Finding a mainstream notebook with a high resolution screen can be harder than pulling teeth. Outside of the new Dell XPS 15 and the odd business-class machine, a resolution higher than the dismal 1366×768 on a 15.6" screen can be extremely difficult to locate and may even force you to compromise and buy a bigger machine than you'd intended. Fortunately there are options and we've tracked one down in the form of the Clevo B5130M. Sporting NVIDIA's new GeForce GT 425M and a 1080p high-resolution screen, is this notebook enough to steal the crown from the Dell XPS 15?

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Generally speaking when we think of Antec, we usually think of quality cases (such as the silent gaming stalwart P182/P183 line) and solid power supplies. Personally I even think of good customer service (i.e. missing some drive rails? E-mail their customer service and they'll send you replacements for free.) What we don't think of is quality audio, and just like Corsair's recent branch into audio hardware with their HS1 gaming headset, Antec has opened a brand new line dubbed "Soundscience," which starts with their Rockus 3D 2.1 speaker system. The $249 MSRP could make them a tough sell; do you get your money's worth?

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Last week I mentioned that I had recently spent some time with AMD down in Austin, TX, benchmarking its upcoming Brazos platform. The Brazos platform is composed of an AMD Zacate or Ontario APU and the Fusion Controller Hub (a South Bridge based on the SB800 series). Brazos systems will run the gamut of mainstream notebook, netbook and nettop segments ranging from $299 to around $500. While AMD let us reveal the fact that we tested Brazos, we weren't allowed to publish numbers last week. Today, we can.

Read on for our full Brazos performance preview.

Updated: Now with Core i3-330UM performance data!

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Over the summer we previewed OCZ's first affordable PCIe SSD: the RevoDrive. Made of a pair of SandForce SF-1200 controllers behind a PCI-X RAID controller and a PCI-X to PCIe bridge, the RevoDrive performed well and ended up being only slightly more expensive than a pair of SF-1200 SSDs. 

The original RevoDrive had an expansion connector on it that was never used. That's where the RevoDrive x2 comes in. You get twice the number of controllers, making the x2 identical in performance to OCZ's recently announced IBIS drive. But without the HSDL interface. Read on for our quick look at OCZ's latest PCIe SSD.

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Back in March 2010, Intel announced an Atom based platform optimized for storage applications. Using either a D410 or the dual core D510, paired with an Intel 82801IR I/O controller, it was touted by Intel to have been picked up by various NAS vendors such as LaCie, LG, QNAP, Synology and Thecus. We have had the LaCie 5big storage server in our labs for the last few weeks. Aimed at the needs of small businesses, the server brings in a wealth of features thanks to the Windows Storage Server 2008 platform on which the NAS runs.

Read on for our review of the LaCie 5big storage server, and to identify whether it would be a good solution for the storage needs of your small business.

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Even though the WP7 official unveiling is quite a ways behind us, we’ve been spending quite a lot of time with the respective Windows Phone 7 launch devices. Anand has the LG Optimus 7 and the Samsung Focus, and I got the HTC Surround. There are a number of other devices bound for other carriers both international and domestic, and we’re getting to them in time. 

If you haven’t already, definitely read our Windows Phone 7 launch piece which covers the platform as it exists purely from the software perspective. We promised then that we’d be taking an in-depth look at each of the devices with the usual rigor, and are starting out with the HTC Surround.

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When someone talks about budget gaming on a laptop, a lot of things might go through your head. Are they talking about ten year old games on netbooks? Maybe by "budget" they mean $1000? Or perhaps they're referring to a pathetically slow IGP that can barely run modern games at 768p (but does reasonably well with 3+ year old titles)? So many options, but today we're talking about a laptop that can legitimately play almost any modern title at medium to high detail and 768p, and it checks in at a pocketbook friendly price of under $700.

Given the specs and performance potential, it's no surprise that the laptop in question comes from Acer—with everything that implies. The Acer Aspire 5551G also happens to be the best example of AMD's midrange gaming laptops, packing a dual-core P520 processor with a Radeon HD 5650 graphics card. There are certainly some blemishes in the overall experience, but many people are able to overlook those when they see the bottom line—which might explain in part why you can no longer find this model in stock. Yeah. But if you're curious as to how an AMD Vision Premium 2010 notebook stacks up to the competition, read on….

