Reviews
Overwatch, the team-based multiplayer shooter from Blizzard Entertainment has proven to be an unstoppable force in the industry having now reached the hands of more than 7 million gamers within a week of launch. Many predicted as much once the early beta saw nearly 10 million users. Admittedly, we too have been...
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Back in March, Intel launched its Xeon Processor E5 v4 family of products, based on the Broadwell-EP core. We had the chance to evaluate a dual Xeon E5-2697 v4-based system with a total of 36 cores (72 Threads) and detailed some of the changes and new features in Broadwell-EP. As powerful as that 36-core system was...
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CES is a distant memory now, but we’re still seeing new products arrive that were announced in Las Vegas at the beginning of the year. One of those is the Dell Latitude 13 7000 series, the latest in the company's line of business laptops. The 13-inch ultrabook landed several awards at CES for its sleek design and...
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It was all the way back in August of 2014 that Intel officially launched its Haswell-E based Core i7 series processors and its companion X99 chipset. At the time of its release, Haswell-E’s top of the line, 8-core Core i7-5960X was easily the most powerful processor for multi-threaded workloads on desktop systems...
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Earlier this month, we told you a bit about the next generation 64-bit ARM v8-A mobile processor core, codenamed Artemis. Artemis is built using TSMC’s 10nm FinFET process technology and promises some pretty sizable performance and efficiency gains over the Cortex-A72, which is built using a 16nm FinFET process...
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The powerful GeForce GTX 1080 got the lion’s share of media attention immediately following NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s official unveiling at an event in Austin, Texas a couple of weeks back. But its little brother, the GeForce GTX 1070, was also mentioned along with its expected price point, which just happened to be far more attainable...
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Intel's successful line of NUC (Next Unit of Computing) mini PCs have done well for the company, for various use cases where an ultra-small form factor computer might come in handy. In areas where a PC either needs to stay out of sight, blend in with its surroundings or squeeze in places where other, larger computers...
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Toshiba OCZ is at the ready with a brand new NVMe solid state drive, targeted squarely at the high-performance enthusiast computing market. We first caught a glimpse of the drive we’re going to be showing you here today, the OCZ RD400, back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. OCZ had the drive on display – branded the RevoDrive 400...
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ARM has been working closely with TSMC – the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company – for a number of years now. Over the last six years or so especially, ARM and TSMC have collaborated to ensure that the latter’s cutting-edge process technologies work well with the former’s processor IP. So, with every...
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A couple of weeks back, at a packed event in Austin, Texas filled with tech press and attendees from the DreamHack gaming event that took place up the road, NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun-Huang unveiled the company’s newest graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070. These latest flagships represent a true...
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Boutique gaming PC system builders are a flourishing breed these days with new brands popping up on the scene regularly it seems. It's a testament to the fact that PC gaming, and the hardware the fuels it, is not only alive and well but kicking some major butt, especially with the advent of the eSports industry. Maingear has been building...
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A few weeks back, during its GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA announced a new Quadro-branded graphics card for the professional workstation market. That card was the Quadro M2000 we’ll be showing you here today. The Quadro M2000 is a low-power pro graphics card featuring a GPU based on NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture. In fact, it’s the very...
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A few weeks back, we gave you our initial take on the retail-ready HTC Vive virtual reality kit. While we were able to explain the Vive’s specifications, setup, configuration, and give some opinions on the experience, at that point, we hadn’t had the kit long enough to form any solid, concrete opinions. We had experience with multiple versions...
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At a time when laptop makers are shunning big and bulky notebooks in favor of thin and light designs, Lenovo went a different direction with its ThinkPad P70, a mobile workstation brimming with high-end hardware for tackling rough and tumble tasks in the field. It's all about finding the right tool for the job, and...
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Update - 10/27/16: AMD Radeon Technologies Group recently announced their new Radeon Pro series graphics cards based on the company's Polaris GPU architecture. This is the same technology in the Apple's new MacBook Pro 13 and 15-inch machines that were announced today. The following coverage here on the pages ahead is of...
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Fans of the original Mirror's Edge will be happy to hear that a follow-up titles is in the works, dubbed Mirror's Edge Catalyst ME Catalyst revisits the dystopian world of the original game with a fresh new story that expands on the origins of protagonist Faith Connors. The beta test just wrapped up last week...
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Internet privacy is kind of like a VCR or CD player, in that one day our kids will ask us “you used to have that?” It’s staggering how much of our online activity is tracked, catalogued, and used for a wide array of purposes, most of them related to commerce. But if you’re a dissident, journalist, someone who lives in...
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Update 4/26/2016: We've refreshed our battery life test suite for this review and have new, more real-world metrics to share on page 8. When Dell launched its updated XPS 13 notebook with an Infinity Edge display that squeezes a 13 inch IPS panel into essentially a 12-inch frame, it was met with universal praise for...
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After almost a year of sneak peeks and strategic demos, AMD has finally begun shipping its dual-Fiji GPU powered graphics card, the Radeon Pro Duo. AMD is positioning the Radeon Pro Duo as a card for “gamers who create, and creators who game” and for budding VR developers in need of some monstrous compute performance, though the simple fact...
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It looks like Microsoft’s grit is paying off. After years of shepherding its Surface tablets, Microsoft seems to have convinced its partners that there is a market for premium, Windows-based ultra portables. HP’s Spectre x2 caught our attention late last year and Dell’s XPS 12 and Lenovo’s Yoga (technically a...
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HTC launched its latest flagship smartphone on Tuesday, the aptly named HTC 10. The HTC 10 is the follow-up to devices the HTC M9 and M10 (sans the letter designation), and as such, it has similar design language and high-end feature set. The HTC 10, however, packs some of the latest mobile hardware currently...
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The second wave of 802.11ac routers are now shipping, and they offer a tantalizing performance benefit over the previous routers we’ve reviewed (at least with their older firmware) — the ability to broadcast multiple data streams to several clients at once. This technology, named MU-MIMO, which stands for Multiple...
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