Dave Altavilla
Recent posts
Alienware's X Series of thin and light gaming laptops was first introduced a little less than a year ago, and Dell's gaming products division has been refining the sleek, spacey looking machines at a fairly rapid clip ever since. A couple of weeks ago, we gave you a look at the new Alienware x17 R2, the second coming of Alienware X Series...
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For those of you who find joy in larger gaming laptop form factors, the recently unveiled Alienware x17 R2 is proof that your mobile battle station size preference has not been left behind. Better still, Dell has a found a way to maintain its larger display and keyboard form factor while making this the thinnest...
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Samsung's previous generation Galaxy S20 Fan Edition was met with high praise for its value proposition when it launched last November. The goal of Samsung's Galaxy FE products is to deliver key features most mainstream and enthusiast users want at a price point that's more approachable for the masses. This class of smartphones has been wildly...
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Last week we gave you an early hands-on look at Google's oft leaked Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. Even Google has teased these new Android flagships a time or two, leaning into the engineering the company has done on the semi-custom design of its Tensor mobile platform processor. Tensor is rumored to be based on Samsung's...
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Thin and light gaming laptops are a bit of an enigma. They essentially aim to defy the laws of physics, eschewing size and thermal dissipation area in an effort to strike a more portable, stylish design while still maintaining respectable gaming chops. Let's face it, no one really likes the bulk and chunky demeanor of...
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When it comes to wireless earbuds, you might say we're fairly particular and almost snooty about them. It's not easy to reproduce decent acoustics with such tiny drivers, never mind with quality active noise cancellation (ANC) that doesn't make it sound like you're listening to music in some kind of weird anechoic chamber. Regardless,...
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After releasing the excellent $79 half in-ear OnePlus Buds last summer (now just $59), followed by the decent $49 full in-ear OnePlus Buds Z last fall, OnePlus just launched its most stylish and expensive TWS (true wireless stereo) earbuds to date, the $149 full in-ear OnePlus Buds Pro, which crank things up a notch by adding ANC (active...
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Intel held its annual Architecture Day earlier this week, and it’s safe to say that members of the press and analyst communities were waiting with baited breath for the deep dive disclosures on the company’s next-gen silicon architectures and products that are typically unveiled at the event. This year...
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Lenovo's venerable ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been one of the longest-running of the company's trusted business-class laptop series. Now in its 9th generation, Lenovo sought to re-energize the X1 Carbon not only with Intel 11th Gen Core Series processors (Tiger Lake), but with Intel Evo certification that brings with it a...
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Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is on a mission to put the company back on track in terms of leadership in its fab process technologies and innovation. The company found itself behind schedule in the transition from 14nm to 10nm and previously announced a multi-year delay for its 7nm migration as well. However, Gelsinger has...
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The ASUS ROG Phone family has always been synonymous with squeezing the most performance out the Android smartphone platform and more specifically Qualcomm's Snapdragon mobile processing platforms. If you've been keeping tabs on the ROG phone line-up, you're probably aware that ASUS recently unveiled its 5th gen ROG Phone 5, and it's based
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When Samsung first introduced its new Galaxy S21 5G line-up, the company took a similar good, better, best approach to its previous generation launch. Like the Galaxy S20, the new Galaxy S21 lineup consists of a base device, a mid-tier device and a top-end model, though all of them can be considered...
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This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one who has been paying attention to the tech sector, but AMD is coming off a record quarter of earnings, which contributed to record fiscal year results. AMD capped off 2020 with $3.24 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter, up 16 percent sequentially and 53...
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This year's virtual CES 2021 is wrapping up today, but before we close out our coverage, we wanted to take you on a tour of a couple of rather innovative products from Dell. The Dell OptiPlex 7090 Ultra is a compact, modular PC that actually resides inside the monitor stand of this bodacious and gorgeous Dell...
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Just over two weeks ago, Qualcomm introduced us to the latest member of its extensive mobile platform SoC family: the Snapdragon 888. This high-end Snapdragon Mobile Platform is the successor to the Snapdragon 865/865+, and will be featured in next year's top tier flagship Android smartphones from the likes of...
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There was little question, when we took a deep dive look at AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X in our launch day review, we came away thoroughly impressed. Not only did AMD deliver on its promise of a significant performance lift in many areas, versus its previous gen Ryzen 3000 series, but we also realized better...
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Earlier this week, Qualcomm announced its latest flagship SoC that will soon power an array of premium smartphones, branded the Snapdragon 888 5G Mobile Platform. The Snapdragon 888 features a faster 8-core CPU complex that incorporates Arm's Cortex-X1 architecture and, for the first time in a Qualcomm flagship SoC...
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Apple is hitting the ground running today with the announcement of its very first custom Apple Silicon designed specifically for its MacBook line of laptops and Mac Mini desktops. Meet Apple M1, which is a new Arm-based SoC that Apple says delivers a significant boost in performance over the Intel processors that it...
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Earlier this month, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su took to the stage and officially unveiled the company’s high-performance Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 series processors. Towards the end of that event, Dr. Su also snuck in a few juicy tid-bits of information regarding the company’s upcoming high performance RDNA 2-based Radeons...
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Yesterday, we brought you news of the new 3DMark WildLife graphics benchmark, which is the latest cross-platform test from the folks at UL Benchmarks. UL explains that WildLife is primarily tasked with measuring GPU performance across platforms, and two distinct tests are available.
The standard WildLife test is...
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It’s fall and it has been quite a while since we gave away a hardcore gaming PC, so we thought what better way to say good-bye summer and usher in the season of crunchy leaves and pumpkin-spice lattes, than to give away an awesome gaming rig?
This time around we’ve teamed up with the good folks at EK Fluid Gaming...
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When Google releases a new iteration of its popular Android operating system, we expect to see the typical generation-over-generation features and security enhancements that make the experience more powerful and capable. Also, if we’re lucky, we might even expect see some performance gains from time to time as...
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