Reviews
A few months ago, we assessed the performance of a pair of GeForce 6800 GTs and a pair of GeForce 6800 Ultras running in SLI-mode, and were impressed by the platform's performance. We did have some concerns over driver support and the TCO of the platform, however. NVIDIA's current SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology requires a specific...
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In July of 2004, AMD released their latest economy class processors in the form of the Sempron line. The initial release was predominantly Socket A-centric, with only one Socket 754 solution being offered. Since that day, the Socket A Sempron family has grown to incorporate 7 flavors, yet the socket 754 Sempron line only recently...
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It seems that today's mid and high-end video cards are coming with increasingly more creative cooling solutions. Lately, large, quiet fans are becoming more popular as seen with Abit's OTES, HIS's IceQ II and Sapphire's Lethal Cooling. All of these options aim to keep a video card cool under load while minimizing fan noise, and...
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Once the dominant player for chipsets compatible with AMD's Athlon, VIA has fallen out of favor lately, it seems. The company introduced its K8T890 chipset with PCI Express support way back in November of last year. Yet, we've heard very little about retail products centering on the platform until recently. The PT-series, destined for...
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With the next notebook refresh cycle right around the corner, we are taking the time to look at some of the more recently refreshed notebooks. In the meantime, there is a lot of buzz surrounding the AMD Turion platform, which we have been eagerly anticipating. The news so far (directly from a few system vendors) is that it does surprisingly...
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When it comes to making Small Form Factor PCs, we find that most manufacturers need to make compromises in order to create a viable product. Radical heat dissipation techniques typically consume much of the area in already cramped confines, motherboards are usually cut-down versions of full-sized models which, in turn, have...
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Hot on the heals of the official announcement of Intel's new dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840 processor, we have more news for those interested in Intel platform solutions. Today, NVIDIA is finally taking the wraps off of their nForce chipset for the Intel platform, a chipset now known as the nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition. For months there...
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Today, we're bringing you a Dual-Core Pentium quick take, on short notice from the folks at Intel. With only a few hours of testing at our disposal, we're attempting to make time with some level of meaningful analysis for you and hit Intel's NDA embargo lift time this morning. Would we have liked to spend more quality lab time on such...
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Every so often a new technology, or a new piece of hardware, comes along that polarizes the PC enthusiast community. One such product is the recently released NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI chipset. The nForce 4 SLI chipset is the preferred platform for NVIDIA's Scalable Link Interface technology, that gives users the ability to use a pair of GeForce...
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While we have already taken a look or two at NVIDIA's current mainstream offering, the GeForce 6600, in the past, today we've got a completely new take on this card with Albatron's PC6600U Trinity Series. While the basic technology behind the PC6600U remains largely the same as past cards, the core clock and memory speeds have been raised...
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In January we took a look at the HIS X700 Pro IceQ Turbo because it piqued our interest with its somewhat unique cooling solution. HIS took a page from the book of "OTES", which stands for Outside Thermal Exhaust System, a thermal management approach pioneered by Abit Computer, that has been out on the market in various...
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When shopping for a new video card, naturally, we all want the fastest card available performance wise. However, many simply can't justify the price that some high-end cards currently command. With many premium models now selling for more than $500, gamers on a budget often need to focus their efforts on finding a good,...
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It's been a little over six months since ATI first announced the All-In-Wonder X800 XT, but in the months following the announcement the card never made it onto retail shelves. It's no secret that ATI has struggled through some supply issues recently with their high-end GPUs. Since the time that we were first introduced to the card, ATI has...
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Centrino based notebooks are the mobile computing industry's current bread and butter. There is really no denying the huge market share that Intel has claimed in the notebook arena. Centrino is synonymous with mobility and power efficiency, and it is generally regarded as the present gold standard when it comes to mainstream mobile computing....
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Years ago, when computers with a 200MHz Pentium processor and 32MB of RAM were all the rage, we came upon a nifty device that came pre-installed in a wimpy Packard Bell PC. This device was a PCI TV Tuner Card. Back then, the ability to watch TV on a computer was somewhat of a rarity. And now, while there are many more options available,...
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When it comes to mainstream notebooks, the big three: Dell, HP/Compaq, and IBM still lead the pack in regard to overall notebook price, design, quality, and service. Of course, the enthusiast notebook vendors still get to set some interesting aesthetic and performance trends, but Dell and HP (Dell more so) have been picking up on the...
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As the old saying goes, "Times are a changing". When the personal computer first caught on, word processing and text based gaming was all the rage, and then there was this thing called the "Internet" on the rise. Today, the Internet is at the center of the technological universe and the PC has become a powerful...
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Five plus years ago, there weren't many "must have extras" to include on your do-it-yourself list of desired PC components, minus that relatively expensive Sound Blaster and a pricey, yet affordable, 3D Graphics card. In fact there weren't too many extras to consider in a configuration other than perhaps an optical drive of some...
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Back in December 2004, NVIDIA introduced their latest evolution in the budget graphics card market with the release of TurboCache technology. The focus with TurboCache was both system resource utilization and economics, in an effort to deliver a quality business-class/casual gaming video card at the lowest possible price point. ...
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Normally, when a new Small Form Factor PC arrives in the lab, the unit is generally a single manufacturers combination of form and function. Inside and out, everything is designed by only one OEM in a singular effort. From Shuttle to Epox and more recently Foxconn, the outer chassis is meant to support the technology within. Not...
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About three weeks ago, we tested a new Acer notebook powered by ATI's Mobility Radeon X700. With our testing complete, we found the Mobility Radeon X700 to be a well-balanced mobile GPU that offered very good performance, in a thin and relatively light form factor. Then, a few days after that article went live, we...
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It has been a little over two months since we first got to play with ATI's Radeon X800 XL, and we have now begun to receive retail products based on this eagerly anticipated GPU in the HotHardware labs. For those unfamiliar with the Radeon X800 XL, it is a .11 micron GPU, with 16 pixel pipelines, 6 hardware vertex shaders and all of...
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