A few months ago SandForce announced its second generation SSD controller: the SF-2000 series. The specs SandForce released at the time were almost too good to be true. As a refresher here’s what we saw back in October of last year:

SandForce is promising a single enterprise level drive that can deliver 500MB/s sequential reads and writes (for highly compressible data), and up to 60K IOPS for 4KB random reads and writes. That’s not an evolutionary improvement, that’s more than a doubling of what most of the competition can do today. Even compared to existing SandForce drives it’s a huge increase in performance. But as I’ve heard many times before, anyone can put out a promising PDF.

Read on to find out if OCZ's beta Vertex 3 Pro can live up to the expectations.

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Intel never quite reached 4GHz with the Pentium 4. Despite being on a dedicated quest for gigahertz the company stopped short and the best we ever got was 3.8GHz. Within a year the clock (no pun intended) was reset and we were all running Core 2 Duos at under 3GHz. With each subsequent generation Intel inched those clock speeds higher, but preferred to gain performance through efficiency rather than frequency.

Today, Intel quietly finishes what it started nearly a decade ago. When running a single threaded application, the Core i7 2600K will power gate three of its four cores and turbo the fourth core as high as 3.8GHz. Even with two cores active, the 32nm chip can run them both up to 3.7GHz. The only thing keeping us from 4GHz is a lack of competition to be honest. Relying on single-click motherboard auto-overclocking alone, the 2600K is easily at 4.4GHz. For those of you who want more, 4.6 – 4.8GHz is within reason. All on air, without any exotic cooling.

Unlike Lynnfield, Sandy Bridge isn’t just about turbo (although Sandy Bridge’s turbo modes are quite awesome). Architecturally it’s the biggest change we’ve seen since Conroe, although looking at a high level block diagram you wouldn’t be able to tell.

Read on for our full, in-depth review!

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The Silverstone "Grandia Series" GD04 comes as a well regarded, oft recommended media center case. It has an attractive, understated look and the choice of silver and black lets it fit right in with other home theater components. Silverstone advertises it as having an effective positive pressure design to keep it relatively dust free. Unfortunately, despite its good looks and reasonable cooling, the GD04 makes a little more noise than you'd like.

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Although not quite the Intel SSD announcement we were expecting in Q4, today Intel unveiled its first mSATA SSD: the Intel SSD 310.

Based on the 34nm Intel X25-M G2 controller, the 310 will be available in both 40GB and 80GB capacities. The 80GB version should perform a bit slower than an 80GB X25-M G2 while the 40GB version will perform like a 40GB X25-V.  

The 310 isn’t about performance, rather form factor. The SSD in Apple’s new MacBook Air is just the beginning – OEMs are beginning to shed the limits of traditional hard drive form factors as SSDs don’t need to house a circular platter.

The mSATA interface is physically a mini PCIe connector (similar to what you’d see with a WiFi card in a notebook) but electrically SATA. The result is something very compact.

The full sized mSATA 310 measures 50.8mm x 29.85mm and is less than 4.85mm thick. Total weight? Less than 10 grams. 

The Intel SSD 310 is OEM only at this point. Lenovo has already announced it will offer the 310 in ThinkPads in the future, while DRS Technologies will show off a tablet PC next month with the 310 inside. The 40GB drive is priced at $99 while the 80GB version will run you $179 in 1000 unit quantities. 

As for the rest of Intel’s SSD updated lineup? While internal roadmaps showed a Q4 release for the 3rd generation X25-M based on 25nm NAND, that product is obviously delayed. We’re also hearing that new SandForce drives are still months away so those of you eagerly waiting for new drives at the high end will have to wait a bit longer.

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We're going to be touring pre-CES and CES show floors looking for interesting things to make note of, and already found something that piqued our attention. While walking around CES Unveiled, one device which caught our eye was the Parrot Asteroid, a single DIN sized head unit for vehicles – that's nothing out of the ordinary, except the Asteroid runs Android.

Read on for more about this interesting new application for Google's open source platform.