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I hate to keep things from you all, but last week I was diligently working in a room at AMD’s new campus in Austin, Texas. You see, AMD wanted to give us more time with the Brazos/Zacate platform we tested at IDF ahead of its official launch. It’s too early for production worthy OEM systems and AMD wasn’t too keen on these reference platforms leaving its offices so it did the next best thing: fly us out to test the systems on AMD’s campus.

The rules were simple. We couldn’t run anything that would harm the system, but other than that we were free to bring whatever we wanted and test however we wanted. AMD dropped by our private room to check to see if we needed anything but other than that, it was all hands off.

The Brazos test platform

While I’d love to share performance data with you today, I can’t. You’ll have to wait another week or so for that. What AMD is allowing us to talk about are the specific configurations AMD’s first Fusion APUs will ship in and general impressions from the testing. 

Read on!

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I haven’t had an official product briefing with VIA in years. The last time I met with a representative from the company was two years ago outside of IDF in San Francisco. Before then, it was probably around 4 years.

VIA was the first casualty of integration in the PC space. Today we’re all talking about moving graphics onto the processor die, but a few years ago we were having similar discussions about moving the memory controller and north bridge on die. As a manufacturer of chipsets (north and south bridges) for CPUs, VIA lost relevance in the x86 CPU market as the need for a third party chipset maker faded.

VIA’s recent visit to me in Raleigh, NC had two purposes according to the company. One, to remind me that VIA was still around and to give me some face to face time with a VIA representative (appreciated). And two, to showcase VIA’s dual-core Nano platform and brand new integrated graphics chipset (intriguing).

Read on for our preview of VIA's latest, and surprisingly competitive Nano platform.

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As we discussed a couple weeks back, Dell has relaunched their XPS brand for laptops, with a focus on quality and "mainstream performance". The latter means that unlike previous XPS laptops, you won't find the highest performing GPUs in the new models—Dell will continue to serve the needs of mobile gamers with the Alienware brand. The former is the more interesting aspect, as Dell's XPS laptops will have better build quality and improved LCD panels. Dell sent us their new L501x, the 15.6" chassis with NVIDIA's Optimus Technology and a new GeForce 420M GPU (our first look at the mainstream 400M parts!), and they included the upgraded 1080p B+GR LCD panel. Read on to find out just how good the new XPS is, and whether it's worth the price of admission.

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Back in April we dissected Drive Extender v2 – Microsoft’s storage pool and data duplication technology for Windows Home Server – based upon the first preview release of Windows Home Server “Vail”. So imagine our utter shock when we found out that Microsoft is going to be removing Drive Extender entirely from “Vail” and the rest of its offshoots.

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Content aggregation has been instrumental in the development of the web. In the early days of the web, destinations held all the power. If you wanted news or reviews you went to news and review sites, consuming the content they had to offer at each individual website. Email newsletters were the first to really change the manner in which content was consumed online. Instead of visiting a website to read the latest it had to offer, you got an email in your inbox with either complete content or enough of a teaser for you to decide whether or not you were interested in it.

These days we have many more ways to get access to written content on the web than a simple newsletter. There’s RSS, Twitter and Instapaper among others. It generally works well. RSS didn’t stop users from visiting websites, neither did Twitter and Instapaper hasn’t spelled the end of the front page either. If anything all of these technologies have helped make consuming content online easier. While the front page of any website today isn’t quite as big of an example of prime real estate as it was 10 years ago, it’s still quite valuable.

I mention this history for one important reason: we haven’t seen the same progress with aggregating and distributing television content on the web. These days you can find a lot of cable TV content on the web, usually posted the day after the shows air live on cable TV. All of the major networks support it. Visit Fox.com, NBC.com or CBS.com and you’ll be greeted with ways to watch all of the shows they air via the web. The content is all out there, and it wouldn’t be too difficult to aggregate it all into one cable-TV-like interface. In theory, with what’s posted online already, you could pull the plug on cable and just rely on video over the web without missing much. It’s just not quite as easy as a cable subscription with a DVR. This is where Boxee comes in.

