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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Thursday, 07 February 2019 17:09
About a month and a half ago Crucial reached out to me about an upcoming update to their product stack. They were looking at updating their Ballistix Sport LT lineup with 3200MHz models and they wanted me to check them out. They sent over two engineering samples, one of their 8GB single rank kits and a 16GB dual ranked kit, both in dual channel for total capacities of 16GB and 32GB. They wanted notes on their new kits and some independent testing. Well, I did both and sent it over and they recently reached out to let me know that those same kits are now going out to the market. So today I’m going to check out the new kits and see how they perform.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Thursday, 21 June 2018 13:42
From time to time in the hardware market, there are weird and interesting products that come out that seem to break the norm. In the past, you used to see them all the time. For example All in One video cards with capturing built in, crazy multi CPU boards like the SR-2 and SR-X, Asus’s crazy dual GPU MARS and Ares cards and so on. Well right there along with them are the Hades Canyon NUCs from Intel. Okay, NUCs are cool, but what makes these so crazy and special. Well Along with the Intel CPU inside, they actually have AMD Vega graphics. Now lots of PCs being sold these days have Intel CPUs with an AMD dedicated GPU, but what they did here is different. They are both on the same chip! So it's not a big surprise they went with the Hades Canyon name, Hades is another word for Hell and its clear things have frozen over there for these two to be working together like this. So before things thaw out I’m going to check out its features, software, and performance then figure out if this SFF PC has a place in the market or my LAN bag.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Thursday, 26 October 2017 11:47
So today Corsair is introducing their new Spec case and typically I would check it out in one of our traditional case reviews. I’ve done this so many times in the past, in fact I counted, we have done 112 case reviews over the past 9 to 10 years. To do something different this time around I decided rather than do a review that we take a look at the case then do a build in it. So like the original Spec-04, the Spec-04 Tempered Glass model is a budget case. It has an MSRP of $59 so to go with that I thought I would put together a budget build to go along with it. I can’t wait to see how well it performs!
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Friday, 22 September 2017 10:09
Wow, so it was all the way back in April when our last installment of this build was published. Back at that point Ryzen 7 was new, now we have Ryzen 3 and 5 as well as Threadripper. So things have been a little crazy. At the time I was looking at cooling options and the original plan was just to add an AIO cooler but at the time no one had AM4 brackets available. I ended up reaching out to Alphacool, they had contacted me a year or two ago about working together on a build but I didn’t have anything that really fit. It just so happened they had AM4 support early on, fitting this build perfectly. I will go into more details inside, but I ran into multiple delays and hiccups but Carmine is finally all together. It’s about time we catch up and show off what has been done to the build.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Friday, 15 September 2017 13:36
Now I know most of you have no problem building and upgrading your PC, hell for me that is half of the fun. But for everyone I know that builds their own PC, there is another person asking me or friends to help put everything together. Not everyone has friends that can help and some people just don’t have the time to do it as well. This is especially true with things like renovations around the house and working on or building cars but for some reason, there is a big stigma when people would rather buy a prebuilt PC. For me, it's not something I need to do but I completely get why some people would go that route and frankly I would rather people be going with boutique builders who use off the shelf parts that are easy to fix or upgrade later than proprietary PCs from other companies. Anyhow the Ohio bases AVADirect sent over one of their Avant builds a while back and we have been playing with it. It’s about time that I sit down and talk about the build, its performance, and the overall experience.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Friday, 08 September 2017 15:33
So last week I went into detail on the case, power supply, and the fans I went with in Iris. Those are cool, but it’s the components inside that determine how fast the computer is going to be. So today I’m going to go over the “go fast” goodies so to speak. I will talk about the reasoning on the motherboard and CPU and what else is going with it. Considering that my wife ends up playing more games than I do, making sure this build was extremely fast was important. I don’t need her getting angry at me when her games don’t work!
