Dave Altavilla
Recent posts
We've been looking forward to Windows 8's Consumer Preview for months. This, after all, is Microsoft's big chance to show what they've been working on and unveiling bit by bit for the past year; a chance to evaluate the sum total of changes and advancements baked into the next-generation...
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Intel’s X58 chipset made for great platform performance, and even though the chip maker has unleashed many more chipsets since the X58 came out, there hasn’t been a true successor in the high-end of their product line-up (not even the Z68 chipset) until now. The X79 chipset looks...
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ASUS, ever the gracious hosts, had us out to Dallas, TX recently to show us the company’s upcoming motherboard series and let us play with some test systems to see if we could break them. (Full disclosure: We did. But we fixed them, we think.) There is much we learned there that we...
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Today we're continuing our coverage of the ultrabook onslaught with Dell's first effort in the space, the XPS 13... Dell does a nice job of striking a balance here, between features, performance and cost. The team obviously invested quite a bit in the display, however, as Dell's 13-inch...
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Ultrabooks are an interesting phenomenon. It's like the industry took a long hard look at the emaciated netbook market and decided consumers deserved better. Thank God. We're big fans of the thin and light trend in notebooks, and netbook price points are something we all can appreciate. However, as performance enthusiasts,...
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When Maingear computers first stepped out with their high-end SHIFT line of gaming and workstation PCs, we took note and were genuinely impressed; a bit of rarefied air if you will. It wasn't so much the component selection that stood out, but it was the excellent build quality and the...
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Alright, we'll come right out and gush a little bit. Our cynical, sometimes overly-critical opinions can occasionally be tempered by momentary flashes of greatness. We see a lot of high-end (and low-end) gear around here, so after a while, you can't stop your eyeballs from glossing over and a yawn from escaping from the cranium....
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Intel's presentations at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this year are focused on one of the biggest problems facing modern CPU designers—how to improve power efficiency without sacrificing compute...
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A few months back, we examined the performance of four liquid coolers for the Sandy Bridge-E socket LGA 2011 platform: Corsair's H80 and H100, Maingear's Epic 180, and Intel's own reference cooler. Liquid coolers are popular with high-end...
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On the test track, Alienware notebooks have racked up some of the best performance numbers we've seen and the company's desktops rank right up there as well. One shape the Aliens have never assumed previously, however, is the small form-factor desktop. And let's be honest, systems...
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Dell's enthusiast gaming PC division has built a legacy on designing over-the-top desktops and notebooks, that push the boundaries of performance and style with an unmistakable design flair. We've been pretty impressed with the Alienware systems we've looked at thus far, and though they...
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When we first received the new NVIDIA Tegra 3-powered Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime for testing, we had solid communication from both Asus and NVIDIA that this tablet was one of Google's test vehicles for their upcoming Android 4.0 operating system, also referred to...
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Our friends at CyberPowerPC were showing off some seriously decked-out gaming rigs this year at CES 2012. We've always had good experiences with their products here in the lab and the systems on display at CES...
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Prior to the start of this year's CES 2012 show, a number of OEMs were showcasing their latest products at various hotel venues throughout the bustling city of Las Vegas, Nevada. Of course OCZ Technology was first on our list of suites to visit, in an effort to satiate our need for...
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Prior to the start of this year's CES 2012 show, a number of OEMs were showcasing their latest products at various hotel venues throughout the bustling city of Las Vegas, Nevada. Of course OCZ Technology was first on our list of suites to visit, in an effort to satiate our need for...
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In addition to a number of new laptops, smartphones, and a TV, Lenovo announced the IdeaPad Yoga Ultrabook today. This new multi-mode notebook meets the specifications for an ultrabook and also has a 360-degree flip-and-fold design. As you...
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Prior to the start of the CES 2012 show in Las Vegas this week, major players in the storage industry kicked off their mini conference, in an effort to get the buzz going early in consumer and enterprise storage. Of course Micron and...
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There's an old saying that goes something like "the best things in life are free." Then there's another, more cynical proverb that says, "there's no such thing as a free lunch." While I'm not here to choose sides or recite old proverbs, I'd offer that, in reality, both views are...
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There's an old saying that goes something like "the best things in life are free." Then there's another, more cynical one that says, "there's no such thing as a free lunch." While I'm...
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We have evaluated a handful of Patriot’s SSDs recently, all of which proved to be solid (no pun intended) offerings in their respective categories. The high-end Patriot Wildfire SSD hung right alongside the best of the SandForce-based drives with synchronous NAND we’ve tested and...
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If 2011 was the year of the tablet, then Q4 2011 had to be the quarter of 7-inch versions. With a late-in-the-year burst of releases from various manufacturers spurring break-out products like the Kindle Fire and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, it's as if manufacturers made a...
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We called the 10-inch Toshiba Thrive the "Swiss Army Knife" of tablets when it first arrived, with its copious amounts of connectivity options and full-sized ports. It's a large-than-most tablet but the sort of device that...
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