Reviews
Every once in a while a product comes along that really garners the attention of the enthusiast crowd. There can be a number of factors for this, including overclocking performance, easy modding potential or just an overall great value for the money. One such piece of hardware that encompasses a lot of these qualities is the Sapphire...
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The old crowd of PCI TV Tuners may need to step aside soon, as their PCIe cousins head into the market. Sure, there are still plenty of people without motherboards equipped with PCI Express expansion slots, but the old PCI bus is eventually on it's way out. Today we're going to take a look at PowerColor's PCI Express based Theatre 550 Pro...
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Without question, there is seemingly an endless number of music fans with a massive collection of songs and albums. Unfortunately, managing these impressive collections can be tedious at the very least, to downright appalling for larger compilations of music. Traditionally, music fans were forced to stockpile their collection of CD's in racks...
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In October of '05 ATI officially unveiled a new family of graphics cards based on the company's R520 GPU core and its derivatives. With the R520 ATI introduced a new "Ultra-Threaded" architecture, along with their new Ring Bus memory controller, and a more powerful video engine dubbed AVIVO, among numerous other things. Unfortunately...
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Western Digital has earned themselves quite a reputation in the Computing Enthusiast market with their line of Raptor hard drives. Originally targeted as "Enterprise class" SATA variants of what WD had historically brought to market for high-end SCSI server storage solutions, the 10K RPM Raptor...
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Looking back on 2005's list of hot products, dual-core CPUs and dual-graphics solutions are a couple of things that immediately come to mind. Adoption of dual-core processors continues to increase, with both Intel and AMD bringing their own renditions to the frontline. Both company's products have their own pros and cons, however. ...
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There is a current trend in PC hardware to have two of everything. Whether it's two (or more) drives in a RAID configuration, dual-core CPUs, dual-channel memory, or adding an additional video card to increase frame rates; it's apparent that doubling-up is here to stay. Up until recently, running two video cards simultaneously...
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As usual, the Las Vegas convention center, and a handful of the nearby ritzy hotels and restaurants, were overflowing with gear being showcased at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. There are a couple of other major electronics and technology-related trade shows that take place all around the world, like CeBIT...
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Intel's launch of their next generation Pentium Extreme Edition 955 dual-core processor last month, marked a solid improvement in overall performance for what is to be the last core iteration utilizing the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture. While this Intel dual-core kicker, essentially beefing up a pair or Prescott dies in a single...
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Intel has been relatively quiet over the last eight months or so, since the initial release of the dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840 processor back in early April of this year. The company has released an entire line of dual-core 'Pentium D' processors since then, and have also introduced a number of new core...
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No question about it, Flash Memory devices have taken on the Consumer Tech industry by storm. Flash memory is utilized in so many different applications these days, from Cell Phones and PDAs, to MP3 players and Digital Cameras, that it's hard to imagine a world before the Flash memory was invented. However, thanks to some...
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With the holidays looming around the corner, and a bit of money burning a hole in your pocket, we here at HotHardware.com thought we'd do what we could to ensure that you spent your hard-earned cash in the most appropriate manner. Before we begin, it makes sense to outline our approach and illustrate what we're trying to accomplish. It is...
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The onslaught of ATI announcements this quarter continues today, with the official unveiling of the Radeon X1800 XT Master Edition graphics card -- the "missing link" necessary to run a pair of X1800 cards in a dual-GPU CrossFire configuration. From the end of September '05 through to today, ATI has announced and released a top-to-bottom...
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Abit has earned a reputation over the years, as a builder of top-quality motherboards geared for high-performance enthusiasts and extreme overclockers. They've produced some exceedingly popular products in the past, like the legendary BX6 and long-time favorite the TH7-II RAID, and the company continues to innovate today. In our tenure here...
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When NVIDIA first resurrected the term "SLI" from the technology archives, it was welcomed back with open arms. Although the exact definition has changed from it's 3Dfx roots, it boils down to two graphics cards working on the same job. The obvious benefit is that two cards should be able to easily outperform even the fastest single...
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ATI has been on tear the past few months, releasing a number of new and interesting products. Since late September / early October of this year, we've been presented with Radeon X850 CrossFire and requisite CrossFire capable dual-PEG slot motherboards to go along with it, a whole series of products based on the new X1K family of GPUs, and...
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For the last few years, there has been an undeniable trend towards packing all the functionality and performance of a full-fledged desktop system into a smaller form factor. As one of the chief pioneers of this new form factor, Shuttle enjoyed having dominant market share as they were one of the only true contenders in the SFF category. Fortunately...
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Although they were once a dominant market leader, S3 is now a company that almost exclusively focuses on the budget / business-class graphics market. For years, S3 has been marketing budget / business-class video cards, managing to offer competitive solutions in a segment that is dominated by "the big boys" - ATI and NVIDIA. ...
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An unfortunate side effect of many of today's high-performing PC peripherals is significant heat output. The need to tame this heat has led to bigger, and unfortunately, louder cooling solutions, which is something we at HotHardware are very familiar with. With the number of fans we have in some of our test systems, you'd think we were trying...
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The big headlines in today's video card related articles almost always come down to seeing double; whether it's two NVIDIA GeForce cards connected in SLI or two ATi Radeons running in CrossFire mode. Perhaps it's justified in that people always want to see higher framerates and increased performance, regardless of the cost. ...
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With the adoption of PCI Express as a next-gen I/O technology, all of the major chipset manufacturers worked hard to bring compatible chipsets to market. Naturally, Intel was first on the scene with the 900 series chipsets. But on the AMD side, VIA was first to market with its K8T890 Chipset. Building on the successes of...
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It has only been about six weeks since ATI officially unveiled their new Radeon X1K family of products, but the Canadian based graphics giant is already introducing a new addition to the line-up today. It probably comes as no surprise to many of you that, in parrallel with their X1K family of products launch, engineers at ATI were also hard...
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