Round Ups

With big radiators and no vents, closed-loop coolers give us a taste of liquid-cooling’s benefits, sans the risk. While less punishing on the motherboard than big air, can any closed-loop liquid cooler beat Noctua's famed NH-D14 in thermal performance?

We all know that gaming and workstation graphics cards employ the same hardware, differentiated by slight tweaks, drivers, and validation. We also know desktop cards usually perform awfully in professional apps. Does the reverse hold true as well?

We have four portable keyboards and a quartet of gaming mice that could turn heads at your next LAN party. We put the boards through a number of performance-oriented metrics, and handed the hardware off to some gamer friends for their opinions, too.

With monitor prices creeping lower than ever, even the latest IPS-based models are now affordable. Today, we look at a pair of 27-inch, LED-lit, 1080p displays from AOC and ViewSonic. Both products recently hit the market and are selling for around $300.

Five years ago, we didn't have homes with a dozen wireless nodes and the need to run HD video to multiple screens. Today we do. Our 802.11n networks, especially on the 2.4 GHz band, are swamped. Can 802.11ac save the day? We test six routers to find out.

Yesterday, we embarked on a quest to find the ultimate quiet gaming case. Today, we’re testing three more enclosures: Corsair’s Obsidian 550D, Fractal Design’s Define R4, and Gigabyte’s Luxo M10. How will they compare in cooling, noise, and overall value?

Today we're breaking out the Hackintosh for our first-ever Web Browser Grand Prix on Apple OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). How will Chrome 21, Firefox 15, Opera 12.02, and Safari 6 stack up against each other, and to IE9 and the rest of the Windows 7 browsers?