Reviews
When NVIDIA launched the powerful GTX 980 and 970 last month, it was obvious that these cards would be coming to mobile sooner rather than later. The significant leap forward that Maxwell offers in performance-per-watt means that these GPUs would shine in mobile contexts -- maybe even more than in desktop. The mobile Maxwell die Today, NVIDIA...
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Welcome to the era of dual-mode devices, where the mantra "bigger is better" rules the day. Need an example? Take smartphones -- Samsung's been serving up large size handsets for the past several years, some of which are so big that it warranted creating a brand new category. Even Apple jumped on the big device bandwagon with...
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Samsung made some waves earlier this year with the introduction of its 850 Pro family of solid state drives and the first commercial use of 3D stacked NAND Flash memory. Micron is striking back today with a lower manufacturing process geometry in conventional NAND, however, and a new Flash technology it claims, will accelerate performance...
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Dell has become a very different company since going private about a year ago. It’s quieter, more nimble, and it has dramatically focused its product lines. A company once known for its ability to ship just about anything you could ask for on a custom PC is reinventing itself in a world smitten by handheld devices with tighter profit...
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In the interest of full disclosure, I’m going to start this piece off with a bit of a confession: Last year, when I was first exposed to NVIDIA’s G-SYNC technology, I turned to one of our contacts at the company and said, “The moment someone comes out with a nice 4K version, I’ll hand over my credit card”....
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If your any kind of a computing enthusiast, you're quite familiar with EVGA, even if you haven't bought and of their hardware. From power supplies to motherboards and graphics cards, the company has established a solid reputation for producing high-quality, enthusiast equipment. EVGA recently sent over one of their new Torq X10 gaming...
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As much as we obsess about the latest and hottest hardware, we sometimes like to take a look at a value system to see what kind of bang you can get for your buck on a tight budget. And with the school year just getting underway, the Dell Inspiron 11 3147 caught our eye as a possible candidate for a highly mobile classmate or conference room...
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A few months back, we took a look at the GeForce GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti, which features a GPU based on NVIDIA’s bleeding-edge Maxwell microarchitecture. Although there have been a few exceptions, when one of the big GPU makers releases a next-gen GPU, they typically start at the high-end and then scale the GPU back to flesh out a top-to-bottom...
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We think it's fitting for Maingear to bring 3K resolution gaming to its aptly named Pulse line of laptops. Consider that playing games at full HD 1080p (1920x1080) on the desktop is nothing special these days, which is why we're seeing more and more players jump to higher resolution displays, from 2560x1440 (most 27-inch class monitors) on...
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Earlier this year we detailed the launch of new 15-core Ivy Bridge-based server processors from Intel, as part of the Xeon E7 refresh cycle. Today, Intel is pushing the Xeon E5 family forward -- except in this case, the new Xeon E5 v3 chips are leaping to higher core counts, the more advanced Haswell-EP architecture, and DDR4. The result?...
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Intel's next-generation Broadwell Y (now known as the Core M processor) is set to ship on schedule for the end of the year. The company, occasionally flagged with criticism of its repeated delays and with its IDF show ramping up next week, is sharing more detail on the upcoming hardware, features and performance characteristics of its new...
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Just about a year ago, AMD released the Radeon R9 290X, based on the GPU formerly codenamed Hawaii. At the same time, the company also re-jiggered and re-named the rest of its line-up to create a fresh, top-to-bottom line-up of graphics cards in the Radeon R7 and R9 series. The Radeon R9 290X, and eventually the R9 290 and R9 295X2, however,...
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It has been more than a year since AMD launched its last major update to the top end FX processor line -- the FX-9590. The company has been quiet in the face of Intel's high-end launches, but today AMD is shipping a new CPU that's aimed at multi-core performance enthusiasts who don't want a furnace sitting on their motherboards, and prefer...
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We have been eagerly anticipating the release of processors based on Intel’s Haswell-E microarchitecture for quite some time. After about three years of incremental performance improvements at the ultra-high end, as Sandy Bridge-E was eventually replaced by similarly clocked Ivy Bridge-E based processors, the rumored specs of Haswell-E...
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Bold. That’s the word that comes to mind when we consider Amazon’s Fire Phone. In a world where precious little has happened in the smartphone space over the past few years, at least in terms of groundbreaking innovation, Amazon’s entrance provides all the spark you need to sit up and pay attention. These days, a major OEM...
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A few months ago, Samsung released its most-recent flagship phone, the Galaxy S5. In our hands-on review of the Galaxy S5, we were so impressed with the phone that we gave it our Editor’s Choice award. The Galaxy S5 was designed with an active lifestyle in mind as is evidenced by various features including the built-in heart rate monitor...
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AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill pretty closely, it’s probably not something you’d expect. It’s not a new CPU or APU. And it’s not a new GPU or memory kit either. Well then, “what could it be” you ask? Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid...
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It's that time again. The time of year when students and parents frantically hit e-tailers that offer fast shipping in order to get that all-important back-to-school technology into a dorm room or backpack before classes begins. It's back-to-school season, and whether you've started classes recently or are awaiting (dreading?) that first 8AM...
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Before we dive in and show you the brand-new ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q G-Sync enabled monitor, we have a confession to make: We are ecstatic that there is finally some innovation happening in the monitor market. For years, 30” panels with native resolutions of 2560x1600 and paltry 60Hz refresh rates remained the pinnacle of desktop...
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OCZ is launching a brand-new series of solid state drives today, targeted squarely at budget-conscious, mainstream consumers. The new ARC 100 series doesn’t stray far from its roots, however. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 as the higher-end Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm...
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Competing with Intel's desktop or notebook processors is like taking on the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, but when it comes to resources, the company is more like an 800 pound gorilla on steroids, with advanced weaponry and a big budget. Intel is a manufacturing and process technology juggernaut. There was a time...
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It was about a year ago that we first took a look at the Samsung SSD 840 EVO series of solid state drives. If you recall, those drives featured a new controller and the latest generation of Samsung’s TLC NAND flash memory, which allowed the company to offer the SSD 840 EVO series at very competitive prices, despite their relatively strong...
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