Chris Connolly
Chris Connolly
Recent posts
Nearly every motherboard manufacturer on the market today makes at least one line of products for the "enthusiast" market. Typically, these motherboards are a bit flashier, offer better cooling, enhanced overclocking, more features and are priced significantly higher than their mainstream variants. In the majority of cases, these boards are...
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Windows 7 is undoubtedly the most exciting new operating system to come out of Microsoft within the past decade--and with good reason. The user interface is superb, gone are many of the oddball Vista quirks, and the operating system is light and snappy, marking a massive 180 degree shift away from the heaviness and bloat of Vista. Despite...
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Adobe, the software development powerhouse behind Photoshop, Premiere, and dozens of other content creation suites, has finally embraced the power of the GPU. Amazingly, until Adobe's CS4 suite of graphics software came out this year, the company which has nearly built their empire on graphics related software, relied entirely on the...
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Turn the clock back to the middle of this decade, and the idea of a Dell system using an AMD processor would be considered facetious at best. Dell, had been an Intel-only shop from the beginning, and had only toyed with AMD processors from time to time in highly niche market systems. Many AMD fans considered Dell's acceptance...
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Since the great DRAM price plummet of 2007, memory prices continue to be extremely low. It's currently possible to pick up high capacity memory modules for very respectable prices. As the DRAM market is highly volatile, however, it's possible that we could see prices jump within the next month, week, or even by the day. However, it has been...
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With the introduction of the new Intel Core i7 processor architecture, the company affectionately known as "Chipzilla" from Santa Clara has once again topped itself on the performance charts. Core i7 chips deliver significantly better performance per clock cycle, while at the same time being more power-efficient versus its predecessors....
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While NVIDIA has released a number of new graphics cards for the gaming market over the last year and a half, we have seen relatively few updates to their workstation lineup in that same timeframe. It's been since mid-2007 that we saw the last major performance update to the QuadroFX lineup with the launch of their flagship QuadroFX 5600....
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ATI has spent much of the last decade producing the FireGL line of high-end workstation graphics cards, regularly challenging and often times besting competing products from Nvidia's Quadro lineup. ATI's last generation of FireGL products, which we covered heavily, were excellent all around performers. It certainly wasn't perfect (a bit...
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Every sign we've seen thus far leads us to believe that netbooks are going to be very popular this holiday shopping season. With good reason, too – they fill a void which has existed since the dawn of mobile computing. Truly cost efficient, rugged, little notebook computers with enough processing power and screen resolution to...
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When you think of a high-powered graphics workstation, the first thing which typically comes to mind is a huge, bulky tower chassis, packed to the brim with multiple processors, high-end graphics cards, and multiple hard disks. For the most part, this assumption is still fairly accurate, as these are the components which designers and artists...
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It has been almost exactly one year since we saw the Asus Eee line of notebooks hit store shelves and it has been quite a year for this little side project from Asus. The original Asus Eee PC lineup, even with its flaws, turned out to be a massive surprise hit, as Asus hit a price and form factor that the market was finally ready...
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Traditional hard disk storage is living on borrowed time. We know it and storage manufacturers know it. Solid state drives, which use non-volatile memory chips instead of rotating metal discs for storing data, are simply a better medium in the long run. They consume less power, create nearly zero heat, and produce no noise – but best...
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Gigabyte is typically one of the most loyal Intel partners, when it comes to chipsets. While they don’t solely produce Intel motherboards, when Intel does release a new chipset, Gigabyte is almost always there to produce several products on any given chipset. Most often, we’ll see low-end, mid-range, and high-end products, that are usually...
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At first glance, Intel's technical documentation for the new P45 / G45 Express series chipsets, you'll note looks alarmingly similar to the previous generation P35 / G35 Express series that this new lineup of chipsets is meant to replace. As the P35 series was a rather successful architecture, this immediately...
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We’re willing to bet that many of you have wildly varied opinions of Dell. Some no doubt consider them a huge, monolithic corporation who pushes out generic computers without a soul; while others consider them to be pioneers of the low-cost PC movement, who (almost) single-handedly made computers available to nearly every price point....
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Today at Computex, Intel has officially launched their updated lineup of x45-series chipsets, which will likely be the last major mainstream chipset launch from Intel on the Core 2 platform as we know it today. The names and specifications of these products have been rumored and reported on for the past few months, although today everything...
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It has been surprising and frankly somewhat satisfying to see the success to date of the "Wolfdale" core architecture in Intel’s Core 2 lineup of processors. "Wolfdale" is Intel’s first 45nm based dual-core design, and is an interesting product beyond first glance. When it was first announced, there was a bit of doubt throughout...
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Let’s talk about SCSI for a moment. The disk interface which was once ubiquitous with high-end workstations and servers is now on the verge of obsolescence. With the influx of inexpensive and reliable Serial ATA hard disks and hardware SATA RAID controllers (which can provide excellent performance at a fraction of a SCSI’s price), it’s...
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Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q9300 has some rather large shoes to fill. This newly shipping, relatively low-cost (~$270) quad-core processor from Intel is a replacement for their long-standing price to performance champ, the Core 2 Quad Q6600. The Q6600 was the first quad-core in Intel’s arsenal which was actually affordable, and even today, it...
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ATI has been particularly aggressive with their FireGL workstation graphics card lineup over the past six months. While their flagship R600-architecture was the basis for the solid (but ultimately underwhelming) Radeon HD2900XT release for the gaming market, our tests have shown that this particular GPU architecture actually is much more competitive...
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Earlier this year, we conducted a series of reports on both the high-end and mid-range workstation graphics card markets with a range of comparative tests. In our prior tests, we found performance to be exceptionally close between comparatively priced products from AMD/ATI’s and NVIDIA’s high-end and mid-range cards. NVIDIA is typically...
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When it comes to 7,200 RPM desktop drives, there are few names in the industry that are quite as well respected as the Western Digital Caviar lineup. It’s a time-tested brand which has consistently held its own, in terms of raw performance, acoustics, and reliability. While the Caviar name once stood for a single lineup...
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