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 23 August 2017 12:37
So 5-6 years ago I had a crazy custom painted build in the office and my wife came in and snatched it up. I like to tease her about it but the fact is she gets more gaming time in than I ever do so that build has been put to good use over the years. It’s had its video card upgraded a little but overall it has been extremely long in the tooth and as I was writing this is actually died on her. So a while back I started putting together plans to build something specifically for her, something more fitting than the rig she snatched up. So my base idea was something in your face, flashy, with lots of bright colors. This is just her style, always picking the crazy colors. She picked up her nickname (Koolaid) back when we were dating because her hair was never the same color. Anyhow with this project, I kind of set off with a theme best described as unicorn vomit, but she picked out the name Iris. In Greek mythology, Iris is the personification of the rainbow and messenger of the gods. I think that sums up what I was going for with this build. Anyhow! Today I’m going to just start things off by touching on a few of the base components and then we will come back later to talk about the go fast parts and what we are going with to get those crazy colors.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 26 April 2017 13:27
So a few weeks ago I got started on our Ryzen based project build. At the time the plan was to put together a reasonable Ryzen build with a nice red theme. We picked out the case, the motherboard, and a power supply. Well, today I’m going to run through the rest of the go fast bits so to speak. That means we need some sort of storage to get our OS on, memory, a video card, and to pick out which CPU we want to go with as well. So today we run through those parts and at the end I will include a small preview of what else is coming for this build. I’ll give you a hint, while the original plan was to put together something reasonable things have gone a little crazy on the water cooling front.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 05 April 2017 18:00
So the launch of Ryzen was exciting because AMD was finally rejoining the high-end market on the CPU side of things and a lot of the benchmarks were very exciting. So once it was all finished up I had to get a proper AMD build together. The original plan was my wife's new PC might be running a Ryzen 7 CPU but ITX AM4 boards aren’t out yet so rather than wait I decided to build an AMD themed build right away. While Ryzen has gray and orange as its colors I decided to stick with the traditional black and red as AMD has used them both a lot in the past. So I started gathering parts and decided on a project name as well. This build is going to be called Carmine as it is a shade of red while also avoiding the traditional red themed names like Ruby. I’m still working on getting in components and planning out the build but I did want to at least get a post up with the base components we are going with, so check them out!
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 15 March 2017 11:51
Well, things have been extremely busy and with that, I haven’t been able to follow up on the Crush project build recently. AMD and Intel both had big launches that pushed everything back and I just couldn’t fit these into the publishing schedule. That said I have still been working on things. More specifically I have been making a few tweaks after living with the build for a while. I said I was all finished a few articles ago then I just had to paint the cards. Well with them painted I had to do something about the Intel 750 Series drive to match and I also noticed just how much dust and dirt was in the case after a few weeks so today I’m going to deal with both of those issues.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 22 February 2017 11:51
For some people, you get your computer together and never mess with it again. I, on the other hand, have a problem and as they say, the first thing is to admit you have a problem. I finished up the Crush build and even posted up performance numbers last week. My problem is I keep looking and thinking how much better the build could look with this one change. Once you do that, you are done, right? Nope! Now that you did that, this other thing really needs to be changed. It’s an endless battle. Well with Crush I just HAD to pull it all apart and keep messing with it. I’m actually in the middle of a few different changes, but the biggest was painting the two GTX 1080’s like I had originally planned. So today I’m going to run through how to paint the new GTX 1080/1070 Founders Edition cards for a nice matching look.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 15 February 2017 10:01
Getting the Crush build all together took a lot of time and a lot of coordination working with the whole list of sponsors, especially after having to pull the motherboard and CPU for our test bench. But it is all finally together, at least for now, so today is the day I finally get to see how it performs. The build didn’t end up being as crazy as The Fridge, but it did end up being a lot more usable and more practical for my office space. Plus the orange theme is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, it's exciting to check that one off the to-do list. Of course, I’m already looking at more things I can do to the build and I am always open to suggestions, but for now let’s see how it performed and check out the office area around it now that I gained space back from the HUGE Fridge build.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 08 February 2017 08:24
Last week I went through the main components in the Crush build, this week I want to touch on a few of the areas that people sometimes skimp on. The power supply is at the top of that list, but some people skimp on their cooling so I want to talk about what my original plans were, how they changed after I started the build, and what we ended up with. Then after all of that, we can finally dive into a few of the small changes I made to fine tune the build and make it exactly what I wanted. That LanOC style if you will.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 01 February 2017 08:13