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The launch of the Sandy Bridge platform today brings Intel’s newest socket, the new LGA-1155 platform, into the hands of the consumer. Pre-release information across the internet has heralded this new platform for its per-clock performance, and the reduction in complexity when it comes to overclocking. Through the ASRock P67 Extreme4 motherboard, let us examine some of the new features Sandy Bridge has to offer, and see whether this board is worth the $150 projected price point.

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Anand and I rushed from the LG press conference over to AT&T's, where CEO Ralph de la Vega has just announced the carrier's LTE plans for the future. Some 20 LTE devices, including tablets, modems, smartphones, and hotspots are coming throughout 2011.

First up, AT&T has completed its HSPA+ deployment in the US, and will continue to expand backhaul – roughly 2/3rds of traffic is already being transacted over expanded backhaul, with speeds of 6 megabits/s being possible.

I've seen speeds around 6 or 7 megabits/s in the best coverage areas on AT&T without touching an HSPA+ baseband, so it's likely that once more AT&T-band-compatible HSPA+ devices come we'll see even faster speeds. AT&T's LTE deployment will be completed by 2013.

It appears that AT&T is also taking a nod from T-Mobile and calling HSPA+ "4G" as well. 

Newly christened Motorola mobility is launching the Motorola Atrix 4G, which it claims is the world's most powerful smartphone. More on that in Anand's article.

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Here’s a little deja vu for you. At last year’s Storage Visions (a small storage show that precedes CES) Micron announced its first 6Gbps SSD, the RealSSD C300. Although met with its fair share of growing pains in the form of firmware issues, the C300 ended up being a competent performer throughout most of 2010.

This year, once again at Storage Visions, Micron announced its next generation SSD: the RealSSD C400. Based on the same architecture as the C300, the C400 is a combination of IMFT 25nm NAND, a slightly tweaked controller and a significant improvement in firmware.

Read on for more details!

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Just four months ago, NVIDIA released their top-to-bottom 400M lineup. Since the announcement, it took about a month but we then got the ASUS G73Jw (460M), Dell XPS L501x (420M), Clevo B5130M (425M), and ASUS N53JF (425M) in rapid succession. All of these were decent offerings, with a nice blend of performance and features at reasonable prices. Of course, Core 2010 products are last year’s news, and with the launch of Sandy Bridge the whole industry is moving to 2^nd Generation Intel Core Processors (aka Core 2011). With an improved IGP threatening low-end discrete GPUs, what better time for NVIDIA to refresh their mobile parts?

Unlike the desktop GTX 580, the new 500M mobile parts are all using existing architectures; there are even a couple of new 400M parts to round things out. The major change is that we’re getting higher clock speeds, both on the GPU cores/shaders as well as the memory. In a few cases we also have additional shaders available, as well as clearing up some potentially confusing part names (really!). Read on for details on this year’s NVIDIA laptop offerings—coming soon to a Sandy Bridge laptop near you!

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a 15.6” notebook walks into the AnandTech labs, sporting NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 425M and a 1080p display…. Yes, for the fourth time in under two months, we have a midrange 15.6” 1080p notebook on our test bench. So far, we’ve praised the displays as being universally great, though other design elements have been lacking. Now ASUS offers up their N53JF, with a Blu-ray combo drive and Bang & Olufsen ICEpower speakers. On paper at least, this looks like a notebook that could even topple the Dell XPS 15 L501x from its lofty perch. As always, the devil is in the details, but let’s see if this devil is willing to make a deal.

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Last year we put out our first ever public Call for Writers. Over the past year we've added many new faces to AnandTech and we're looking to do it again. It takes a great deal of time to cover the products that we do on AnandTech and we continue to have more to review and analyze than we have time to actually review and analyze them. We need your help.

