awkward proportions or clunky mechanics. Instead, the x360 only inherits the added fl exibility of a two-in-one machine, letting you use it more ways than just on your lap. It’s well worth a look over the many, many other hybrids.

Intel Core i7-5775C Desktop Broadwell is here. Was it worth the wait ?

Intel’s fi fth-gen desktop CPU, the Core i7-5775C, is fi nally in our test benches. So what is Broadwell? It’s a 14nm production process die shrink on what’s still essentially Haswell CPU tech, giving serious power effi ciency to the chips. That’s why they’re fi rst and foremost of interest to the mobile crew, although they retain some interest on the desktop because you also get the very best in processor graphics. This is the fi rst time the Iris Pro level of graphics has appeared in socketed form, and compared with the HD Graphics 4600 parts in the latest Haswell Devil’s Canyon chips, the Iris Pro 6200 has more than twice the execution units (EUs). Elsewhere, you’re looking at classic Core i7 stats – four cores with eight threads. Because this a ‘C’ class chip, you only get a clock speed of 3.3GHz with a max turbo of 3.7GHz, although it retains unlocked multipliers to aid overclocking. performance, but nowhere near enough to worry the existing top Haswell chip in straight performance. But this isn’t where Broadwell is meant to compete. It’s a low-power i7 with high-end graphics and limited overclocking. At stock speeds, the peak power we were seeing during Cinebench tests was just 104W, with the CPU only a shade over 50°C. But even when overclocked to 4.2GHz, the CPU was still under 60°C and only drew another 50W at maximum. That’s some seriously impressive effi ciencies. This eight-threaded CPU is barely drawing the same power as last-gen quad-thread parts. In terms of its graphics performance, having more than twice the EUs of the Haswell HD Graphics 4600 – 48 compared to 20 – the Iris Pro 6200 delivers a huge performance boost. Gaming at top 1080p settings goes from practically slideshow levels to genuinely playable. As a preview of what we can expect from the next- Technologically speaking, the i7-5775C is the top CPU in Intel’s standard desktop lineup. For the next few weeks, anyway. So what makes it a relevant upgrade to the cheaper Devil’s Canyon Core i7? On the face of it, there seems to be no reason to upgrade from your current Haswell i7, and probably most existing i5 chips. The i7-5775C is a good chunk more expensive than the i7-4790K, and in terms of straight clock speed and thus gaming performance, it’s a bit of a bust. In our benchmarks, X264 and Cinebench gave a landslide victory to the last-gen CPU. The bright spot is in the memory bandwidth fi gures. The Broadwell chip shows big improvements, topping anything we’ve seen outside of Ivy Bridge-E processors. And what of overclocking? Sadly, we couldn’t hit the standard 1GHz overclock that Intel CPUs often offer. Boosting it from a 3.3GHz base up to 4.2GHz is no mean feat and does improve gen Skylake family, this 14nm die shrink is darned impressive. But the thought of spending $569 on one is beyond the pale. Even with the excellent Iris Pro graphics fi nally hitting socketed CPUs, we struggle to see who would actually consider picking one up. This is a chip that might have looked impressive last year, and maybe even today if it had a higher clock speed and lower price. But that’s not the case, so there’s little reason to consider it.

THE SAMSUNG PORTABLE SSD T1 IS THE ULTIMATE IN PORTABLE STORAGE.

Designed for creative professionals and demanding business users on the go — or anyone who just wants a slick and speedy storage device — the Samsung Portable SSD T1 houses up to 1TB of Samsung’s class-leading solid-state NAND ash memory in a very compact package. And with USB 3.0, there’s no bottlenecking when you’re copying data to and from your PC. It’s the no-compromise storage device that combines amazing features with a sleek and stylish package.

FAST
e Samsung Portable SSD T1 is built from the ground up for speed. Taking advantage of Samsung’s extensive SSD know-how, the T1 range o ers read and write speeds of up to 450MB/s* — that’s up to six times as fast as a regular mechanical hard drive. at means it’s fast enough to tackle almost any storage-intensive task you can throw at it. Whether you’re editing 4K video or just looking for the quickest loading times in games, the T1 won’t leave you waiting.

