Gaming laptops have the reputation of being monstrous objects requiring specially constructed bags for carrying them between locations with the battery life span of electronic gnats. With the MSI GS40 6QE Phantom, however, at least size isn't an issue. Weighing in at 1.6kg, this is a notebook you could carry …

Scan will be well-known to KitGuru readers for its huge and comprehensive component supply business. But the company has also been building professional workstations for many years. The 3XS range includes both enthusiast systems for gamers as well as rack-mount servers and high-performance computing nodes. The 3XS GW-HTX35 is a …

Overclockers is a company that will be better known here at KitGuru for its choice selection of enthusiast components and lovingly enhanced gaming systems. But the ability to put together a quality system is potentially something of interest to the professional market as well as more entertainment-oriented users. With one …

So far in this series, we have made some initial tests and conclusions about the balance between CPU and graphics in a workstation, and then focused specifically on the types of application covered by the industry-standard SPECviewperf 12.02 tests. In this article, we turn our attention to two very significant …

In the second part of this series, we presented some initial tests to illustrate how CPU and graphics can affect different types of performance in a PC workstation. In this third part, we focus down on one particular, industry-standard benchmark that puts a workstation through a range of tests with …

Mesh is one of the oldest names in the UK PC manufacturing business. The company has been selling computers since 1987, and although the last five years have had their ups and downs they appear to be back with all guns blazing. The Elite Game Changer 980 sounds like a …

From the advent of affordable internet in the 90s to the explosion of broadband services over the past 5 years, content has been getting better and better. From building designers to game developers, from training companies to broadcasting organisations, everyone is processing larger and larger media files and regularly sharing them …

As we explained in our introduction to this series, workstations are considerably more than just powerful PCs. Brute performance may be the basis of a system you intend to use for high-end desktop computing tasks like 3D animation, CAD/CAM, engineering and product design. But there is much more to a …

After all the fanfare around Chromebooks when they were first launched in 2011, the concept seems to have dropped off the radar in the last year. Samsung, once a Chromebook champion, has stopped selling them in Europe, and indeed pulled out of the entire notebook market as well. But there …

The workstation market is a bit like a parallel universe compared to mainstream desktop computing. But technological developments work both ways. Armari's Magnetar M16E-AW1200-GPU is the first system we have seen with AMD's new FirePro W8100, based on the Hawaii PRO GPU. The Hawaii PRO first saw the light of …

Building on what was good about the M-Cube WS we reviewed recently, YOYOTech has tried to fit even more processing power into an unfeasibly small package with the M-Cube WS2. Where the M-Cube WS opted for a frequency-enhanced Core i5, the M-Cube WS2 takes a more traditional workstation approach, using …

AMD's FirePro W-series arrived towards the end of 2012, but they still pack a punch. The fact that these cards remain competitive over a year after release is testament to the strength of the architecture. We had the opportunity to pit three of the top models against each other – …

From the days of the floppy disk, the portability of data and programs has been an important aspect of computing. Today we are looking at the latest external Solid State drive from ADATA – the DashDrive Elite SE720 128GB. When we received this device into the KitGuru Labs, one question …

The 3D graphics workstation is supposed to be big, black and expensive, like the Green Hornet's gadget car. But YOYOTech clearly hasn't read that particular script with the M-Cube WS. The model we were sent was not only about half the size of the average workstation, but half the price …

At KitGuru we are used to analysing the very first products in each new line-up. By and large, they come into the KitGuru Lab in the same way that they would off the shelf when one of our readers makes a purchase later. Today we have a very unusual first …