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 has been pretty open about discussing certain products in the roadmap. In fact, we’ve disclosed a number of details regarding the main products we’ll be talking about in this article--Kabini, Temash, and Richland--over the last few months. It was all the way back at CES...
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Today marks one of those funky occasions when you’ve probably been aware of the “new” product we’re going to show you for quite some time. And we’re not talking about a few days or weeks here either. In fact, it was all the way back in December of 2011, when AMD...
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A few weeks back, the enthusiast community was abuzz after news broke that AMD’s Radeon HD 7000 series would remain “stable throughout 2013” and would be the company’s focus “for quite some time”. The wording of the initial news made it sound like AMD...
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We have had a few weeks with three A85X motherboards and AMD’s top of the line Trinity APU, the A10-5800K, which combines 4 unlocked Piledriver CPU cores (stock 3.8GHz, turbo 4.2GHz) with an integrated Radeon HD 7600D GPU with 384 Radeon Cores at 800MHz. We’ve written several...
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It has been a rough few years for AMD. The company has found itself increasingly behind the eight ball and outmaneuvered, thanks to strong competition from Intel and less-than-stellar performance with recent releases of their A series integrated APUs. At a press event yesterday at CES...
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There is a reason ASUS is so well respected amongst PC enthusiasts. The company has been making some of the best-performing, most feature-rich products in the space for years. Whether it’s a min-ITX motherboard, sleek Ultrabook, or a full-fledged, touch-enabled All-In-One system, ASUS...
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A growing number of graphics professionals, gamers, and all-around power users are turning to WQHD (Wide Quad High-Definition) monitors as cost-conscious alternatives to pricey 30-inch panels, and ASUS is all too happy to oblige. The PB278Q we're looking at here slips into ASUS' Professional lineup and brings with it a 27-inch PLS (Plane-to-Line...
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Even before AMD officially released its Bulldozer-based FX-Series of desktop processors last year, the company was already talking about the follow-on microarchitecture codenamed “Piledriver”. In fact, in the conclusion of our launch article featuring the AMD FX-8150, we posted an AMD-provided slide that showed Piledriver...
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Late last week, we posted a glimpse of what AMD had in store with their latest A-Series APUs for desktop systems. In that article, we were able to officially unveil the Virgo platform and discuss speeds and feeds, GPU performance, and power consumption characteristics. However, we...
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As of today, AMD has a new set of high-end professional GPUs available -- and a new shot at the professional GPU crown. It's a move the company hopes will allow it to take a greater share of the professional 3D business. AMD's battle against Nvidia in the professional graphics market is...
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Apple's Mountain Lion operating system has been a long time coming. Apple first teased the "200 new features" represented in OS X 10.8 back in June, and here we are in August with well over three million copies already downloaded. According to Apple, the launch of Mountain Lion is its most successful OS X launch ever. It's also interesting...
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When we first took a look at the ASRock Vision 3D 137B with NVIDIA 3DTV Play last year, we were quite impressed with the machine. It offered excellent all-around performance for a system in its class and had an extensive feature set that included Blu-Ray and 3D video playback capabilities, all wrapped up in what we considered to be an...
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When Asus asked us if we'd be interested in a reviewing their new, high-end USB 3 implementation that offered better performance than anything available elsewhere, we were skeptical. Historically, USB performance has been a function of which controller (Intel, AMD, NEC, Texas Instruments...
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It was exactly 6 months ago to the minute that AMD officially took the wraps off its Tahiti GPU and the original Radeon HD 7970. The Radeon HD 7970 was the first graphics card to feature AMD’s “Graphics Core Next”, or GCN, architecture and when it hit the scene, the Radeon HD 7970 proved to be the fastest single-GPU...
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Lisa Su, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Business Units, opened up this year’s AMD Fusion Developers Summit by reiterating AMD’s commitment to heterogeneous computing. She began her talk by saying that AMD is firmly committed to heterogeneous computing because...
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We won't burn up too much of your bandwidth setting the stage here. AMD's second-generation Bulldozer core processor microarchitecture, codenamed Piledriver, has made headlines at HotHardware many times in the past few months, including our CES sneak peek of the chip that AMD is launching today for the mobile market, codenamed Trinity. ...
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The FirePro V3900 is AMD's latest budget solution for the professional graphics market. We covered the card's launch last month; it's a formidable step up from the V3800 it replaces. Budget card launches may lack some of the excitement of high-end product debuts, but lower-end cards like the...
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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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Here we are, less than three weeks removed from the launch of the Radeon HD 7700 series, and AMD is already at it again. Today we’ll be showing you the first two members of the Radeon HD 7800 series of graphics cards, the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and Radeon HD 7850. These two graphics cards are based on yet another new GPU design,...
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By now you should all know the drill. A big GPU manufacturer releases a new high-end GPU, based on a new or updated architecture. Then over the course of the next few months, the company continually fleshes out its product stack until a top-to-bottom line-up of new graphics cards emerges, at a wide range of price points, all based on the same...
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When AMD announced the Radeon HD 7970 last month, it revealed a new, ultra-powerful graphics card that snatched the single-GPU performance crown from the previous titleholder, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580. AMD may have staked a claim for the fastest single graphics card with the...
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When AMD initially released their Llano-based A-Series APUs, the company targeted cost-conscious consumers looking for highly-integrated, easy to assemble solutions for an entry-level or mid-range PCs. At the time of launch, the flagship model in the A-Series line-up was the A8-3850, which...
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