Reviews
Over the course of the past few months, we've brought you detailed analysis on Intel's forward-looking products based on their 45nm Penryn core architecture. At the time, these products were not officially launched in the various sales channels. Today Intel has announced official...
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Speed. It's the one thing that gets all the attention when most folks consider performance computer hardware. Whether we're referring to the CPU, Memory, Hard Drive or Graphics card, one of the most important characteristics we consider is its raw performance, wanting to know just how fast a component is compared to others in its...
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Seagate was surprisingly late to join the small, but elite club of storage manufacturers shipping one terabyte (1TB) class hard drives. Somewhat expectedly, the first out of the gate was Hitachi, who made it to market several months beforehand with a high-density five-platter 1TB hard disk design. While Hitachi’s performance, thermals,...
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As it stands today, many of the major components in a typical enthusiast class PC have built-in mechanisms for monitoring the health status of the device. Processors and GPUs have internal thermal diodes for monitoring temperatures, and graphics cards and motherboards have sensors for monitoring a myriad of voltages and things like fan...
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Hype, we all know the drill. We've seen it many times before. There's only so much commotion you can digest before you start to wonder if something is as good as it's played up to be. Such is the case with the highly anticipated Asus Eee PC. In fact, this product has been easily the most researched and searched-upon...
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In the GPU business, like any other semiconductor technology, die size, cost and performance-per-watt are the name of the game. Performance-per-watt from a design and manufacturing perspective is important on multiple levels. Certainly, power efficient products are important to the consumer but also, generally speaking, power-efficient...
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It seems like Intel started talking about the Penryn core as soon as the Conroe core launched in the form of the first Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors. Penryn was to be the next evolution in Intel’s Core microarchitecture and would be the foundation of a new class of mobile, desktop, and server processor built using the company’s...
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Claiming to be the best at anything is bold. From professional athletes to product manufacturers, stating you or your product is the best out there opens things up for closer scrutiny. Being the best at what you do, or what you make, means near flawless execution. Regardless of the context, one thing is certain,...
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It was back in January of this year at the Consumer Electronics Show that AMD first revealed their plans for the DTX open industry standard for small form factor computers. The focus of those early briefings was to explain AMD’s vision for interoperable small form factor systems. As it stands today, most SFF systems from large...
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Whether you’re a hardcore power user or a casual tinkerer who knows just enough to get into trouble, Asus is a company that you’re no doubt familiar with. The company is held in high regard in the PC enthusiast community thanks in no small part to their consistent track record and seemingly never-ending flow of innovative products....
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As enthusiasts, we're always looking for the next great design in computer cases. We're eager to see companies innovate in various areas of design, including cooling, tool-less installation, and style. When we see a new case hit the market, we often hope that it is made of aluminum, includes quiet 120mm or larger fans, and is easy...
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Just about four and a half years ago, a company started by ex-Visiontek executives entered the already crowded graphics card market with the hope of capturing the enthusiast and hardcore gaming audience. The plan was to factory overclock many of their products, offer a life time warranty, and have a dedicated 24/7 technical support staff ready...
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Today’s power supplies are a far cry from those that were available just a few years ago. With the increasing power demands of the latest GPUs and high-end processors, the need for ample, stable power has increased exponentially. With more and more attention being paid to efficiency and energy conservation, one has to question...
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It has been quite some time since Intel launched a desktop chipset targeted squarely at power users and PC enthusiasts. Of course, the P965 and current P35 have both been very well received by motherboard manufactures and the enthusiast community, but these chipsets were actually designed for the upper-mainstream space. In fact,...
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DirectX 10 (DX10) has been one of the hottest topics for discussion and news coverage since the first DX10 compliant hardware appeared in the second half of last year. Touted as the biggest milestone in games development since programmable shaders were introduced with DirectX 8, nearly seven years ago, DX10 has generated a lot of buzz. Unlike...
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Intel’s latest chipset family, the P3x-series, can certainly be qualified as a hit thus far. While Intel P3x-series chipsets, like the mid-range P35 series and the budget-targeted P31 series, don’t sport any truly exciting new features in comparison to their previous generation counterparts, they’re showing themselves to be extremely reliable...
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Just prior to the Radeon HD 2000 series' introduction, numerous rumors circulated regarding an ultra-high clocked ATI R600-based video card, that featured a large 1GB frame buffer. Some went so far as to say the GPU would be clocked at or near 1GHz. Spy shots even cropped up on the web showing the card in all its glory. But sometime between...
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If silence is golden, then silence plus overclocking is platinum. Hardware enthusiasts have loved squeezing every last drop of performance out of their hardware for quite some time. Noise levels are not a concern for many of these enthusiasts, but over the last several years, more and more of them have become not only performance enthusiasts...
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Upon its release, it was expected that even the most ardent power users and enthusiasts were going to tread lightly at first with respect to adopting Windows Vista as their primary OS. Though end users in this demographic are classically early adopters, in terms of new hardware technologies coming to market, an operating system change brings with...
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Day 2 at this year’s IDF began with a mobility keynote hosted by Intel’s David “Dadi” Perlmutter and Anand Chandrasekher. The keynote was broken up into two parts; the first focused on notebooks and Intel’s mobile platforms as a whole and the second focused on “ultra mobility” featuring a number of UMPCs and MIDs....
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During a closed door session at IDF, we had a chance to get some hands on time with a few upcoming Intel platforms including Skulltrail, the octa-core platform Intel is targeting at enthusiasts. We also saw some dual-core 45nm desktop and mobile (Wolfdale) machines at work and even snapped off a few pics of a phase-change cooled, overclocked...
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There were a multitude of products on display on the show floor at the Intel Developers Forum this year, most of which were designed for the enterprise space. In addition to the plethora of servers on display, however, were products from a number of manufactures that are well known to enthusiasts. We stopped by a few of their booths and...
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