1) A sample of a product review you've written. This can be any product in the categories mentioned below, the review can follow any format and be of any length. Ultimately your content would live on AnandTech, so take a look at our reviews and how we do things and keep that in mind as you submit your sample. You don't need complete testing. If you don't have things to compare the product being reviewed to just outline how you would test, what tests you'd run, what you'd compare to and how. Obviously the more complete your sample is, the better it looks

 

2) A sample guide. This can be a how to, a tutorial, or anything of the sort. I'd caution you against submitting a guide to building a PC, try to do something a bit more unique.

 

3) A sample analysis piece/column/editorial. This would be something similar to our Micron ClearNAND analysis or my take on the Google Chrome OS announcement. Again, these are just examples, think of something creative on your own

 

4) A sample set of blog/news posts. We're looking to bring back some tech news to AT with the new site. Submit a handful of interesting stories along with your brief analysis. These can be product announcements, interesting revelations around the web, drawing attention to a forum post, etc…

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You demanded them, we listened, and finally some fruit fell from HP's tree. We have an Envy 14 in house getting tested right now, and today we bring you the results of the Envy 17. HP—and to an extent the rest of you—have posited the Envy line as PC-based alternatives to Apple's MacBook Pro notebooks. Today we're testing that theory with the big daddy, the Envy 17. An Intel quad-core, AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5850 graphics, and a splashy 1080p screen. Does it get the job done?

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When Anand first asked if I wanted to review the Nokia E5-00 (referred to as E5 henceforth), I wasn’t sure what to say. Having used Nokia’s Symbian based smartphones almost exclusively for the first half of this decade, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be happy to meet an old friend after a long time, or loathe it thinking of all the reasons I decided to move away from the platform in the first place. But then again, I realized I may actually be in a better position than some to review this device because of my prior experience with the platform.

So jostling for front-page area on AT along with other, decidedly more exciting, better spec’d and feature-packed smartphones is the almost shockingly simple Nokia E5.

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NVIDIA can be a very predictable company at times. It’s almost unheard of for them to release only a single product based on a high-end GPU, so when they released the excellent GeForce GTX 580 last month we knew it was only a matter of time until additional GTX 500 series cards would join their product lineup.

Now less than a month after the launch of the GTX 580 that time has come. Today NVIDIA is launching the GeForce GTX 570, the second card to utilize their new GF110 GPU. As the spiritual successor to the GTX 470 and very much the literal successor to the GTX 480, the GTX 570 brings the GTX 580’s improvements to a lower priced, lower performing card. Furthermore at $350 it serves to fill in the sizable gap between NVIDIA’s existing GTX 580 and GTX 470 cards.

So how does NVIDIA’s latest and second greatest stack up, and is it a worthy sibling to the GTX 580? Let’s find out.

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Fifteen years ago if you wanted to write an application that would run on over 90% of the world’s personal computers, you only needed to target one OS. Today, to do the same, you’d need to develop for ten – Windows, Linux, OS X, Android, iOS, webOS, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, MeeGo and of course, the web. 

You don’t get order without first having chaos and you don’t end up with consolidation without first going through fragmentation. The PC era was dominated by Microsoft and Intel. The transition to ubiquitous computing allowed for many more competitors, which results in a great deal of fragmentation up front.

The goal however, is the same. Every player in this space wants to be what Microsoft was during the PC era. Even the actions are the same. There’s no interoperability between platforms, there are closed door negotiations and exclusivity agreements resulting in a number of alliances that are not easily broken. 

Read on for our take on Google's second attempt to capture a piece of the new pie: Chrome OS.

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NAND endurance is on its way down with each subsequent process generation. At the same time unrecoverable bit error rates are on their way up. Companies like SandForce have included powerful ECC engines in their SSD controllers and implemented RAID-like technologies to deal with the problem. Today Micron is providing an alternative solution: ClearNAND. 25nm NAND with an on-package 24-bit BCH ECC engine per device.

Read on for the full story.

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ASUS and Intel are putting together a webcast that they've invited me to attend. The topic of discussion? Sandy Bridge. The webcast will air after Intel's official announcement of Sandy Bridge at 9AM PST on January 5, 2011 at CES.

