2014: Year in Review

March

Custom cooled R9 290X and R9 290 models

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.

Akasa Tesla H

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.

News

• Razer unveils own-brand keyboard switches
  
• Cameron pledges more cash for IoT projects
  
• Sony Project Morpheus revealed as virtual reality headset
  
• Nvidia unveils GeForce GTX Titan Z at GTC
  
• Facebook buys Oculus VR for $2bn