SAFE
When it comes to data security, the Samsung Portable SSD T1 also has your back. With virtually uncrackable hardware-based 256- bit AES encryption onboard, you can protect your data from prying eyes. And when you want to access your private les, it’s just a matter of entering your password. It’s not just encryption that protects your data either. With solid-state technology, the T1 doesn’t have any vulnerable moving parts, meaning it’s much better-equipped to stand up to the rough-and-tumble that portable drives inevitably experience.

STYLISH
Samsung hasn’t compromised in the style department either. With a classy and sleek black polycarbonate chassis, the T1 packs all that storage and speed into a package that has a footprint that’s around two-thirds the size of your average business card. Images don’t do justice to how compact the T1 really is: you need to see it in person. is is an elegantly-designed drive with a thin pro le and, weighing in at a tiny 30g, it can easily slip into a shirt or pants pocket without being a burden. In short, the Samsung Portable SSD T1 delivers a mass of speedy storage that comfortably ts in the palm of your hand, all based on Samsung’s trusted SSD expertise. With the T1, Samsung hasn’t compromised — so you don’t have to either

MSI R9 380 Gaming Premium looks, value results

On a tight budget? Looking for a graphics solution under $500? Want to play the latest games comfortably at 1080p? Well, the R9 380 might just be the card for you. OK, we’ll drop the advertising pitch. But seriously, if you’re looking for a budget buy to build your 1080p gaming/LAN rig, the 380 is a serious competitor. Small and light, the R9 380 series brings to the table that faithful Tonga core — an architecture that’s been providing AMD with budget-crunching frames since 2011. Here, of course, we’re referring to the Tahiti core found in AMD’s 7000 series graphics cards from yesteryear, being reworked into the Tonga architecture late at the end of the R9 200’s life cycle. Either way, it’s a powerful core. Featuring 1,792 shaders and 2GB of GDDR5 (or 4GB, depending on which option you go for) on a 256-bit bus, this card is designed from the ground up for gaming at 1080p. snugly at around 72°C, even when overclocked. The fans rarely spin up above 70%, and when they do, it’s not noticeable in comparison to the reference cooler. Another feature becoming increasingly commonplace in the market nowadays is the addition of 0dB fan speeds. It’s fantastic if you’re just browsing the web or playing Minesweeper, but it does take a little while to get used to the fans not spinning when powering on. Once your monitor’s booted and you’ve stopped panicking over whether your card’s dead, however, we’re sure you’ll appreciate this new piece of software. What’s more impressive is how MSI has managed to pack such a solid card into such a low price. The cooler is the same design that you’ll fi nd on MSI’s 390 and 390X, featuring the same backplate and LED lighting features. Put simply, it… looks… stunning. There’s no way around it, and regardless of whether that backplate helps cool the card That’s all well and good, but should you buy it? It’s certainly appetising for those on a tight budget — indeed, it’s our graphics card of choice in this month’s ‘Build a budget Windows 10 PC’ feature on page 70. The performance is less than desirable if you’re looking to game at 1440p or 4K, but it copes very well at the lower-end resolutions, achieving benchmarks in line with that of the GTX 960, showing that even an aging core can keep up with the best of the new breed. The one major problem the R9 380 has over its Nvidia rival is power draw. Requiring an additional six-pin connector, the 380 also pumps out a whopping 65W more heat, making those fans spin that extra bit faster. That being said, MSI’s R9 380 Gaming is a stunning card. The build quality is phenomenal for a GPU at this price point. Featuring MSI’s Twin Frozr cooler, now in its fi fth iteration, the card rests down or not, it suits the card perfectly and looks clean in a tidy build. But back to the allimportant question: is this the graphics card for you? That depends entirely on what you want to do with your rig. If you’re content with gaming at 1080p, then the R9 380 is undoubtedly a strong contender. However, if you’re wanting to go further and push that resolution-based barrier beyond the confi nes of the traditional, you might want to look to the R9 390 or the Fury X. At those levels, this card simply won’t cut it.

