Reviews
If you love building computers, you probably appreciate a good case or chassis. While there are plenty of excellent products available for a song, there’s also an upper echelon of models that cost quite a bit and offer all the premiere features you could hope for. While it seems as though there’s a lot...
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Today marks one of those funky occasions when you’ve probably been aware of the “new” product we’re going to show you for quite some time. And we’re not talking about a few days or weeks here either. In fact, it was all the way back in December of 2011, when AMD introduced the original Radeon HD 7970, that we...
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Samsung has done an exceptional job the past few years building interest and recognition for their Galaxy-branded smartphones. The fervor isn’t quite on the level of Apple's iPhone launches, but if the attendance of their “Samsung Unpacked” event at Radio City Music Hall and the buzz on-line for today’s introduction...
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For many users, smartphones are tools that are more about the software and user experience than the hardware. Of course, you still need adequate hardware and smooth performance to ensure a good experience, but beyond that, there are plenty of users who are attracted more to software and easy-to-use features than anything else....
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One of the perks of working at a place like HotHardware is that we have access to some of the hottest hardware around. So when I decided to dive into Windows 8 head-first a few months ago, I thought I’d give the OS as much breathing room as possible and install it on a freshly built, ultra high-end rig. Building myself a second...
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The awkward days of Window 8 laptops without touchscreens aren’t behind us just yet, but the end is in sight. It’s easy enough to resist touching the Start screen on a desktop PC, but when a laptop display is inches from your fingers, if you're anything like us, your instinct is to reach out and touch it. Thankfully, affordable...
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In between chipset releases, manufacturers typically pump out numerous motherboard variations, adding this or that feature or optimizing boards for a particular function. Unsurprisingly, folks like us enjoy tinkering with those boards when granted the opportunity to see if they offer anything special, over and above plain-Jane products. Gigabyte...
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We're not going to beat around the bush, here. BioShock Infinite is game-of-the-year material. The floating city of Columbia is one of the most evocative, intense, gorgeous environments I've ever seen -- but how much you like it may depend on what sort of visual wizardry you prefer. BioShock Infinite is built on Unreal Engine 3, and while...
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The smartphone market has changed quite a bit over the past few years. Once a major competitor in the smartphone market, BlackBerry has lost much of its market share as many former BlackBerry users have switched to iOS and Android. Despite its troubled history, the company remains and is fighting to regain its stronghold in the smartphone...
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While many full-size gaming rigs are built to elicit oohs and ahs with their stunning looks and high performance, gaming notebooks can sometimes be a little bland. CyberPowerPC has had its share of solid yet non-distinct looking gaming notebooks, but the Fangbook series is a different animal. Built with plenty of alluring hardware...
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It has been quite a while since we last put an mSATA solid state drive (SSD) under the microscope. It's actually only been about two years, and if you care to jump into our time machine, you can see what we had to say about Intel's 310 Series mSATA SSD in 80GB form. The idea then was the same as it is now -- to offer full-size SSD features...
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Lenovo's first ThinkPad tablet was a bit of a disappointment to be candid. Even the best Android Honeycomb tablets were severely lacking on a number of fronts, back in the day. What was the use of a business tablet that couldn't run business apps? Well, forget all that. The ThinkPad Tablet 2 is a real business tablet, and one that...
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Are business oriented tablets such as the Dell Latitude 10 better suited for the workplace than popular mainstream tablets such as the iPad? Dell believes their solutions are. Last month, Dell issued a press release in which it claimed its Latitude 10 Enhanced Security tablet is "up to 17 times faster and 94 percent less expensive to deploy...
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In the final analysis of our AMD Radeon HD 7790 review, which launched last week, we mentioned that the mainstream GPU landscape would likely change again by the time the 7790 was actually available on store shelves. Although we posted a full review of the card on March 22, they aren’t slated to go on sale until April 2. Today we're...
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When Blizzard announced that they were splitting Starcraft II into three titles, Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, and Legacy of the Void, the general reaction from fans was controversial. The fear was that Blizzard would pad out the contents of each game with busywork missions and red-herring plot devices, while charging full price for...
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A few weeks back, the enthusiast community was abuzz after news broke that AMD’s Radeon HD 7000 series would remain “stable throughout 2013” and would be the company’s focus “for quite some time”. The wording of the initial news made it sound like AMD wouldn’t be releasing any new GPUs for the...
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Microsoft's Surface Pro has been out just over a month now, but with its $899 base price, it's at the high-end of what a lot of consumers are willing to fork over for a Windows 8-equipped tablet, and that's not even factoring in the $120+ keyboard option. Thankfully, the market is getting a few more entrants in the field, and Lenovo's IdeaTab...
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Building a small form factor gaming PC is a tricky business. For one thing, there simply isn’t enough room to fit as many components as you would put in a mid- or full-size gaming PC. Multiple graphics cards aren’t likely, and oversized power supplies (not to mention CPU heatsinks) usually present major challenges. The other issue...
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There’s a lot to love about a mini-ITX gaming PC. Portability is a big draw, of course: carrying your computer through the parking lot to a LAN party is much easier if it happens to be an SFF system. Reclaiming desk space is another reason to go small. And some of us just take a lot of pleasure in knowing that our tiny, unassuming PC...
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We have taken a look at a few Samsung-built solid state drives over the years and found them all to be relatively strong performers in their respective product categories. If you’d like to check some out for yourself, you can find our coverage of the Samsung 830 Series SSD here and our coverage of the newer Samsung SSD 840 Series...
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Sharing photos with one's friends and family is a common, everyday occurrence. Instagram has gained over 100 million photo sharing users in just two years, and this is just one of many outlets people use to share photos with the people they love. While sharing pictures taken with your smartphone is easy and convenient since you can upload...
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Custom PC makers are getting increasingly creative, particularly with small form factor gaming systems. There was a time when the lion's share of the sexiest gaming rigs consisted of high-end components mounted in large, gaudy (but fun) chassis with lots of lights, killer paint jobs, and perhaps a wild mass of liquid cooling tubes...
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