The discussion will be a conversation between myself, Gary Key (former AT Motherboard Editor, current ASUS Technical Marketing Manager), and Michael Lavacot, an Intel Consumer Field Application Engineer. 

If you have any questions you'd like to see me answer on air or that you'd like me to grill ASUS and Intel on, leave them in the comments to this post and I'll do my best to get them addressed.

Of course we will also have our full review of Sandy Bridge around the same time. 

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Next year is looking to be a very important year for smartphone and tablet performance. Just as we saw widespread migration to the ARM Cortex A8 and Qualcomm Scorpion CPU cores in smartphones in 2010, in the next 12 months we will see the first tablets and smartphones based on dual-core SoCs from TI, Qualcomm and NVIDIA. The long awaited Tegra 2 will start shipping in smartphones and tablets in early 2011, and Qualcomm will have its own 45nm dual-core Snapdragon SoCs featured in devices as well. Today TI is announcing more details on its OMAP 4440, a high performance dual-core Cortex A9 SoC slated for production in the second half of 2011.

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Since there are so many smartphones on the market, we figured that the holiday season was a great time to write our first smartphone buyer's guide. And so we continue our 2010 Holiday Buyer's Guides with the handset sector. This year was the first year that we got some real, honest competition in the smartphone sector. Google's 2.0 version of Android released late last year to great success, and versions 2.1 and 2.2 only continued that trend. Apple, always good for some drama, kept it up this year with the iPhone 4 and the ensuing Antennagate scandal. Microsoft finally made a serious play for the handheld sector with the brand new, Zune-based Windows Phone 7. Palm got bought out by HP, BlackBerry finally got a WebKit browser in BB6, and Nokia continues pair increasingly awesome hardware with Symbian on everything not called the N900. Safe to say, we had a pretty busy year in the smartphone segment.

We've split our guide into 6 segments – one for each carrier, then one for unlocked and international devices. We put in a page for tablets, since that's still an expanding market closely related to smartphones. Over the next few months, we'll see rapid growth in tablets and slate computing devices, but for now, it's not big enough to warrant more than a page. So, we'll kick it off with the carriers, starting with AT&T.

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Business centric laptops are something most people have used at some point or another, but they're not always the first devices to get reviewed. The reason is pretty simple: businesses are conservative in nature, so they generally don't want to jump on the latest and greatest technology until they've let it mature a bit. Consumer devices are thus the first to move to new CPUs, GPUs, etc. while the enterprise-class laptops in particular will lag behind and continue to sell long after they're "outdated". The upside to business laptops is that they're built to last, making the plastic consumer laptops look flimsy and weak by comparison.

Packing one of Intel's reasonably fast i5 CPUs and a 1440×900 matte LCD in a mag-alloy chassis, with nary a glossy surface in sight, this is a business laptop in every sense of the word. And if your general use case is Office and Internet work rather than gaming and movies, there's a lot to like with the E6410. Of course, with Sandy Bridge right around the corner this is more about setting the stage to see just how far Intel's new platform improves on the current Arrandale offerings, but we'll have to wait another month before we can take the wraps off of Sandy Bridge laptops.

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On the move, or in the groove, SuperTalent reckons they have the product for you. What we have here is a press release for a combination product – a new SuperTalent USB2/3 USB thumb drive; which comes combined with, at a discount, the Ceedo Personal software.  SuperTalent is marketing these new drives as their fastest yet, utiliziing four channels of NAND to improve transfer speeds. 

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AMD is usually pretty aggressive with turning process tweaks and yield improvements into new products. Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 560, today we're getting speed bumps of both of those parts. The Athlon II X3 455 runs at 3.3GHz, up from 3.2GHz and costs the same $87. You get an additional 100MHz for free. The chip hasn't changed otherwise. You get a quad-core die with one core disabled, no L3 cache and a 512KB L2 per core.

