Reviews
While the average PC enthusiast may gawk endlessly over pages of reviews of high-end power-hungry graphics cards, jaw-slackened by the frame rates and 3DMark score that he or she might find there, at the end of the month it is the low to mid-range card that is purchased most often than not. Price typically comes into consideration, but...
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In the last half year, Dell has been busy revamping their entire desktop XPS lineup. First came the XPS 420 late last year, a premium multimedia workstation. Then Dell introduced a new mid-range gaming oriented desktop, the XPS 630 early this year. The 630 is a mid-tower sized gaming desktop styled after the flagship XPS 700 series but with...
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The intoxicating smell of fresh paint was the first sensation to greet us when we opened up a very special package from Diamond Multimedia and Smooth Creations. This was quickly followed by jaw-dropping awe as we admired the meticulous detail of the system's custom paint job. Speculating at the power waiting to be unleashed under its hood,...
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Earlier this year we stumbled upon a widely circulated You Tube video (at least in tech circles), in which a man is seen ruthlessly abusing a poor LCD monitor. The protagonist starts by letting a child draw on the screen with a black permanent marker. Taking matters into his own hands, the man proceeds to take a pen-knife to the surface of...
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Futuremark has just officially unveiled the latest version of their 3DMark benchmark suite, 3DMark Vantage. Like PCMark Vantage which was released a few months ago, this latest version of 3DMark was designed for testing Windows Vista-based systems. This latest version of the 3DMark, however, is specifically bound to Windows...
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Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q9300 has some rather large shoes to fill. This newly shipping, relatively low-cost (~$270) quad-core processor from Intel is a replacement for their long-standing price to performance champ, the Core 2 Quad Q6600. The Q6600 was the first quad-core in Intel’s arsenal which was actually affordable, and even today, it...
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As enthusiasts, we aren't too fond of the idea of running a PC with integrated video. Like many of you, we prefer a discreet video card for the performance benefits, even if it has to be an entry-level solution. Despite that fact, though, most of the monitors in homes and offices across the world are connected to IGPs, and not to...
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When AMD first announced plans to introduce triple-core processors back in September of last year, reaction to the news was mixed. Some felt that AMD was simply planning to pass off partially functional Phenom X4 processors as triple-core products, making lemonade from lemons if you will. Others thought it was a...
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Western Digital's Raptor line of high performance hard drives has been a long-time favorite of PC enthusiasts since its introduction several years ago. When WD's Raptors first hit, their 10K RPM spindle speeds allowed for much lower access times than the more common 7200 RPM desktop drives of the time, and overall relative...
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While he may not have invented the Internet, Al Gore has played a major role in bringing the issue of Global Warming to the masses. In his book and movie "An Inconvenient Truth", Gore made a compelling case, and whether his message convinced you or not, one thing is certain, it's clear people were listening. Today, there...
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ATI has been particularly aggressive with their FireGL workstation graphics card lineup over the past six months. While their flagship R600-architecture was the basis for the solid (but ultimately underwhelming) Radeon HD2900XT release for the gaming market, our tests have shown that this particular GPU architecture actually is much more competitive...
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With recent price cuts to current generation Radeon HD 3800 series cards, due to increased competition from new mainstream graphics cards from NVIDIA, there is a large gap in ATI's product stack between the sub-$200 Radeon HD 3870 and the now roughly $400 Radeon HD 3870 X2. Until AMD readies a new batch of GPUs to fill this hole in their...
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Water cooling has traditionally been considered an extreme solution, pursued by enthusiasts looking for the best cooling performance to squeeze every last drop of performance from their systems. For a long time this wasn't far from the truth and you were unlikely to find a water cooling setup that wasn't hooked up to an overclocked rig. However,...
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When we're asked by readers for hardware advice, one of the most popular topics involves the graphics card. With a myriad of options out there covering the price and performance spectrum, it's not always a cut and dried answer. First, we need to consider the person's budget requirements, then assess the rest of their...
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AMD made it very clear in our sneak peek at the 780G integrated chipset and Athlon X2 4850e processor that its platform aspirations were coming to pass. Not only did the company introduce a complementary hardware ecosystem, complete with processor, chipset, and graphics solution, but it succeeded in trumping the best effort of its principal...
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Earlier this year, we conducted a series of reports on both the high-end and mid-range workstation graphics card markets with a range of comparative tests. In our prior tests, we found performance to be exceptionally close between comparatively priced products from AMD/ATI’s and NVIDIA’s high-end and mid-range cards. NVIDIA is typically...
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Do you remember the original Pentium 4? It launched at 1.5 GHz and gave us our first bittersweet taste of the NetBurst microarchitecture, which Intel would use to replace the P6 design.When the Pentium 4 began its life, Intel manufactured the chips on a 180 nm node. The 42 million transistors that went into those first Pentium 4s - internally...
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NVIDIA's onslaught of new graphics cards based on the company's G92 graphics processor continues today with the introduction of the GeForce 9800 GTX. As its name suggests, the GeForce 9800 GTX is the successor to the wildly popular and unusually long-lived GeForce 8800 GTX.We're sure you all know by now that the GeForce 8800 GTX was...
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It's not very often that we see innovation in a PC chassis. Of course, just about every other component in a typical PC is enhanced or somehow improved on a regular basis, but chassis haven't really changed all that much in the last few years. Aesthetically they have gotten more pleasing and diverse, new materials are being used,...
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We're always on the lookout for Asus Eee PC updates and today we've come up with some breaking news for you relative to the Windows XP variant that is due to hit the market in April. Actually, it's more than just some breaking news; we've got one. Though the machine isn't due out until sometime in...
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It doesn't take a genius to figure out that AMD's initial Phenom processor launch didn't go exactly as planned. The first batch of retail-ready Phenom processors were clocked lower than expectations and in the days leading up to the launch, the now infamous TLB bug reared its ugly head. If you're not aware, all initial Phenom...
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Last week, NVIDIA formally launched the dual-GPU powered GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card and nForce 790i SLI Ultra chipset. We evaluated both of the products in depth in our coverage of the launch, but had to leave out one important detail per NVIDIA's embargo agreement - that being Quad-SLI.It wasn't that Quad-SLI needed...
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