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Showing posts with the label Zak Storey

The Razer Soma Chroma has a silly name, silly price tag, and sillily requires you bring your own battery to light the thing up

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Razer Soma Chroma: One-minute review I've reviewed a lot of gaming chairs, sat my butt on plenty of seats promising the best of the best comfort, or ergonomic longevity (I'm convinced noblechairs wants my posture to last me until I'm 126 years old), and I've got to say, aside from possibly the AndaSeat Novis , this might be the most comfortable chair I've ever sat in. At least, part of it is. The seat base. The fabric, the material, lovely; the base width, great. The backrest? Right up my street. But the Soma is a bit of an odd one when it comes to everything else it's trying to do. And an even bigger issue is its launch day price tag. It's $500/£500 (about $954 AUD), which is a lot, and yes, there's RGB lighting in this, but Razer doesn't include an integrated battery (or even an optional one at checkout), doesn't pack a long enough cable, and doesn't ...

Alienware 15 (2026) review: exceptional performance at a remarkable price... just ignore the single-channel RAM

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Alienware 15 (2026) review: Two Minute Review Alienware's going "entry-level" with this one. Or, at least sort of. The whole list of configurations of the new Alienware 15 (2026) is a little confusing. Officially it starts at £879 in the UK, but for that you get an RTX 3050 GPU instead of the 5050 that we have in this review unit. That's a five year old graphics card there hidden away in a 2026 laptop. So first thing's first, keep a bloody good eye on the spec you get. The last thing you want is to think you're snatching up a bargain, only to be caught out by a sub-par silicon mix-up crushing your frame-rates in the process. The good news, though, is that on the whole the specs of the Alienware 15 (2026) we were sent (Ryzen 7 260, RTX 5050, 16GB DDR5, and 512GB SSD), is actually remarkably good value for money. Particularly in the US. You can pick one up for about $1,160...

Corsair Makr Pro 75 review: close to being damn near perfect

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Corsair Makr Pro 75 one-minute review It's difficult to ignore just how big of an impact the custom keyboard community has had on mainstreaming gaming options in the last decade or so. Jump back in time three, four, or even five years, and the very idea of the Makr Pro 75 would've been inconceivable, certainly in Corsair's product arsenal. Eight layers of sound-dampening, gasket plates, magnetic hot-swappable hall effect switches, the spec sheet is rich and detailed, and would make 21-year-old me, with his first-ever mechanical Cherry MX Red, weep if he saw it 14 years ago. Just take a look at the switches, they're linear magnetic hall effect, MGX Hyperdrive models (a mouthful, I know). Aside from being hot-swappable, they're pre-lubed, dual-rail designs with a shine-through PBT keycap that actuate at a fully custom-calibrated actuation point of your choosing. If you want to b...

Corsair Galleon 100 SD review: Stream Deck meets K70, complete with all the bells and whistles

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Corsair Galleon 100 SD one minute review I still don't quite know what to make of Corsair's Galleon 100 SD gaming keyboard . On the one hand, the ethos of this thing, the switches, the design, the implementation are generally very well thought out, and it's solidly built too. Sound-dampening is decent, the linear MLX switches are delightful to type on, and the Stream Deck integration on the right-hand panel gives the whole thing a lot more versatility than you first might think. Whereas before your Stream Deck buttons sat beside your monitor, the Galleon 100 SD brings them within reach, taking up that numpad position instead. That makes it a more natural flow while you're gaming and streaming at the same time. That's a long-winded way of saying you can actually use all of the Stream Deck's vast utility in-game, finally, without stretching halfway across your desk to do it....

The world's greatest laptop… almost. Dell's 2026 XPS 16 lands almost every blow perfectly, with only one exception: the ports

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Dell XPS 16 (2026) Two-minute review Dell's XPS line finally returns at long last. The company may have shifted tack in its naming scheme, but the XPS has returned, and it's back with a bang. The Dell XPS 16 (2026) I have tested here is beyond impressive. With a clean, crisp aesthetic, stylised CNC black aluminum chassis, super-thin bezels, and a keyboard that genuinely makes you question what other laptop manufacturers have been doing for the last 10 years, it's otherworldly in appearance. There's no drama, no ostentatious LEDs or illuminated logos, just clean, tidy lines and materials that complement it perfectly. Even the screen (in my review spec, a 3K touch OLED 3,200 x 2,000 @ 120Hz) leaves little to be desired. (Image credit: Future) But that's not where it ends; it's how it performs that really drives home the point. Thanks to Intel's latest Panther Lake archit...