PC Components, Peripherals And Gadget Reviews And News
Dig into our deep-dive product reviews and news of PC components from processors, to motherboards, graphics cards (GPUs), sound cards, and storage, along with other gadgets and peripherals that complete the computing experience. Whether you're a DIY PC enthusiast builder or just looking to read-up on what should be inside or connected to your next pre-built PC, here's where you'll find all the nuts and bolts sorted on what makes modern computer systems tick, as well some of the best user interface devices to go with them.
Currently, if you're in the market for a video card, there are two great options that will get you premium performance without blowing your budget: the Radeon X800XL from ATi and the GeForce 6800GT from nVidia. Sure, there are more powerful cards, namely the X850XT and GF 6800 Ultra, but the price of these cards alone can sometimes...
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As Intel's Alderwood and Grantsdale chipsets have brought a whole new platform of technology to the P4, OEMs are now in full swing, bringing their own flavors to the mix. With support for Intel's new LGA775 processors, DDR and DDR2 and PCI-Express, the playing field has certainly changed. Granted, while upgrading will require a...
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In the past few months we've seen numerous announcements for PCI Express equipped core logic chipsets, and we have already evaluated a few of them as well. We've previously looked at Intel's 900 Series of chipsets, NVIDIA's nForce 4 and ATi's RADEON XPRESS 200, and hope to get our hands on VIA's K8T890 and SiS' x56 chipsets very soon. ...
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Now that the DVD format war is essentially over, thanks to the advent of Dual-Format drives, the market's next big push is towards Dual-Layer recording. One of the most noticeable differences with the next generation of DVD drives is low pricing from the start, unlike the initial DVD offerings of years past. This instant affordability...
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A few years back, if you wanted the best of DVD playback and CD burning, you had to buy separate drives for each task. With the advent of combo drives hitting the mainstream market, however, users can now get top-notch CD and DVD performance from a single optical device. MSI's XA52P for example, reads DVD-ROM discs at 16x, writes...
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The MSI GeForce FX5900XT-VTD128 A Value Priced Powerhouse... By, Marco Chiappetta March 25, 2004 With all of the fan-fare reserved for high-end cards powered by NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra or ATi's Radeon 9800 XT, its easy to forget that these expensive products comprise only small percentage of the overall...
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MAD DOG Entertainer 7.1 DSP Sound Card 8 Channels of Chest Pounding Sound By Tom Laverriere February 17, 2004 Many of today's motherboards are equipped with more than ample integrated sound solutions, which has made aftermarket sound...
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The MSI FX5950 Ultra-VTD256 NVIDIA's Flagship GPU, MSI Style... By, Marco Chiappetta February 12, 2004 After facing some fierce competition from ATi's R3x0 GPUs and fielding a mountain of criticism regarding questionable driver "optimizations", NVIDIA has had to deal with quite a bit of adversity as of late. They have also...
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The M-Audio Revolution 7.1 Viva la revolución! "Burned in" by Robert Maloney June 23rd, 2003 The history of the audio card industry can be summed up by saying there has always been Creative Lab's SoundBlaster line, and then there have been the "others". When Aureal disappeared from the picture in 2000, it seemed to...
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The MSI GeForce FX5200 TDR128 A Budget Card with a Little Extra By: Jeff Bouton June 3rd, 2003 If there is one thing that is certain, it's that there is no other channel of the PC hardware industry more heated in competition and embroiled in controversy than the graphics sector. This is a fierce market consumed with debates over...
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Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 9 Serial ATA Drive Serial ATA Drives Mature By Dave Altavilla March 20, 2003 Our first look at a Serial ATA drive, quite frankly, was a little less than inspiring. That is to say that, even though the SATA 150 standard offers a higher bandwidth interface and those tidy, thin little cables, ...
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The MSI CR52-A2 - 52X CD-RW Drive Breaking the speed barrier at 52X By Tom Laverriere March 14, 2003 The first CD-RW drive I ever bought was an 8X4X32X unit for around $200 beans and I thought it was amazing how fast that thing could burn CD's. It took me only about 10 minutes to burn a full disc of songs. I was loving life. ...
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MSI's VT2D8X GeForce4 Ti4600 More Bandwidth, More Cooling, More Goodies! By - Jeff Bouton February 16, 2003 As we enter the latest phase in the nVidia vs. ATi battle, the focus again is on who's video card is going to be the all out fastest. It's natural that we get caught up in the hype of who has the faster card, but the bottom line...
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The MSI GNB Max-FISR Motherboard Intel's Granite Bay With Dual Channel DDR and AGP8X By, Dave Altavilla December 8, 2002 It seems as though the entire PC world has been waiting for a Dual Channel DDR chipset to come to the Pentium 4. Although RAMBUS and RDRAM technology certainly had its merits, as the highest available bandwidth memory...
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The MSI KT4 Ultra-FISR Motherboard Review VIA's KT400 Chipset Matched With MSI's Best By, Jeff Bouton October 27, 2002 Most of us remember the transition from VIA's KT266A to the KT333 chipset. We had been patiently waiting for a worthy successor to the popular KT266A, anxious to see the next level in chipset performance. ...
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The MSI 648 Max Motherboard Review Great Performance at a Great Price... By, Robert Maloney October 23, 2002 Increased competition often leads to technological advancement at a faster rate than normal, because one company constantly tries to out-do another. This result of this competition usually leads to the end-user being rewarded...
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The MSI 845G Max-L Motherboard Review Integrated Graphics and Bluetooth Technology By -Chris Angelini June 28th, 2002 The i845 chipset gained quick popularity due to its DDR memory support, providing an alternative to the once-expensive RDRAM standard. In fact, many proponents of the chipset went so far as to call the i845 ?the...
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The Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP Hands on testing of Matrox's High End Gaming Card By -Dave Altavilla June 25, 2002 When Matrox took the wraps off their next generation GPU, last month, HotHardware brought you a full showcase of the chip's features, new capabilities and estimated performance level. Clearly Matrox is targeting the...
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The MSI K7D Master Dual Socket A Motherboard Athlon Power X 2! By Marco Chiappetta May 21, 2002 There is no denying that AMD has done very well with their Athlon line of processors. A few years ago, back in the K6 days, AMD CPUs were found only in low-end desktop systems. The terms "high-performance" and "K6"...
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The Matrox Parhelia 512 Matrox Re-Enters The 3D Graphics Ring - Big, Bad and Pretty By -Dave Altavilla May 14, 2002 We know you've been waiting for this, haven't you? Of course you have. Since the launch of the Matrox G450, we don't know of any hard core PC Hardware Enthusiast that hasn't been waiting for Matrox to step...
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The MSI KT3 Ultra ARU Motherboard Review KT333 Muscle and All the Trimmings! By, Jeff Bouton March 24, 2002 This evening we will be taking a look at the new KT3 Ultra ARU motherboard from MSI. This is the first of what will surely become a long line of motherboards to incorporate the new VIA® KT333 chipset. The new chipset...
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The MSI K7T266 Pro DDR Socket A Monster Misguided? or Misunderstood?... By, Marco "BigWop" Chiappetta June 14, 2001 With the influx of DDR memory into the market place, came a craving for a high performing chipset to exploit the increased bandwidth offered by this new memory type. AMD was first to introduce a DDR chipset for...
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