Reviews
NVIDIA has been on a tear as of late, releasing a constant stream of GPUs over the last few weeks. In mid-August, the GPU giant released the GeForce GTX 660 Ti and less than a month later, followed up with the GeForce GTX 660 and GeForce GTX 650. Here we are now, less than a month since that release and NVIDIA is at the ready again with...
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Apple upped the ante in the tablet market with its Retina display found in the third-generation iPad, which offers a resolution of 2048x1536. Since then, some Android tablet manufacturers have followed suit by increasing screen resolution and providing a better display overall. Acer's latest Iconia Tab A700 is one such tablet that aims...
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Late last week, we posted a glimpse of what AMD had in store with their latest A-Series APUs for desktop systems. In that article, we were able to officially unveil the Virgo platform and discuss speeds and feeds, GPU performance, and power consumption characteristics. However, we weren’t able to disclose any CPU performance...
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So here it is, the mid-2012 refresh of Apple's trend setting MacBook Air line. It's been four long years since Apple first introduced the MacBook Air to the world, which at the time was almost considered a luxury item, with a comparatively steep price tag versus other ultralight machines. That changed a couple of years later, and in the process...
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We’ll be taking a somewhat different two-tiered approach with our coverage of AMD’s new Trinity-based APUs for desktop systems today. AMD is lifting the veil on their new product line-up, in addition to graphics performance and power consumption, but we can’t quite give you the full monty just yet, due to a new multi-tiered...
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For all the performance being packed into today’s super-slim ultrabooks, gaming and multimedia are often the weakest links. Most ultrabooks have Intel integrated graphics that aren’t designed to take on graphics-intensive games. Storage space, graphics processing, and display quality can be key areas in many ultrabooks that leave...
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While we were testing the WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo, a funny thing happened. At one point, we reflected on our first external hard drive--a 40GB unit salvaged from a laptop--and remarked at how quaint it seems in comparison to WD's powerful, spacious storage beast. Indeed, external storage has come a long way in a relatively short...
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The iPhone 5 is available, but only for those who pre-ordered right away on September 14th and were willing to stand in line at an Apple Store or pay big bucks on an auction site. For the second year in a row, Apple decided to unveil a new iPhone in the run-up to the fourth quarter, instead of in June at WWDC. Last Q4, Apple saw record...
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Apple's iOS 6 is now available to download, and Apple has been quick to tout some "200 new features" over iOS 5. But of those 200, only a select few are noticeable to the end user. While a ton of stuff has been tweaked under the hood to enhance or otherwise modify the OS, not all of it is apparent to the end user. There are...
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If you are a fan of phones with physical keyboards you don't have a lot of choice these days. Generally you're going to have to choose between a Blackberry and a handful of Android phones, as most companies are focusing their attention on bigger and thinner devices. The Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE has the rare mix of a decent physical keyboard...
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It takes serious guts to try and remake Half-Life. Valve's 1998 first-person shooter didn't change FPS gaming, it redefined it. Before Half-Life, blockbusters like Quake and Quake II were lone gunman affairs with little to no interaction with non-hostile NPCs (Non-Player Character). Half-Life took that entire model, and blew it apart. The...
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Intel's next-generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, was the major star of IDF. One aspect of the chip we haven't talked about at length, however, is its emphasis on reduced power consumption. When Intel announced that its Ivy Bridge mobile products would target 17W for mainstream systems, it made headlines. Pushing Haswell down to 10W is an even...
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Last winter, Intel made waves by demonstrating a number of cutting-edge technologies it believed could drive the next-generation of lower power devices. In addition to its pioneering work with Near Threshold Voltages, the company showed off Rosepoint -- a prototype SoC that combined a dual-core 32nm Atom with an all-digital radio. As we covered...
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In the past few months, we have taken a look at no less than four new high-end GPUs from NVIDIA based on the company’s Kepler microarchitecture. NVIDIA kicked things off with the GeForce GTX 680 back in May and followed up a few weeks later with the monstrous, dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX 690, which remains the fastest graphics...
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Intel's Dadi Perlmutter took to the stage in the opening keynote of Intel Developer's Forum 2012 to greet an enthusiastic crowd and evangelize the company's vision of what they call the rise of "natural, intuitive computing." On stage with Dadi were a number of Intel-powered devices including a myriad of Windows 8 tablets and new Ultrabooks...
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Intel’s Dadi (David) Perlmutter, General Manager Intel Architecture Group and Chief Product Officer, opened up the 2012 Intel Developers Forum by reflecting back on the significance of this day, the eleventh anniversary of the attacks on 9/11. Today, however, also marks the fifteenth anniversary of IDF, so Dadi ultimately moved on to...
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There are a couple of inconveniences of modern connected living that Patriot Memory is trying to address with a product called the Gauntlet Node. One is the problem of storage; the only computer or mobile device we have--and you know that we have quite a few--that isn’t constantly running out of local storage is our big desktop...
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Back in April, we ran a pair of OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs (256GB and 512GB) through the benchmark grinder to see what they could do and also told you everything you ever wanted to know about them in the process. Today, we’re testing another brother in the family, the 128GB OCZ Vertex 4. When we first tested the aforementioned drives, we...
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Cloud-based storage solutions are all the rage these days, but if you don't want to trust your files to a third-party data center and deal with the risk of hacker attacks and unexpected downtime, maintaining your own centralized storage platform is the way to go. This is where network attached storage (NAS) devices come into play. With...
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There seems to be a recurring phenomenon in the technology press, where any trojan that affects Linux or Macs becomes front page news. On the other hand, trojans that affect Windows are mostly ignored, perhaps because this is considered to be the normal state of affairs. There are two common statements made in the discussions...
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Samsung recently launched the follow up to their Galaxy Tab line of Android-based tablets, the Galaxy Note 10.1. Although the original Galaxy Note's form factor didn’t quite conform to either traditional smartphones or tablets, and some even dubbed it a “phablet”, it has been a huge success for Samsung...
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The recent rise and fall of the netbook as a computer category made one thing clear: consumers are willing to sacrifice some screen size and power in the name of portability, but not as much as a netbook requires. On the other hand, many shoppers are willing to pay a premium for a thinner, lighter notebook, and that's where the ultrabook comes...
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