Reviews
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, despite first generation issues like software compatibility,...
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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 efficiency. And for the last few months since their...
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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 these components is just as important as the components themselves. With the...
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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 Center Edition operating system. While the product...
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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 cards was the advent of the first truly DX10 capable GPU architecture on the...
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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 680i SLI chipset, the upcoming 680a SLI, and a...
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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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Stepping back to look at who has the largest market share in the chipset sector for AMD socket AM2 processors, it's clear who is on top and who is not. Take virtually any major motherboard manufacturer and see what they have to offer and in most cases, NVIDIA chipset solutions are going to dominate the...
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When news first broke that Abit was going to be purchased by USI earlier this year, it seemed unlikely that Abit would continue their long-running tradition of producing enthusiast level motherboards. After all, USI is a much more traditional electronics company, and enthusiast/overclocking platforms didn't seem like they would...
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To say this year has been a bit of a whirl-wind adventure would be an immense understatement. We've seen Intel move from a back-seat position versus the Athlon 64 X2 with their Pentium D architecture, to commanding virtually all of the lime-light as of late with Core 2 Duo, not to mention running away with nearly all of...
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Recently, we were given the opportunity to take a look at a preproduction sample of a new gaming platform coming from ASUS. Dubbed the "G2P", this is a robust new product that combines the latest flagship mobile components with a unique new aesthetic and gaming-specific features in one convenient package. Although we've opted...
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About two weeks ago, ATI launched the Radeon X1950 Pro, a new mainstream graphics card with a host of new features. This graphics card was equipped with a single-slot cooler, a relatively low-power GPU that was manufactured on TSMC's 80nm fabrication process, and in a first for ATI, native CrossFire support. Native CrossFire...
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Several months ago, Seagate got the PC industry's attention with the introduction of the company's first 750GB consumer hard drive. As shown within our review of the drive, the Barracuda 7200.10 combined excellent performance with unparalleled capacity and a stellar 5-yr warranty. Fast forward to today and we find ourselves...
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When Intel unleashed the Core 2 back in July, they introduced the P965 as their mainstream chipset, while the 975X Express chipset was upgraded with Core 2 support to cover the high-end enthusiast segment. However, the P965 didn't end up being 'just' a mainstream product. As production boards utilizing the...
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