Reviews
You might say Intel has been absolutely killing it as of late. Whether you consider their recent earnings announcement beating Wall Street's expectations, the Ultrabook craze, their re-entrance into the handset arena with their Medfield platform, or the proliferation of their 2nd generation Core Sandy Bridge-based processors in...
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LG and Verizon Wireless have brought the same display technology used in LG's premium HD televisions to a new smartphone dubbed the Spectrum. Featuring a 4.5-inch True HD IPS display and a resolution of 1280x720, the LG Spectrum uses Real Stripe subpixel arrangement which LG says is denser and 1.4 times sharper than the PenTile subpixel...
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It's only been five months since Skyrim hit store shelves, but the amount of work done on the game by both Bethesda and an army of modders has been enormous. With the Creation Kit now in the wild for several months, we've rounded up some of the best mods available and brought them for your consideration. We'll also walk you through the modding...
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Although solid state drives have generated the lion’s share of buzz in the storage space these last few years, traditional hard drives with spinning media continue to be a mainstay of the industry, and have evolved to offer higher capacities and more performance than ever before. Of course, even the fastest of today’s hard drives...
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Intel has historically stuck with SATA-based solid state storage solutions, but today the company is taking a different approach with its first PCI-Express solid state storage device. Like the SSD 710 family of products, the newly announced Intel SSD 910 is based on 25nm MLC NAND Flash. The two product families share a number of...
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In addition to building graphics cards, Zotac is one of only a handful companies to fully embrace small form factor and home theater systems. Whether you want to build something yourself from the ground up, quickly assemble a barebones rig, or pick up a fully built HTPC, Zotac has you covered. The company offers a wide array of mini-ITX motherboards...
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Windows Phone is only about a year and a half old in the market at this point but Nokia has a much longer lineage. In the past 12 months though, their two worlds have collided in a fashion that will have repercussions for quite some time to come, with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop firmly committed to focusing his company's turnaround on what...
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In preparation for the impending arrival of the company’s 3rd Generation Core processor products based on its Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, Intel has readied a new chipset dubbed the Z77 Express. We have already been able to show you a number of Z77 Express-based motherboards, thanks to a handful of sneak peeks while out at CES early...
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We’ve been impressed with what we’ve seen recently from Corsair, and we were glad that the company saw fit to send us a couple more mid-tower cases to pore over and test: the Corsair Carbide 300R compact gaming chassis and the Obsidian 550D quiet case. The two are dissimilar from one another in terms of design and purpose, but...
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OCZ Technology’s Vertex series of solid state drives have been consistently popular with enthusiasts since their initial arrival in 2009. OCZ has made significant changes with each successive generation of Vertex solid state drives, but generally speaking, each one has offered strong performance and was considered among the best overall...
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Diablo III is the sequel to one of the most popular games of all time; its launch on May 15 could cripple college graduation rates, triple the number of insomniacs worldwide, and slash national productivity. Believe us--we know. We've spent about six weeks with the beta and have just recently escaped from Khanduras to detail our findings....
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So you’re in the market for a smoking fast system, and you have your heart set on a custom build. You can easily drop upwards of three (or four or five) grand on a completely tricked-out enthusiast-class rig that will leave your gamer friends standing in puddles of drool. If you’re on a stricter budget, you can also opt for something...
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The FirePro V3900 is AMD's latest budget solution for the professional graphics market. We covered the card's launch last month; it's a formidable step up from the V3800 it replaces. Budget card launches may lack some of the excitement of high-end product debuts, but lower-end cards like the V3900 account for a significant percentage of AMD's...
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Last week, we previewed the launch of Wing Commander Saga: Darkest Dawn, the fan-built companion to Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger that's been in the making for the past ten years. We were excited for its launch. But now that the game is available, how'd the team do? Descent 2 had beautiful explosions -- a feature Darkest Dawn...
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Typically mobile graphics launches trail their desktop counterparts by a few months, as major GPU players like NVIDIA and AMD wring out power consumption and performance from their architectures in order to accommodate the tighter thermal and power budgets of notebook form factors. However, NVIDIA has obviously been refining their new...
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We’ve been hearing about NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture since about September 2010. It was back at that years’ NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, that company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang first publically disclosed that Kepler would offer massive performance per watt improvements over Fermi and previous-gen architectures and that GPUs...
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Apple called its first iPad tablet "magical," as if owning one would turn flatulence into a flowery fragrance and unlock the mystery of double complete rainbows. Instead it entranced millions of people into buying one, even though it lacked basic amenities like expandable storage, built-in cameras, and Flash support (back when people still...
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Maybe you're addicted to World of Warcraft and spend every free moment immersed in the most popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) of all time, wandering through Azeroth doing whatever it is WoW players do. I wouldn't know, but I assume it's a lot of questing and raids. As popular as WoW has become, I've never set virtual...
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It's easy to understand why the fledgling ultrabook market is exploding with new offerings from virtually all of the major players. The new class of notebooks, seemingly reinvented by Intel's vision (and a $300 million dollar marketing fund) are designed to offer robust performance for everyday tasks and multimedia, in a wafer-thin and...
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One of Merriam-Webster's definitions for the word obscene is "so excessive as to be offensive." By that definition, Maingear sent us an obscenely spec'd SHIFT Super Stock X79 system packed to the hilt with so much decadent hardware that even the one percenters would feel guilty owning it, right up until the moment they pushed the power button...
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Intel’s X25-M (mainstream) and X25-E (enterprise) solid state drives proved to be very popular in their respective target markets. As our testing showed back in the day, these drives offer excellent performance, and as time in the field would tell, they were quite reliable as well. On the desktop / mainstream front, Intel has since launched...
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We've been looking forward to Windows 8's Consumer Preview for months. This, after all, is Microsoft's big chance to show what they've been working on and unveiling bit by bit for the past year; a chance to evaluate the sum total of changes and advancements baked into the next-generation operating system. We'll discuss some of the features...
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