World of Tanks (WoT) is a free-to-play MMO-action video game by Wargaming.net that is loosely based on World War II-era tanks from the Soviet Union, Germany, USA, China, Britain, France, and Japan. Players can open either a free or premium account, and earn their way up a tiered ladder by competing against other online players in random battles. World of Tanks is developed for the Microsoft Windows PC platform, and is designed to be played using a wide range of computer hardware: from portable laptops with integrated graphics to high-performance desktop computers with discrete graphics. Benchmark Reviews recently published our World of Tanks 3D Vision Game Review for enthusiast gamers wanting life-like realism and effects, but for this article we concentrate on the best video settings for competitive play and share helpful game play tactics.

Of all the superheroes, Batman is one of the few who does not possess any super-human power. Perhaps that is why so many people cheer for The Great Detective, and why so many gamers seek to wear his utility belt. Although the upcoming movie The Dark Knight Rises depicts the same character played in the Batman: Arkham City video game, both also share 3D special effects that offer a glimpse from behind Batman's cowl. Super-villain Joker always gets the last laugh, and uses dozens of other arch enemies to help make his punch line. In this article, Benchmark Reviews guides you through the criminal masterminds that inhabit Batman: Arkham City in this NVIDIA 3D Vision game review.

The official category for the QNAP TS-419P II Turbo NAS is "Network Attached Storage", but in today's environment, think of it as "Connected Storage". By consolidating and providing direct access to your data via cloud services or on your mobile device, it's more about connectedness than the ability to serve up files over 1000BASE-T in your home or workspace. The TS-419P II is the next logical step up from a two-bay device and allows you to implement RAID 5 or 6; a four-bay device is really the bare minimum for a high availability NAS appliance. It's equipped with a faster Marvell CPU running at 2.0 GHz, a 25% increase in clock speed from previous models. Benchmark Reviews has tested several NAS units recently, let's take at look at how this latest unit compares.

Although the company was established in 1989, G.SKILL is still not as familiar a name in the memory market as are Corsair, Mushkin, Kingston, and others. But in the past few years they've built their portfolio of memory (and memory is almost all they do) to encompass a broad selection of price/performance points ensuring that system builders and enthusiasts can find virtually anything they need. Today Benchmark Reviews tests G.SKILL's "mainstream" DDR3-1600 16GB quad-channel memory kit for Intel's X79 platform.

Hardcore PC racing simulator enthusiasts would argue that there is no alternative to a force feedback wheel and pedals, and they might be right, but not everybody has $300+ to fork out on an expensive setup. At the same time not everyone is content either being a keyboard racer or having to make do with a sub-par wheel or console style game controller. This is where SteelSeries and Ignite Game Technologies come into play. Together they have developed the SteelSeries Simraceway SRW-S1 motion sensitive steering wheel. A wheel that bridges the gap between console style game controllers and high end wheel/pedal setups, and it is available now from the SteelSeries web shop for $119.99 MSRP. Out of the box it is setup to work with Ignite's 'Simraceway' online racing simulator for the PC, but SteelSeries state that it will work with just about any racing game designed for the PC. Here at Benchmark Reviews we take marketing claims at face value and we always leave our judgement to real world testing, but if looks are anything to go by then we are in for one hell of a treat.

Intel's "Extreme Edition" CPUs have always represented the company's top consumer offerings. Typically priced in the $1,000 range, they have unlocked multipliers, lots of cache, and lots of cores. But until now, Intel's top Extreme Edition offering, the Core i7-990X CPU, was based on the older Gulftown architecture, and the performance gap between this CPU and the newer Sandy Bridge architecture Core i7-2600K and 2700K is pretty damn narrow, especially considering that the latter costs less than a third the price of the former. But now Intel's made a Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition, with six physical cores and a staggering 15 megabytes of cache. Benchmark Reviews takes the new Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition CPU around the benchmark course, testing it against the best CPUs Intel and AMD have to offer.

Benchmark Reviews has previously tested the Patriot Pyro SE, a second-generation SandForce SF-2281 solid state drive, which is considered their standard-IOPS enthusiast storage solution. Now we return to test the Patriot Pyro SE, which pushes the throttle on synchronous NAND flash for the best operational performance possible. Patriot rates the Pyro SE to deliver SATA 6Gb/s read speeds up to 550 MB/s with 4K aligned operations reaching 85,000 IOPS. In this article Benchmark Reviews tests the Patriot Pyro SE SSD, 240GB model PPSE240GS25SSDR, against the leading competitors to find out just how much speed and performance this new solid state drive really offers.