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Earlier today Qualcomm briefed analysts on its Snapdragon SoC roadmap. The current Snapdragon is available in both 65nm and 45nm versions integrating a single Scorpion CPU core running at up to 1GHz and an Adreno 200 or 205 GPU (respectively). Snapdragon was the SoC of choice for many Android phones over the past year and a half, not to mention the only SoC available in Windows Phone 7 devices.

In the coming months we’ll see the first dual-core Cortex A9 based NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoCs ship in devices. Sometime next year we’ll see A9 based OMAP4 SoCs in smartphones as well. So what does Qualcomm have in store for us over the next few years?

Read on for the details.

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We haven't updated our various system buyers' guides for a while, and what better time to rectify that oversight than the holiday shopping season? We're going to take a different approach this time, with different builds from most of our staff covering the gamut from pure budget to dream level systems. We have widely ranging tastes and budgets, but we've tried to make sure that someone covers each general category of system, with both AMD and Intel builds. Whether you're in the market for a complete new system or just want to upgrade a component or two, our System Builder's Guide should have what you need.

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Although OCZ was first on the market with a USB 3.0 enabled SSD with its Enyo drive, competitors are knocking down the doors and bridging the gap. We saw the first lower cost USB 3.0 SSD with Kingston's DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0, however the JMicron JMF612 controller it was based on didn't really impress. The only thing the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 had going for it was a lower total cost for the smaller capacity versions.

Hot on the heels of the release of its unusually potent V+100 SSD, Kingston aims its sights at the high end with its second USB 3.0 SSD: the HyperX MAX 3.0. Borrowing a brand from Kingston's enthusiast memory line, the HyperX MAX 3.0 is literally a SSDNow V+100 SSD paired with a SATA to USB 3.0 bridge PCB. 

Read on for a quick look at the drive's performance and behavior over time.

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Back when ASUS released the UL80Vt last year, we gave it a glowing review, praising its balance of performance and battery life without breaking the bank. The UL80Vt had an overclocked Core 2 Duo SU7300, an NVIDIA G 210M with a manually switchable option, and ASUS’ now standard 84Wh battery. This gave it pretty solid performance, on par with larger mainstream notebooks, and close to 13 hours of ideal-case battery life, even with turbo mode enabled. Today, we’ve got the UL80Jt, an updated version running the new Core i3-330UM processor and NVIDIA’s Optimus-enabled G 310M graphics. Does it measure up to the reputation its predecessor had, or will it ultimately be overshadowed by newer and equally well rounded notebooks? Read on to find out.

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With an all-custom launch for the Radeon HD 6850, the door was immediately opened to a variety of 6850 cards with a wide variety of performance characteristics. In fact you won't even find the reference design for sale in North America, making it all the more important to look at custom cards. As such We have wasted no time in collecting a few cards to see what they’re capable of, and today we'll be looking at those results. After all we’ve seen what the reference card can do, but how about the cards you can actually buy? And how about overclocking, do the latest 6850 cards continue the tradition of the *850 being strong overclockers? Today we’re going to answer all of that and more.

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When we first looked at the ASUS Eee PC 1201N last year, we thought it was a unique take on the netbook idea, and possibly one of the first acceptably performing netbooks on the market. Fast forward to 2010, and we have the Eee PC 1215N, basically an updated 1201 with a dual-core Atom D525 and Next-Generation ION. But with the release of the dual-core Atom N550 for netbooks and smaller netbooks releasing with NG-ION in tow, does the $499 1215N still have enough appeal to capture the niche market it had before? Read on to find out.

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Yes folks, it's that time again: time to open your wallets and let a ravenous technology industry take its cut so you can have the shiniest, latest gadgets on store shelves. We're kicking off our Holiday 2010 Buyers' Guides with the mobile sector. While it wasn't perfect, overall this year has been a great one for notebooks, and there has been a healthy share of upheaval in the process. The dust shows no sign of clearing, but hopefully we'll be able to guide you through it to the very cream of the crop this industry has to offer.

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There's little doubt in our minds that the GF100/GTX 480 launch wasn't quite what NVIDIA was hoping for. It did end up being the fastest single GPU card on the market, but when it came to heat and noise it didn't fare so well. What could have been an amazing card became a reasonable card, but a card with caveats.

