| |
|
AMD vs. Intel: What to Get? Which is Better?
|
 There are countless companies in the computer industry but there is only one battle that counts... AMD vs. Intel. This is a favorite topic in the forums, yet instead of blindly pledging allegiance to one CPU or the other, let's take a look behind the scenes and find out which companies processor is the best bet.
Now I should say that I'm a hardware enthusiast at heart, so for me CPU performance matters the most. I stick with gear only as long as it keeps my PC at the front of the performance curve. After that, I drop it like a rock and move onto greener pastures, regardless if it's the same brand or not.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Enermax MODU 87+ 600W PSU Review
|
|
"The Enermax MODU 87+ 600W PSU arrived Technic3D. See you in the following Review from Technic3D the next 80+ Gold (LLC) PSU with three +12V rails (25A), 140mm Fan, 8x SATA hard disk connectors and 4x PCI-e 6+2-Pin."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Patriot Box Office Media Player
|
|
I must admit that I am kind of spoiled. My primary media box is a full PC running XBMC and so I have come to have high expectations from my media device. I don't think I am alone though in my expectations. However the Box Office does definitely have price in its favor, and if you can overlook some of its UI shortcomings you will get an inexpensive device that is well built, quiet as a mouse (even after playing 1080P video), power friendly and very small. . .
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Ineo Technologies I-NA314Ue - Review
|
|
Being a computer enthusiast, i often use accessories to get my
work done. I have a lot of files which i keep on about 20 hard drives and
sometimes it takes me a while to find the right hard drive with the right
files. There are few accessories on the market which will let you to plug
your hard drive in and browse the files with in. Those accessories are very
much valuable in the geek world. Today we are going to take a look at one of
these accessories, I-NA314Ue by Ineo Technologies.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ASUS Workstation line of motherboards
|
|
"Both the ASUS P6T7 and P7P55 WS motherboards offer a slightly
different set of features and specifications than the traditional
motherboard in the gaming market. The P6T7 definitely is impressive for
high-end users that are going to want to take advantage of multiple
graphics card or other PCI Express-based accessories as it includes a total
of 7 PCIe x16 slots along with the X58 chipset and support for the latest
LGA1366 processors, including the upcoming Gulftown 6-core CPU."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
G.Skill PC3-18400 (2300MHz) PI Series 4GB Kit
|
|
"When I think of memory companies that want nothing but speed, only a few really come to mind and one of them would have to be G.Skill. While so many companies these days produce high end memory, we only really see a few leading the pack and when I say that I mean we see the same few companies ahead of everyone with most other companies playing catch up when it comes to speed.
While most companies are sitting around the PC3-17600 mark these days, G.Skill as always has kicked it up a notch with a PC3-19200 kit and a PC3-18400 one which we have on hand today. Like most high performance memory kits at the moment, the modules are aimed at P55 platforms due to them coming in dual-channel packets."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Lian Li PC-T1R Spider
|
|
Here's Lian Li being Lian Li. The PC-T1 is an open mini-ITX chassis, which is one of the most wacky cases on the planet: it looks like a spider when assembled. Being the case that it is, we wanted to look into the belly of the beast and see if the menacing looks are coupled with the kind of engineering required to pull such a design off.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 1GB
|
|
"In recent weeks, ATI has continued to roll out its “Evergreen” Radeon HD 5 series range of DirectX 11 graphics cards. The Nvidia v. ATI rivalry that has existed in previous GPU ranges has been a non-starter with ATI able to set out its performance, mainstream and lower end segment cards without response from Nvidia. Indeed, the Fermi cards are not due to hit the markets until late March, six months on from ATI's headline act – the Radeon HD 5870.
The performance GPUs (5800 series and higher) make use of the Cypress chip architecture with the more mainstream cards using the smaller Juniper core. This mainstream segment of ATI's DirectX 11 range was filled with the joint launch of the HD 5770 and HD 5750. So what's the difference between the two 5700 cards? Effectively, the 5770 is the full-fat version of the Juniper chip making use of all ten of the SIMD cores with the 5750 trimmed down a little.