The Phenom II X2 565 is an unlocked Black Edition part, also identical to its predecessors. Here you have a quad-core die with two cores disabled, a 512KB L2 per core and a shared 6MB L3. The 565 runs at 3.4GHz, up from 3.3GHz, but the clock increase comes with a $10 price increase.

The six-core Phenom II X6 gets a speed bump as well. The 1100T increases default clock speeds from 3.2GHz to 3.3GHz, and increases Turbo Core frequency from 3.6GHz to 3.7GHz. Turbo Core is only supported on Thuban based processors (currently only Phenom II X6s) and increases operating frequency if half or fewer cores are actively in use. 

Read on for our full review.

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As expected, today Google announced Android 2.3 Gingerbread and the Nexus S. Android 2.3 is the latest iteration of Google’s popular smartphone platform, and includes a number of immediately apparent graphical changes to the Android 2.2 UI, and a host of under the hood features for developers.

Alongside the Android 2.3 announcement came official confirmation of the Nexus S, which appears to be architecturally very similar to the Galaxy S line of devices, with the notable inclusion of near field communication (NFC) hardware, a curved display, and front facing camera. 

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Verizon just announced that on this Sunday, December 5, Verizon will launch its LTE network in the US. The network will launch in 39 cities around the country (listed below) alongside LG's VL600 USB 3G/LTE modem.

The modem will be available in Verizon stores for $99.99 after a $50 rebate with a new 2-year agreement. Service will set you back $50 per month for up to 5GB of data transfers or $80 for 10GB. Overages are billed at $10 per GB.

Verzion stated that speeds on a fully loaded LTE network will range between 5 – 12Mbps down and 2 – 5Mbps up. Latency should be roughly half what it is today on VZW's 3G network.

We'll see more LTE modems ship before the end of the year and LTE enabled smartphones towards the middle of 2011, with devices being announced at CES in January. 

What about the rest of the country? Verizon plans to have its current 3G network covered by LTE before the end of 2013.

Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Initial Major Metropolitan Area Deployment (Dec. 5, 2010) 

Akron, Ohio 

Athens, Georgia 

Atlanta, Georgia 

Baltimore, Maryland 

Boston, Massachusetts 

Charlotte, North Carolina 

Chicago, Illinois 

Cincinnati, Ohio 

Cleveland, Ohio 

Columbus, Ohio 

Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, Dallas, Texas 

Denver, Colorado 

Ft. Lauderdale, Florida 

Houston, Texas 

Jacksonville, Florida 

Las Vegas, Nevada 

Los Angeles, California 

Miami, Florida 

Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Minnesota 

Nashville, Tennessee 

New Orleans, Louisiana 

New York, New York 

Oakland, California 

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 

Orlando, Florida 

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 

Phoenix, Arizona 

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 

Rochester, New York 

San Antonio, Texas 

San Diego, California 

San Francisco, California 

San Jose, California 

Seattle/Tacoma, Washington 

St. Louis, Missouri 

Tampa, Florida 

Washington, D.C. 

West Lafayette, Indiana 

West Palm Beach, Florida 



Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Initial Commercial Airport Deployment (Airport Name, City, State) Dec. 5, 2010 

Austin-Bergstrom International, Austin, Texas 

Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshal, Glen Burnie, Maryland 

Bob Hope, Burbank, California 

Boeing Field/King County International, Seattle, Washington 

Charlotte/Douglas International, Charlotte, North Carolina 

Chicago Midway International, Chicago, Illinois 

Chicago O’Hare International, Chicago, Illinois 

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International, Covington, Kentucky 

Cleveland-Hopkins International, Cleveland, Ohio 

Dallas Love Field, Dallas, Texas 

Dallas/Fort Worth International, Fort Worth, Texas 

Denver International, Denver, Colorado 

Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 

George Bush Intercontinental/Houston, Houston, Texas 

Greater Rochester International, Rochester, New York 

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, Atlanta, Georgia 

Honolulu International, Honolulu, Hawaii 

Jacksonville International, Jacksonville, Florida 

John F. Kennedy International, New York, New York 

John Wayne Airport-Orange County, Santa Ana, California 

Kansas City International, Kansas City, Missouri 

La Guardia, New York, New York 

Lambert-St. Louis International, St. Louis, Missouri 

Laurence G. Hanscom Field, Bedford, Massachusetts 

Long Beach/Daugherty Field, Long Beach, California 

Los Angeles International, Los Angeles, California 

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International, Metairie, Louisiana 

