Category: Reviews

We’ve got two more chances to win a Z87 Haswell motherboard, this time courtesy of MSI. Today’s giveaway includes one MSI Z87 MPower Max and one Z87-GD65 Gaming.

We’ve had quite a few major wireless networking standards over the years, and while some have certainly been better than others, I have remained a strong adherent of wired networking. I don’t expect I’ll give up the wires completel…

Apple typically offers three different CPU upgrades in its portable Macs: the base CPU, one that comes with the upgraded SKU and a third BTO option that’s even faster. In the case of the 2013 MacBook Air, Apple only offered two: a standard SKU (Core i5-4250U) and a BTO-only upgrade (Core i7-4650U). As we found in our initial review of the 2013 MacBook Air, the default Core i5 option ranged between substantially slower than last year’s model to a hair quicker. The explanation was simple: with a lower base clock (1.3GHz), a lower TDP (15W vs. 17W) and more components sharing that TDP (CPU/GPU/PCH vs. just CPU/GPU), the default Core i5 CPU couldn’t always keep up with last year’s CPU.

The Core i7 CPU upgrade comes at a fairly reasonable cost: $150 regardless of configuration. The max clocks increase by almost 30{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3}, as does the increase in L3 cache. The obvious questions are how all of this impacts performance, battery life and thermals. Finally equipped with a 13-inch MBA with the i7-4650U upgrade, I can now answer those questions. The two systems are configured almost identically, although the i7-4650U configuration includes 8GB of memory instead of 4GB. Thankfully none of my tests show substantial scaling with memory capacity beyond 4GB so that shouldn’t be a huge deal. Both SSDs are the same Samsung PCIe based solution. Let’s start with performance.

Corsair’s cases have been defined by excellent ease of assembly, solid watercooling support…and middling air cooling performance. The Air 540 is a completely different beast, though, and it looks like they may have sorted out that last issue.

Round two of our ergonomic keyboard coverage brings us the Kinesis Advantage. Earlier this year, I reviewed the TECK—the Truly Ergonomic Computer Keyboard—one of the few keyboards on the market that combines an ergonomic layout with mech…

While their 17″ gaming system has seen steady and incremental improvement, new to the Razer lineup is a notebook with all of the gaming performance in a remarkably slim 14″ chassis. Could this be even better than the full size Razer Blade Pro?