From afar, there’s little to distinguish the Antec P280 from such long-in-the-tooth predecessors as Antec’s P183. The steel side panels are all black, without mounting holes for additional fans or windows to provide a look inside. There’s no LED glow, either. The only exterior visual clues that reveal this to be an entirely new chassis are the front-panel connections, including two USB 3.0 connectors with an internal header, which are located above the case’s front door.

The P280's front door doesn't, for once, hide the power and reset switches; Antec's engineers moved them up where they belong.

Remove the sound-dampening … [Read More...]

To be honest, between Z68 this and Sandy Bridge that, we haven’t had much time to check out AMD's latest motherboard offerings.

It’s not that we don’t care; it’s just that the fire is burning on the other side of the fence these days. That’s not to say that the 990X chipset in Asus’s midrange M5A99X Evo is a slouch. As a real AM3+ board, it’s guaranteed to work with the upcoming Bulldozer line of CPUs from AMD. On the other hand, plenty of older 890FX boards will also work fine with Bulldozer, so … [Read More...]

We have a term for technology like Toshiba’s Qosmio F755 laptop. It’s “demo cool.” It wows you in a demo, but after some serious testing, you’re not quite sure you’d want to use it day in and day out. Though we’re impressed by the technical achievement of Toshiba’s glasses-free 3D technology, it’s just not developed enough to earn our recommendation.

Unlike most stereoscopic 3D displays, which require you to wear a pair of 3D glasses, Toshiba’s lenticular display creates a stereoscopic 3D illusion with the naked eye. That illusion did impress us. Watching a 3D Blu-ray … [Read More...]

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...]

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...]

Some would say the NERF Vortex weapons system is a product of the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in 1961. NERF already has a perfectly effective dart-based ammunitions system, but now seems to be forcing a new standard with the introduction of the Vortex line. Vortex blasters employ wafer-like projectiles—"XLR" discs. It's a fine piece of ammo, but it's incompatible with all those N-Strike blasters that are sitting in the munitions depots of nerds worldwide. Is this a craven policy shift designed to migrate everyone to a new ammo standard, rendering … [Read More...]

Any fears we had that the OCZ Vertex 3’s speeds were due solely to some voodoo magic or secret deal with SandForce were unfounded. OWC’s Mercury Extreme Pro 6G—a product name that contains three too many buzzwords—goes toe to toe with the Vertex 3 in nearly every benchmark, and exceeds it in some.

Like the Vertex 3, the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G (and why not tack on “Enhanced Premium Plus” while you’re at it, OWC?) utilizes 256GB of synchronous, 25nm NAND (Micron, in our review unit). As with other SandForce drives, 16GB are reserved for redundancy and overprovisioning; the rated … [Read More...]

The basic idea behind the PopDrive is a good one: a sleek, portable external enclosure that holds two 2.5-inch drives in RAID 1, to protect against the risk of data loss due to drive failure. Add in support for user notification emails, hotswap drive bays, and a relatively speedy 3Gb/s eSATA port, and it sounds like you’ve got yourself a winner. And you might, eventually.

The PopDrive includes a slim, aluminum dual-bay chassis, 5V AC adapter, and USB 2.0 and eSATA ports at the rear of the chassis. If the PopDrive’s 1.2x3.9x6.4-inch aluminum … [Read More...]

It seems like these days it’s just not enough to master the Case-Heatsink-Power supply trifecta of PC parts. In the past couple years we’ve seen Corsair, Cooler Master, and now Thermaltake diversifying their hardware portfolios with gaming mice, keyboards, and headsets. The Thermaltake Shock One is the flagship of the new Tt eSports line of gaming headsets, and we got a chance to take it for a spin.

The Shock One is, first and foremost, a well-built headset. None of the materials—from the plastic mesh on the earcups to the cushy … [Read More...]

We’re no fan of the console-ification of PC gaming, either, but you’ve got to admit, Microsoft has had the gamepad market locked since it introduced the USB Xbox 360 controller more than five years ago. In that respect, it’s not really surprising that the first real challenger to Microsoft’s super-solid wired controller is, itself, an Xbox 360 controller: the Razer Onza.

The Onza was first revealed more than a year ago at CES 2010, so consumers have had a lot of time to ask questions like, “Is Razer really going to … [Read More...]

What you do alone in your man cave is your business. If you want to put on a pair of 3D glasses and practice the Na’vi language, more power to you. Sony’s F Series Vaio 3D can make that dream a reality in style, but it lacks the graphics power to deliver first-class stereoscopic 3D gaming.

If you’re not piloting the Mars Rover or doing endoscopic telesurgery, you probably want stereoscopic 3D technology for two main purposes: watching movies and playing games. Now that 3D TVs are becoming widespread, there are lots of … [Read More...]

We’re not living so close to the cutting edge here at Maximum PC that we can’t see the utility of a no-frills, budget portable that’s capable of performing all the common day-to-day computing tasks. Whether it serves as a secondary machine for work on-the-go or as a primary PC for a school-age kid, we get it. It’s the same need that netbooks were meant to fulfill, if only they hadn’t fallen short of the mark. What netbooks taught us is that today’s common computing tasks—which include things like gaming and high-def video playback—require more … [Read More...]