McCarran International, Las Vegas, Nevada 

Memphis International, Memphis, Tennessee 

Metropolitan Oakland International, Oakland, California 

Miami International, Miami, Florida 

Minneapolis-St. Paul International/Wold-Chamberlain, Minneapolis, Minnesota 

Nashville International, Nashville, Tennessee 

New Castle, Wilmington, Delaware 

Newark Liberty International, Newark, New Jersey 

Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International, San Jose, California 

North Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada 

Orlando International, Orlando, Florida 

Orlando Sanford International, Sanford, Florida 

Palm Beach International, West Palm Beach, Florida 

Philadelphia International, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 

Phoenix Sky Harbor International, Phoenix, Arizona 

Phoenix-Mesa Gateway, Mesa, Arizona 

Pittsburgh International, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 

Port Columbus International, Columbus, Ohio 

Portland International, Portland, Oregon 

Rickenbacker International, Columbus, Ohio 

Ronald Reagan Washington National, Arlington, Virginia 

Sacramento International, Sacramento, California 

Salt Lake City International, Salt Lake City, Utah 

San Antonio International, San Antonio, Texas 

San Diego International, San Diego, California 

San Francisco International, San Francisco, California 

Seattle-Tacoma International, Seattle, Washington 

St. Augustine, Saint Augustine, Florida 

St. Petersburg-Clearwater International, Clearwater, Florida 

Tampa International, Tampa, Florida 

Teterboro, Teterboro, New Jersey 

Trenton Mercer, Trenton, New Jersey 

Washington Dulles International, Dulles International Airport, Washington, D.C. 

Will Rogers World, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 

William P. Hobby, Houston, Texas

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In 2009 AMD launched the highly successful Radeon HD 5800 series to great fanfare and even greater shortages. With a 6 month lead on NVIDIA, AMD had the high-end market locked up tight, and in spite of recurring GPU shortages was able to make the best of the situation. Ultimately their one-sided dominance did come to an end with NVIDIA's GTX 400 series launch, but it's not until the past month with the GTX 500 series that NVIDIA gained a clear upper-hand over AMD's long-lived 5800 series.

Hot on the heels of the Radeon HD 6800 series launch and NVIDIA's GTX 500 series launch, AMD is making a truly fresh start in the high-end market. Launching today is the Radeon HD 6900 series, marking the launch of not just AMD's competitor for the GTX 500 series, but also the start of the company's future. With the launch of a new GPU architecture premiering with the Cayman GPU, this is anything but a typical GPU launch.

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Google TV launched to high expectations a couple of months back. Users have slowly come to terms with the capabilities of the software as well as the underlying hardware platform. Without doubt, the Logitech Revue was the flagship product for Google TV at launch. However, many of its users are finding it hard to justify a dedicated device for just the functionality provided by Google TV. A detailed review of the Revue will follow in the coming weeks, but the unanimous opinion amongst the editors at AnandTech is that Google TV could only be justified as a value add-on for already existing CE devices in a HT setup such as a TV, Blu-Ray player, media streamer or even an AV receiver.

Sony was one of the first companies to jump onto the Google TV bandwagon, and they debuted some TVs and even a Blu-Ray player with Google TV inbuilt around the same time as the launch of the Logitech Revue. We have had the Sony NSZ-GT1 Blu-Ray player with Google TV in our labs for the past couple of weeks. Read on for our findings about the player.

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Back on December 2^nd AMD’s Catalyst Product Manager, Terry Makedon, posted an interesting if cryptic note on his Twitter feed: “Catalyst 10.12 is going to be HUGE”. Since then there’s been some speculation on just what was going to be huge, but nothing quite hit the mark until the last couple of days.

