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be quiet! CES Suite Tour
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be quiet! CES Suite Tour

One of the companies I visited is a company that’s perhaps a bit less well known in the US, be quiet! (I joked with the representatives that they should change their name to “Shut Up!”, but that probably won’t happen.) Headquartered in Germany, be quiet! focuses on creating silent or at least low noise components for PCs, with a range of power supplies, CPU coolers, fans, and now cases. We’ve reviewed a few of their power supplies over the past couple of years, and most have performed well – though they were not necessarily “silent” during testing at high loads. Most of the products on display in their suite have been available for at least several months or more, so I’ll confine my comments to the three new products being shown.

Starting with what is perhaps the most interesting of their new releases, the Silent Base 800 is be quiet!’s first PC case. It’s a full-size ATX tower case, measuring 266mm x 559mm x 495mm (W x H x D) – 230mm x 542mm x 495mm without the stand. Keeping components cool without generating a lot of noise is often easier to do with a larger case, so it’s not too surprising that be quiet! went with a larger chassis. The design is clean and generally conservative in appearance, though the case is available with three accent colors – black (no accents, really), silver, or orange. MSRP is $139, and you can find the orange and silver cases on Newegg right now. be quiet! also mentioned that they’re trying to get more of their products to the US via other outlets (e.g. Amazon), which would certainly help with increasing brand recognition and pricing in the US.

The other new products are both CPU coolers, expanding the already large selection of be quiet! offerings. First is a top-down alternative of an existing cooler, the Dark Rock TF (TF = Top Flow). Of course, being top-down cooling instead of a tower with a side fan changes the appearance quite a bit, so other than name there’s not a lot in common between the two. The Dark Rock TF has six heat pipes, two 135mm SilentWings fans with fluid dynamic bearings, and it’s rated to cool up to 220W TDP, which means it’s enough for all the current CPUs from AMD and Intel.

The second CPU cooler is a low profile offering, the Shadow Rock LP. This cooler has four heat pipes, a Pure Wings 2 120mm PWM fan with rifle bearings, and a maximum TDP rating of 130W. It’s rated at a maximum of 25.5 dB(A) for noise, making this a great option for a compact and quiet build.

Both the Dark Rock TF and Shadow Rock LP should be available in the near future, but be quiet! was not able to provide pricing at this time. You can view the other products on display in the gallery below.

be quiet! CES Suite Tour
  • Comments are Closed

be quiet! CES Suite Tour

One of the companies I visited is a company that’s perhaps a bit less well known in the US, be quiet! (I joked with the representatives that they should change their name to “Shut Up!”, but that probably won’t happen.) Headquartered in Germany, be quiet! focuses on creating silent or at least low noise components for PCs, with a range of power supplies, CPU coolers, fans, and now cases. We’ve reviewed a few of their power supplies over the past couple of years, and most have performed well – though they were not necessarily “silent” during testing at high loads. Most of the products on display in their suite have been available for at least several months or more, so I’ll confine my comments to the three new products being shown.

Starting with what is perhaps the most interesting of their new releases, the Silent Base 800 is be quiet!’s first PC case. It’s a full-size ATX tower case, measuring 266mm x 559mm x 495mm (W x H x D) – 230mm x 542mm x 495mm without the stand. Keeping components cool without generating a lot of noise is often easier to do with a larger case, so it’s not too surprising that be quiet! went with a larger chassis. The design is clean and generally conservative in appearance, though the case is available with three accent colors – black (no accents, really), silver, or orange. MSRP is $139, and you can find the orange and silver cases on Newegg right now. be quiet! also mentioned that they’re trying to get more of their products to the US via other outlets (e.g. Amazon), which would certainly help with increasing brand recognition and pricing in the US.

The other new products are both CPU coolers, expanding the already large selection of be quiet! offerings. First is a top-down alternative of an existing cooler, the Dark Rock TF (TF = Top Flow). Of course, being top-down cooling instead of a tower with a side fan changes the appearance quite a bit, so other than name there’s not a lot in common between the two. The Dark Rock TF has six heat pipes, two 135mm SilentWings fans with fluid dynamic bearings, and it’s rated to cool up to 220W TDP, which means it’s enough for all the current CPUs from AMD and Intel.

The second CPU cooler is a low profile offering, the Shadow Rock LP. This cooler has four heat pipes, a Pure Wings 2 120mm PWM fan with rifle bearings, and a maximum TDP rating of 130W. It’s rated at a maximum of 25.5 dB(A) for noise, making this a great option for a compact and quiet build.

Both the Dark Rock TF and Shadow Rock LP should be available in the near future, but be quiet! was not able to provide pricing at this time. You can view the other products on display in the gallery below.

Samsung Launches SM951 M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD for OEMs/SIs
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Samsung Launches SM951 M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD for OEMs/SIs

Back at Samsung SSD Global Summit in July, Samsung showed off the SM951 for the first time. The drive has then created a lot of interest because the Z97 and X99 chipsets finally brought proper boot support for the XP941 and many have decided to hold off their purchase and wait for the upcoming SM951. 

Similar to the XP941, the SM951 will come in M.2 2280 form factor with capacities ranging from 128GB to 512GB. In terms of the interface the SM951 moves to PCIe 3.0 x4, which doubles the available bandwidth from the XP941, and Samsung is claiming read speeds of up to 2,150MB/s with writes coming in at 1,550MB/s. Random performance isn’t as impressive but the SM951 is still capable of up to 130K random read and 85K random write IOPS.