But they say time heals all wounds. With GF100 out the door NVIDIA has had a chance to examine their design, and TSMC the chance to work the last kinks out of their 40nm process. GF100 was the first Fermi chip, and it would not be the last. With a lesson in hand and a plan in mind, NVIDIA went back to the drawing board to fix and enhance GF100. The end result: GF110, the next iteration of Fermi. Hot out of the oven, it is launching first in the consumer space and is forming the backbone of the first card in NVIDIA’s next GeForce series: GeForce 500. Launching today is the first such card, the GF110-powered GeForce GTX 580.

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I'm not sure what it is about SSD manufacturers and overly complicated product stacks. Kingston has no less than six different SSD brands in its lineup. The E Series, M Series, SSDNow V 100, SSDNow V+ 100, SSDNow V+ 100E and SSDNow V+ 180. The E and M series are just rebranded Intel drives, these use Intel's X25-E and X25-M G2 controllers respectively with Kingston logo on the enclosure. The SSDNow V 100 is an update to the SSDNow V Series drives, both of which use the JMicron JMF618 controller. Don't get this confused with the 30GB SSDNow V Series Boot Drive which actually uses a Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller, also used in the SSDNow V+. Confused yet? It gets better.

The standard V+ is gone and replaced by the new V+ 100, which is what we're here to take a look at today. This drive uses the T6UG1XBG controller but with updated firmware. The new firmware enables two things: very aggressive OS-independent garbage collection and higher overall performance. The former is very important as this is the same controller used in Apple's new MacBook Air. In fact, the performance of the Kingston V+100 drive mimics that of Apple's new SSDs.

Read on for our full review.

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Last year was dominated by two SSD controller manufacturers: Intel and Indilinx. Intel delivered the performance while Indilinx offered a value alternative. Once SandForce hit early this year however, it was game over for Indilinx. We have reviewed a couple of Indilinx drives since SandForce hit but for the most part we've been enamored with SF and Crucial's offerings.

Over the summer Indilinx was supposed to have its next-generation controller ready for debut, codenamed Jet Stream. Unfortunately the 6Gbps controller has been delayed until 2011, leaving Indilinx with two options: quietly bow out of the SSD market, or update Barefoot.

And here we have the updated Barefoot:

The Indilinx Martini based OCZ Vertex Plus

Read on for our preview of the first new Indilinx controller since 2009.

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If you are looking to improve your virtualized datacenter, 10Gb Ethernet really deserves your attention. It delivers more than twice as much bandwidth as quad-port gigabit, lower latency, lower power per gigabit, and the ability to greatly simplify your network infrastructure–especially with virtualized servers. 10GbE is a game changer for I/O virtualization; it is much more than “a bigger pipe” for your (virtualized) network traffic. That is the good news.

The bad news is that you have to take quite a few hurdles before I/O virtualization does it's magic. One bad decision and you end up with a power gobbling, CPU hogging monster. We gathered two modern 10GbE NICs, one from Solarflare and one from Neterion, and checked if they are really an improvement compared to the typical Intel 82598 NIC. This article is not a simple throughput and latency benchmarking review, but turned out to be a story about how virtualization technologies like VT-d, IOMMU, Netqueue, SR-IOV and I/O convergence can make sense in the modern datacenter.

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A couple of weeks ago we looked at Apple's new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs. We came away happy with the upgrades, however a little disappointed at the performance of the 11-inch system. Today we take a look at what $400 in upgrades will get you. Is it enough to make the 11-inch MBA more of a workhorse? Read on to find out.

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With the launch of Sandy Bridge on the horizon, the larger motherboard manufacturers are putting the final touches to their products.  ASUS, Gigabyte, EVGA, MSI, Foxconn, and others will all be vying for your hard earned cash by attempting to wow you with images of hardware, and words regarding supposed performance.  So when ASUS started handing out images of their upcoming high-end P67 range, we had to dissect and pass on the information.   Click through for the P8P67 Pro, P8P67 Deluxe and the P67 Maximum IV Extreme.

