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To call HP’s 2560p an “ultraportable” is pushing it. It has a slightly smaller footprint than the Toshiba R830, with a screen size of 12.5 inches, but it’s heavier by more than a pound. With its power brick, you’re looking at more than five pounds, including a battery that protrudes a full inch from the back of the notebook’s body. This is no dainty package.

Of course, it feels like a machine that can take its licks. HP likes to point out that the notebook is designed and tested to meet Mil-Spec standards for drops, temperature shock, and altitude changes, … [Read More...]

Fast, frantic, fun…forgettable?

Before Rage was released there were a lot of unanswered questions floating around. Could Id make another genre-defining shooter? Would the six-plus years of development and the much-touted Id Tech 5 engine yield a sufficiently impressive result? While these are certainly appropriate questions for both reviewers and gamers to be curious about, we found ourselves haunted by another, seemingly trivial, question: What does the title Rage mean? Only after playing completely through could we truly understand.

Rage pulls off an impressive feat: It manages to have a lot of personality despite having minimal character. While you may … [Read More...]

A barely there home-theater PC

PCs make great Blu-ray players, but Acer’s Revo RL100-UR20P is the first Blu-ray-equipped PC we’ve seen that’s thinner and smaller than most purpose-built Blu-ray players. If it played high-definition audio discs such as SACD and DVD-Audio, it would be one of the most powerful Blu-ray players on the market, but this machine isn’t that ambitious.

It is, on the other hand, considerably less expensive than very high-end Blu-ray players that are capable of playing those high-definition audio formats. The Oppo BDP-95, for example, sells for $999 and is almost never discounted.

Acer’s Revo RL100-UR20P is … [Read More...]

Absurd speed—for an absurd price

OCZ just keeps pushing the envelope on its PCI Express SSDs. The first RevoDrive contained two 60GB SF-1200-powered SSDs in RAID 0, with a Silicon Image PCI-to-SATA controller. The RevoDrive X2 kept the same architecture, but added a second PCB with two additional controllers and two more 60GB sets of NAND. OCZ’s RevoDrive3 X2 updates the platform to second-generation SandForce, but the new SSD controller isn’t the only change.

The OCZ RevoDrive3 X2 contains four second-gen SandForce SF-2281 solid-state drive controllers, each with 16 8GB Micron 25nm asynchronous NAND modules. The RevoDrive3 X2 is, then, … [Read More...]

The Portégé puts the third accent on battery life

There was a time when Toshiba’s line of Portégé business ultraportables was the epitome of sleek utility, particularly in the days of the R500 and R600. Samsung stole some of that show when it released the Series 9 (reviewed here)—the closest a PC has come to a MacBook Air to date. But while the Portégé R830, much like the R700 before it, won’t win any design contests, it offers many useful amenities in a very-portable package.

Costing exactly the same as the Series 9, the 13.3-inch R830 trumps that fancy lad … [Read More...]

Two GTX 580s, one gargantuan videocard

Imagine a graphics card weighing 5.25 pounds with three (yes, three) 8-pin PCI Express power connectors. Now imagine this card taking up three PCI Express slots and almost sucking the life out of an 850W power supply.

That may be one reason Asus named this card after the Roman god of war. It’s probably the most powerful single graphics card we’ve tested, but that power comes at a substantial cost. You’ll need the right type of motherboard and case, too—one where you can install a three-slot-wide card that’s 12.25 inches long and 5 inches … [Read More...]

At long last, a router to get excited about

It’s easy to become jaded when you review as much cutting-edge hardware as we do. We try not to be curmudgeons, but we do get grumpy when next-gen hardware fails to make a leap in performance—or worse, when it falls behind the gear it’s intended to supplant. So we’re happy to report that benchmarking Netgear’s new WNDR4500 left us grinning from ear to ear. This is the fastest router we’ve ever tested, and it’s packed with new features.

Netgear continues to brand its wireless routers with two different model numbers. The … [Read More...]

The Blackberry Playbook is the red-headed stepchild of the tablet world. Since being revealed this past year, just about everyone’s taken a swing at it: Pundits dug it’s hearty hardware specs, but decried the device’s lack of native email or calendar functionality. Consumers loyal to the Blackberry name felt compelled to purchase the tablet based on the love they had for their Canadian built handsets, but quickly found the apps on offer in Blackberry App World to be few, with many of the available titles of embarrassingly poor quality. In the face of shrinking profit margins and angry device owners … [Read More...]

Belkin’s N750 DB offers a better-than-average feature set, but the router’s performance is a mixed bag. At most of our test stations, it delivered very good performance from its 5GHz radio but mediocre throughput from its 2.4GHz radio. Belkin arrives at the N750 model number by adding the 300Mb/s theoretical throughput on its 2.4GHz radio to the 450Mb/s theoretical throughput of its 5GHz radio. This is nonsense, of course, because you can’t bond the two together to achieve throughput that even approaches 750Mb/s.