Last week I went over what I was coming from and got an idea of what kind of build I was looking to build. I also locked down the CaseLabs Bullet BH7 as the case, so now we can finally get down to business and really figure out what is going to make this new built tick. Today I’m going to run through most of the main components. This includes picking out a motherboard, CPU, and RAM. I will also figure out what video card is going to push my games and all of the storage needed to store it all.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 25 January 2017 11:20
So in the past, all of our project build logs have all been for ITX LAN rigs because that’s what I really enjoy the most. My personal main PC has been looking a little dated though and I finally set out to build a new full ATX build. This is an exciting one for me because I finally get to build an orange build and if you can’t tell orange is my favorite color. I’m calling this one Crush both because of the Orange Crush reference and because I hope it crushes all of the games/benchmarks I throw at it. Today I’m going to talk a little about the build it is replacing and start by checking out the case Crush will be in. Keep an eye out in the future as I build and customize the build piece by piece.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Tuesday, 23 August 2016 13:21
So yesterday I went through and spoke about each of the components I went with for Lunchbox 4 and why I went with them. Today's the day we dive into customizing the build to make it stand out a little including adding that all important carrying handle. Then after that, I benchmark the build and figure out how the new build compares to our last Lunchbox build. Does it fit our goal of always going smaller and faster? Do I have any regrets with the new build? Well I talk about that in the last section, so don’t forget to check that out as well.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Monday, 22 August 2016 16:42
Talk about a long time coming, not only has it been almost three years from our last Lunchbox build, but I’ve been planning and working on this build for a good portion of the year. If you follow our coverage, you will see breadcrumbs of comments all the way back to January of me mentioning potentially using components in Lunchbox 4. The problem is how exactly do you follow up our last build, it fit the bill perfectly, was easy to take to events, and had more than enough power for everything we tossed at it. I mean I could do the same thing again but with a few upgraded components but we have always tried to go smaller and faster with every Lunchbox build and frankly going much smaller has a few major limitations. So today I’m going to sit down and run through our new build. A lot of the components have been covered in their own reviews but today I’m going to go over why I picked each part. Then tomorrow I will dive into a few of the customizations I did to the build, benchmark everything, and then talk about how the build turned out.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Friday, 12 June 2015 16:02
In the past I have taken a look at a nice variety of small form factor PCs. Out of all of them I was most impressed with the NUC. Not only did it have the smallest form factor, but it also performed extremely well. It really opened up my eyes to the possibility that only gamers and enthusiasts will be sporting full or mid-sized PCs in the future. We already see a lot of people moving to just using a laptop or even a tablet. So beyond the NUC I was really curious about other NUC like PCs like the Brix from Gigabyte. Well today I have the chance to check out the Brix GB-BXA8-5557, an AMD based PC that has a similar footprint to Intel’s NUC. Let’s see what it is all about and find out if it can hold its own in the performance benchmarks compared to the others.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Friday, 08 May 2015 11:31
I sometimes feel a little like a broken record when talking about LANRigs. While we have been doing them for years here at LanOC, over the past few years the small form factor builds have really come into their own. The introduction of parts has helped a lot and frankly I think a lot of people are starting to see that you can get amazing performance out of a small PC if it is built right. This makes taking your PC to LANs much easier and even for those of you who don’t do that, they take up a lot less space in your office. Well when Asus recently introduced a new all in one PC called the ROG GR8 I was a little surprised. They were promising a PC that is a fraction of the size of a normal SFF gaming rig but you could get it with an i7 and a dedicated video card. I had to check it out. Over the past few months we have been lucky enough to pack it up and use it at multiple LANs, today I’m going to talk a little about the GR8 and our experience with it. While we are doing that I’m going to try to keep our only GR8 (Great) reference to right here in the introduction.
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Category: Pc-hardware
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Published: Wednesday, 22 October 2014 14:49
Those of you who come around often, will have most likely figured out that I have a thing for small form factor PCs. I have been building small PCs with big video cards for years, even before Mini-ITX became the norm. Trying to pack the fastest hardware into the smallest possible case is challenging, but also rewarding when you don’t have to break your back carrying a huge PC into LANs. I know a few of you have been catching on to this, I have been seeing LAN rigs showing up a lot on my Facebook and at the LAN. Well when Intel launched their NUC I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one, well my wife just happened to win one at a LAN. So today I’m going to check out what the NUC is all about and put it together with some cool hardware from Kingston and a Harmony Smart Keyboard from Logitech to help put it to use as an HTPC.
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