The fact of growing popularity of compact PC systems is not a bit of news by itself, however the emerging of a fresh space effective Abee chassis solution is.



The Japanese company has presented its brand-new AS Enclosure RS04 desktop case, which will be available in 6 colour versions (black, silver, pink, bright green, sky blue and chocolate brown). The front panel is made out of 5 mm and upper and bottom panels – out of 2 mm high-quality aluminium. The inner framework is steel and meant for Mini-ITX boards.


Abee AS Encolsure RS04 allows to install four 2.5-inch drives, an SFX power supply, the CPU cooling system of up to 78 mm height and an entry-level graphics adapter (for instance, Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti OC), the length of which must not exceed 190 mm. This chassis is well cooled down due to the efficient allocation of vent holes.


The specialty is 105 mm in height, 357 mm in width and 239 mm in length and weighs 3.1 kg. The AS Encolsure RS04 model is not cheap and …

Almost a year has passed since the announcement of the AMD mid-price video card – Radeon RX 480 which is a bestseller on the market. It is not difficult to guess why: good performance for the cost, as well as decent energy efficiency, previously unavailable to users of the company's graphics solutions, have turned out to be good.


But the model has one flaw, or rather a feature – in pursuit of a high ratio of speed and power consumption, AMD developers have been so carried away by this goal that they have absolutely forgotten about the potential rival that has not been sitting idly by. The GeForce GTX 1060 family has been updated with several modifications: with three and six gigabytes of memory, with reference and increased memory frequency.


As a result, the emerging AMD has to compete for the leading places with two competitors. To this end, engineers have taken the energy efficiency issue to a secondary place and start to optimizing in the pursuit of speed.


Both …

Seagate has expanded its lineup of hybrid drives with the 5th-generation FireCuda SSHD. The greenhorns are based on shingled magnetic recording technology (SMR), rather than perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). The SMR enables the partial superposition of data tracks; it ensures the ultimate record density. The models are backed by a 5-year’s limited warranty.



Seagate FireCuda series is introduced by 5 models, developed in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch formats. Their capacity varies from 500 GB to 2 TB. The drives employ MLC flash memory (8 GB) as well as SATA 6 Gb/sec external interface. The spindle rotates at 5400 RPM.


The average data read speed makes up 140 MB/sec with 2.5-inch models & 156 MB/sec with 3.5-inch items. The latter offer also up to 190 MB/sec of the average read speed from flash memory; besides, it takes only 8.5-9.5 ms for the chips to search for the needed data on Read/Write operations. To add, the new FireCuda is thought to consume between 1.7-6.7 W power.