Displaying items by tag: Cooler Master

Asetek is hard at work throwing its legal muscle around and they have rolled AMD and Gigabyte into their efforts. After winning a patent suit against Cooler Master over technology found in the pumps on some of their All in One water coolers. So far the list of infringing products include Gigabyte’s GTX 980 Water Force and AMD’s Fury X. Cooler Master has already been ordered to pay 14.5 % on sales of the Seidon, Nepton and Glacier products, but seems to have decided not to do so.

Cooler Master’s CMStorm group has built up a reputation for making good gaming peripherals. Over the years we have seen them put out everything from mechanical keyboards to customizable mice and even gaming headsets. For the most part these offerings have been on the pricier side of the market, but in the recent months they have been working on a more value oriented batch of products. One these (that we happen to have in the lab) is a keyboard and mouse combo, the CMStorm Devastator. Is this combo set really worthy of the CMStorm name? I think we should find out.

Audio on gaming computers is one of the things that gets overlooked when people are building their systems. While they are busy making sure they have a powerful CPU, GPU and enough RAM they seem to forget that audio is an important part of the gaming experience. With good audio the gaming experience becomes more immersive. Of course even if you do get a good audio card you still need something that can reproduce the audio properly or that is just a waste of money. Headphones, Speakers, etc. all need to be able to do their job or you lose a part of the overall gaming experience. With that in mind we are taking a look at set of gaming headphones from Cooler Master’s CMStorm line, the Ceres 300. Let’s see if this set of headphones can bring out the best in your gaming audio.

Cooler Master Silencio 652 is a Midi Tower chassis with a total weight of 10.4 kg and dimensions of 220x507x508,6 mm. Inside the enclosure can be installed three 5.25 "devices, as well as nine 3.5" HDD. It is designed for installation of Micro ATX and ATX motherboards.

The computer case has come a long way since its beige-box inception.  Anyone who’s been lucky enough to be around since that time has had the joy of watching it evolve from that mid-sized invisible-by-design box to the incredible array of enclosures we have today.  Granted, the hardware is a lot more varied today, but that doesn’t begin to account for the options we have before us as builders. 

Personal computing has had its ups and downs of the last 10 years and these have not always been because of consumer reaction. In many cases the manufacturers have failed to meet the expectations of the people they are selling to. One of the biggest places where the market has failed the consumer is when they moved to “good enough” computing. We saw this as far back as the Pentium III when Intel pushed for onboard audio, networking, modem etc. These devices were not the greatest of components, but they were “good enough” in the eyes of the manufacturers. Now the situation is shifting (very slowly) as these components are no longer good enough in the consumer’s eyes. They are demanding more from their hardware. One place where this shift has been the most obvious is in the audio market. Today we have a product that is supposed to fall well outside the good enough range. This is the CMStorm Pulse-R gaming headset. Let’s take a look and see if it really can.

When Cooler Master Launched their new QuickFire Line of gaming keyboards with Mechanical switched they were very well received. We have had the chance to test out all of the models even though we have not always been able to try out the different Cherry MX Switch types (we have gone through Red, Brown and Blue). Now while all of the models were well received there were complaints about more than a few of the features that were built in. One of the most common complaints that we have heard about the QuickFire line up is that the QuickFire Pro did not have full back lighting. Instead Cooler Master chose to only light up a small selection of keys that they called the gaming cluster. Still this keyboard has been bought by many gamers because it is one of the only mechanical keyboards that supports NKRO over USB. As an added bonus the QuickFire Pro has two modes of NKRO; Full and 6-Key. Well for those of you that have wished for a mechanical keyboard with full NKRO over USB and full back lighting your wait is over. Cooler Master has taken some of the best features of the QuickFire Pro and put them in a smaller version named the QuickFire TK and the best part,… it has full backlighting. Read on to find out all of the nice details.

Although all-in-one water cooling systems are nothing new, their rise in popularity is something very recent. We have watched as multiple companies have launched products designed bring “enthusiast” level cooling to the masses. This type of move is also nothing new as we have watched it happen with RAID, SLI, and many other items that were once only for gamers and other computer enthusiasts Still what many do not know is that most of these companies all buy their parts from the same place; Asetek. This company makes great water cooling products and they resell the pieces to others. Now, while that represents most of the market there are some that still build their own; one of these is Cooler Master. Back at CES 2011 we were allowed to see a prototype water cooling unit and we knew that they were looking to do something very different. Now in last months of 2012 Cooler Master has released their work. Today we will be taking a look at the Seidon 120M all-in-one water cooling unit to see if all of Cooler Master’s hard work has paid off.

In the world of computer enclosures things can get boring pretty fast; after all how much can you do with a box? For too many companies the way to differentiate their products is to put in a window and extra LEDs and call it a day. There is little that is new to be perfectly honest with you. However, every now and then something comes out that does stand out from the crowd. We have seen it before with some very unique designs and concepts. One company that has done a fairly good job at keeping things interesting is Cooler Master and in particular their CMStorm line. While at CES this year (2012) we were shown a case that caught our eye and imagination. It was the CMStorm Stryker. We called it the Storm Trooper, not only for its connections to the CMStorm Trooper, but also because it reminded me of the Strom Troopers from Star Wars.  We have one of these in our lab now and well… let’s dive in to see what you get and how well it performs.

A rather long time ago (in computer years) when real audio first came out on the computer the market was pretty bare for not only sound cards, but also for anything to use to listen to them. I can vividly remember buying an expensive ISA Soundblaster card and not being able to find any decent speakers to use with it. There simply was not a lot of choice out there to reproduce your audio. Of course before that I can still remember only having 8-bit audio through the motherboard speaker so decent is relative there. Now the market is flood of products many are just plain terrible (bad design, bad quality and bad audio playback). There are a few companies that have been working to break the “good enough” trend in audio. Cooler Master is one of them as we have shown you with their CMStorm Sirus headset. Now Cooler Master has another gaming headset available. This one is called the Sonuz and features a pair of massive 53mm drivers to push the sound deep into your skull. Let’s listen to them shall we?