Sapphire Nitro R9 390 1440p gaming ? No problem !

So let’s get right to it. Is the R9 390 a rehashed core? Yes, kind of. It’s the same Hawaii core found in the R9 290 nearly two years ago. It has the same number of streaming cores at 2,560, the same GDDR5 memory and the same number of transistors littering the GCN GPU. Understandably then, you’re probably wondering why you should bother purchasing one of these cards. Good question. For a card that uses more power with just a slight overclock over the reference card, it certainly doesn’t make much sense to upgrade if you already have an R9 290. Unless, of course, you’re after that 8GB memory fi gure, in which case it might be worth your time. Laughably though, there are people out there who have managed to fl ash their R9 290s to 390s, using the latest R9 300 series BIOS, most likely to AMD’s disapproving frowns. So, who should be looking at this card then? Well, if you’re still on a Tahiti core, or a 600 series card from Nvidia, this is defi nitely a suitable solution to your graphical woes. It’s fantastic for gaming at 1440p, and thanks to Sapphire’s Nitro implementation (because apparently nitrous oxide cards are a thing), this card overclocks above and beyond anything we really expected. In our testing, we found that with games such as Witcher 3, Shadow of Mordor and Project Cars, our R9 390 was regularly only around 10-15fps behind AMD’s fl agship Fury X, purely thanks to the Nitro’s ability to aggressively overclock, no doubt. That may still seem like a big disparity between the two, but there’s something you might want to take into consideration — the Nitro is currently half the price of the Fury X. How interesting are those fi gures sounding now? So, the obvious solution here would be to run two of these bad boys in CrossFire – the same performance as a single Fury X with twice as much memory, for the same cost. Say what you like about HBM (highbandwidth memory) — yes, it’s revolutionary — but it’s just not there yet. And with DirectX 12 merging dedicated graphics card memory together, you’d be looking at a setup containing four times the memory of a single Fury X card for the same price — 16GB to be exact. An insane solution, to say the least. Sapphire’s Nitro Tri-X fan design is a fantastic cooling solution, providing dissipation for that massive heatsink with one 10mm heatpipe, two 8mm heatpipes and two 6mm heatpipes. It’s well cared for. The card also has a (rather terrifying in our opinion) 0db fan feature, so if you’re not gaming, those fans aren’t spinning — ideal if you’re often working from home. Even so, it’s not exactly a noisy cooler when it does spin up. Even in Furmark’s GPU stress tests we only hit 69°C, with the fans spinning at around 65% capacity. What would’ve been nice to see on the Nitro is a backplate, but then Sapphire presumably reserves those specifi cally for its 390X iteration and beyond. Understandable, but it would have helped to transform this GPU into the lustrous black beauty it so righteously deserves to be. Otherwise, we have no bones to pick with Sapphire’s offering. Yes, it’s a rebrand, but it still performs admirably. When it comes to bang-for-yourbuck performance, it’s on a par with AMD’s Fury X, if not better.

