Reviews
To coincide with the launch of the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors, many manufacturers released new or updated motherboards to support Intel's cutting edge CPU. Over the past few months, we've taken a look at a handful of these motherboards, including products based on...
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NVIDIA has enjoyed quite a bit of success the last couple of years thanks in part to its GeForce 6 and 7 Series graphics cards. Like every other company in the world, NVIDIA likes to ride its success as long as possible. In NVIDIA's case, this can be done with product refreshes. The most recent refresh brought us the GeForce 7950 GT, interestingly...
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While NVIDIA is marching forward with its DirectX 10 capable GeForce 8800 series, ATI is still mum on their next generation graphics cards. Which is somewhat surprising, as one would think this time of year would be ideal for new product announcements. But while Vista is due for a broad...
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ATI made quite a splash a few weeks ago, with the introduction of the Radeon X1950 Pro. The RV570 GPU at the heart of the X1950 card is manufactured on TSMC's 80nm node. It's equipped with 36 pixel shader processors, 8 vertex shader units and 12 texture units. ATI's reference design calls for a 575MHz GPU clock and with...
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When you think of the "ultimate computer upgrade", visions of powerful graphics cards, a blistering fast CPU, a spacious-high density hard drive or perhaps another Gig or two of memory to feed your ever-hungry OS might come to mind. On the surface, these are all very reasonable...
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A few short weeks ago, NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce 8800 series of graphics cards and the nForce 600 family of core logic chipsets on the very same day. The flagship parts in each of these product categories, the GeForce 8800 GTX and the nForce 680i SLI, made the basis of what NVIDIA has dubbed...
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The recent release of the GeForce 8800 series means two good things for those in NVIDIA's camp: for benchmark junkies there's a new set of cards to put through their paces. And for those with less lofty goals, it means that that the prices for the existing crop of...
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As the holiday season approaches its peak and minds rush to conjure up the ideal gifts, we here at HotHardware have taken the liberty of creating three ideal system configurations to illustrate the best way to spend your holiday budget. Although we are confident in the performance offered by each system listed in this guide, we are in no way...
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Today's high-end flagship video cards may cost an arm and a leg, but that segment of the market is not where the real money is. The big money is made in the low-end and mid-range (or mainstream) segments of the market. It's simple really: most people shopping for a video card have budgeted $100-250, while relatively few have $400+...
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Home users and Small Business owners can often benefit from technologies that are normally out of reach for some general consumers. Home users may benefit from having a file server for sharing media, transferring large files between PCs, or even remote access while away. Small Office users can utilize the same features...
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When we first took a look at the Gigabyte GA-SN-SLI Quad Royal motherboard a few months back, we gave it solid praise, yet lamented on what we thought was an exciting opportunity. The board was capable of supporting up to four individual PCI-e based graphic cards, but the Quad Royal was only able to support two GeForce cards running in...
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Nvidia's SLI technology launched in mid-2004, and was designed to provide high-performance rendering power for gamers. Because the technology was brand new, and the fastest thing on the market, SLI configurations demanded exorbitant price premiums over single card configurations...
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By now you're all familiar with Intel's Core micro-architecture, as well as the dual and quad-core Core 2 Duo, Extreme, and Quad processors based on it. With the launch of their Core 2 processors, Intel no longer played second fiddle to AMD in terms of overall performance or power...
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Power -- It's one of the most important factors for peak system performance and stability. Yet, the PSU is still an often overlooked PC component. While not as sexy as a high-end motherboard, video card or RAM, the power supplying...
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Not long ago, when we reviewed MSI's GeForce 7600 GT, the closest ATI-based competitor available was the Radeon X1600 Pro. It was far from an apples-to-apples comparison from a technical standpoint, however. While both models sported the same number of Pixel and Vertex Shaders and had similar prices, the X1600 Pro's...
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Although the mobile market is full of rather bland and painfully similar designs, there are a handful of notebook vendors which have created unique products to stand out from the crowd. Typically acting as the company's flagship notebook, these systems generally offer performance which is equally as impressive as their...
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In the last two years, we've seen a major push for home theater PC's by big names in the computer industry. Intel is pushing their ViiV initiative for HTPC market, AMD is pushing their competing AMD Live! program, and of course, Microsoft got in the game with their Windows XP Media...
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NVIDIA's two major launches last week marked a significant advancement in both 3D Graphics and PC Motherboard feature-set and performance. The launch of NVIDIA's G80 GPU with their GeForce 8800 series of graphics...
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When Shuttle first thrust small form factor systems upon the Do-It-Yourself crowd in 2001, they were deemed niche products that wouldn't likely appeal to the masses, due to inherent expandability deficiencies and limited feature-sets relative to full-sized desktop systems. Over the last half decade though, interest in small form...
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Back in 1992 IBM introduced its Thinkpad line of laptop computers. Since that time the Thinkpad has become a staple in mobile business computing. Thinkpads have had a history of firsts in the laptop industry with the invention and usage of such innovative features as the Trackpoint, Thinklight, Ultrabay, biometric fingerprint reader, and Magnesium/Titanium...
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A couple of weeks ago at an Editor's Day event at their headquarters in Santa Clara, California, NVIDIA proclaimed that they planned to "redefine reality" with their self-branded ultimate gaming platform. The products in the spotlight throughout the event were the new nForce...
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The second phase of NVIDIA's two pronged attack on the gaming and enthusiast community today involves a new family of nForce chipsets for both the Intel and AMD platforms. The nForce 600 family of products is spearheaded by the nForce 680i SLI and 680a SLI. Although the two products share a similar naming convention, they are...
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