Reviews
Intel officially announced the new SSD 320 Series drives yesterday, which feature proprietary Intel SSD controllers paired to cutting edge 25nm NAND flash memory. This new family of drives, however, isn’t geared for ultra-high performance. While still fast, the overarching goals with the Intel SSD 320 series were increased reliability...
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With the early 2011 refresh of the MacBook Pro family, Apple came out with both guns blazing. Not only is the entire lineup now powered by Intel’s second generation Core i5 and i7 mobile processors (commonly known by its codename, Sandy Bridge), but the new MacBook Pros also feature the brand-new Thunderbolt I/O technology (the official...
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Over the years, we have consistently been impressed by cutting-edge dual-GPU powered graphics cards, not only for their relatively high performance, but because of the engineering involved to design, build, and bring the cards to market, in form factors not much bigger than their high-end, single-GPU based counterparts. From the GeForce 7950GX2...
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For their new generation of notebook processors, Intel decided to take the opposite approach that they took in their desktop architecture, where they launched their mid-range quad-core product first, with a promise of top-end multi-core performance to come just a bit further down their roadmap. From a mobile standpoint, the Core i7 2820QM...
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The magic is back for a second act, baby, and it doesn't play for the Lakers (that's the other Magic). The magic we're talking about plays for team Apple, and while the competition tries to come up with a so-called "iPad killer," Apple may have beat them to the punch. How's that for irony? We're of course referring to the iPad 2, Apple's second...
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Intel's Sandy Bridge processors have won acclaim for their hardware-accelerated video transcoding capabilities, dubbed Quick Sync, but there are significant limitations in the current iteration. LucidLogix, a company that's heretofore been known for its multi-GPU Hydra hardware, has developed a software-only solution named Virtu that it claims...
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When the GeForce GTX 580 arrived, it extended NVIDIA's lead in the single-GPU graphics card market. Although the green team's own GTX 480 previously held the title of fastest single-GPU, its reign was temporary as the first generation Fermi card required some tweaks in order to unleash all 512 shader cores, reduce heat output and...
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NVIDIA continues to flesh out their GeForce GTX 500 series line-up, this time with a new GPU targeted at more mainstream, budget conscious gamers. The new GeForce GTX 550 Ti which is being introduced today, like the other members of the GeForce GTX 500 series, is based upon a refinement and update to a GeForce 400 series GPU (in this case...
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The PAX East show has really started to gain traction with a number of major brand manufacturers and this year's event had, dare we say, stellar support and turn-out from the community. We've grown pretty fond of its smaller, more manageable venue, with its casual, laid-back atmosphere sans the stuffed shirt marketing pitch that gets...
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One of the unfortunate consequences of AMD's inability to match Intel's performance at the ultra high-end of the CPU market over the past few years is that there's been a substantial decline in the number of high-end AMD motherboards. NewEgg presently stocks just two AMD motherboards in the $200-$300 price range compared to 36 Intel products....
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The product we’ll be featuring here today, the AMD Radeon HD 6990, should come as no surprise to anyone that even remotely stays on top of the PC graphics scene. News of the Radeon HD 6990’s arrival has been circulating for many months now, although back in the early days it was referred to by its codename—Antilles. Antilles...
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What do you do when you're the fastest thing around? You just keep on WINNING. It's as if there was tiger blood coursing through your veins. You're so good, you're bi-winning. Heck, with a six core processor at your disposal, you'd be hexa-winning. Ol' Charlie needs one of these things to go with his rock-star life style. ...
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The solid state storage market continues to bristle with activity. Over the last couple of weeks, we have shown you two hot new SSDs from OCZ—the Vertex 3 and the Vertex 3 Pro--that offer stellar performance, thanks in no small part to their next-gen SandForce SF-2000 series controllers with native SATA 6Gbs support. And now, it...
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Over the last couple of years, MSI has made a concerted effort to bolster their reputation as a premiere brand in the PC enthusiast space. MSI’s motherboards, graphics cards, notebooks, and virtually every other high-profile product family in their repertoire has been revamped and updated in some way to differentiate them from the competition....
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Google's Nexus S smartphone has a lot of attractive features, but the one that attracts the most attention is the fact that this smartphone is the first to ship with the latest version of the Android smartphone operating system—version 2.3. Otherwise known as Gingerbread, this OS is said to be the fastest version of Android yet. In addition...
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Just last week, we gave you a glimpse of what OCZ has in store for the enterprise SSD market with our preview of the Vertex 3 Pro. Without giving away all of the juicy details, the Vertex 3 Pro essentially buried the competition and offered performance that was significantly better than any current-gen solid state drive. As we mentioned though,...
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This week, at ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) Intel unveiled its next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. This new octal-core processor is easily the most significant update to Itanium Intel has ever built and could upset the current balance of power at the highest-end of the server / mainframe market....
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Free flowing bandwidth; it's an enabler. There was a time when no one had cable modems or DSL lines. Remember that? Alright, fair enough, neither do we. Regardless, having a 10Mb+ data connection to your domicile is a thing of beauty, because there's obviously so much you can do with it. The question becomes...
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It's good to see that AMD's Fusion technology is finally shipping. The convergence of the CPU and GPU has been looming for some time now, and while there have already been a few CPU / GPU hybrids available form the likes of Intel, the thought of having another low-power, economical to produce, cutting edge CPU / GPU combo on...
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OCZ Technologies’ Vertex 2 series of products are undeniably some of the more popular Solid State Drives currently on the market. Since their introduction, the drives have offered excellent performance, competitive prices (which have dropped considerably in recent weeks), and excellent support in terms of constant firmware updates and...
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We have been hearing about AMD’s Fusion initiative for what seems like an eternity. In fact, some of the very first posts regarding Fusion hit this site of ours way back in 2006. Many things have happened within AMD since those early announcements and rumors began swirling, most notably AMD’s acquisition of ATI. However,...
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Actor Rick Moranis must be moonlighting at Intel, because honey, somebody in Santa Clara shrunk the solid state drives. And it's not as if SSDs are big to begin with. The typical mechanical hard drive built around the 3.5-inch form factor measures about 4 inches x 1 inch x 5.8 inches (W x H x D, and yes, we rounded) and are absolutely...
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