2015: Year in Review

September

AMD Radeon R9 Nano

While the R9 Fury X is certainly a small graphics card, it also uses a built-in liquid cooling unit, which obviously requires more space than just the card would. The R9 Nano, however, was the true demonstration of what shifting to HBM from GDDR5 could achieve in terms of shrinking form factors. This card is seriously tiny, yet it offers playable 4K frame rates and isn't even noisy. Well, at least as far as noise from cooling it goes. That's because, unfortunately, the cards by a large suffer from annoying levels of coil whine. This really is the Nano's Achilles' heel, as otherwise it's an impressive bit of kit.

CM Storm Quick Fire XTi

We'll be the first to admit that the £140 price tag of this keyboard is pretty eye-watering, but also have to acknowledge that it impressed us at every turn. It's built like a bomb shelter and has heaps of features, including macro programming on almost every key and some pretty fancy dual-colour lighting effects. In spite of all this, however, it's entirely plug and play through the use of clever onboard programming. This means it avoids the need for any software, which we know can be a real bugbear for some enthusiasts.

Raijintek Styx

September also saw the arrival of the Raijintek Styx, a lovely little aluminium micro-ATX cube case based on the design of the earlier Metis but with much improved thermal characteristics. The gold review sample we received is, to borrow forum user Spreadie's phrase, pretty barf-tastic, but thankfully it comes in a wide selection of colours and is pretty decent value as well.