Reviews
One of the ways AMD is able to test and qualify ATI Mobility Radeon GPUs, without having to design and build numerous mobile reference cards that fit in multiple notebook form factors, is to produce fully-loaded, custom reference cards that'll fit into standard PCI Express x16 slots. The...
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With the wide variety of network storage device offerings hitting the market, you'd think that this was the year of the NAS (network-attached storage) device. Considering how many people need or want a central location--a "hub" of sorts--to store their media and other files, share these files with other people, and access this data remotely,...
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Placing a product in the "audiophile" category automatically opens it up for scrutiny of the highest order. The new Asus Xonar Essence STX "headphone amp card for audiophiles" is Asus' latest in a line of audio card offerings that pretty much cover the spectrum of PC audio applications. Asus now offers audio cards designed for gaming to...
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Adobe, the software development powerhouse behind Photoshop, Premiere, and dozens of other content creation suites, has finally embraced the power of the GPU. Amazingly, until Adobe's CS4 suite of graphics software came out this year, the company which has nearly built their empire on...
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Boutique system builders tend to fall into three categories, there are the more custom or high-end offerings from some of the larger names like Dell/Alienware or HP/Voodoo (though you may or may not classify them as "boutique"), there are offerings from large e-tailers like...
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You'd be hard pressed these days to find a small business or even family home that doesn't have at least a few computers being used by a number of different local users. This multi-user scenario poses at least a couple of potential complications for managing all the files and data that gets...
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The solid state drive, or SSD, market is incredibly hot at the moment, with a constant influx of new products that seem to leapfrog previous offerings at every turn. No one has been able to overtake Intel's X25 series of SSDs in terms of overall performance just yet, but the SSDs available from many other companies today are clearly superior...
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With Asus's recent Blitzkrieg of inexpensive Eee PC netbooks and nettops, it might be easy forget that Asus also manufactures a full bevy of components and peripherals from motherboards to graphics cards to networking products. Asus also makes LCD displays, ranging in size from 17-inches on up to 26-inches, which cover a wide swath of feature...
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Turn the clock back to the middle of this decade, and the idea of a Dell system using an AMD processor would be considered facetious at best. Dell, had been an Intel-only shop from the beginning, and had only toyed with AMD processors from time to time in highly niche market systems. Many AMD fans considered Dell's acceptance...
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When we think about what is perhaps the one draw-back that enthusiasts and gamers could point to with respect to an Intel chipset-based motherboard, historically, it was lack of NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU support. Though you could drop more than one AMD ATI Radeon-based graphics...
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NVIDIA has gotten a lot of mileage out of their G92 GPU architecture. Starting with the GeForce 8800 GT, which featured a 65nm variant of the G92 GPU, on up through the GeForce 9800 GTX+, which used an updated version manufactured on a more advanced 55nm process. The G92 GPU has been featured on no less than seven different GeForce branded...
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Synopsis: The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is a rather unique product, targeted squarely at mobile professionals who require the power, features, and performance of workstation-class machine on the go. We previously evaluated the standard ThinkPad W700 and praised the system for its...
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Asus continues to broaden their Eee PC line of netbooks, as we roll through the first quarter of 2009. Clearly, however, Asus was aiming more for evolutionary than revolutionary with its latest Eee PC 1000HE. Even though it's largely unchanged from its siblings, there are still enough refinements to the product here to take notice. For...
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Synopsis: The Eee Top ET1602 builds upon Asus' popular line of Eee-branded products by introducing an all-in-one desktop form factor, complete with a 15.6" touch screen. Like the Eee PC netbooks that preceded it, the Eee Top ET1602 is built around Intel's low-power Atom platform, with the 945...
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Since the great DRAM price plummet of 2007, memory prices continue to be extremely low. It's currently possible to pick up high capacity memory modules for very respectable prices. As the DRAM market is highly volatile, however, it's possible that we could see prices jump within the next...
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Since you are here, reading this and potentially some other articles and news about PC hardware, you've probably attended or at least heard of LAN parties. The main point of LAN parties is, of course, to play video games with your peers on networked PCs. Another fun aspect of LAN parties...
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Toshiba’s Qosmio X305 is the company’s flagship gaming notebook line, with configurations that include dual graphics cards, dual storage drives, and the latest Intel Core 2 quad-core processors. At CES, Toshiba introduced a new Qosmio X305, the X305-Q725, which competes with the company’s higher end X305-Q708, but at a much better price ($2,699.99...
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Touchscreen smartphones are certainly a big hit right now. If you consider Apple’s ever-popular iPhone, HTC’s well-received Touch lineup, and many others, touch is a high-demand feature. Manufacturers are certainly taking note of this fact. Traditionally speaking, the BlackBerry line of...
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When AMD launched their current generation of Radeon 4800 series graphics cards last summer, they propelled themselves back into the ring against NVIDIA, who had previously been dominating the performance game for a few product cycles. The Radeon 4800 series provided decidedly high-end...
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A few weeks back, we took an in-depth look at the dual-GPU powered NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295. Just to recap a bit; the GeForce GTX 295 is NVIDIA's current flagship graphics card that couples a pair of 55nm GT200 GPUs with 1792MB of frame buffer memory, culminating in what is ultimately the...
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Last month, AMD launched the Phenom II X4 processor line-up, and with it ushered in the first desktop processors built using the company's 45nm process node. While the first two Phenom II processors to arrive, the 3.0GHz X4 940 and 2.8GHz 920, were clearly superior to previous Phenoms in terms...
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If the recent release of Intel's X58 chipset has taught us anything, it's that change can be good. In our first two forays with these new boards and Intel's Core i7 processor, we've been firmly impressed by the performance gains seen over legacy Core 2 architectures, much less AMD's...
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