Reviews
In the last six months we've seen a wide variety of cost effective, yet powerful, video cards hit the market. First came NVIDIA's superb GeForce 8800 GT last October which, despite being introduced at an upper mid-range price point, provided top-notch performance not far off from the best cards of the day at nearly 1/3...
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AMD is launching a three-pronged attack on the desktop CPU space today, with the introduction of three new quad-core Phenom X4 processors. One of the processors, the new Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition, is AMD's latest flagship desktop CPU. The other two, however, are somewhat surprisingly "green", low-power quad-cores dubbed the...
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Last week, due to some unexpected circumstances, we were able to post a sneak peek of the RV770 GPU and ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. As our limited testing showed, the Radeon HD 4850 was quite promising for a $199 graphics card. But we weren't able to tell the complete story. While the initial benchmarks definitely looked...
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When you consider notebooks are easily the highest growth segment of the PC industry, isn't it sort of odd that we don't hear more about new product refresh efforts from the major OEMs? The simple fact of the matter is, that while we hear of new desktop and workstation technologies on a regular basis, core notebook architectures, more...
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LCD monitors were supposed to free up our precious desk real estate as they relegated bulky CRTs to the local landfill. But with the quantity and quality of high-definition content increasing and LCD prices continuing to drop, widescreen LCDs are becoming increasingly prevalent. Now our desks are filling up again--only this time in width,...
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NVIDIA has held a dominant position in the high-end GPU space ever since the introduction of the G80 architecture back in November of 2006. When the G80 first arrived in the form of the GeForce 8800 GTX and the pared-down GeForce 8800 GTS, the cards were clearly superior to anything else at the time in terms of both performance...
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When you visit NVIDIA’s Web site and hit the Products drop-down menu, a long list of the company’s offerings scrolls down in front of you—impressive for an organization that originally found notoriety by designing the fastest desktop display adapters.Graphics processors for the desktop, workstation, and server space still dominate NVIDIA’s...
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NVIDIA's GeForce 9 Series was first introduced in February of this year by way of the 9600 GT launch. Admittedly, we thought it was interesting to see a new GeForce series launch, not with the flagship card, but rather with a new midrange offering. It makes perfect sense, though, considering that more people can afford midrange cards...
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Long gone are the days when the primary differentiating factors between competing laptops models were just battery life and weight. Don't be mistaken---battery life and weight are still important; but with so many folks now using a laptop as their only computer, laptop manufacturers have stepped up their efforts on the very look of their notebook...
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We’re willing to bet that many of you have wildly varied opinions of Dell. Some no doubt consider them a huge, monolithic corporation who pushes out generic computers without a soul; while others consider them to be pioneers of the low-cost PC movement, who (almost) single-handedly made computers available to nearly every price point....
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Today at Computex, Intel has officially launched their updated lineup of x45-series chipsets, which will likely be the last major mainstream chipset launch from Intel on the Core 2 platform as we know it today. The names and specifications of these products have been rumored and reported on for the past few months, although today everything...
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Soon after we began posting images and information regarding the original Asus Eee PC from the Computex show in Taipei in June of last year, we knew Asus had a hot product on their hands. In fact, our initial hands-on preview of the Eee PC was so popular, it has actually been one of the most heavily trafficked articles we've ever...
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Dell's XPS branded products have come a long way since they first appeared in 1993. Starting life as a performance trim for the Dimension product line, Dell has nurtured XPS into a well-known and respected premium performance brand. While not all XPS branded products are specifically targeted at gamers, gaming has always been at the core...
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It has been surprising and frankly somewhat satisfying to see the success to date of the "Wolfdale" core architecture in Intel’s Core 2 lineup of processors. "Wolfdale" is Intel’s first 45nm based dual-core design, and is an interesting product beyond first glance. When it was first announced, there was a bit of doubt throughout...
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As many of you are no doubt aware, Intel is planning to officially release a new mainstream chipset in a few weeks, the P45. From a feature standpoint, the new P45 is somewhat similar to last year's P35. The P45, however, will have official support for PCI Express 2.0, with a more flexible lane configuration for multi-GPU...
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Enthusiasts love high-end hardware, and when it comes to Intel chipsets, that means the X48 and X38 Express platforms. The 910GL Express sits at the polar opposite of the company’s lineup, shoring up sales of entry-level systems where price is the principal consideration. In between, you have a massive list of discrete and integrated chipsets...
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Let’s talk about SCSI for a moment. The disk interface which was once ubiquitous with high-end workstations and servers is now on the verge of obsolescence. With the influx of inexpensive and reliable Serial ATA hard disks and hardware SATA RAID controllers (which can provide excellent performance at a fraction of a SCSI’s price), it’s...
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Enthusiasts are familiar with the Smooth Creations team as the artists behind the airbrushed gaming rigs from the likes of Falcon Northwest, Alienware, and Maingear. Not as many may be aware, however, that Smooth Creations has recently expanded from the realm of painting cases to that of building and selling painted, customizable systems and...
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Just last week, we posted an evaluation of a Radeon HD 3650 card by Diamond Multimedia, where said manufacturer decided to one-up ATI's reference specifications by raising the amount of on-board memory to a full one gigabyte. The results, unfortunately, were not overly favorable as the memory happened to be of the...
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Just a few years ago, if someone said that integrated audio would deliver great performance with many of the features of a full-blown add-in card, it might have raised an eyebrow or two. Today, however, thanks to vastly improved integrated technologies, today's integrated audio solutions are often more...
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It is hard to believe that it has been almost two full years since NVIDIA released a new flagship chipset for the AMD platform. Since the nForce 590i SLI's official release in May of 2006, NVIDIA has introduced a handful of mid-range and more affordable chipsets for the AMD-platform, but the 590i SLI was it at the high-end, despite AMD's...
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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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