Chieftec, a renowned PSU designer, developed and released its Nitro 2 series of power supply units a few years ago. Last year the series replenished with new models and nowadays it consists of nine units with 400W-850W power. All of them have managed to gain 80 Plus Bronze certificate, due to a high efficiency level 81-85-81 at 20%, 50% and 100% power loading correspondingly. Chieftec BPS-750C2 unit is a deserving representative of Nitro 2 series that attracts clients not only by its facilities but also by a democratic price.



Design and Delivery Kit


Chieftec BPS-750C2 is housed in a black casing with a rough texture. Black ventilation grid with the company's logo in the center covers the integrated cooling system fan. Network socket on the external side is supplemented with a switch; internal side accommodates four sockets for the connection of cables that provide power to peripheral devices, and two more sockets for the graphics cards power supply. Each socket is …

Skull Canyon was designed to dispel stereotypes about low efficiency of compact-sized PCs. Intel tried hard to take its mini-PC to the next level. Hence, the company furnished it with a 4-core Core i7-6770HQ CPU (Skylake) with support of Hyper-Threading. It features 6 MB L3 cache, 45 W TDP and runs at 2.6/3.5 GHz frequency. The CPU incorporates Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580 (GT4e) graphics core with 72 computing units and an additional eDRAM of 128 MB (frequency index: 350-950 MHz).



Intel Skull Canyon is housed in a stylish case with skull logo, featuring 216x116x23 mm dimensions & 0.7 liters capacity. The model accommodates a pair of So-DIMM DDR4-2133+ slots, allowing to install up to 32 GB of memory. Storage subsystem might be organized thanks to a pair of M.2 slots which support SSDs with SATA or PCI Express x4 interface.


This mini-PC comes with Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 8260 adapter that is thought to support Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity. The rear panel …

Four- and six-core models of Ryzen 5 Summit Ridge processors have already appeared on sale, and almost everything is known about the speed and overclocking potential of the eight-core models (R7). The new Ryzen series processors are actually system-on-a-chip (SOC). Integration of the memory controller, functions of which have been once performed by the north bridge, is not something surprising.


Much more interesting is the south bridge, responsible for working with the periphery. Now such processors have basic capabilities for connecting, for example, drives, and they also have several USB outputs. In other words, most of the functions of motherboards have now lost their habitual form.


The so-called «chipset» is a hub; it greatly extends the capabilities of the computer. In fact, those fixes that many users expect are in the plane of UEFI interaction with the CPU (SOC) itself and are unlikely to rest on the structural component of the board.


AMD X370 is the senior …