2014: Year in Review

Item: 2014: Year in Review
Author: Matthew Lambert

Written by Matthew Lambert

January 6, 2015 | 10:45

Tags: #2014 #best-ssd-2014 #haswell-e #maxwell #x99 #year-in-review

Companies: #akasa #amd #asrock #asus #bit-tech #corsair #crucial #fractal-design #intel #noctua #nvidia #phanteks #sapphire #silverstone #synology #turtle-beach

June

Crucial MX100

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.

Intel Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition

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.