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.
Intel's next-generation Broadwell Y (now known as the Core M processor) is set to ship on schedule for the end of the year. The company, occasionally flagged with criticism of its repeated delays and with its IDF show ramping up next week, is sharing more detail on the upcoming hardware, features and performance...
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Competing with Intel's desktop or notebook processors is like taking on the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, but when it comes to resources, the company is more like an 800 pound gorilla on steroids, with advanced weaponry and a big budget. Intel is a manufacturing and process technology juggernaut. There was a time...
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Intel’s solid state storage offerings are as diverse as they come. Although Intel started with only a single family of enthusiast-class drives a number of years ago, the company has since expanded its scope to include everything from ultra-high-end PCI Express-based offerings to small, entry-level SATA drives, meant to be used solely...
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The pace of innovation on in the solid state storage market hasn’t slowed a bit in the last few years. Numerous manufacturers continue to release newer, faster SSDs at regular, frequent intervals. There’s been an underlining limitation, however, that’s prevented monumental leaps in performance—the aging SATA interface....
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Intel has established a strong record in the solid state storage space, dating all the way back to 2008 with its debut of the excellent X25-M series of drives. Back then, Intel upped the ante in enthusiast-targeted solid state storage, and they want to do it again with the drive we’ll be showing you here today, the upcoming Intel SSD...
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Intel is announcing its new tablet and smartphone designs this week at Mobile World Congress, alongside a major push to drive adoption of its 28nm XMM 7160 and XMM 7260 modem technology. It's been two years since Intel launched its first serious Atom-based smartphone platform, codenamed Medfield, and it's safe to say that those two years haven't...
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For months, there have been rumors circulating of a new Intel 15-core CPU, with a particular focus on Big Data analytics, multi-socket systems, and the enterprise market. Well, this past January, we took a trip to Intel's SAP research lab to see the new processors and the rather substantial update coming down the pipe. Unlike Intel's...
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It has been a while since I have personally setup a test bench, rolled up my sleeves and built a test system with top-shelf components, a fresh OS install and some overclocking mojo. However, Intel's recent release of Ivy Bridge-E gave us a hankering to do just that. We've been testing a lot of tablets, smartphones and ultrabooks,...
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This most recent metamorphosis of the PC hasn’t been kind to the high-end desktop processor segment. While the industry as a whole continues to focus on the steadily growing ultra-mobile market, and releases new products in rapid succession, there have only been two major flagship desktop processors released since the Intel Core i7-3960X...
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Intel is updating its line of enterprise-class solid state storage offerings today, with a new more cost-effective drive that targets datacenter and cloud-computing applications. The Intel SSD DC S3500 as it is known, is similar in a number of ways to the SSD DC S3700 we evaluated a few months back. The new drives, however, are built around...
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If Haswell's debut on the desktop has left you feeling a bit flat, the company's mobile efforts may be the pick-me-up you've been hoping for. If you step back and think about the entire CPU market, the last two years have been marked by tremendous shifts in consumer buying habits, as tablet sales skyrocketed and desktop/laptop sales have...
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We've been talking about Intel's 4th Generation Core processor technology, codenamed Haswell, for over two years now. If you've been hanging around these parts and are like most self-respecting geeks, you've likely been feeling the build-up of Haswell for quite some time. Intel has disclosed lots of information on their latest...
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It’s no secret that Intel is readying processors based in its Haswell microarchitecture. The new chips are due to be released in the not too distant future and feature a number of noteworthy enhancements, including a much more powerful integrated graphics core. When Haswell arrives though, it will supplant current Ivy Bridge-based...
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This news has been a long time coming. It's been six years since Intel first began talking about Atom. When it was initially announced, the 45nm, in-order core, based on the Bonnell microarchitecture, was a new product from the ground up. It drew on Intel's expertise in other areas and shared some design elements with the original Pentium,...
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When we covered Intel’s first significant foray into the smartphone arena, early in January 2012, there was little doubt in our minds that the company had set its sights on the mobile market with a plan and roadmap for execution. Though Medfield and Lexington, now known as the Atom Z2460 SoC, and its lower cost sibling...
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Intel set the solid state storage market ablaze when it released the X25-M a few years back. Up until that point, solid state drives had steadily been improving in performance, but there was no real dominant player in the space. When the X25-M arrived though, with its proprietary controller, firmware, and NAND, it blew the doors of the competition...
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Last month, Intel brought us out to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin to brief us on their latest and greatest foray into high-performance computing (HPC) and exascale level processing performance. Parallel Computing and the Road to Exascale There are mountains of problems that need to be solved and a myriad of insight...
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The solid state storage market has rapidly evolved over the last four years or so. Whereas early drives were relatively slow and offered inconsistent performance, current high-end drives routinely approach the limits of the SATA interface and off much better performance, both in terms of sequential and random IO operations. Over the same time...
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Intel's next-generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, was the major star of IDF. One aspect of the chip we haven't talked about at length, however, is its emphasis on reduced power consumption. When Intel announced that its Ivy Bridge mobile products would target 17W for mainstream systems, it made headlines. Pushing Haswell down to 10W is an even...
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Last winter, Intel made waves by demonstrating a number of cutting-edge technologies it believed could drive the next-generation of lower power devices. In addition to its pioneering work with Near Threshold Voltages, the company showed off Rosepoint -- a prototype SoC that combined a dual-core 32nm Atom with an all-digital radio. As we covered...
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Intel's Dadi Perlmutter took to the stage in the opening keynote of Intel Developer's Forum 2012 to greet an enthusiastic crowd and evangelize the company's vision of what they call the rise of "natural, intuitive computing." On stage with Dadi were a number of Intel-powered devices including a myriad of Windows 8 tablets and new Ultrabooks...
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Intel’s Dadi (David) Perlmutter, General Manager Intel Architecture Group and Chief Product Officer, opened up the 2012 Intel Developers Forum by reflecting back on the significance of this day, the eleventh anniversary of the attacks on 9/11. Today, however, also marks the fifteenth anniversary of IDF, so Dadi ultimately moved on to...
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