2014: Year in Review

August

Corsair Carbide Air 240

The Air 240 was one of our favourite and most anticipated products from Computex 2014, and it didn't disappoint when it came to review time in August. Taking the dual-chamber approach of the Air 540 and shrinking it to micro-ATX dimensions, the Air 240 looks fantastic, leaving only your core hardware on display through the large window and tidying away the messy PSU, cables and internal drives. There's no place for ODDs, but haven't been bothered by that for a long time, especially in small form factor cases. The Air 240 works well as an air-cooled chassis, but using mini-ITX hardware leaves you more room for liquid-cooling, and we've seen some great builds that do just this.

Intel Core i7-5960X (Haswell-E)

August's Haswell-E CPU and chipset launch (X99) was far more exciting for enthusiasts than the earlier Z97 and Devil's Canyon ones, though it was spoiled slightly by it being rushed and motherboard BIOSes consequently being a bit flaky at first. The Core i7-5960X was particularly exciting for being Intel's first desktop eight-core CPU, and the Haswell-E CPUs (including the Core i7-5930K and Core i7-5820K) were the first consumer products to support DDR4 memory as well. For multi-threaded workloads, these CPUs are the pinnacle of performance available for the consumer market.

News

• Remind yourself of all our Gamescom 2014 coverage
  
• Microsoft loses overseas data privacy case
  
• Bitspower reveals full-cover waterblocks for Asus ROG boards
  
• USB Group finalises reversible Type C design
  
• Razer teases Chroma RGB lighting system
  
• Valve adds Oculus Rift DK2 support to SteamVR
  
• Seagate begins 8TB hard drive sales