The features include dual USB 2.0 ports to enable network sharing of both a printer and attached … [Read More...]

Literally the coolest case we’ve tested this year

Like the God of Thunder for which it is named, Rosewill’s Thor is a mighty full-tower chassis, with phenomenal cooling capabilities and enough power to smite the competition.

The Thor is a steel chassis with plastic trim along the sides of the front and top of the chassis. The front fan filter and optical drive bezels are black mesh, and the top of the case includes plastic vent fins that can be opened and closed using a sliding mechanism. If that seems familiar, Alienware offered a similar, though powered, venting system on … [Read More...]

Get Gaming on an HTPC

I don’t want to watch cable TV. I don’t want to use a controller. I just want to watch 3D Blu-rays and frag people with a mouse and keyboard, all on a box that fits on my entertainment center. Is that too much to ask?

We’ve built our fair share of home theater PCs in the past, with all sorts of different use cases in mind. Our August 2010 HTPC was a stunner built for 3D, with passively cooled GPU, CPU, and PSU, as well as a four-channel CableCard tuner and Blu-ray 3D support. In … [Read More...]

Creative hedges its bets

Is Creative buying into the notion of the post-PC world? The Sound Blaster Recon3D is a powerful USB audio device based on Creative’s all-new Sound Core3D chip. But you can also connect the Recon3D to an Xbox 360, PS3, or even an Intel-based Mac. Creative tells us the Sound Core3D doesn’t boast the naked power of the company’s previous-generation audio processor, but that it is extremely efficient—it draws all the power it needs from a single USB port.

The Recon3D has an optical S/PDIF input, a 1/8-inch audio output to drive a pair of speakers or … [Read More...]

Three platters, three terabytes

Since time began, man has looked at four- and five-platter 3TB hard drives and dared to say, “That’s cool, but when will we get hard drives with one terabyte per platter?” Man is impossible to please. Nevertheless, drive makers have cracked the 1TB-per-platter limit, and this year we’ll see 4- and 5TB drives, and even one-platter 1TB drives. The first 1TB/platter drive to cross our bench, though, is Seagate’s new 3TB Barracuda.

This is the first from Seagate’s simplified consumer 3.5-inch drive lineup. The LP and XT brands, for “green” and “enthusiast,” respectively, are gone. In fact, … [Read More...]

Dolphin Browser HD is one of the most popular alternative browsers on Android, which is why the latest news on that front is so disconcerting. According to an exhaustive investigation by Android Police, Dolphin HD is sending all user URLs in plain text to a Dolphin webserver. The goal is to match URLs to a webzine whitelist service that Dolphin then provides to users, but as Android Police said, this is “an amateur solution.” 

It appears that any URL, be it secured or not is sent with no security whatsoever. For its part, Dolphin says that the data is not … [Read More...]

In Washington today, someone got something done. If that was not shocking enough, it was the FCC. We can wait while you compose yourself. The FCC voted unanimously today to re-purpose the universal service program, which was used to get phone service to rural Americans. The fun will now be used to deliver broadband internet access to the most remote areas of the nation. 

The new rules will expand broadband by shifting the $4.5 billion dollar fund from subsidizing phone service to pay for the deployment and service costs associated with rural broadband. The FCC has also mandated changes to … [Read More...]

Google announced last May that it intended to begin adding business interiors to Google Maps Street View. Now the first test images are rolling out. Users browsing maps will be invited into shops and offices that make use of the same 360-degree panning view that we’re used to with street view. Considering the very different nature of the content, Google has changed the way they acquire these images.

If a business owner is interested in having their interior added to Google Maps, they have to fill out an application online. Google will then contact the applicant to set up a … [Read More...]

Yes, yes, this was inevitable, but usually there’s rhyme or reason to these things. Or somebody starts a nice little leak in the rumor mill’s engines, and it’s all old news by the time it’s actually “official.” Or there’s a convention (think E3 or GDC) coming up. Or something! Rockstar, though, merely plastered its website the GTA V logo, promised that a trailer’s going for a nice little rampage on November 2, and then quietly strode away while everybody scratched their heads. Meanwhile, Kotaku’s now rumoring that it’ll be set in LA. Which sounds nice enough, but why not try … [Read More...]

When it comes to protecting the data on your computer, you can’t do better than strong encryption. Properly encrypted, your files are safe even if a ne’er-do-well gains access to your computer, either physically or through a network. In the past, we’ve discussed how to use various encryption tools to encrypt individual files or create virtual, encrypted drives. Now, we’ll look at how to get maximum security by encrypting your boot disk using the BitLocker full-drive encryption system that’s built into Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise.

Step 1: Assess Your System

Ideally, you have a motherboard with a Trusted Platform … [Read More...]