The rising competition between the two giants in the manufacture of processing units, Intel and AMD, makes each of the two invent ever newer technologies and implement them in their products. The attempts to dominate in the market and win as many consumers usually develop into brand new approaches and brand new advanced facilities.



In this light, Intel is going to upgrade its Ivy Bridge processors to make them more power-efficient. But power-efficiency does not imply that processing units will show less performance; quite the contrary, the manufacturer is willing to combine an utmost performance with the maximal power efficiency level.


Currently, the most power-saving processors of Ivy Bridge generation can be found in mobile devices on Windows platform and in Apple MacBook Air devices. Their TDP level is recorded at 17W. As appears from the above mentioned, the TDP level in upgraded Ivy Bridge processors will be lower than 17W, though the developers do not voice the margin …

Zalman has long been deprived of a full-tower flagship PC chassis, after it discontinued the line of GS1200. The anticipation of a new etalon was accompanied by an overall market uncertainty as for the future of desktop platforms. Luckily, laptops and tablets couldn’t fully satisfy the customers’ growing needs, so Zalman decided to fire off with a new top-tier case, entitled H1. Stylish and magnetic from outside, this model has a lot of interesting options in the bins. Let’s have a look at them.



Key Features


Zalman H1 is a full-tower case, featuring 561x238x570 mm dimensions. The chassis is made of steel, aluminum and a high-quality plastic, with exterior and interior totally painted black. Internal layout allows for the installation of motherboards with elongated PCBs, including E-ATX and XL-ATX models. The model houses three external bays for 5.25-inch drives, seven internal bays for 2.5-/3.5-inch drives as well as nine expansion slots.


The case boasts some …

Thrifty enthusiasts willing to build up an efficient gaming system are given a chance to enjoy the privileges of a new motherboard from Asus: the B85-Pro Gamer. The model employs an affordable set of components, although it is highly competitive with more powerful solutions. This ATX board is based on Intel B85 Express chipset for Socket LGA1150 platform and supports Core i3/i5/i7, Celeron and Pentium (Haswell gen.) CPUs.



Asus B85-Pro Gamer comes with 4x DIMM slots that are ready to welcome up to 32 GB of DDR3-1600 MHz memory modules (two-channel). Storage section is represented by six SATA ports, four of which support 6 Gb/sec standard. Expansion of functional facilities might be realized due to three PCI slots, two PCI-e 2.0 x1, and two PCI-e x16 slots. The delivery of power supply is organized by means of 1x 24-contact socket and 1x 8-contact socket.


The hardware base also embraces network gigabit Intel I217V controller with an integrated GameFirst II technology; the …