Reviews
It has been quite a while since AMD launched a truly new CPU core architecture. It was way back in September of 2003 that the first "K8" based desktop processors arrived in the form of the single-core Athlon 64 and Athlon 64-FX. And while the company has launched a slew of new desktop...
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A short while after Dell purchased Alienware late last year, news broke that Hewlett Packard had acquired boutique system vendor Voodoo PC. Voodoo PC is best known for their high performance gaming PC's that feature custom cases, some with lavish paint jobs, unique cooling solutions, and...
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Quick! Name that one piece of PC hardware that will automatically garner the most "oohs" and "aahs" from enthusiasts and casual-users alike. No, it's probably not the glow-in-the-dark water cooling system or bright LEDs shining from the multiple fans in your windowed case. The quickest path to glory is buying a brand new, flat, large, widescreen...
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Most of you probably already know that 2.5" notebook hard drives typically aren't as big or fast as hard drives found in desktop machines. In case you aren't aware, most laptops are sold with 5400RPM hard drives that range from 60GB to 100GB. In contrast, most desktops are currently sold with...
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If you have ever been in the market for a graphics card, you are undoubtedly familiar with the constantly changing graphics card market. About every 8-10 months, new GPUs are introduced by NVIDIA and ATI, and after their introduction, dozens of graphics cards built by their add in board partners come to market. Because these add in board partners...
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End user demand for storage capacity is expanding exponentially year after year, as multimedia content, email, and document and file generation show explosive growth in this age of new media. In addition, protecting that data is becoming increasingly more critical, with investments in digital...
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It’s a fact that extremely large, high-wattage power supplies tend to get the most press online, as the vast majority of PSU manufacturers are caught up in the never-ending competition of trying to get the highest wattage products out there. While this competition has fostered innovation in this market, in addition to pushing down prices of...
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We first took a look at Intel's P35 Express chipset back in May, when it was released into the wild to supplant the still relatively youthful P965 and usher in the era of DDR3 memory and 1333MHz FSB Intel processors. The P965 is a tough act to follow. Despite its intended mid-range market...
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Data. Can't live with it, can't live without it. We're sure you can all understand why we can't live without it, but you may be curious why we say we can't live with it. The problem with data is not the data itself but rather the users of that data. More accurately, we should say that the real problem (or challenge or opportunity, depending...
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If you're a PC hardware enthusiast - and chances are pretty good that you are if you're reading HotHardware - Asus is a company that needs no introduction. Asus' track record for building quality products targeted squarely at power users is well known and documented, so we'll forego the...
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This past weekend marked the twelfth anniversary of a gaming event started by a group of die hard Quake players in suburban Dallas, Texas. Evolving and growing rapidly since its grass roots founding, Quakecon has become the largest LAN gaming event in the United States, with over 3000 gamers attending, some from places as far as Japan, Iraq,...
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When you think of GIGABYTE, you may envision only a manufacturer of motherboards and video cards, but there is a lot more to this Taiwan based company than initially meets the eye. GIGABYTE also markets Network Servers, Notebook PCs, a broad array of peripherals and their Thermal Solutions line which covers PSUs, air and water cooling kits,...
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For several months, the battle for the biggest consumer hard drive was only fought by Hitachi and Seagate. First, only Seagate was in it with its 750GB hard drive using perpendicular recording technology. Then, Hitachi decided to skip 750GB and go straight to 1,000GB (1TB). Seagate has...
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Back in February of this year, we took a look at the AMD 690 series chipset and praised it for its affordability, power efficiency, and strong performance relative to its competition. Since then, the 690 series chipset has gone on to be somewhat of a success for AMD with over 35 different...
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DDR3; it's the future of desktop system memory, plain and simple. However, it's far from becoming the mainstream standard. As it stands now, there is little benefit to DDR3 as high costs and latency makes DDR3 a less attractive option in its current state. It's a familiar story. If you...
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As hardware enthusiasts, our enthusiasm for the latest and greatest PC gear often surpasses our bank account's ability to fund another upgrade. That's when we fall back on the always practical approach to maximizing our bang for the buck...
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At this point in time, it's probably safe to assume that the majority wireless network users are outfitted with some type of 54Mbps solution. First introduced in 2003, 802.11g has proven its worth as a solid wireless technology for both home and business users alike. However, as technology...
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It’s been almost one year since Intel launched the 965 series of chipsets, which were originally designed to be packaged with Intel’s Core 2 Duo series of processors. While the 965 series didn't perform quite as well as Intel’s flagship 975x chipset in some cases, most notable in multi-GPU...
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AMD hosted a small gathering in the Penthouse at the SoHo Grand Hotel in New York City yesterday (yes, the same place that Lindsey Lohan had her meltdown a few weeks ago), to showcase some of their existing products and technologies, to show off a few products built by their partners, and to demo some products due to be released in the coming...
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What goes faster than a Core 2 Quad processor at 3GHz? Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, nothing from AMD at the moment. Thankfully Intel has a few more "MHz in the can", or so to speak. Actually, it appears they may have a lot more, as you'll see in the pages that follow. Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves...
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Gigabyte has almost always been a well respected brand amongst PC enthusiasts, but it seems the company has come on very strong in the last year or so. Gigabyte has released a number of highly praised motherboards is recent months, like the GA-P35T-DQ6 and GA-965P-DQ6 2.0 that were all lauded for their feature sets, performance, and overclockability....
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Although TV tuners have been in the desktop PC space for more than a decade, only in the last couple of years have they started to become integrated and widely used in notebook computers. OEMs started to recognize that many consumers simply didn’t want large desktop systems. But at the same time they wanted the multimedia features offered...
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