Reviews
NVIDIA may have had to navigate a tumultuous path on their way to releasing the company’s first DirectX 11 desktop GPU, the GF100-based GeForce GTX 480, though they seem to be firing on all cylinders at this point. In the last 5 or so months since the GeForce GTX 480 arrived, NVIDIA has...
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Is Intel's Pinetrail platform really all its cracked up to be? We recently took an in-depth look at the 1.8GHz processor / platform, but it's a different thing to take a look at the same thing in a shipping product that's available today to consumers. We have been longing for faster Atom processors, and particularly in recent months, we felt...
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On September 1, GlobalFoundries played host to the first annual Global Technology Conference (GTC for short). While there were a fair number of partner presentations on display, the conference was primarily driven by GlobalFoundries executives and announcements. When we spoke to...
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It's that time again. The time of year where students and parents frantically hit e-tailers with overnight shipping deals in order to get that all-important back-to-school technology into a dorm room or backpack before classes begins. It's back-to-school season, and whether...
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When it comes to Android devices, there are two inevitabilities. The first is that its popularity is unstoppable. Twice as many Android smartphones are sold now than were only two months earlier; Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, claims that about 200,000 Android devices are sold every day. The second given is that an onslaught of Android...
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It's been over 12 years since Starcraft launched, and expectations for the sequel have been quite high*. Well, the highly anticipated sequel, Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, is here and we've taken the time to play through the campaign, test various difficulty levels, and tackle both human and the computer's AI in multiplayer. The single-player...
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A few weeks back, AMD quietly released a couple of new graphics cards in the Radeon HD 5500 series. For a while there, starting with the Radeon HD 5870 in late September of last year, it seemed like AMD was releasing a new series of graphics cards aimed at different price points, practically every few weeks. Things slowed down a bit once...
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Smartphone manufacturers have been using very boastful smartphone names lately—everything from the HTC Droid Incredible to the Motorola Droid X (where X stands for extreme). Certainly with names such as these, expectations will be high. We've already taken a look at both of these...
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SSDs account for just a fraction of the storage market in terms of units shipped, but high consumer interest and significant profit margins have brought manufacturers in droves. GSkill isn't exactly a newcomer to the field, but the sheer number of companies in the dogpile make it more...
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Yesterday, we chided AMD for its decision not to reveal more details about Bulldozer and Bobcat, but it turns out we didn't have all the facts. AMD was planning on disclosing more information later in the day at Hot Chips—but the company failed to disclose that before we went...
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If you're in the market for an X58 motherboard, there are plenty of options available. A quick search fetches countless results that fill a wide range of price points. Budget conscious enthusiasts looking to save some scratch will be happy to find that almost every motherboard maker offers an...
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Lenovo has been making a push in touch-enabled products as of late. A few months back, we actually tested one of the company's first touchscreen-enabled ThinkPad notebooks (and an IdeaPad, for that matter). Regardless, the company isn't exactly a household name when it comes to touch-enabled products but with Windows 7's limited built in touch...
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By now, we all know that NVIDIA's flagship GeForce GTX 480 is a powerful graphics card. For most systems, it provides a lot more GPU muscle than is even necessary, but that's OK with us. We're sure there are many enthusiasts out there that consider overkill a good thing. Unfortunately, the...
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The MSI XPower series of motherboards is clearly designed to curry favor with overclocking enthusiasts and the high-end gamers Asus has targeted with its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand. The XPower packs full support for all the latest buzzwords and capabilities, but MSI is also claiming to...
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There was a significant influx of CULV based notebooks earlier in the year, due in part to their excellent balance between power, performance, and price. While CULV based machines were a good fit for many users who didn't want to sacrifice much performance for longer battery...
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There's little question, like the sun rising and setting each day, that when Intel launches their latest top-of-the-line processor, a stinging four-figure price point awaits. It seems like forever that Intel's latest flagship desktop chips drop into the market at anywhere from...
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It's hard to remember that before the advent of SSDs, storage performance was a rather tepid topic. Save for the introduction of occasional new features like NCQ, hard drives continued along a mostly predictable path of rising capacities and (slightly) higher performance. If you wanted top-end...
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When we published our comprehensive P55 motherboard roundup back in early April, one of the boards we discussed and really liked was the Asus P7P55D Deluxe. At $220, that particular board was priced significantly higher than some of the other LGA1156 options we considered. Fast forward a...
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Apple has been in the line of fire lately. It's an unusual place for the company, which has found itself on the positive end of things for quite a while. In fact, for a string of years, it seemed as if Apple could do no wrong. The iPhone 3G and 3GS were huge hits, as was the new "unibody" MacBook design. And then there was the iPad, which...
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Every once in a while a product comes along that really gets us worked into a frenzy. Typically, the latest and greatest processors and graphics cards generate a lot of buzz around here, but some other components aren’t always as enticing for one reason or another, like motherboards for...
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The original Motorola Droid was a huge hit, both for Motorola as well as for Verizon Wireless. In the time since the DROID was launched in November, Verizon Wireless has also added the HTC Droid Incredible to its lineup of popular Android handsets. Now, Motorola and Verizon Wireless have...
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It's been said for years by industry veterans: a lot can happen in a very short window of time when you're dealing with technology. As soon as one piece of cutting-edge tech makes it to market, the next big thing is just days, weeks or months away. In the netbook realm, that hasn't applied as much. Netbooks haven't evolved nearly as quickly...
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