The product line of MSI’s mini-ITX motherboards now welcomes a new-comer: the MSI A88XI AC. It takes AMD A88X chipset for Socket FM2+ platform as the basis; this implies the support for AMD Athlon and AMD A series CPUs (of all generations). The PCB offers two DIMM slots for the integration of DDR3-2133 MHz RAM (up to 32 GB). Upon the whole, this model is able to offer much more than other small-sized boards.



The MSI A88XI AC accommodates 4x SATA III 6 Gb/sec ports for the connection of drives and 1x PCI-e 3.0 x16 socket for the implementation of an add-on card. Network options are secured as by gigabit Ethernet controller, so by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 802.11 ac modules. External I/O panel houses three audio ports, one S/PDIF out, one RJ-45, two USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, one PS/2 Combo port, and three video ports (HDMI, DVI-D and D-Sub).


Moreover, the support for 8-channel sound production (due to Realtek ALC887) and HDMI video port entails the playback of 4K Ultra HD …

Buffalo Technology is about to release its newest line of wearable hard drives. Codenamed HD-PCFU3-C, the products will be available in three capacity versions: 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB. All of them allow as pure black so pure white exterior design. The models will be backed by 1 year limited warranty.



The Buffalo HD-PCFU3-C external HDs are housed in solid aluminum cases and equipped with a high-speed USB 3.0 interface. The latter might be used both for data transfer as well as charge-in purposes; put it otherwise, the user will be saved from the necessity to buy an additional AC adaptor.


Pricewise, the cheapest solutions are 500 GB HD-PCF500U3-BC and HD-PCF500U3-WC with the price tag of $90. The HD-PCF1.0U3-BWC and HD-PCF1.0U3-BBC of 1 TB capacity will cost about $110, whereas their senior companions, the PCF2.0U3-GBC and HD-PCF2.0U3-GWC of 2 TB capacity, will go as high as $165. Shipping is to start in early January 2015.

Republic of Gamers devotees have been pleased with yet another addition to Ares series of graphics cards – the Asus ROG Ares III. It is a new powerful model based on two AMD Radeon R9 290X (Hawaii XT) GPUs, each of which cooperates with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory. At its core, this is a modified version of AMD Radeon R9 295X2 videocard, although with some perceptible changes. Potential customers will receive AMD Radeon Gold Reward warrant and a flash-memory card (8 GB) as an additional bonus. It’s worth of acquiring, isn’t it?



Asus ROG Ares III operates at heightened clock frequencies – 1030 MHz – if compared with Radeon R9 295X2 model that runs at 1018 MHz. Each memory module with 512-bit interface runs at 1250 MHz (nominal) frequency, but is able to accelerate up to 5.0 GHz (effective) index. The new-comer employs 16-phase power supply subsystem (Asus Digi+ VRM) that accommodates high-quality components Asus Super Alloy Power, i.e. Japanese solid-state capacitors from …