Introduction



If you are looking for a fashionable gaming case with a good technological potential, I am happy to introduce you to X2 i5. X2 is the gaming brand from Spire. It creates products mainly for gamers. But X2 i5 is developed not only for gaming purposes. First of all it is a good-looking compact chassis. It also has good GPU length support and very nice balance between air cooling, storage, and compatibility. Not to waste the time, let’s start our review with the first point, which is Packaging and Contents.


Packaging and Contents


You have already bought the device and ready to open the box. Your X2 i5 comes in an ordinary brown cardboard box, as it usually happens. There is a big X2 logo on both sides – front and back. On the sides you may find some information about the chassis. The company did their best to protect the device from dust, fingerprints and different kinds of damages. The i5 is held in place by two standard Styrofoam spacers, which keep …

ASRock came into the market with a new small-sized overclocking-oriented mainboard. Entitled Z170M OC Formula, the model is designed in micro-ATX form-factor on the basis of Intel Z170 chipset. The latter is ready to cooperate with Intel Skylake CPUs for Socket LGA1151. The PCB offers a pair of DIMM slots for DDR4-4500 MHz RAM (up to 32 GB capacity).



ASRock Z170M OC Formula accommodates three PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion slots, enabling the creation of various graphics configurations (including Nvidia SLI & AMD CrossFireX). Storage subsystem is introduced by a pair of SATA Express ports (10 Gb/sec) as well as four SATA ports (6 Gb/sec) and one Ultra M.2 slot (32 Gb/sec).


This motherboard boasts a high-quality audio subsystem; it is based on Realtek ALC1150 controller, generating 7.1-channel sounding (Purity Sound 3). The 10-layer PCB comes with an integrated 14-phase power subsystem with dual-stack MOSFETs, premium choke coils, and solid-state capacitors Nichicon 12K Platinum. …

Graphics cards, based on NVIDIA GP107 chipsets, are in great demand due to their reasonable “price-efficiency” correlation. With this in mind ASUS developed a couple of video adapters, namely the Dual GeForce GTX 1050 Ti OC 4GB V2 (DUAL-GTX1050TI-O4G-V2) and Dual GeForce GTX 1050 OC 2GB V2 (DUAL-GTX1050-O2G-V2) models. The “Dual” term refers to the number of fans in the cooling system, not to the quantity of GPUs, as one might think.



The preinstalled cooler takes two expansion slots and includes a fancy aluminium radiator, a pair of 80 mm fans and a decorator cover. There is no backplate and no 6-pin PCI-E Power connector.


The Dual GeForce GTX 1050 Ti OC 4GB V2 card operates 768 streaming processors, 48 TMU, 32 ROP, as well as a 128-bit memory bus, compatible with the 4 GB GDDR5 buffer store. The specialty’s core frequency is boosted from 1,290–1,392 MHz to 1,341–1,455 MHz, and VRAM chips reach effective 7 GHz clocks, which is a recommended value. The Dual …