Today's review takes a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 to discover whether Juniper is able to deliver to the extent the Cypress chip was able to. Let's delve a little deeper..."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
MSI GTX 275 Lightning - Overclocking Beauty
|
|
With the GeForce GTX 275 Lightning MSI shows a card where
absolutely no compromises hae been made. The card should be faster and
quieter than every other 275 GTX. The card is everything else but not
reference design and especially the ten plus two phase power design
should be able to convince enthusiasts and overclockers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
VidaBox vCase3 Premium mATX HTPC chassis
|
|
This chassis is a low profile mATX HTPC chassis with a great design at a reasonable price. Simple, basic, handy -- these are all keywords that apply to the overall design and looks of the vCase3 Premium. Especially in an era where we see form factors change a lot, a chassis like this in the living room can help out a lot. It blends in with the rest of your components really well, it can house the latest mATX motherboards.
You can pop in a regular ATX power supply and well... you are good to go. Whether it is entry-level, mid-range or even if you pop in say a high-end ASUS Maximus II Gene with Core i7 870 processor -- it's all possible with this HTPC chassis.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
OCZ Agility Series 120GB SSD
|
|
"When it comes to performance, the OCZ Agility had some mixed results. Don't get me wrong, this drive is miles ahead of any mechanical drive on the market, but seemed to struggle in the lower file size testing when compared to the comparison SSDs. However, it did perform quite well in the larger file size testing and delivered some excellent performance numbers."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kingston 128GB V Series Notebook Upgrade Kit Review
|
|
Kingston thought of everything when it comes to designing an SSD drive for the notebook market at large. The drive has adequate performance, but it is primary designed to slide into the enclosure and work as an external drive hooked up through the USB interface which allows up to 480Mb/s of bandwidth between the two devices. The SATA 2 interface is not necessary as the bundle includes an enclosure to work with notebook PCs that have limited expansion bays and may not fit an SSD drive internally .At the end of the day, the Kingston Notebook Replacement drive is a SSD drive with all of the positives you could want and is available online for under $300 making it a good fit for those wanting a SSD drive without paying the high price of some others on the market that may offer higher performance but cost more. The Kingston 128GB Notebook Upgrade Kit is available at most e-tailors and many PC DYI centers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
GIGABYTE Announces USB 3.0 & 3x USB Power Web Contest
|
|
GIGABYTE Announces USB 3.0 & 3x USB Power “Increase Your Speed, Triple
Your Power” Web Contest
Send in your creative USB ideas to win a GIGABYTE USB 3.0 motherboard
GIGABYTE, a leading manufacturer of motherboards and
graphics cards today announced the start of the GIGIABYTE USB 3.0 & 3x USB
Power web contest, “INCREASE YOUR SPEED, TRIPLE YOUR POWER”. GIGABYTE has
recently introduced two exciting new USB features to a full range of their Intel
and AMD motherboard product lineup including USB 3.0 compatibility, which delivers a 10x data transfer
boost over USB 2.0, and USB Power Boost
, which provides additional power and stability for USB devices such as external storage devices or optical drives. In order to showcase these new technologies, GIGABYTE would like to hear from you how you would best use these technologies. 
Send us your concepts for USB 3.0 devices or USB devices
that can take advantage of a 3x USB Power Boost. Your concepts can include videos, pictures,
or just a description of the device. Visitors to the contest website then have
the ability to vote for their favorite concepts. In order to help spread the
word, contestants have the option to share their creations with their friends
via Facebook to help get them the votes they need to win. At the end of the
competition, the top three concepts with the most visitor votes will each win a
latest GIGABYTE H55M
motherboard and an A-DATA NH01
Portable Hard Drive.
GIGABYTE will also play judge by awarding entered
concepts points based on creativity, originality and design, with the top 3
concepts chosen by them winning a GIGABYTE
GA-P55-USB3 motherboard and A-DATA N002 Combo Flash Drive
. Visitors who vote for their favorite concepts also have the chance to win. Each time a visitor votes, they will receive one entry into our lucky draw for the chance to win a yet to be released GIGABYTE GA-880GM-USB3 motherboard based on the AMD 880G North Bridge and SB850 South Bridge. Visitors are allowed to vote up to 10 times per day.
