EK Water Blocks is about to put on sale its VGA waterblock, designed specifically for Asus ROG Matrix HD 7970 graphics card. Codenamed EK-FC7970 Matrix, the product will become available in retail sale already on 8 March and will cost approximately €110. Such price is justified by the utmost heat management facilities that ensure 100% percent reliability.



EK-FC7970 Matrix belongs to the echelon of waterblocks with full coverage. Its base is made of nickel-plated copper, its rear backplate – of anodized aluminum, and its lid – of acetal. The model shows compatibility with all standard fittings of G1/4 dimensional type.


It should be mentioned that EK Water Blocks furnished its new creation with all necessary fastenings, a backplate, and a mounting plate; the latter takes only two slots, unlike a nominal Asus ROG Matrix HD 7970 plate which takes three slots. Such switch of plates will be useful on simultaneous installation of several expansion cards.


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The company ASRock, as well as Gigabyte, appreciates the prospects of cutting-edge interface Thunderbolt, so much that it has supplied motherboard Z77 Extreme6/TB4 with four corresponding slots. The novelty is based on existing models with the prefix Extreme6, but its layout is slightly different from the original. In particular, the place of mini-PCIe slots and a pair of PCI slots are occupied with PCI-E x1, and PCI-E x4.



For those who don’t remember all specification, there is a reminder: ASRock Z77 Extreme6 uses a bunch of processor socket LGA1155 for two-and quad-core CPU Ivy Bridge (22 nm) and Sandy Bridge (32nm) chipset and overclocking Intel Z77 Express. The exact specifications of the new model are not listed. Its predecessor could work with three video adapters Radeon in 3-Way CrossFire (x8 + x4 + x4) or two GeForce in SLI (x8 + x8), DDR3 memory with a frequency of 2800 MHz and above, had a four-channel SATA 6 Gb / s and the same number of SATA 3 Gb / s and USB 3.0.
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APU A-Series from AMD has already proved itself as a fair correlation of performance and consumer properties. This allows users to create budgetary home systems that can readily cope with all contemporary tasks, video games, simultaneously providing a considerable speed increase. MSI is one of the companies to develop a motherboard on the basis of this platform, ensuring in its FM2-A85XA-G65 rich functional and maximal performance. The developers have managed to design the board with a minimal amount of additional controllers, though expansion facilities are sure to satisfy the majority of potential customers.



Design and Layout


Motherboard MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 belongs to Military Class III line and is developed in ATX form-factor. Similar to other products of this line, this model is differentiated by a voluminous cooling system and a quite powerful VRM node. This board is destined for Socket FM2 logics and is ready to accommodate processors of A-Series and Athlon. It is based …