Posts Tagged ‘SSD’
January 11th, 2012 | 
Are Ultrabooks tablet killers? We pose that very question on the cover of this month’s print issue. The debate rages on, but Lenovo is looking to skirt the issue with a newly unveiled offering. Rather than going the Eee Pad Transformer/Slider route and sticking a keyboard on a tablet, Lenovo instead got all bendy and twisty with the IdeaPad YOGA, a touchscreen Ultrabook with a 360 degree hinge on its lid. That little design tweak lets you use the YOGA as a tablet or a notebook. Heck, you can even give it a V-shape, stand it on its end and … [Read More...]
Posted in 
Tags: Stylish, screaming fast, and slim
Samsung is kind of a big deal. In addition to manufacturing everything from tablets to televisions to turbines, the Korean giant is one of the world’s largest producers of DRAM and NAND flash memory, and it has long provided SSDs to OEMs and systems integrators. Samsung entered the retail SSD market in late 2010, with its 470 Series SSD delivering performance on par with the first-gen SandForce drives that owned the top end of the market. It’s now late 2011, and the goalposts have shifted. Samsung’s Series 830 drive boasts a slimmer look, a refreshed … [Read More...]
Intel’s Core i7 2700K processor is new in town and boy does she get around. We mean that in a good way, and it’s totally with the blessing of her folks from Santa Clara who told her, “Hey, you’re unlocked, go have a good time.” The 2700K took those words to heart and, among other places, found herself hanging around Maingear where she’s running laps at 5GHz and beyond.
Maingear tells us they’ve added the 2700K to its Shift and F131 desktop systems. The less expensive F131 starts out at $1,104, or $1,339 with the 2700K option, and includes an … [Read More...]
Let’s cut to the chase here. If you’re pondering buying the Acer Aspire S3, it’s because you desperately want an Apple MacBook Air but are too freaking cheap to pony up the $1,300 (minimum) for the 13-inch model.
The Aspire S3 is a glorious knock-off of the Air — stripped down to the basics and slashed to just $900. Is a 30 percent price cut a compelling enough reason to buy it over its inspiration? That’s debatable, but it’s at least worth a look.
The tale of the tape tells the story the best: The Acer Aspire S3 is almost … [Read More...]
Corsair’s Force GT comes in a bright red chassis, which by Ork logic (in the Warhammer 40K universe) would make it the fastest SSD ever. So is it?
The Force GT consists of a 6Gb/s SATA bus, SF-2281 controller, and 16 64Gb Micron 25nm synchronous NAND modules (as opposed to the eight 128Gb modules on the Patriot Wildfire). This is the same Micron NAND found in the 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G, except that drive had 128Gb modules instead of 64Gb. (Corsair is also shipping the Force 3, which bears the same relationship to the Force GT as OCZ’s … [Read More...]
Do you need gigabytes or performance? Laptop upgrades or a screaming new gaming PC? We walk you through what you need to know to pick the right storage solution for your PC.
Storage. Always needed, often overlooked.
Often lost in the buzz surrounding the latest DirectX 11 GPUs and hexacore CPUs is the ability to actually store and retrieve your stuff. Your applications, games, photographs, digital music and everything else lives on your hard drive. But that boring old rotating magnetic disk just doesn’t seem exciting or high tech – even though the technology in a hard drive is actually … [Read More...]
Storage solutions and HBA (Host Bus Adapter) specialist HighPoint Technologies just let us know about its new RocketU 1144A, which is a four-port USB 3.0 add-in card. That in and of itself isn’t terribly exciting, but it just so happens that this particular model is the industry’s first/only four-port PCI Express Gen 2 x4, 20Gbps USB 3.0 SuperSpeed HBA. That’s right, this thing packs four dedicated USB 3.0 ports, each one capable of a full 5Gbps for 20Gbps total.
“Conventional USB 3.0 HBA’s impose a performance bottleneck on multi-drive configurations, limiting transfer rates to 5Gb/s. Such controllers limit the potential … [Read More...]
We set out to build a Sandy Bridge box that takes up little space in our entertainment center and fulfills all our streaming needs
Back in the August 2010 issue of Maximum PC I built a 3D HTPC that I was pretty damned happy with, but the times have changed. The CableCard quad tuner that was featured prominently in that machine is no longer needed, as I have joined the ranks of the Cable Cutter Movement™. So without the need for a CableCard, I wondered if I could build a rig with all the same capabilities but make it much, … [Read More...]
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Ryan and I are proud to announce the start of a new video series on the Windows Experience Blog, one that we think will be a lot of fun, and really helpful for those of you in the market for a new PC. Called “Ben and Ryan Explain”, the series will explain the technology that powers today’s computers in plain English and demonstrate what it can do in ways that anyone, even someone who’s brand new to computers, can understand. Basically, our goal is to arm you with as much knowledge as possible about the tech inside your computer … [Read More...]
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