Reviews
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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At last week’s GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled a couple of key products and technologies that target the High-Performance Computing, or HPC, space, including the Tesla P100 data center accelerator and its companion DGX-1 deep-learning system, which is a powerful server that has up to eight Tesla P100 cards at...
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The Asus Z170 ROG Maximus VIII Extreme motherboard is the latest in Asus' flagship line of enthusiast-class motherboards for gamers. It’s a top-end premium solution with a dizzying array of tuning options to supercharge your next build and tweak overall performance in games, networking and more. Our previous...
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With the release of Windows 8, Microsoft effectively encouraged its hardware partners to think beyond the confines of traditional PC design, giving them the nudge they needed to introduce bold new products. Lenovo embraced the challenge, and in 2012 it brought its first Yoga system to market, a multi-mode laptop that...
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Whether or not this latest push for virtual reality resonates with consumers and brings the technology into the mainstream remains to be seen. But it appears that all of the major players in the space, from the GPU manufacturers, to game developers, and VR leaders like HTC, Oculus, Samsung and Sony (among others) are...
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Intel is officially launching a brand new series of Xeon processors today, the Xeon Processor E5 v4. Unlike mainstream desktop products, which feature Intel’s latest core technologies like the Skylake-based Core i7-6700K, mission-critical, big-iron parts like the Xeon E5 v4 series are more complex and go through much...
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Forget almost everything you’ve read about the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL up to this point. We know that’s a bold statement, but bear with us here. Save for the phone’s specifications, if there’s one thing we’ve learned evaluating the 950 XL over the last few weeks it’s that virtually everything from the OS to the camera...
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When it comes to technology, especially the fast-paced advancement of mobile technology, design cycles are often based on either innovation or iteration. Sometimes it's a blend of both, but often times, like Intel's tick-tock silicon design process, it makes perfect sense to innovate one design cycle and then iterate...
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You read the headline correctly – this is not a review of a Synology NAS, but instead a wireless router. If this sounds unusual to you, you are not alone. Synology is a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) company, or at least it used to be, as it's now taking all its networking expertise and jumping into the router market, and the black beauty...
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We promise, this is going to be a review of some upcoming wearable technology from Hykso, designed specifically for punch tracking, but before we dig into the product a bit of backstory is in order. There are reasons why this particular product is so interesting to us, and we want to lay some groundwork to help you...
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Professional system builders are usually obsessed with silence and cooling. Custom cooling solutions are some of the biggest differentiators in pre-built systems. And one of the chief selling points of aftermarket cooling gear for enthusiasts is noise output, usually listed in decibels. There are even companies, like "be quiet!" for example,...
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Face the facts: if you want a pre-built PC that can play virtually any game at high resolutions with high-quality settings, you're going to have to pay a princely sum. While you could probably build your own PC for less than a pre-built system, boutique builders typically offer a number of benefits in the form of guaranteed overclocks or custom...
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Mechanical keyboards are commonplace now, but that wasn't always the case. For many years, squishy membrane and dome-switch keyboards dominated the landscape in part because they're cheap to produce, and also because typists who've never used anything else didn't really know what they were missing. Imagine trying to describe the taste of ice...
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Update 4/26/2016: We've updated our battery life test suite for this review and have new more real-world metrics to share on page 6. It was just about this time last year that HP first took the wraps off its chic, convertible ultrabook, the original Spectre x360. Although the Spectre name wasn’t new, HP’s approach to the ultrabook’s design...
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Dell recently refreshed its popular XPS 13 with new hardware to bring it up to date with current CPU and storage offerings. The updated model now sports a Skylake-based Intel processor and a Samsung PM951 NVMe solid state drive, plus a few minor tweaks to its already impressive design. When the current iteration of the Dell XPS...
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While discussions about the best desktop gaming PCs tend to be divided between do-it-yourselfers and fans of pre-built PCs, gaming laptops spark a different debate, typically between large system builders versus, smaller boutique system integrators. Many of the industry behemoths kick-started or bolstered their gaming...
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Amazon’s current generation of Fire tablets offer something for everyone, from the budget-conscious user who wants a super-cheap $50 tablet, to the consumer who’s willing to spend more in exchange for a larger format device with all the bells and whistles. Today, we’re going to take a look at Amazon’s Fire HD 10...
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