As the prospect of the last weekend before Christmas looms take comfort in not having to wrack your brains, trying to think what to buy other people, at least for these few brief minutes. Instead sit back, relax - maybe even grab a mulled beverage - and enjoy yet another easy peasy, lemon squeezy chance to win something for yourself in our latest Christmas Countdown Competition. Today Synology has provided a prize in the shape of a two-bay NAS drive, the Synology DS214se. Able to accommodate two 3.5in or 2.5 hard drives - or SSDs if you fancy - the DS214se packs in a gigabit Ethernet interface two USB 2.0 ports for adding extra storage and it boasts transfer speeds up to 102MB/s read and 58MB/s write. It also supports a host of apps and services, including DLNA media streaming, bit torrent downloads, QuickConnect and EZ-Internet for remotely accessing your files from anywhere round the world and much more besides. 
All you've got to do to be in with a chance of winning this great prize is answer the following question:
Simply email your answers to competition@bit-tech.net, putting "Christmas competition 15" as the subject/title.Terms and Conditions· Please include your contact details (shipping address, contact telephone number and full names) in the email.· This competition is open to all bit-tech readers worldwide.· Prizes cannot be swapped for a cash alternative.· Multiple entries will be disqualified· Emails must be received by midday (GMT) 23rd December 2013 to qualify.· By entering this competition, competitors will be deemed to have accepted and agreed to be bound by the rules, and all entry instructions given are deemed to form part of the rules of the competition.· Bit-Tech’s decision over the winning entry is final.· Your email address and all other personal information will only be stored for the purpose and duration of this competition and will not be passed on to any third parties.· The winners will be informed by email.
Having taken the SSD world by storm again with the SSD 850 PRO earlier in the year, Samsung last month brought 3D V-NAND to a lower price point with the SSD 850 EVO before any other NAND manufacturer had released any 3D NAND-based products. The SSD 850 EVO does fall into the dangerous middle class of SSDs, where it can't compete on performance with the top dogs or on cost per GB with the value drives, and this will likely leave it at a disadvantage. However, Samsung's continual innovation in the SSD space is worthy of recognition, and the SSD 850 EVO range is undeniably great, with TurboWrite, RAPID Mode and the Magician software suite being particular highlights.
Our final product highlight of 2014 is this great little chassis from SilverStone. With its sleek, all-aluminium exterior and a design remniscient of the excellent FT02, the FT05 scores big points in the design department. It's not all show though, as the FT05 continues the tradition of Fortress cases being fantastic when it comes to air cooling. It uses a rotated design with a bottom-to-top, positive pressure airflow design that will do wonders for your temperatures. If you don't have too much hardware inside, it's a solid choice for a premium ATX build.
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That's it for our 2014 year in review. Think we've missed anything vital? Let us know! Be sure to let us also know what you're most looking forward to in 2015.
The start of June 2014 saw an interesting development in the SSD market when Crucial released an incredibly well-priced SSD in the form of the MX100. The new low price was enabled by the use of Micron's 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND dies, which are extremely high density and thus allow Micron to squeeze even more storage space out of a silicon sheet, and these savings are then passed onto the consumer. Moreover, the excellent feature set of the M550 was entirely carried over into the MX100, and the endurance is easily high enough for it to be of no concern to regular everyday users. As such, the MX100 remains one of the best options available for introducing fast flash-based storage to your rig without breaking the bank.
Celebrating 20 years of Pentium processors, Intel released a rather special CPU in June. To the annoyance of enthusiasts worldwide, Intel has in recent years stopped allowing users to tweak the multipliers on all but the highest-end CPUs (Extreme Edition ones or those that carry the -K suffix). This essentially prevents users from yielding significant overclocks on lower-priced parts in order to surpass the performance of the higher-priced ones. However, the Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition treated users to a Pentium-branded CPU that shipped with an unlocked multiplier. It sports two Haswell cores running at 3.2GHz by default, so it's hardly a slouch to begin with, but we had no issue overclocking these all the way to 4.8GHz, which gave it a huge boost in applications limited to one or two threads. It's absolutely ideal for a cheap but powerful gaming system, and it was great to see Intel breaking the mould for a change, even if that mould was one it had created for itself. We did consider featuring the Devil's Canyon CPUs too, which also launched in June, but all we really have to say about those is: meh.
Due in large part to a low quality stock cooler, most people associate AMD's R9 290X and R9 290 cards with being extremely hot and loud. AMD's rush to get the cards to market meant that its board partners were unable to release their custom-cooled SKUs until a good few months after the initial late-2013 launch. Thankfully, by March, there were plenty of options available, making AMD's top-end GPUs a much more realistic option for those not interested in strapping liquid cooling to them. Specifically, we saw the excellent Asus R9 290 DirectCU II OC and Sapphire's beastly triple-fan R9 290X Tri-X OC, both of which did a fantastic job in keeping the toasty Hawaii GPUs cool and quiet.
Here at bit-tech, we can't get enough of quad-SLI, eight-core monster PCs but of course very few people actually need this level of computing power. For many, it's possible to get everything they need from one of Intel's low-power NUC boards, and Akasa's Tesla H case proved to be the perfect companion for such devices. The aluminium construction is very high quality, and the case cools the NUC (and your mSATA SSD, if applicable) entirely passively, so you don't have to worry about any noise or dust. There's even a pair of 2.5-inch drive mounts inside, opening up the possibilities of what you can do with the NUC even further.
The GTX 750 Ti was one of the most interesting graphics card launches of recent years for a few reasons. It introduced a new architecture to the market in a way that was until then unheard of for Nvidia, bringing it in first at a mainstream price point rather than with a top-down approach where the fastest card is released first. It also marked a very significant increase in performance per watt, without any process node shrink, which is truly remarkable. The card itself is dinky and powered solely by the PCI-Express bus, yet it's capable of smooth framerates in modern games at 1080p with high or even ultra settings. As such, it quickly became the ultimate affordable upgrade for those running basic off-the-shelf PCs or integrated graphics.
Corsair has always been a dominant force in the all-in-one liquid cooler market, which has now grown to incorporate numerous companies and brands and, thankfully, a little more variety in the look and feel of the products compared to a few years ago when almost everything was a rebranded clone of an Asetek or CoolIT model. By design, the H105 and H75 are actually both very run-of-the-mill, as they lacked the software compatibility introduced with the H80i and H100i and had no other real unique features besides an interchangeable coloured plastic ring on the pump unit. However, with their launch, Corsair showed it still has an edge in this market – these two coolers are well-built and perform very well. They're also the easiest to install AIO coolers we've ever worked with.
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