It's hard to remember now, but the original AMD Ryzen processors topped out at "just" 8 cores. The Ryzen 3000 family came along in 2019 with the Ryzen 9 branding and the first sixteen-core desktop CPUs. Even in the enterprise market, 16 CPU cores can be overkill. However, you can't just go buying consumer PC hardware...Read more...
Love it or hate it, Apple's MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines have remained a watermark for which the majority of notebook manufacturers aspire to, whether it's enthusiast gaming companies like Razer with their Blade, or mainstream vendors like Dell via their outstanding XPS 13. Enter Asus. They've utilized their ZenBook line to...Read more...
The Asus Transformer Book T100 packs an impressive list of features into a diminutive chassis and companion keyboard dock. After working with system, it's clear that Asus is hoping to capture lightning in a bottle, for the second time in a row. It's been six years since Asus launched the first Eee PC and kicked off a miniature revolution in...Read more...
Considering just how much we all rely on smartphones every day, they’re shockingly fragile. All it takes is one quick drop or spilled drink to end in disaster for your expensive gadget. For as quickly as phone technology is advancing, durability for many smartphones has remained a problem. That’s where Samsung hopes to make some...Read more...
IBM is following in the footsteps of ARM and will begin licensing its core intellectual property for its POWER technologies to other companies for use in designing servers employed in cloud data centers, the company announced. The licensing model is part of IBM's OpenPOWER Consortium, a new initiative aimed at...Read more...
A few weeks back, we examined whether a new GPU like the GeForce GTX 660 could breathe new life into an older quad-core gaming system built in mid 2008. The answer, we concluded, was definitely yes -- but many of you of you asked us to reconsider the question, this time using a dual-core Core 2 Duo. We've done so. And just for fun, we've...Read more...
We have had a few weeks with three A85X motherboards and AMD’s top of the line Trinity APU, the A10-5800K, which combines 4 unlocked Piledriver CPU cores (stock 3.8GHz, turbo 4.2GHz) with an integrated Radeon HD 7600D GPU with 384 Radeon Cores at 800MHz. We’ve written several in-depth articles on AMD’s new Virgo platform--A85X...Read more...
Nearly two years ago, Facebook launched the Open Compute Project. The initiative was intended to rethink all aspects of data server design, including cooling, racks, and server configuration. The coalition has gathered steam and support from a number of companies; AMD announced its own Open 3.0 Platform at today's OCP...Read more...
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...Read more...
How do you make the experience of buying from a boutique system builder easier than it already is? If you're Digital Storm, you answer that question by offering a line of pre-configured machines that are fully loaded to meet your budget and ready to ship in 72 hours. Not only do you save the time and energy required to build your own system...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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....Read more...
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...Read more...
New silicon? Yep, AMD's got it. The company this week announced the new Opteron 3200 Series CPU family, a revised outlay of chips that are sure to be useful for enterprise and cloud-based applications. AMD claims that it offers 38% better price performance and up to 19% less power per core than the competition, and that folks running rack...Read more...
Today, Intel formally announced a new class of low-power Xeon processors meant to fill the growing demand for cloud computing servers. Intel has dubbed such servers micro servers, and believes they'll be the major source of server market growth in the next four years. Micro servers are defined by the company as...Read more...
NVIDIA may have had to navigate a tumultuous path on their way to releasing the company’s first DirectX 11 desktop GPU, the GF100-based GeForce GTX 480, though they seem to be firing on all cylinders at this point. In the last 5 or so months since the GeForce GTX 480 arrived, NVIDIA has released—or will imminently release—a...Read more...