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Today I have in my hands the Netgear Roku XD media streamer, the latest media streaming solution for the living room to get retail store distribution by allying itself with a company best known for networking solutions. Does the Netgear Roku HD have what it takes to compete with the likes of D-link's Boxee Box or Logitech's Revue? What are the limitations and benefits of this particular media streamer? Let's find out.

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Picking up immediately from where we left off yesterday with our review of NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 580, we have a second GTX 580 in house courtesy of Asus, who sent over their ENGTX580. With our second GTX 580 in hand we’re taking a look at GTX 580 SLI performance and more; we’ll also be taking a look at voltage/power consumption relationship on the GTX 580, and clock-normalized benchmarking to see just how much of GTX 580’s improved performance is due to architecture and additional SMs, and how much is due to the clockspeed advantage.

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Last year, Micca released a hard drive based portable media drive called the Slim HDD Digital Media Player (imaginative, I know). Based around a standard 2.5” notebook hard drive, the Slim DMP could handle a wide range of containers and formats and had a 720p HDMI output. For the $59 (no drive) price tag, it represented a solid value and even without too many premium features, it was a very functional media player at its core. Now we’ve got Micca’s followup device, the $79 Slim-HD Portable 1080p Full-HD Digital Media Player, which adds support for 1080p playback, FLAC audio, and a new UI. How does it fare in our labs? Read on to find out.

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At the risk of sounding like a puff piece and marketing drivel, Corsair has been essentially synonymous with quality hardware for a while now. If you were having trouble with cheaper RAM and just wanted to save yourself a headache, or if you wanted kit that you could push as hard as your wallet would allow, you'd buy Corsair. When Corsair jumped into the power supply market, there was another big splash. Cases? The Obsidian series isn't cheap but it's reviewed well the world over. So now what are we to make of Corsair's first stab into the consumer audio world, the HS1 gaming headset?

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Intel's been making a decent amount of noise with their Intel Wireless Display, or "WiDi" technology, something our own Vivek Gowri is a big proponent of. But WiDi has limits, specifically  720p resolutions and Intel HD graphics. Now ASUS brings another solution to the table, the WiCast, which can be connected to any computer and any television and promises latency-free 1080p video and audio. That's no small promise, and the big question is: just how well does it work?

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"You get what you pay for!" Is this maxim realy true? On the one hand there are more than enough expensive PSUs with high ripple and noise results with a noisy fan thrown in as well; on the other hand, you can't get the best capacitors without paying a premium. So let's see how three different 550W power supplies compare, particularly in light of their pricing. There's quite a spread here in terms of cost; how much PSU can you get for your dollar?

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I realize I've been very slow with these. My travel schedule as returned to unexpectedly ridiculous once again. You've been seeing the results of those travels on the site, most recenty with the Windows Phone 7 coverage. There are a few more exciting trips left in the year for me so I appreciate your patience as always.

Last month we held a giveaway for an ASRock 890GX Extreme 3. The winner? MUluke. Respond to my email to claim your prize

Today's giveaway is going to be a media streaming box we reviewed not too long ago: Patriot's Box Office. The full spec sheet is here. Patriot was kind enough to even throw in a WiFi adapter with the Box Office.

Read on for entry instructions!

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A couple of months ago we shared with you the CPUs that are going into our new server farm. We've actually started physically installing the machines (hence the brief outage over the weekend) so it's time to share another piece of the server puzzle.

The final configuration we decided on was 12 machines. This is a significant reduction of the number of systems we have installed (currently nearly 30) but the performance per box is much higher, allowing for consolidation through virtualization.

We are building two private clouds: a lighter cloud of 8 machines for our application serving needs (including some redundancy in the cloud), and a 4 machine DB cloud to handle the heavier IO. We'll dive into our infrastructure design in the later, full article but for now let's talk about memory.

The application server cloud is light on memory. Each system in this cloud has 12GB of memory (6 x 2 DDR3-1333 DIMMs). The DB server cloud on the other hand has 48GB of memory per box (12 x 4GB DDR3-1333 DIMMs).

Kingston was nice enough to supply the memory for our project with. The 96 sticks of memory were broken down into 48 x KVR1333D3D4R9S/4GI and 48 x KVR1333D3D8R9S/2GI. If you want to see what 288GB of memory looks like, check out the gallery below.

