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.
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 been slowly releasing information about its Devil’s Canyon processors for a few months now. If you’ve been on top of the processor scene, you probably know that Devil’s Canyon is the codename for a new revision of Intel’s 4th Gen Core processors, based on the Haswell microarchitecture, that features a...
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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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Crucial has been on a tear as of late. In the last few weeks alone, the company has released a couple of new series of solid state drives, one targeting the enthusiast segment (the M550) and the other targeting data centers (the M500DC). Today, Crucial is at it again with the launch of the brand new MX100 series. The Crucial MX100 series of...
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When NVIDIA first announced that it would create a workstation-class remote virtualization system that enabled full GPU acceleration with latency-free streaming I was more than a little skeptical. Not only did it seem like a solution in search of a problem, the bandwidth requirements and technical heavy-lifting to support professional PC users...
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OCZ's RevoDrive series has been a popular enthusiast and workstation-class storage product family for years now. The last time we looked at an OCZ RevoDrive, the RevoDrive 3 X2 offered smoking-fast performance and bandwidth of up to 1.5GB/sec for reads and 1.25GB/sec for writes thanks to its PCI Express-based design, which basically comprises...
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Although Intel isn’t quite ready to take the wraps off of its updated Haswell-based processors (codenamed Devil’s Canyon) or its next-gen Broadwell-based processors, the company is at the ready with a brand new chipset that ups the ante in terms of features and overall performance. Intel’s 9-series chipset isn’t quite...
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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 bunch was an entry from ASUS. Not to worry -- we didn't...
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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. The company started off with an in-depth exploration...
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The near-constant influx of new solid state storage solutions has shown no signs of letting up. In the last few weeks alone, we have looked at new drives from Micron/Crucial, ADATA, Intel, Samsung, OCZ and SanDisk, and today we’re going to cover something a little different from Plextor, the new M6M series. Plextor’s M6M series...
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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 form factor and mobile platforms. With this release,...
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Despite being limited by the capabilities of the SATA interface, many solid state drive manufacturers continue to innovate and introduce new products that improve on previous generation products. For example, Micron recently released its M550 series of drives, which was an evolution of the previously released M500 series, but built around...
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Do you know what gets our juices flowing even more than high-end hardware? It's having the opportunity to wrangle and evaluate multiple versions of a top-tier product. In this case, we've gone out and collected NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards from three different enthusiast brands: EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI. Each of the cards in this...
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As a species, we've come a long way from the days of carving notes into stone. While our ancestors used chisel and rock, we now use keyboards to hammer out our thoughts and anything that needs to be documented. Some of us spend hours a day sitting in front of a PC, a large portion of which is dedicated to punching keystrokes at a frenzied...
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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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Last week, we took a trip to San Diego to meet with Qualcomm and discuss the company's cutting edge 20nm radios and upcoming Snapdragon processors. Unlike the already-launched Snapdragon 801 and 805, these are fundamentally new chips with updated CPU cores as well as Qualcomm's new Adreno 400-class GPU. Qualcomm is announcing two new chips...
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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 series of drives to be solid offerings, with well-rounded...
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A few months back, we took a look at Samsung’s SSD 840 EVO series of solid state drives. At the time, we found their performance to be quite good, and the drives were competitively priced too. Shortly after the 2.5” versions of Samsung’s SSD 840 EVO drives hit the scene, the company prepared an array of mSATA drives...
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NVIDIA's 2014 GTC (GPU Technology Conference) kicked off with a bang this morning in San Jose California, with NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang offering up a healthy dose of new information on next generation NVIDIA GPU technologies for the professional workstation, big data analytics, cloud computing, gaming and mobile markets. As members...
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Western Digital’s original My Cloud personal cloud storage solution brought a unique approach to the NAS segment, for individuals and the SOHO crowd, and the subsequent multi-bay My Cloud EX4 offered a beastly amount of storage--8TB, 12TB, or 16TB--via the same “My Cloud” platform. WD introduced the My Cloud EX2...
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The solid state storage market continues to be one of the hottest in the PC industry. Over the last few weeks alone, we’ve seen the release of the Intel SSD 730 and the OCZ Vertex 460 series of drives and there are still plenty more on the horizon, as many companies ready products with different capacities, form factors and...
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In case you didn't get the memo, the 4K Ultra HD revolution has begun. What's been remarkable about the ongoing transition from Full HD 1080p to 4K Ultra HD is that hardware makers and content creators didn't get stuck in a 'chicken and egg' scenario. Typically when new technology emerges, hardware makers wait for software developers to come...
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