In addition to increased performance, the SM951 also brings power savings. The drive includes support for L1.2 low power standby mode and according to Samsung the idle power consumption is under 2mW (i.e. within the DevSleep spec). The XP941, in turn, uses about 50mW as per Samsung’s data sheet, so it’s a fairly significant increase in power efficiency.

But now the bad news: the drive does not support NVMe nor does it come with 3D V-NAND. Back in July Samsung’s own presentation mentioned that the SM951 would be the world’s first client SSD with NVMe support, but those plans has then changed. Currently Samsung has no plans to bring NVMe to the SM951, which leads me to believe that the hardware is not NVMe compatible in the first place. Why that is the case, I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that the current Haswell/Broadwell platforms aren’t really designed for PCIe/NVMe SSDs, which is why everyone is looking forward to Skylake before releasing their drives to the market. There are workarounds to get PCIe/NVMe SSDs to work on existing systems, but apparently Samsung decided to stay with AHCI for one more generation for increased compatibility (it’s an OEM drive after all, so I’m sure the PC OEMs have had their say about NVMe). 

As for the NAND, the SM951 uses 128Gbit 19nm MLC. That’s planar NAND, unfortunately, even though Samsung has been adopting V-NAND to nearly all of its other SSDs. I suspect that the reason behind the choice of planar NAND is PC OEMs and their unwillingness to pay the premium for V-NAND because the truth is that V-NAND is still not as cost efficient as modern planar NAND. Another reason might be the newness of 3D NAND as PC OEMs tend to prefer proven technologies to maximize reliability. 

Since the SM951 is an OEM drive, it won’t be available through the usual retail channels, but at least RamCity (the first XP941 retailer) will be carrying the drive. Stock should arrive around March time and I’ve also heard that there will be a TLC based version called the PM951. All in all, while the SM951 didn’t exactly meet my expectations on the specification frontier, I’m eagerly waiting for a review sample to see how the transition to PCIe 3.0 increases performance. We will be getting our review sample as soon as RamCity receives the first units, so look back for the review in about two months.

Samsung Launches SM951 M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD for OEMs/SIs
  • Comments are Closed

Samsung Launches SM951 M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD for OEMs/SIs

Back at Samsung SSD Global Summit in July, Samsung showed off the SM951 for the first time. The drive has then created a lot of interest because the Z97 and X99 chipsets finally brought proper boot support for the XP941 and many have decided to hold off their purchase and wait for the upcoming SM951. 

Similar to the XP941, the SM951 will come in M.2 2280 form factor with capacities ranging from 128GB to 512GB. In terms of the interface the SM951 moves to PCIe 3.0 x4, which doubles the available bandwidth from the XP941, and Samsung is claiming read speeds of up to 2,150MB/s with writes coming in at 1,550MB/s. Random performance isn’t as impressive but the SM951 is still capable of up to 130K random read and 85K random write IOPS.

In addition to increased performance, the SM951 also brings power savings. The drive includes support for L1.2 low power standby mode and according to Samsung the idle power consumption is under 2mW (i.e. within the DevSleep spec). The XP941, in turn, uses about 50mW as per Samsung’s data sheet, so it’s a fairly significant increase in power efficiency.

But now the bad news: the drive does not support NVMe nor does it come with 3D V-NAND. Back in July Samsung’s own presentation mentioned that the SM951 would be the world’s first client SSD with NVMe support, but those plans has then changed. Currently Samsung has no plans to bring NVMe to the SM951, which leads me to believe that the hardware is not NVMe compatible in the first place. Why that is the case, I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that the current Haswell/Broadwell platforms aren’t really designed for PCIe/NVMe SSDs, which is why everyone is looking forward to Skylake before releasing their drives to the market. There are workarounds to get PCIe/NVMe SSDs to work on existing systems, but apparently Samsung decided to stay with AHCI for one more generation for increased compatibility (it’s an OEM drive after all, so I’m sure the PC OEMs have had their say about NVMe). 

As for the NAND, the SM951 uses 128Gbit 19nm MLC. That’s planar NAND, unfortunately, even though Samsung has been adopting V-NAND to nearly all of its other SSDs. I suspect that the reason behind the choice of planar NAND is PC OEMs and their unwillingness to pay the premium for V-NAND because the truth is that V-NAND is still not as cost efficient as modern planar NAND. Another reason might be the newness of 3D NAND as PC OEMs tend to prefer proven technologies to maximize reliability. 

Since the SM951 is an OEM drive, it won’t be available through the usual retail channels, but at least RamCity (the first XP941 retailer) will be carrying the drive. Stock should arrive around March time and I’ve also heard that there will be a TLC based version called the PM951. All in all, while the SM951 didn’t exactly meet my expectations on the specification frontier, I’m eagerly waiting for a review sample to see how the transition to PCIe 3.0 increases performance. We will be getting our review sample as soon as RamCity receives the first units, so look back for the review in about two months.

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Corsair HX750i Power Supply Review

Today we will look at the latest revision of Corsair’s HX series, the HX750i PSU. Corsair came a long way since their first PSU, the HX520W, with the HX750i now boasting 80 Plus Platinum efficiency levels, a digital interface, and numerous other features. Is it a worthy successor of Corsair’s first and most reputable PSU series? Read on for our full review.