Reviews
Building a Home Theater PC is often times a much better option for enabling your entertainment center for various forms of digital media playback capability. Rather than stepping up to additional discrete components, like a stand-alone Blu-ray, DVD or CD player, why not infuse your...
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Just this past week, the Game Developers Conference was held in downtown San Francisco, CA. If you're unfamiliar with GDC, it is the "world's largest professionals-only game industry event." In other words, everyday gaming enthusiast can't just walk in off the street...
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Although they are not due to hit store shelves for a few more weeks, Intel is using the always exciting Game Developers Conference currently being held in San Francisco to officially unveil the new Core i7-980X Extreme processor. Intel's Extreme Edition processors have always been targeted at...
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Lenovo proved at the Consumer Electronics Show in January that it wasn't messing around when it comes to latest generation of notebook technologies. The company has a vast array of options, from tiny to huge, and they span the gamut from casual road warriors to hardcore business users. There's also a machine or two in there for the gaming...
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If you could design your own laptop in an effort to have the perfect balance of performance, price, size, weight, and features, what would you include and what could you live without? As part of its Blue Label program, Best Buy asked that question of its customers--accepting as much feedback...
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For the last couple of years, Dell's foray into the small-form-factor desktop market was its successful mini-tower (with the emphasis on "mini") Studio Hybrid. But with Dell's latest small-form-factor entry, the Inspiron Zino HD, out goes the vertical mini-tower and in comes the horizontal square--7.8-inches wide by 7.8-inches deep to be exact,...
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Solid State Storage products are obviously setting the computing market on fire as of late. There is little question that the writing is on the wall. Like the vacuum tube transistors of yesterday, spinning hard drives are bound to go the way of the Dodo bird. It's only a matter of time; not if, but when. However, the...
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Ever since NVIDIA's original ION chipset proved it was possible to pair Intel's low-power Atom processor to a relatively powerful graphics core and attain acceptable multimedia performance, the market has been curious as to what NVIDIA's Ion 2 Next-Generation Ion product might offer. This...
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It has been quite a while since AMD launched a new high-end desktop chipset. The 790FX has been riding high at the top of AMD's line-up for over two years now. It has been paired to newer Southbridge chips and AMD did follow up with the 790GX about a year and half ago, but for all intents and...
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There's an old cliche' that seems to ring true with respect to the onslaught of SSD technology we've been treated to in the market over the past year or so, "there's always another one coming." Solid State Drive technologies are advancing so quickly, that some manufacturers don't even...
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Western Digital recently began to ship a new series of Caviar hard drives that included the company's Advanced Format technology. The new Caviar Green models are nearly identical to their standard brethren, but offer double the cache (64MB instead of 32MB at 1-2TB) and have a different model...
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Here we are, barely two weeks removed from the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 5570, and we find ourselves in the now familiar position of announcing yet another Radeon HD 5000 series card. With the breakneck pace (relatively speaking) of Radeon HD 5000 series releases over the past 5 or 6 months...
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The CULV notebook market has been overloaded with options over the past few months, and this year's Consumer Electronics Show saw even more PC makers jump in with an abundance of new offerings. Asus and Acer seemed to be at the forefront of the CULV revolution, which--for those who don't know--are machines that split the divide...
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Looking at current solid state drive market, it's easy to draw some parallels with the early days of 3D on the PC. When 3D graphics cards first hit the scene (before the term GPU was coined), there were only a few major players, i.e. 3dfx, Tseng Labs, S3, etc. As the technology was more accepted by consumers, however, numerous other manufactures,...
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We have been fans of MSI's Wind series of netbooks. They have consistently rivaled Asus' Eee PC range and HP's Mini line, and the competition has been good for the industry. MSI's Wind line has remained relatively consistent over the years, with the design staying mostly the same, but the internals progressively...
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Lenovo had one of the largest showings from any single PC manufacturer at CES this year, and while sifting through the company's new lineup of machines can be a daunting task for the average consumer, it was pretty clear from the outset that the ThinkPad Edge would be one of Lenovo's standout products of 2010. In many ways, it's a departure...
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A few years ago and again only recently, a select few notebooks hit the scene with "switchable graphics". That is to say, these notebooks are able to manually switch between low-power integrated graphics solutions in the notebook chipset, to more powerful, and higher-performing discrete graphics processors. To enthusiasts, power users, or...
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"This is like déjà vu all over again." That quote from the ever-so-quotable former New York Yankee Yogi Berra is particularly suitable for today's launch of the ATI Radeon HD 5570. Just last week, we brought you our coverage of the Radeon HD 5450 launch and wrote a bit about AMD's aggressive release schedule with regard to their DirectX 11-class...
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Over the course of the past four months or so, AMD has been on a tear, releasing a slew of new DirectX 11-class GPUs at price points ranging from approximately $600 all the way on down to about $100. All the while, AMD was also up front about the release schedule for many upcoming, future products. If you remember back to some of our previous...
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What's this? Yet another SSD product from OCZ Technology? It's not like the company doesn't already have a staggeringly large selection of solid state drives of both the MLC and SLC varieties, with various controllers under the hood and even a RAID-driven, PCI Express...
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IM Flash Technologies is a joint venture between Intel and Micron that is targeted for producing NAND flash memory. With a focus on research and development, IMFT has doubled NAND density approximately every 18 months. In 2006, they started production with a 50nm process, then moved to a 40nm process in 2008. This co-development inevitably...
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As you've no doubt heard by now, Apple launched a new mobile computing device and it's within a product category that is all-new territory for the traditionally tight-lipped company. It's a bit of an odd choice for a company that revels in innovation, and after today's announcement, we're left...
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