Reviews
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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It's no secret that Intel has occassionally been playing a bit of catchup this year in the desktop and workstation processor arena. AMD's Athlon 64 releases have recently positioned the company in the lead from a general performance standpoint. Additionally, the Athlon 64 was the first processor to...
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Over the years, Abit has cultivated a well deserved reputation for building some of the most overclockable, and feature rich motherboards available. So, anytime a new core-logic chipset is released, knowledgeable enthusiasts inevitably wonder what Abit has in store. Abit tends to incorporate features that make their motherboards...
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Until Intel's next-generation chipsets arrive, with support for upcoming multi-core processors, the 925X and 925XE will remain the flagship chipsets for LGA775 based Pentium 4 processors. The 925X and XE are very similar, as Dave pointed out in his introduction to the P4 EE 3.46GHz last October. When we compare the 925X and 925XE,...
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Widescreen notebook solutions are becoming more popular for general consumers, which is evident looking at the newest offerings from Dell or HP/Compaq. And as far as other OEMs go, there are few new players entering the market as well. In the past few years, we have started to see large motherboard manufacturers join the fray of OEM...
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In what seems to be an ever expanding market, we've got yet another look at a new Small Form Factor system on HotHardware. This time the system comes to us by way of Foxconn. The same company that's been putting their stamp on motherboards and other OEM hardware since 1991. Following their recent successful foray into...
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It used to be the case that the fastest optical drive was, by default, the best. Reducing CD burn times from 12 minutes to eight and then to six was considered significant evolutionary progress. But then a barrier was encountered, where the imperfect nature of mass-produced compact discs precluded, or at least made it much more difficult,...
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Mobile Graphics technology is advancing at a fevered pace. In a little over a year, the once dominant Mobility Radeon 9600 was eclipsed by the Mobility Radeon 9700. Then, the MR 9700 was surpassed by the Mobility Radeon 9800, which itself was recently eclipsed by the Mobility Radeon X800. ATI's mobile GPUs went from 4, to 8, to 12 pixel...
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Refinements and performance optimizations in PC motherboard designs often track chipset re-spins and tweaks, as a new base architecture matures. Intel is absolutely famous (or shall we say infamous) for releasing a new chipset only to set sail with a re-spin or further characterization of the product, just a few months later. ...
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VIA is perhaps most notable for its contributions as a supplier of chipsets for AMD's Athlon XP/64 processor families. The company's work with Intel's offerings has ranged, over time, from clandestine manufacturing of unlicensed core logic (in Intel's eyes, at least) to the manufacture of a respectably leading edge product in the form...
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We are going to go start down the proverbial "rabbit hole' for notebooks in the coming weeks. And because of this, we need to lay a few things out before we go on. First and foremost, certain notebooks are designed with certain people in mind. Five or six years ago, not everyone was cut out to own a notebook, for a variety of reasons;...
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One of the major up and comers in the video card industry is HIS. In recent months, HIS has garnered some attention with several impressive additions to their product line. They put a major emphasis on overclocking, cooling and stability, while providing competitive performance. With such innovations as oversized, yet quiet...
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If you are looking to add a TV tuner card to your computer, there are a broad range of choices currently available, ranging from economical solutions to high-end cards that offer more advanced capabilities. However, if you are looking for a TV/Video card combination, there are fewer choices, namely NVIDIA's Personal Cinema, S3's OmniChrome...
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Even though DDR2 memory may be the current talk of the town, thanks to Intel's platform upgrade, there are plenty of P4, Athlon, and Athlon 64 owners that still use standard DDR based systems. Reason being, it's almost always cheaper to stay slightly behind the curve when purchasing hardware. It's...
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When DDR2 first saw the light of day, the memory marked the next level in DDR technology. However, with improved frequencies, lower voltage requirements and improve packaging also came higher latencies. With intial offerings coming in at CAS 4-4-4-12 and even higher, the performance improvements over DDR1 were minimal at best. ...
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Every time a new small form factor system arrives in the lab, inevitable comparisons are made to Shuttle's popular line of XPC systems. The simple fact of the matter is that Shuttle's XPCs have set the bar for the rest of the industry. And their XPC systems have sold so well, they've transformed Shuttle from a second tier motherboard...
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This years 2005 CES show, was certainly a whirlwind adventure for us as we literally ran from meeting to meeting in the two short days we were able to attend the event. For us this year, the show was about meeting up with all the good people at all of the various OEMs we work with and hearing about their roadmap product efforts, as much...
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Competition can be a blessing for consumers, a headache for manufacturers and a driving force for an entire industry. Where a market once may have been dominated by one or two big companies with a handful of smaller competitors striving for their piece of the pie, nowadays the scales are somewhat more balanced. A good example of...
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A few months ago, we took a look at a sampling of Athlon 64 Socket 939 motherboards, and ended up giving an Editor's Choice award to the NVIDIA nForce 3 Ultra based MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum. At the time, the K8N Neo2 Platinum struck the best balance between features, performance, overclockability, and price. Another motherboard tested...
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In this our first article of 2005, we're going to take a look back at recent history and examine a driving force in computing technology that was dominant throughout much of 2004. Intel launched its mobile Centrino technology in mid-2003. It took a while to ramp up but once this new platform initiative gathered steam,...
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Over the past year, DFI has made a name for itself with a crowd that is traditionally very hard to please. A company that once built parts strictly for the OEM / white box folks, is now catering to the enthusiast and overclocking communities with a bold, feature laden line of motherboards. DFI's "LANPARTY" products build...
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