With release date for the Catalyst 10.12 driver set finally upon us, AMD has taken the wraps off of what they’ve been up to. The huge news? The Catalyst Control Center is getting a significant interface refresh; its latest since the middle of last year, and certainly the biggest one to date.

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For better or worse, new user interfaces are all the rage right now in the console gaming scene. Nintendo was first to the block in 2006 with 3D motion-controlled user interfaces, leveraging a unique combination of IR sensors and 6-axis MEMS accelerometers in a handheld remote. The motion-controlled Wii has enjoyed a nice long run being the sole platform for motion-assisted gaming. Flash forward to late 2010, and Microsoft and Sony both have readied their response to the Wii – the Microsoft Kinect and Sony Move, respectively. 

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The slate computing market is about to explode, with a literal flood of new tablets releasing over the coming months. Many of them will be Android based, running NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 SoC. NVIDIA made a big deal about Tegra 2 back at CES 2010, but for some reason, it’s taken quite a bit of time for anything running the platform to hit the market. Finally, we have one – the Viewsonic G Tablet. The G Tablet is a 10" slate running Android 2.2 on top of Tegra 2 and a $399 pricetag. For the money, it's packing a lot of power and features. But the real question is how Tegra 2 stacks up against Hummingbird and Snapdragon, along with how much faster the dual-core A9 is than the A8-based SoCs.

So, what's the performance like? Read on to see our impressions and benchmarks.

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The mini-ITX market is gathering pace, and seemingly every motherboard company wants a piece of the action.  Some get it almost right, such as the Gigabyte H55N-USB which is the only motherboard this year we’ve given a highly recommended rating, whereas others can get it very, very wrong.  Mini-ITX specialists Zotac have recently announced their next two AMD offerings.

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OCZ and Kingston have already shown us what solid state technology can do for external drive transfer speeds when given the headroom provided by USB 3.0 technology. Now, ADATA bring us the N004, an Indilinx Barefoot based solid state drive that features both USB 3.0 and SATA connectivity. At this stage of proceedings, Indilinx would not be our first choice of controller utilized this way – at the very least we’d like to see something done with Indlinx’s Martini, more preferably Sandforce’s SF1200. However, ADATA's pricing for the N004 series may be enough to warrant closer inspection if you're in the market for a solid state drive that can be used both internally and externally with minimal fuss…

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The Nexus S, spiritual successor to the Nexus One, is finally here. The Nexus One was supposed revolutionize in the way people buy mobile phones stateside, effectively decoupling phone upgrade schedules from the slow march of two-year contracts – thus allowing Android to evolve rapidly. Though the success of Google selling unlocked hardware directly to consumers turned out to be less than a smash hit, the Nexus One became the best place to get the unadulterated, pure Google version of Android, and moreover the place updates always appeared first. Though the Nexus One has aged gracefully and kept feeling relatively fresh with speedy platform updates, it’s hardware is definitely starting to look dated.

The Nexus S includes a host of definite improvements over the Nexus One, the question is whether it’s better than competition that already is moving incredibly fast. The Nexus S also launches Android 2.3 “Gingerbread,” which includes changes such as a revamped UI with GPU accelerated animations, better stock keyboard, better power management controls, and a bunch more. We’ve been playing with the Nexus S since Friday – read on for our full review of both the Nexus S and Android 2.3.

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One last journey into the land of audio yields curious results; when last we spoke with Logitech they gave us the Z515 wireless speaker set, a curio that seemed destined for a niche market. Today we have on hand the Z305 laptop speaker, a far more practical solution to the common problem of dismal notebook speakers. The Z305 is essentially a long barrel that clamps on to the lid of your notebook, plugs in to the USB port, and threatens to improve your listening experience. At $59 it's fairly reasonably priced, so the question is…just how well does it work?

