Intels X299 Platform to Counter AMDs X399 with 12-core CPUs and more

A great background can start your day off on a good mood. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, minimalism, abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

ASRocks follows up on the Kaby Lake promise with new features and firmware to enhance overclocking. We've tested a flurry of Z270 boards in the past few months, from the value-priced MSI Z270 SLI Plus to ultra-premium Gigabyte Aorus Z270X-Gaming 9, yet we understand that the heart of the market is in $160 to $220 boards. Anything cheaper typically cuts features that enthusiasts expect, and anything pricier has them considering LGA-2011v3 options. ASRock hits the core of the market with a $220 Z270 Taichi, which is often promotionally priced at $190 and even offers additional mail-in rebates. It’s too bad for ASRock that the current discount will have ended and a new one will have likely started by the time this article is published, because such pricing volatility prevents us from using the lower price in our basic value analysis.

It may not feature RGB illumination but thanks to its balanced ambidextrous enclosure and the very fast and accurate "tweaked" ADNS-9800 laser sensor by Pixart the M50 Pro Gaming Mouse by Das Keyboard / Division Zero has nothing to fear from its competition.

Intel's X299 HEDT platform, whose launch we recently covered as having been pulled by the company so as to better compete against AMD's upcoming X399 HEDT platform, has some new, juicy rumors floating about it. Namely, Bench.Life has reported that Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X lines of high performance CPUs will also feature 12-core offerings on its Skylake-X materialization, instead of just the previously reported 6, 8, and 10-core designs.

This really looks like an Intel that's stretching its manufacturing and chip design prowess so as to prevent itself from being buried in higher-performing, higher core and thread count offerings from its rival AMD, which has turned Intel's line-up in the mainstream consumer market head-over-heels already. Latest reports peg the new series as being presented on Computex 2017 (specifically, on may 30th), with availability being expected on June 26th. Which platform are most interested in, and what do you think of this move from Intel?

The MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X Plus is built around the updated GTX 1080 that NVIDIA announced recently. It comes with faster 11 Gbps memory chips and a decent GPU overclock, which results in a significant performance improvement. The cooler is also extremely quiet and runs very cool.

With the Enthoo Evolv mATX Tempered glass, Phanteks has a case for micro-ATX motherboards in its portfolio, which comes with a lot of features and at an an attractive price. Apart from that especially friends of custom watercooling loops will love this case, since it offers a lot of flexibility in that direction. In addition this model supports RGB illumination. For now, we're really curious to find out how this case is going to do in our review.

Not all graphics cards are created equally, such as this GeForce GTX 1070 from PNY. It takes the stock card and makes it even faster than before. PNY is well-known for their premium quality aftermarket graphics cards, and the XLR8 OC Gaming delivers faster clock speeds, a powerful cooling solution, a slick design, and hopefully fantastic performance too.

The Seasonic PRIME Titanium 850W is the company's flagship PSU -- and rightly so.

Sunshine, got a problem with your Skype? Let me a-help you. Here's a short tutorial explaining how to resolve failed Skype installations due to error code 1603 by manually running Skype setup using MSI package. Take a look.

The Ubuntu 17.10 release date is set for October 19, 2017. Ubuntu 17.10 will use the GNOME desktop instead of Unity, the first release to do so since 2011.