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.
AMD updated its family of Kaveri-based A-Series APUs for desktop systems today. We first took an official look at Kaveri back in January, when we evaluated the A8-7600 APU. That particular APU is being re-launched today at a new price point, but AMD is also introducing a couple of new APUs as well, namely the A10-7800 and the A6-7400K. As...
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It has been almost two years since AMD launched the FirePro W9000 and kicked off a new battle in the workstation GPU wars. Today, we're reviewing the company's FirePro W9100 -- a new card based on the same Hawaii-class GPU as the desktop R9 290 and R9 290X, but aimed at the workstation market and professional consumers. Does...
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AMD has had a tough time competing with Intel on the desktop lately, but when it comes to mobile technology, in the notebook arena, performance, value and power efficiency are measured against a very different yardstick. That's not to say that CPU throughput and IPC isn't important in a notebook, not by a long shot, but multimedia...
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You might recall that we recently rounded up a collection of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards and put them through a gauntlet of benchmarks and tests. Each of the cards represented brought something unique to the table and stood out in some way, but curiously missing from the...
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It has been nearly a year since we visited ARM in Cambridge, UK, and the company recently held another tech day -- this time in Austin, Texas. During the three-day session, ARM covered a wide range of topics, with a primary focus on server ecosystems and next-generation mobile hardware...
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A couple of weeks back, we got the chance to get some hands on time with AMD’s upcoming mainstream and low-power APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), codenamed Beema and Mullins. These APUs are the successors to last year’s Temash and Kabini APUs, which powered an array of small...
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For the past few weeks, AMD has been strategically dropping hints about the product we’ll be showing you here today—the ultra, powerful Radeon R9 295X2. If you’ve spent any time on our home page recently, or on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, you may have seen the “two is better than one” tag-line...
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A few weeks back, we took a look at a new series of solid state drives from Crucial, the M550, which leveraged Marvell controller technology, 20nm MLC NAND flash memory, and firmware optimizations gleaned from the last couple of years of SATA SSD advancements. Ultimately, we found the M550...
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AMD is shaking up its mid-range graphics line-up today, by slashing the price of the Radeon R7 260X and introducing the more powerful Radeon R7 265. Though their model numbers are quite similar, the Radeon R7 265 is actually built around a beefier GPU than the 260X, and is more like the higher-end Radeon R9 270X. AMD is positioning the...
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Way back in 2006, after the ATI acquisition, AMD laid out its Fusion initiative and future plans to integrate a CPU and GPU onto the same processor die. The ultimate goal of Fusion was to seamlessly combine CPU and GPU resources into a single, cohesive compute engine equally adept at handling serial and highly parallel workloads. At the...
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Today is a big day for AMD. If you follow the company at all, you're probably aware that there's a new APU from AMD waiting in the wings. Today, AMD is disclosing more information about Kaveri, the first APU to support heterogeneous computing. Kaveri also includes a new CPU core, codenamed Steamroller, and the largest GPU we've seen...
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AMD is closing out the year with yet another new GPU announcement, though this one isn’t quite like the last few we’ve brought you. If you’ve been hanging around here for any length of time recently, you’ve probably read about the semi-new Radeon R9 and R7 series cards that AMD launched back in early October. If...
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The seemingly never-ending onslaught of new graphics cards as of late continues today with the official release of the AMD Radeon R9 270. Like the Radeon R9 270X that came before it, the Radeon R9 270 isn’t a totally new product. This mainstream graphics card actually leverages the same GPU that powered last-year’s Radeon HD 7870...
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This has been an exciting few weeks in the GPU space, to say the least. AMD has released a new line-up of cards that cover the entire spectrum, from entry-level, affordable products, to ultra-powerful, high-end solutions, targeted at hardcore gamers. We’ve also seen NVIDIA react to...
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AMD has been making quite a bit of news the last few weeks, thanks in part to a multi-day event the company held in Honolulu, Hawaii to announce its next-gen graphics products and a few new related technologies. Of course, the recent release of its Radeon R7 and R9 series of products on...
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A ton of AMD related news hit over the last couple of weeks, thanks in no small part to a multi-day event AMD held in Honolulu, Hawaii the company held to showcase all of its upcoming GPU technology. GPU14 Tech Day, as AMD called it, began with a quick talk from AMD’s Corporate Vice...
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ASUS, like the other major motherboard manufacturers, has an extensive lineup of boards that now support Intel’s 4th-generation Haswell processors and come packing the Z87 chipset. There are motherboards in ASUS’ quiver that run the gamut from gaming boards to workstation boards to...
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We have a confession to make (well, several actually, but all the rest date back to our college days, and some secrets are best left untold). Reviewing monitors isn't as fun as it once was. It's not that we've grown jaded over the years, but plain and simple, the monitor market has become...
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Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in...
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Ask any person who owns a dual-monitor setup and they'll all tell you they couldn't fathom going back to a single display. Maybe you're one of those people, and if so, you know exactly the feeling we're talking about. But what if you could enjoy all the benefits of a dual-monitor configuration...
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The SSD market is very competitive at the moment, to say the least, and though ADATA isn’t always necessarily front and center, the company has a handful of interesting product offerings, including the ADATA XPG SX900 we'll be showing you here. SSD manufacturers sometimes roll with proprietary controllers, such as OCZ and Samsung,...
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A few months back, AMD unveiled a handful of mobile Elite A-Series APUs, formerly codenamed Richland. Those products built upon the company’s existing Trinity-based products but offered additional power and frequency optimizations designed to enhance overall performance and increase...
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