Reviews
Intel’s X58 chipset made for great platform performance, and even though the chip maker has unleashed many more chipsets since the X58 came out, there hasn’t been a true successor in the high-end of their product line-up (not even the Z68 chipset) until now. The X79 chipset looks to pick up the X58’s poll position, so we...
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ASUS, ever the gracious hosts, had us out to Dallas, TX recently to show us the company’s upcoming motherboard series and let us play with some test systems to see if we could break them. (Full disclosure: We did. But we fixed them, we think.) There is much we learned there that we can’t yet discuss (suffice it to say you’ll...
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Here we are, less than three weeks removed from the launch of the Radeon HD 7700 series, and AMD is already at it again. Today we’ll be showing you the first two members of the Radeon HD 7800 series of graphics cards, the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and Radeon HD 7850. These two graphics cards are based on yet another new GPU design,...
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Ultrabooks are an interesting phenomenon. It's like the industry took a long hard look at the emaciated netbook market and decided consumers deserved better. Thank God. We're big fans of the thin and light trend in notebooks, and netbook price points are something we all can appreciate. However, as performance enthusiasts,...
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While many of today's better smartphones offer dual-core processors and 1GB of RAM, alongside plenty of onboard storage, one of the easiest differentiating points between smartphones today has become the screen--size, resolution, and screen technology are all considerations. Samsung is pushing the former limits of smartphone screen sizes...
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A new era of home entertainment is upon us. If you think about how you watch TV today versus 10 or even five years ago, it's probably a completely different experience. Nearly everything is served up in high definition, digital video recorders (DVRs) are now the norm and not the exception, and streaming services are making a big push to be...
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Intel launched its Medfield platform only six weeks ago, but the company is moving ahead with plans for additional processors based on the 32nm SoC. At Mobile World Congress today, Santa Clara announced plans for two additional system on a chip (SoC) designs to flesh out its product roadmap. The current Z2460 that we covered in January...
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Not long ago, Motorola and Verizon Wireless brought back the popular Razr line of cell phones in the form of the all new Droid Razr. Now, the two companies are teaming up again to offer another new Razr known as the Razr Maxx. Although these two Droid Razr smartphones are alike in many ways, there are also a few key differences. The most notable...
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Alright, we'll come right out and gush a little bit. Our cynical, sometimes overly-critical opinions can occasionally be tempered by momentary flashes of greatness. We see a lot of high-end (and low-end) gear around here, so after a while, you can't stop your eyeballs from glossing over and a yawn from escaping from the cranium....
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Intel's presentations at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this year are focused on one of the biggest problems facing modern CPU designers—how to improve power efficiency without sacrificing compute performance. Intel isn't just tackling this problem through conventional process shrinks and smaller dies, however;...
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By now you should all know the drill. A big GPU manufacturer releases a new high-end GPU, based on a new or updated architecture. Then over the course of the next few months, the company continually fleshes out its product stack until a top-to-bottom line-up of new graphics cards emerges, at a wide range of price points, all based on the same...
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A few months back, we examined the performance of four liquid coolers for the Sandy Bridge-E socket LGA 2011 platform: Corsair's H80 and H100, Maingear's Epic 180, and Intel's own reference cooler. Liquid coolers are popular with high-end OEMs and some enthusiasts, but they aren't cheap -- and there's a certain group of enthusiasts who aren't...
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When it comes to adding a performance-enhancing upgrade to your system, a good SSD can’t be beat, but storage capacity is an ever-growing need as well. There was a time when a 1TB drive seemed grossly (deliciously?) excessive for the average user, but these days anything less than 500GB seems woefully undersized. Even casual users...
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Most people associate business with boring, but there's little about NEC's MultiSync EA273WM-BK monitor that's a snooze-fest. As the premiere model in NEC's next generation MultiSync EA Series of desktop displays for high-performance enterprise users, the EA273WM-BK brings a big 27-inch, LED-backlit display to the workplace and is ready to...
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Intel is launching a brand new line of solid state drives today, built around SandForce’s popular SF-2200 family of storage processors. The new SSD 520 Series solid state drives, as they are known, will supplant the Marvell-based 510 series at the top of Intel’s consumer-targeted SSD lineup and be offered in capacities ranging...
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Dell's enthusiast gaming PC division has built a legacy on designing over-the-top desktops and notebooks, that push the boundaries of performance and style with an unmistakable design flair. We've been pretty impressed with the Alienware systems we've looked at thus far, and though they tend to run a premium in terms of price, performance...
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When AMD announced the Radeon HD 7970 last month, it revealed a new, ultra-powerful graphics card that snatched the single-GPU performance crown from the previous titleholder, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580. AMD may have staked a claim for the fastest single graphics card with the dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 6990, but its previous flagship...
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Options, folks. That’s what NZXT is shooting for with its new full-tower Switch 810 case, which can be configured in a number of different ways to optimize airflow or sound reduction and is equally friendly for air- or water-cooling setups. Available in black or white, the NZXT Switch 810 takes a while to get to know intimately....
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When AMD initially released their Llano-based A-Series APUs, the company targeted cost-conscious consumers looking for highly-integrated, easy to assemble solutions for an entry-level or mid-range PCs. At the time of launch, the flagship model in the A-Series line-up was the A8-3850, which featured quad CPU cores paired to a DirectX-11 Radeon...
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Considering how close HP came to selling off or severing its world leading PC division, it's products like the new TouchSmart 520-1070 all-in-one (AIO) that make us glad somebody switched out the company's water supply. Actually, it's HP's old CEO, Leo Apotheker, who was responsible for the OEM's temporary insanity, and not some tainted H2O,...
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When we first received the new NVIDIA Tegra 3-powered Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime for testing, we had solid communication from both Asus and NVIDIA that this tablet was one of Google's test vehicles for their upcoming Android 4.0 operating system, also referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich. Besides the fact that...
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As is always the case, CES 2012 was a complete blur of big product announcements, bleeding-edge technology and a mass of humanity clamoring to see it all. Our coverage of the event and the various product announcements came so fast and furious that, unless you were checking the page every few minutes (not a bad idea actually), you...
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