Making motherboards

As part of a guided tour to coincide with Computex in June, Gigabyte took me to its Taipei motherboard factory on the outskirts of the city. Situated in a small industrial town about an hour out of central Taipei, Nanping is the biggest of the company’s three motherboard plants, with the other two – Dongguan and Ningbo – based in China. Opened in 2000, Nan Ping employs 1,500 people and produces 575,000 motherboards per month. Each of these are tested before shipping, and each are created with a mixture of automation and manual labour. The only aspect of motherboard creation not accounted for at Nanping is the printed circuit board (PCB), which is made in China. Otherwise, each motherboard is crafted ‘from 0 to 100%’ at the plant. On the seventh fl oor, large (and loud) surfacemount technology (SMT) machines slot tiny resistors and other chips onto the PCBs, with several workers responsible for testing the results at the end of the line. These SMT machines are capable of slotting in components at a speed of half a second, with long reams of tiny components fed into the SMT automatically. While the seventh fl oor is mostly automated, the manual assembly line two fl oors down is where the more delicate work happens. That said, it doesn’t look delicate — dozens of Taiwanese women sit elbow to elbow placing components at blinding speeds — but a lot of care and attention is afforded to the process and again, every motherboard is also function functiontested before leaving the premises. Each worker wears an antistatic wristband, and each has trays full of ports, chips and transistors, which they apply as a conveyor transports an endless stream of PCBs throughout the fl oor. On the day I visited, the target was 1,500 motherboards. That’s a lot of USB ports manually slotted in. Down on the second fl oor is where packing happens. This is a thorough process and, despite being the least technical part, easily the most fascinating: machines beat cardboard boxes into shape while men and women carefully place the motherboard, cables, driver disc and all manuals into the package you purchase at retail. While the process of building the actual motherboard may seem remote and foreign to anyone with subprofessional technical knowledge, watching the actual product materialise before your eyes is… well, eyeopening. The next time you throw your motherboard’s manual away, keep in mind the guy tasked with putting 1,500 of these into 1,500 boxes, every day. Each motherboard package is then stacked into a bigger box and sent directly from Nanping to Gigabyte’s wholesalers. That’s a lot of motherboards built per day, and for what is arguably the least sexy component of a PC, quite a lot of work. For me, the tour was a welcome reminder that PC components don’t just materialise from out of nowhere in boardrooms or retail outlets: they’re painstakingly constructed by dozens of human hands.

Galaxy S6 Edge

It looks great, is powerful, and has a good camera, but in some ways, the S6 Edge has gone backward.

BACKGROUND
With its glass and aluminum construction and curved-edge screen, Samsung looks to have leaped lightyears ahead with its newest fl agship smartphone, the Galaxy S6 Edge. But is it as future-proof as it is futuristic? Only a teardown will tell…

MAJOR TECH SPECS €
5.1-inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen (1,440 x 2,560, 16 million colours) € Samsung Exynos 7 Octa 7420 processor, integrated ARM Mali-T760 GPU and 3GB memory € 16MP rear camera with HDR, LED fl ash, and 4K video recording € Built-in support for Qi and Powermat wireless charging € 32/64/128GB storage options, but no microSD slot

KEY FINDINGS €
The rear panel is glued on rock-solid. We had to break out a suction cup to slip in an opening pick. Defi nitely not fun. With the panel fi nally off, the adhesive peels off the glass nicely, but leaves a sticky residue on the metal midframe. € Using a screwdriver and plastic opening tool, the midframe comes off easily, revealing all the goodies. However, the battery is still held captive under the motherboard. We’d normally remove the microSD card now, but Samsung eliminated it. If you need extra storage, you’ll need to pay for it up-front. € We pluck out the main camera to get a better look at the hardware. The 16MP OIS rear-facing camera dwarfs the 5MP selfi e cam. On the front we fi nd: Samsung Exynos 7420 octa-core processor (64-bit), 2.1GHz Quad and 1.5GHz Quad, along with Samsung K3RG3G30MM-DGCH 3GB LPDDR4 RAM and Samsung KLUBG4G1BD 32GB NAND fl ash. € A glass back and a stubbornly glued battery? Samsung, have you been hanging out with Apple? Finally free, we get a better look at the 3.85V, 10.01Wh battery. It’s a 2,600mAh battery, like the S4. € In what seems another step backward, the S6 dumps the S5’s lightning-fast Micro-B USB 3.0 port for a microUSB (2.0) port. Apart from saving some space, we fail to see the point of this. € The Super AMOLED display is what allows for the smooth curves. Riding on the back of the display is the customary touchscreen controller, this time an STMicro FT6BH. € Repairability score: 3 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair). Many components are modular. In an improvement over the S5, you no longer have to remove the display to get into the phone and replace the motherboard. Front and back glass makes for double the crackability, and strong adhesive makes it hard to gain entry. The battery is very tightly adhered, and buried beneath the midframe and motherboard. Replacing the glass without destroying the display is going to be very diffi cult.