ASRock is thought to be an innovator in the development of hardware know-hows. The Computex 2016 came as no exclusion: the company introduced a lineup of overclocked mainboards which joined Hyper OC series. Initially, the lineup consisted of three models – H170 Pro4/Hyper, B150M Pro4/Hyper & H110M-DS/Hyper; further on, it will be replenished by three other models – Fatal1ty H170 Performance/Hyper, Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4/Hyper & B150A-X1/Hyper.



As seen from the codenames, the motherboards are based on Intel B150, H170 and H110 chipsets which employ ASRock Hyper BCLK Engine controller; it overclocks Intel Skylake CPUs by means of BCLK alteration, without dislocating other components. The new-comers support the installation of superfast DDR4 RAM, graphics cards with PCI-e 3.0 x16 interfaces as well as voluminous drives (including Ultra M.2).


ASRock H170 Pro4/Hyper features the following specifications:

— chipset: Intel H170;

— memory: 4x DDR4;

— storage: …

The first 4K Ultra HD monitors cost a pretty penny for real enthusiasts. Sometimes the price tag approximated several thousand dollars! Luckily, with the advancement of a new technology, the input has been dramatically reduced, so the end price nowadays does not exceed $1.000. Asus is not an exclusion. Its latest 27-inch PC monitor, entitled PB279Q, costs only $799 without prejudice to efficiency. Therewith, it offers all the privileges 4K displays boast.



Asus PB279Q is powered by a high-quality IPS array with a 10-bit color mapping depth. It ensures the widest possible viewing angles (178/178 degrees), 100% color gamut in sRGB environment, and 5 ms response time. The latter allows for the prime imaging in action games and movies. The display features 16:9 aspect ratio and 3840x2160 pixels resolution on DisplayPort/mini-DisplayPort connection. Moreover, thanks to the implementation of WLED, the model consumes less power on high workload.


To continue, this monitor is able …

Intel and AMD companies have established a good reputation for providing efficient hardware solutions for all customer groups. Each new product introduced by the two companies enters the top sales ranks and this promotes for the competition. AMD has recently produced a new APU solution based on Trinity architecture with graphics module VLIW4 and called it AMD A10-4600M. This model can boast the whole spectrum of improvements and advanced features as compared with its predecessor APU Llano, and is intended to beat its rival Intel in efficiency and performance.



Trinity Architecture


CPU Trinity is based on Piledriver micro architecture which superseded Bulldozer from AMD. The distinctive feature of Piledriver is that it’s primarily integrated in a mobile APU. Quad-core Trinity chips utilize two Bulldozer modules, each of which is equipped with two execution cores. Each APU module employs 2 MB of L2 cache, so the entire module architecture approximates to 4 MB of L2 cache; …