Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Enterprise Storage: Two 2.5" 600 GB Hard Drives Tested

The latest 2.5” hard drive generation ships with SAS 6Gb/s and delivers up to 600 GB of storage space, narrowing the gap with much larger 3.5" disks. Today we're comparing the latest 2.5" drives from Seagate and Toshiba to see if they're faster, too.
Seagate’s Savvio was the first 2.5” hard drive product for enterprise applications. Today, you can get 2.5” SAS drives from Hitachi, Seagate, and Toshiba, but only Seagate and Toshiba ship the latest 600 GB, 10 000 RPM models for mainstream enterprise applications.

PCI Express 3.0: By This Time Next Year

After an unfortunate series of untimely delays, the folks behind PCI Express 3.0 believe they've worked out the kinks that have kept next-generation connectivity from achieving backwards compatibility with PCIe 2.0. We take a look at the tech to come.

Gaming With Nvidia 3D Vision

 Gaming With Nvidia 3D Vision
a 3D dual-projector system, just like in movie theaters. Now, we're comparing it to Nvidia's 3D Vision projector-based setup to see which option offers the best consumer-level 3D experience for your living room.
When we concluded our Wall-Sized 3D Gaming, Just Like The Theaters Do It review, we noted that there could be no proper conclusion until we tested an alternative projector that utilized Nvidia's 3D Vision solution. Well, now you're reading that follow-up article. For those who missed the previous story, we created a 3D projector system similar to the ones used in movie theaters, with two projectors and polarized filters. The whole experiment consisted of about $2,500 worth of hardware and software, not including the PC used to drive the displays.

4GB Memory Kit 4


4GB Memory Kit 4
Now the rules. This contest is unfortunately only available to US residents
in one of the 50 states. I realize that AnandTech is an international site and I do highly value all of our readers, unfortunately extending the contest rules outside of the US is a bit more than we're able to reliably handle today. That's not to say that we won't at some point in the future, we just have little experience doing such things and don't want to get burned early on.

RIM BlackPad Expected To Complete with Apple's iPad

Research In Motion is expected to introduce the BlackPad to compete with rival Apple's iPad, which currently dominates the tablet market. RIM recently acquired blackpad.com, and is also expected to introduce the BlackBerry Bold 9800 to regain smartphone market share from Apple's iPhone. RIM faces an uphill battle with the BlackPad.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

CORE Or Boost? AMD And Intel Turbo Features Dissected

CORE Or Boost? AMD And Intel Turbo Features Dissected
Intel arms its Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs with Turbo Boost. AMD's hexa-core Phenom II X6 chips sport Turbo CORE. Both technologies dynamically increase performance based on perceived workloads and available thermal headroom. Which one does the better job?
Automotive turbochargers increase torque and power output, which is why they're used to increase the air-fuel mixture rate per combustion cycle. AMD’s and Intel’s performance-improving technologies don't actually a require an additional piece of hardware bolted on like a turbo would be, but they both invoke the gas compressor namesake anyway.

Motorola Droid X Reviewed

 Motorola Droid X Reviewed
You have to hand it to Motorola; as little as a year ago their future looked bleak. Android was still in its infancy and lacking polish, mainstream devices running it were few,
and there weren’t public or visible signs of any forthcoming devices which would challenge the dominance of BlackBerry or iOS, especially from Motorola. A few months later, they launched the Motorola Droid, and a few months after the floodgates opened up - out has poured a steady stream of relatively polished devices running Android 2.x. It’s been breakneck almost, with new flagships every 3 months on average - the latest is Motorola’s Droid X on Verizon - henceforth just 'X.'

HP Confirms Plans for Both Windows and webOS Tablets

HP Confirms Plans for Both Windows and webOS Tablets
Hewlett-Packard will offer a tablet computer with Windows 7 for business and a second tablet with Palm's webOS for a consumer tablet. HP gave no pricing or release dates beyond "fall" for the Windows slate. Despite the dismal showing for webOS in the smartphone market, an analyst said HP will need to figure out how to use it in a tablet.
Hewlett-Packard has confirmed it plans separate tablet computers running Microsoft's Windows and Palm's webOS. HP says it will use Windows for a business device and webOS for a consumer-oriented machine.

Two GeForce GTX 460s Beat One GTX 480?

Two GeForce GTX 460s Beat One GTX 480?

The GeForce GTX 460 has already proven itself an excellent value as a single card, but can two of them offer superior performance at similar cost to Nvidia’s flagship GTX 480? Let's just say that there's a good reason to buy an SLI-compatible motherboard.
Graphics giants Nvidia and AMD continuously run up against the limits of manufacturing technology in their effort to release revolutionary products every eighteen months.

U.S. Orders for Dell Streak Overflow Even Without a Price

U.S. Orders for Dell Streak Overflow Even Without a Price

U.S. pre-orders for the hybrid Dell Streak tablet-smartphone are piling up even without a price or a release date. Already launched in the U.K., Dell said the Dell Streak is its most successful pre-order device. The smaller Android-powered Dell Streak with Adobe Flash support is expected to offer some competition to Apple's popular iPad.