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With sales of around 150,000 PSUs each month, Corsair is one of the largest vendors for retail power supplies. They have a lot of experience even if they don't have their own factory. A few weeks ago Corsair presented their latest addition to their power supply lineup, the AX series. The AX brand has the goal of delivering performance, quality, and high efficiency; simply put, it's the best solution Corsair can provide at the moment. Today we take a look at the AX750 and find out if the 80Plus Gold certificate is justified, and just how good Corsair's "best" happens to be.

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The only aspect of purchasing a Windows Phone that's more difficult than jumping on the iPhone bandwagon is choosing hardware. While the OS may be polished, nearly all Windows Phone manufacturers took the safe route and launched relatively uninspired designs for WP7. I'm sorry to say that none of them quite live up to the total package of the iPhone 4. You make sacrifices in battery life, material quality, camera quality or all of the above. The OS may be solid, but there's still a lot of work that has to be done to achieve perfection.

If you are planning on making the jump before the next generation of Windows Phone 7 hardware, there are reasonable options today. While the perfect Windows Phone may not yet exist, there are some devices that are good enough.

Unlike choosing an Android phone, performance and UI aren't differentiating factors for Windows Phones. They all run the same OS and use the same 1st generation Snapdragon SoC. As a result, they all perform identically. There are no OS level carrier/OEM customizations. The best either can do is supply preinstalled apps. Other than that, the difference is all in build quality, battery life and the hardware in general.

Brian posted our review of one of the more unusual Windows Phone 7 devices a couple of weeks ago: the HTC Surround. Today I want to provide a quick look at two other options: the very popular Samsung Focus and the LG Optimus 7.

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We conclude our series of Ask the Experts with four questions you all asked about servers and virtualization in previous posts. Thanks to everyone who participated and we hope you found the series useful!

Read on to read Johan's answers to your questions!

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As a vocal proponent of improving laptop LCD quality—and LCD quality for desktops as well—the past few years have been painful. True, laptop LCDs have never been at the level of their desktop counterparts, but once upon a time there were at least a few laptops that didn't use TN panels. One of those is the vaunted IBM ThinkPad T42, launched way back in 2004. Besides coming before virtually everything migrated to widescreen displays, the T42 is one of the few laptops to use an IPS panel. As luck would have it, I recently had a chance to use a T42, and I took the opportunity to run it through our standard set of LCD tests. Mostly I was curious to see the results, but I figured some of our readers would enjoy getting our impressions of this archeological find as well. Find out just how little has improved after six years of LCD "updates".

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The search for a notebook with a quality screen, at least in the mainstream sector, can often feel like a futile one. Outside of Jarred's recent love affair with the Dell XPS 15 and the respectable Clevo B1530M, most screens we've dealt with have been subpar at best. But make the journey to enterprise-class notebooks and things start to brighten up. On the bench today we have HP's EliteBook 8740w, sporting the vaunted DreamColor IPS notebook screen. The upgrade costs a pretty penny on top of what is already a respectably powerful workstation, so how does the whole package fare?

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Christmas time is coming and perhaps you want to give your significant other a new PSU. "Hey honey, check out this awesome new power supply I got you so you can… um…." Anyway, we gathered up several high-end power supplies from manufacturers all over the world, and we're here to see which one comes out on top. When you're looking at 1kW and larger power supplies, determining the "best" product isn't easy, as the manufacturers have different opinions on what is important. Some will go for pure efficiency, others for lower noise, or better cooling, etc. You'll have to decide which features are the most important, but let's look at this quintet and see if any can clearly rise above the rest.

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Over the past couple of years, Corsair has been branching out from just producing system memory. They've moved into Solid State Disks, power supplies, enclosures, and even brought their first gaming headset to market just this year. Each entry has met with some success, but while the cases in their Obsidian series have proven excellent, they're still prohibitively expensive. The Graphite Series 600T is relatively new, and while the $159 MSRP is still on the steep side, it lines up to compete with the crowd favorite Antec P180 series. I had a chance to take the 600T for a spin, and it may just be worth every penny.

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