Thread: Anandtech News

Earlier this year OCZ announced its intention to bring a new high speed SSD interface to the market. Frustrated with the slow progress of SATA interface speeds, OCZ wanted to introduce an interface that would allow greater performance scaling today. Dubbed the High Speed Data Link (HSDL), OCZ’s new interface delivers 2 - 4GB/s (that’s right, gigabytes) of bi-directional bandwidth to a single SSD. It’s an absolutely absurd amount of bandwidth, definitely more than a single controller can feed today - which is why the first SSD to support it will be a multi-controller device with internal RAID.

Instead of relying on a SATA controller on your motherboard, HSDL SSDs feature a 4-lane PCIe SATA controller on the drive itself. HSDL is essentially a PCIe cable standard that uses a standard SAS cable to carry a 4 PCIe lanes between a SSD and your motherboard. On the system side you’ll just need a dumb card with some amount of logic to grab the cable and fan the signals out to a PCIe slot.

The first SSD to use HDSL is the OCZ IBIS. As the spiritual successor to the Colossus, the IBIS incorporates four SandForce SF-1200 controllers in a single 3.5” chassis. And it's fast. We've measured speeds at up to 800MB/s for a single IBIS and OCZ wants to eventually enable configurations of four IBIS drives. Read on for our full review of the IBIS drive and its technology.



More...

With Intel’s new socket 1155 and Sandy Bridge archtecture nearly upon us, it was only a matter of time before motherboard vendors started to release promotional shots of their offerings. We saw a few pre-production boards at Computex, enough to wet the appetite, but nothing set in stone. Now however, some high-resolution images of final production boards have fallen into our lap in the the form of their TP67XE and TH67HE offerings.





More...

A couple of months ago we ran a webcast with Intel Fellow, Rich Uhlig, VMware Chief Platform Architect, Rich Brunner and myself. The goal was to talk about the past, present and future of virtualization. In preparation for the webcast we solicited questions from all of you, unfortunately we only had an hour during the webcast to address them. Rich Uhlig from Intel, Rich Brunner from VMware and our own Johan de Gelas all agreed to answer some of your questions in a 6 part series we're calling Ask the Experts. Each week we'll showcase three questions you guys asked about virtualization and provide answers from our panel of three experts. These responses haven't been edited and come straight from the experts.

Read on for the latest installation of Ask the Experts.



More...

The past few weeks have been ridiculously busy with the prep for IDF, covering the show itself, a couple of very important meetings afterwards and cranking through the backlog upon my return. I'll spare you the excuses because at long last I've got the announcement for the two winners of our Radeon HD 5770 giveaway: ALoserIsYou and tester42. You should both have an email from me, respond so I can get your prizes out to you :)

The giveaways are far from over, let's give away a motherboard shall we? And not just any motherboard, an AMD motherboard with the 890GX chipset. ASRock was kind enough to send its 890GX Extreme3 for our anniversary giveaways:

Read on for entry instructions.



More...

Honestly, Roku's price drop and yesterday's announcement of Hulu Plus coming to the platform probably stole much if any remaining thunder from the imminent arrival of the new Apple TV. While we'll still give the Apple TV a thorough treatment, it's still clearly a very niche product from Apple (until it gets jailbroken, then all bets are off). It's one of the easiest devices to test simply because it doesn't work with the vast majority of downloadable video content. We can't even run our media streamer test suite on the device since it doesn't support streaming anything outside of iTunes.

To tide you over until our review is done however we've got a full gallery of the new Apple TV dissected. There aren't many surprises installed. The thing is tiny, there are no fans and the entire chassis is used as a heatsink. Apple makes liberal use of thermal conductive pads within the device.

The new ATV does use the A4, but the markings on the chip in my unit are very feint so I couldn't tell how much memory was integrated onto the package. There don't seem to be many other surprises inside, the new Apple TV is a $99 iPod Touch without the display and speaker/mic. The real potential for this platform (much like its predecessor) is realized if/when it's hacked. Until then it'll be a tough sell for many.

Check out the gallery!



More...

Less than six months ago, the ASUS U30Jc ultraportable walked away with a Bronze Editor's Choice award. The combination of portability, performance, and price made the U30Jc a favorite around here. A couple months back, we looked at the bamboo covered U33Jc, with USB 3.0 and Intel WiDi; Vivek loved the bamboo finish, but he's a sucker for fashion statements. Now ASUS is back with a slimmer, lighter version of the U30Jc and no bamboo. Is the U35Jc a worthy upgrade, or did ASUS misfire with their new ultraportable?

More...

Antec EarthWatts EA 380D Green 380W

Antec sent us their entry-level model EarthWatts Green PSU rated at 380W. Billed as an eco-friendly alternative to the usual budget PSUs, Antec boasts about the reduced energy costs associated with the high efficiency design. Given the eco emphasis, we'll examine how the PSU does in those areas along with the usual tests. Is this green power supply a good option for the envronmentally conscious users--or simply those who don't need a large 700W or larger PSU? Read on to find out!



More...

ASRock is one of the companies held in high esteem by everyone here at AnandTech. We have been reviewing their HTPC offerings since they first came out their Ion based HTPC last year. After starting out at the low end, they soon moved up to place mid-range products aimed at the mainstream consumer with the Core 100 series. The Core 100 HT-BD received a very good review from us, and when ASRock informed us about their high-end offering in the Vision 3D, we were quite excited.


When a company is confident enough to send across an engineering sample prior to sending across the production review unit, it is quite clear that they are extremely proud of their product and its features. We have been playing with the Vision 3D for close to a month now (first with the engineering sample, and then with the review unit). Read on to find out more about the Vision 3D and how it performs.



More...

The new Apple TV is a lot like the old Apple TV, at least functionally. You get the same limitations and the same plays-well-with-others* behavior (if by others you mean Apple products and iTunes). Technically, the new Apple TV is a significant improvement over the original - it doesn’t get stupidly hot, it’s very compact and it’s a lot cheaper.

But Apple has to compete with more than itself in this field. The Boxee Box and Google TV are both due to arrive later this year. Not to mention the many other devices that already do much of what Apple promises with the new ATV.

Read on for our full review of the Apple TV.



More...