Reviews
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...
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To say OCZ has had a tumultuous year in 2013 would be putting it mildly. The company took a brutal beating financially and was knocked down, but not out. Now, thanks to an acquisition by Toshiba, the newly formed and revitalized OCZ Storage Solutions, is poised and ready to make another...
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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...
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The mid-range graphics card market has seen a lot of action as of late, with an infusion of new products and the discontinuation of popular previous-gen products. Last week it was AMD’s turn to announce a new card—the $150 Radeon R7 265—and with its arrival also came a price...
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In terms of brand recognition, Lenovo's ThinkPad probably has some of the best "brand equity" of just about any notebook line in the history of Windows PCs. A favorite among IT managers for their rugged reliability, especially in business environments, Lenovo's ThinkPad brand, previously...
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The Dell Latitude E7440 is not quite as sexy as some of the sleek ultrabooks out there, but it’s also not as square as most business notebooks we've been subjected to over the years. The Dell Latitude E7440 thus continues a trend we’ve been noticing lately of companies...
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AMD is shaking up its mid-range graphics line-up today, by slashing the price of the Radeon R7 260X and introducing the more powerful Radeon R7 265. Though their model numbers are quite similar, the Radeon R7 265 is actually built around a beefier GPU than the 260X, and is more like the higher-end Radeon R9 270X. AMD is positioning the...
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In about six weeks, Blizzard will launch Reaper of Souls, the first expansion pack for Diablo 3. I've spent the last few weeks playing in the beta for RoS, and while I normally hold an article this extensive for a launch, there's enough locked-in differences to be worth discussing at this...
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If you’ve spent any time at all following PC and storage technologies, you probably know that SanDisk is a brand that is synonymous with Flash memory. Whether it’s a memory card for a digital camera or a high-performance solid state drive for an enthusiast-class PC, odds are...
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It’s a ThinkPad. No, it’s a Yoga! No, it’s...a ThinkPad Yoga. Lenovo has melded two of its popular laptop design approaches together to create a sort of hybrid ultrabook, bringing together elements of its workhorse ThinkPad lineup and multi-mode capable Yoga notebooks. It has...
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The Sony VAIO Tap 21 is a member of a small, but growing, breed of new PCs that straddles a line between traditional all-in-one desktops and tablets. The VAIO Tap 21’s specifications read like many modern desktop systems, and include an Intel Core i7 processor, hybrid storage...
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Although the market for them is relatively small, we love to check out elaborate, no-holds-barred gaming PCs from time to time--you know, the kind of system that costs about the same amount as a serviceable used car. As fun as it is to check out an ultra high-end gaming rig, we also...
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We all want more from our smartphones. Whether it’s more screen real estate, more battery life, a better camera, or more storage for pictures, videos, and games, it seems there’s always something we could use more of from our phones. Manufacturers are constantly striving to deliver...
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Dell's XPS line of laptops have always been about foregoing compromise in the pursuit of a premium mobile experience. The company's latest lineup of XPS 15 touch-enabled systems carry that tradition into a new era of computing, driven by Microsoft's Windows 8.1 operating system. These machines are anything but cookie cutter, and even...
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We had originally planned to start this review and evaluation off with a brief discussion of OCZ’s potential fate and what the company’s recent bankruptcy and looming acquisition by Toshiba could mean for its future. But in the 11th hour yesterday, news came through that the...
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If you’ve ever worked in a professional environment for an extended period of time, chances are you’ve used an IBM-come-Lenovo ThinkPad at some point. Their simple black rectangle designs with the little red dot on the keyboard are downright iconic, but although Lenovo has made smaller refinements on the exterior design of some...
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Dell has something for everyone with its Venue 8 tablets, which come in both Android and Windows 8.1 flavors. The Venue 8 is the Android-based model, while the Venue 8 Pro runs the full version of Windows 8.1. Dell isn’t the first to put Windows 8.1 in an 8-inch form factor, but the...
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Way back in 2006, after the ATI acquisition, AMD laid out its Fusion initiative and future plans to integrate a CPU and GPU onto the same processor die. The ultimate goal of Fusion was to seamlessly combine CPU and GPU resources into a single, cohesive compute engine equally adept at handling serial and highly parallel workloads. At the...
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Today is a big day for AMD. If you follow the company at all, you're probably aware that there's a new APU from AMD waiting in the wings. Today, AMD is disclosing more information about Kaveri, the first APU to support heterogeneous computing. Kaveri also includes a new CPU core, codenamed Steamroller, and the largest GPU we've seen...
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NVIDIA's Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at CES 2014 to discuss NVIDIA's overarching gaming technology efforts, starting with a discussion of PC gaming streaming courtesy of NVIDIA's Shield. We've discussed Shield's game streaming capability before -- it's easily one of the stronger selling...
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When Microsoft launched Windows 8, the company gambled on consumers welcoming touch on the desktop, just as they had on mobile handheld devices, namely tablets and smartphones. It remains to be seen if that gamble will pay off, but in the meantime, peripheral makers and other...
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NVIDIA officially took the wraps off of its Tegra Note mobile platform a few weeks back, though rumors had been circulating for months that the company was designing its own tablet. If you’re unfamiliar with the Tegra Note, it’s a 7”, Android-based tablet, powered by...
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