Reviews
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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When something sounds too good to be true, we’re as skeptical as anyone, which is why we raised an eyebrow at Republic Wireless last year when the company pledged to offer unlimited mobile service--that’s unlimited talk, text, and data, mind you--for just $19 a month, without any contracts. Compare that number to current...
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Technology marches to the beat of its own drum and the hard part is keeping in step with the rhythm. You may recall, for example, that we already reviewed Dell's XPS 13 Ultrabook a year ago, singing high praise for its edge-to-edge display, stellar battery life, and overall performance, which at the time was the best we'd seen from an Ultrabook....
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Let's get one thing clear up front. Crysis 3's graphics are absolutely stunning. Crytek's latest game doesn't raise the bar -- it annihilates it. At the highest settings, Crysis blows Battlefield 3 out of the water, makes mincemeat of Max Payne, and makes the original Crysis -- itself a graphics powerhouse -- look more like the first...
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When we covered Intel’s first significant foray into the smartphone arena, early in January 2012, there was little doubt in our minds that the company had set its sights on the mobile market with a plan and roadmap for execution. Though Medfield and Lexington, now known as the Atom Z2460 SoC, and its lower cost sibling...
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A couple of days ago, we showed you the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan in all its glory—almost. While we were able to reveal the card itself, discuss its new features and specifications, and talk about some of the new systems it will be powering, we weren’t able to post any performance data. Fortunately, that all changes today....
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In the time since Windows 8 launched, we've seen a number of different devices and different form factors that take advantage of the operating system's touch capabilities. Ultra-portable Windows 8 devices range from ultraportable notebooks to touchscreen tablets that feature attachable keyboards. We've seen a number of hybrid ultrabooks as...
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NVIDIA is launching a new, ultra high-end graphics card today, the long rumored GeForce GTX Titan. Although the card itself and a couple of its features are new to the consumer graphics card market, many details of the GPU powering the GTX Titan, namely the NVIDIA GK110, have been previously covered here at HotHardware. In fact, NVIDIA revealed...
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Not long ago, we tested one of Samsung’s new Windows 8 tablets to take a close-up look at Intel’s Clover Trail Atom Z2760 SoC. Now that we’ve covered the chip driving the tablet, it’s time to take a look at the Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T as a whole. The tablet runs about $650 by itself, which puts the price on par with...
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Micron is announcing a brand new, enterprise-class solid state drive today, the RealSSD P400m. We have a looked at a number of Micron-built solid state drives in the past, including the ultra high-end RealSSD P320h PCI Express-based beast and the consumer-targeted RealSSD C300, but what makes the P400m somewhat different is that it was...
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Samsung has roughly a trillion or so different products in virtually every market of the computing world, but one area where the company can occasionally be overlooked is in consumer storage. Samsung SSDs are plentiful, though, most notably inside of Apple’s MacBooks, and unlike many SSDs out there, they’re built entirely with...
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A few weeks back, we examined whether a new GPU like the GeForce GTX 660 could breathe new life into an older quad-core gaming system built in mid 2008. The answer, we concluded, was definitely yes -- but many of you of you asked us to reconsider the question, this time using a dual-core Core 2 Duo. We've done so. And just for fun, we've...
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We have had a few weeks with three A85X motherboards and AMD’s top of the line Trinity APU, the A10-5800K, which combines 4 unlocked Piledriver CPU cores (stock 3.8GHz, turbo 4.2GHz) with an integrated Radeon HD 7600D GPU with 384 Radeon Cores at 800MHz. We’ve written several in-depth articles on AMD’s new Virgo platform--A85X...
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Ultrabooks are, in a word, cool. They’re slim, flashy, and lightweight, yet they’re rather powerful and offer users a laptop that can do it all in a form factor that begs to be touched and carried around (especially if it’s a convertible ultrabook, in which case the unit can double as a high-powered tablet). Business-class...
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There’s just something about high-end, custom graphics cards that makes us a little giddy. Perhaps it’s their menacing appearance--even the fastest, most powerful processors just look like their lower-end counterparts when sitting side-by-side. But a hulking custom graphics card, with an elaborate, oversized cooler and fierce...
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If our eyes are the windows to the soul, then what does that make our ears? Doorways to our internal sound stage, that's what. But listen up, it doesn't matter how gnarly the guitar riffs your favorite musician is playing or how intense the in-game effects are, if your headphones aren't up to the task, then you might as well go back to the...
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New video card launches from AMD and NVIDIA are almost always reviewed on hardware less than 12 months old. That's not an arbitrary decision -- it helps reviewers make certain that GPU performance isn't held back by older CPUs and can be particularly important when evaluating the impact of new interfaces or bus designs. The downside of this...
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