Reviews
These are the days of form factors. The PC market is changing rapidly as tablets supplant some laptops, new players such as the Chromebook disrupt the old WIntel model, and innovations in processors and graphics allow for ever-smaller PCs such as Intel’s NUC. Here’s a new one for you: a tiny NUC-style PC that doubles as a video...
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As one of the top-shelf systems in the company's mainstream line-up, the Inspiron 15 7537 is in an interesting position in Dell’s extensive family of laptops and ultrabooks. This laptop is too pricey to be considered affordable by most consumers, and yet it’s not quite in the same class as and doesn't have...
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The ability to stream movies and other content to your TV is relatively commonplace thanks to set top boxes such as the Roku 3, Apple TV, gaming consoles that support streaming, and built-in functionality that comes with many of today’s Blu-ray players and TVs. Even so, there’s always room for additional competition, right? Amazon...
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OCZ's RevoDrive series has been a popular enthusiast and workstation-class storage product family for years now. The last time we looked at an OCZ RevoDrive, the RevoDrive 3 X2 offered smoking-fast performance and bandwidth of up to 1.5GB/sec for reads and 1.25GB/sec for writes thanks to its PCI Express-based design, which basically comprises...
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Although Intel isn’t quite ready to take the wraps off of its updated Haswell-based processors (codenamed Devil’s Canyon) or its next-gen Broadwell-based processors, the company is at the ready with a brand new chipset that ups the ante in terms of features and overall performance. Intel’s 9-series chipset isn’t quite...
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You might recall that we recently rounded up a collection of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards and put them through a gauntlet of benchmarks and tests. Each of the cards represented brought something unique to the table and stood out in some way, but curiously missing from the bunch was an entry from ASUS. Not to worry -- we didn't...
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It has been nearly a year since we visited ARM in Cambridge, UK, and the company recently held another tech day -- this time in Austin, Texas. During the three-day session, ARM covered a wide range of topics, with a primary focus on server ecosystems and next-generation mobile hardware. The company started off with an in-depth exploration...
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The near-constant influx of new solid state storage solutions has shown no signs of letting up. In the last few weeks alone, we have looked at new drives from Micron/Crucial, ADATA, Intel, Samsung, OCZ and SanDisk, and today we’re going to cover something a little different from Plextor, the new M6M series. Plextor’s M6M series...
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The Android smartphone wars are heating up here in Q2 with Samsung, HTC and soon LG releasing flagship devices targeted at luring in enthusiasts and mainstream consumers who might be looking to upgrade to the latest technologies and screen sizes. We just gave you a detailed evaluation of HTC's One (M8) for 2014 and today we're here...
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HTC has clearly been putting in considerable effort into its products' industrial design. For years, the company has churned out some of the most appealing flagship devices, running both Android as well as Windows Phone. As of late, the Taiwanese outfit has been struggling to turn a profit, and that’s despite a robust, well-received...
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A couple of weeks back, we got the chance to get some hands on time with AMD’s upcoming mainstream and low-power APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), codenamed Beema and Mullins. These APUs are the successors to last year’s Temash and Kabini APUs, which powered an array of small form factor and mobile platforms. With this release,...
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Two years ago, Samsung launched its Series 9 ultrabook and proved the company could design a thin and light notebook that is both beautiful and powerful. Since the launch, Samsung has unified its Windows PCs under the ATIV brand and continues to innovate and build on the popularity of the Series 9. As the next generation of the company’s ATIV...
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NVIDIA holds the lion's share of the market in mobile graphics hardware, but it's not the only competitor. When Alienware asked if we'd be interested in looking at a notebook based on AMD's top-end R9 M290X in a single-GPU configuration, we agreed. This system is based on exactly the same hardware and chassis as the Alienware 18-inch model...
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Despite being limited by the capabilities of the SATA interface, many solid state drive manufacturers continue to innovate and introduce new products that improve on previous generation products. For example, Micron recently released its M550 series of drives, which was an evolution of the previously released M500 series, but built around...
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Do you know what gets our juices flowing even more than high-end hardware? It's having the opportunity to wrangle and evaluate multiple versions of a top-tier product. In this case, we've gone out and collected NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards from three different enthusiast brands: EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI. Each of the cards in this...
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“You can never have too little screen real estate” is a tagline for no one, but big players like Dell, Toshiba, and now Lenovo are rushing to squeeze Windows 8.1 onto 8-inch tablets all the same. Lenovo is targeting its ThinkPad 8 at business users, which makes sense. Everyone values portability and power, but it’s the business...
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Mini PCs are big business these days, whether you consider devices like Valve's Steambox initiative, ASUS' Chromebox, Zotac's ZBox line or Intel's own NUC (Next Unit of Computing) mini PC. In fact, Intel has gone on record, projecting mini PCs like this have shipped over a million units in 2013 and are projected for strong growth this...
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As a species, we've come a long way from the days of carving notes into stone. While our ancestors used chisel and rock, we now use keyboards to hammer out our thoughts and anything that needs to be documented. Some of us spend hours a day sitting in front of a PC, a large portion of which is dedicated to punching keystrokes at a frenzied...
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Office for iPad is finally here, and for once, the term “finally” is truly justified. For nearly as long as the iPad has been available, general consumers and enterprise users alike have been clamoring for Microsoft’s suite of document editing tools. In fact, the dearth of Office on iPad enabled an entire ecosystem to...
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For the past few weeks, AMD has been strategically dropping hints about the product we’ll be showing you here today—the ultra, powerful Radeon R9 295X2. If you’ve spent any time on our home page recently, or on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, you may have seen the “two is better than one” tag-line...
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Last week, we took a trip to San Diego to meet with Qualcomm and discuss the company's cutting edge 20nm radios and upcoming Snapdragon processors. Unlike the already-launched Snapdragon 801 and 805, these are fundamentally new chips with updated CPU cores as well as Qualcomm's new Adreno 400-class GPU. Qualcomm is announcing two new chips...
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If you want the latest and greatest Nokia-built Windows Phone phone, and you’re an AT&T customer, the Lumia 1520 is a beast of a smartphone, but it’s not available to Verizon customers. Instead, Verizon offers the newer, and arguably more refined, Nokia Lumia Icon, which has nearly all of the same internal specifications...
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