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Note that for all of the components we selected for this project, we decided upon the components first and then petitioned the manufacturers second. The stipulation was that the AnandTech server farm would be a publicly visible test bed. Any failures of the hardware are public failures and would obviously reflect poorly on the manufacturer. For CPUs and memory it's not so big of a deal – physical failures there are fairly rare, but for SSDs this provided an interesting challenge. More on that in our next installment.

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Last month we had our first look at AMD's latest Danube platform with a quad-core P920 processor in the Toshiba A660D. After we posted that review, Toshiba asked us if we'd be interested in reviewing their Intel version of the notebook, with the upgrade to NVIDIA's 3D Vision coming along for the ride. Never one to turn down a review opportunity, particularly for a technological curiosity like mobile 3D Vision, we readily agreed. So today, we have a faster, significantly more expensive version of the A66x chassis, with 3D Blu-ray support and a 120Hz LCD.

There's plenty to look at, but before we get to the review and benchmarks let's make it clear: Toshiba is billing this as a 3D multimedia laptop as opposed to a 3D gaming laptop. We'll see exactly why later in the review, but it's probably no surprise to state right now that the GTS 350M GPU driving the graphics isn't intended to do the heavy lifting involved in 3D Vision. It's still plenty fast for regular gaming, however, and with the marketing push behind 3D—3D movies, 3D HDTVs, 3D cameras, and 3D laptops—we're certainly interested to see how compelling the A665-3DV is when it comes to providing visual depth. Is this the next frontier or another gimmick? Let's find out.

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After announcing it earlier this year, NVIDIA has finally released their 3DTV Play software add-on for 3D TV owners. 3DTV Play enables consumers to take full advantage of the HDMI 1.4a port on their 4xx GPUs / 3D Vision GPUs by enabling 3D over HDMI, allowing 3D TV owners to fully utilize NVIDIA's 3D VIsion technology, after previously being limited to just Blu-Ray 3D.

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Laptop speakers are notoriously terrible. With the odd exception, very few notebooks have speaker systems that can do any kind of justice to music, movies, or even video games. All of us are aware of it, but how do you fix a problem like that? Logitech seems to think they have a good solution in the form of their Z515 wireless speaker set. At an MSRP of $99 it's not exactly cheap: does Logitech offer enough to part you from a crisp Franklin?

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It’s the fastest Mac you can buy and it's a desktop. These days, the Mac Pro is basically the un-Mac. But it's fast and nothing beats the flexibility of a desktop. If you need a lot of cores, it's actually Apple's most price competitive system on the market. We take a look at the Westmere update to the Mac Pro, read on.

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Up to this point, our experiences with AMD's Phenom II mobile line haven't been very favorable. In the desktop world AMD's chips can compete and succeed based on price, but in notebooks thermal properties get added to the mix. Intel's been very aggressive about controlling the mobile market, but is AMD's "we'll sell you more cores for less" strategy going to translate well? On hand is the ASUS X72D, an entry-level desktop replacement notebook designed for media enthusiasts. Is a triple-core mobile AMD chip paired with budget Mobility Radeon graphics and a Blu-ray drive enough?

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If you are in the IT field, you have no doubt heard a lot of great things about ZFS, the file system originally introduced by Sun in 2004.  After doing quite a bit of research we decided to embark on a build of a ZFS storage platform that we could use to replace our existing SAN infrastructure at our hosting company.  We will go in depth talking about how ZFS works, what components we chose for our build, and the performance that we were able to achieve compared to our legacy Promise iSCSI SAN.  Read on to find out more about what we encountered and what we ended up with.

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Last night we published our Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 review. In it we made a decision to include a factory overclocked GeForce GTX 460 from EVGA (the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW). For those who aren't aware, NVIDIA has allowed a number of its partners to ship GTX 460s at higher than stock clock speeds. A practice that has been done in the past. The cards are available in retail with full warranties.

A number of you responded in the comments to the article very upset that we included the EVGA card. Even going as far to accuse us of caving to NVIDIA's pressure and demands. Ryan and I both felt it was necessary to address this front and center rather than keep the discussion in the comments.

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