The GIGABYTE INCREASE YOUR SPEED, TRIPLE YOUR POWER web
contest ends April 30, 2010. In order to enter the contest, and for complete
contest rules, please visit: http://usb3.gigabyte.com.tw/event.
About GIGABYTE Upgrade Your Life
GIGABYTE, headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, is known as a
global leading brand in the IT industry, with employees and business channels in
almost every country. Founded in 1986, GIGABYTE started as a research and
development team and has since taken the lead in the world's motherboard market.
On top of motherboards and graphics accelerators, GIGABYTE further expanded its
product portfolio to include notebook and desktop PCs, digital home
entertainment appliances, networking servers, communications, mobile and
handheld devices, servicing every facet of people's lives at home or business.
Everyday GIGABYTE aims to “Upgrade Your Life” with the most innovative designs
and impeccable quality and services. Visit www.gigabyte.com.tw for more
information.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
MSI Wind Box Intel Atom 330 NetTops
|
|
"Through Phoromatic you can easily build a benchmarking test
farm with minimal effort and combined with Phoromatic Tracker you can
monitor the performance of a given software or hardware component over
the course of time. We used our own tools to launch a Linux kernel
tracker that monitors the performance of the very latest Linux kernel
code on a daily basis at kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com. We are also
announcing another new, important public tracker coming soon, but first
off, we needed a few more low-powered Intel Atom systems. We ended up
purchasing two MSI Wind Box NetTops (the 6667BB-003US and 6667BB-004US)
that are both based around an Intel Atom 330 dual-core processor within
a very low-profile enclosure. The MSI 6667BB-003US utilizes Intel GMA
950 graphics while the 6667BB-004US boasts an ATI Radeon HD 4330
graphics processor. Here is our Linux look at these two Intel nettop
computers."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kingston SSDNow V Series 30GB Boot Drive
|
|
"Today for review I’ve got that new version but it’s only a 30gb drive as opposed to the original 40gb capacity. So we’ve gained TRIM support but lost 10gb in the process?! I’ve decided to compare it to that original 40gb drive and even a couple others I’ve got on hand. From my testing it is faster than the original that came out last year, which is a good thing, but it still lacks fast write speeds. The write speeds though are not supposed to be off the charts fast, it’s meant to be a boot drive which means you boot your OS from it and use it for reading from mainly, it’s meant to be paired with a standard mechanical hard drive where you would keep your programs and use that for writing to. For the price it’s well worth it for those that want the speed of an SSD but don’t really want to or have the cash to pay for a ‘regular’ SSD drive. So read on… "
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Ineo Technologies I-NA205Ue - Review
|
|
We have done a fair share of internal and external enclosure
reviews. So you might say we have an extensive experience in field. It is
definitely tough to find the right enclosure for the job now a days,
specially when there are thousands of different kind of enclosures on the
market. Most of them do not come with a hard drive and well that's a pity,
however some that do are very valuable. Today we are going to review a
hybrid type of the hard drive enclosure, I-NA205Ue by Ineo Technologies.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ASUS EAH 5850 TOP DirectCU
|
|
ASUS has released what seems to be one of the best custom designed HD 5850s. The card which supports DirectX 11 and Eyefinity is extremely quiet, offers better price/performance than the AMD reference design, comes with an overclock out of the box and supports voltage control via SmartDoctor.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Corsair Dominator GT PC3-12800 DDR3 Dual Channel Kit Review
|
|
"There are two things you should take into consideration when choosing what
memory to upgrade to - the first is overall speed which is sometimes called
data rate. Such as the kit we are going to look at today - 1600MHz. The
faster this is the larger the bandwidth and thus better overall performance.
The second is latency, which is often overlooked by consumers. You may well
have fast rated memory modules but if the latency timings are high bandwidth
could experience issues.
Today we take a look at Corsair's Dominator GT series, a DDR3 dual channel
kit designed specifically for the AMD platform. This kit has some pretty
tight timings and is reasonably rated and since Corsair are one of the main
players in the high performance memory marketplace it will be interesting to
see how these modules perform a little later on."
|
|
|
|
|
| |
