Thread: Anandtech News

The march of progress is inevitable, with faster computers constantly replacing last year's top performing parts. Clevo is a company with a heavy focus on Desktop Replacement (DTR) notebooks, often at the forefront of the latest performance enhancing parts. AVADirect is one of a few vendors that sells Clevo notebooks, letting customers choose the various components. In the past, Clevo has had notebooks with desktop CPUs and a reasonably fast mobile GPU, or mobile CPUs with two GPUs; the X7200 combines the two and offers up to hex-core i7-980X CPU support with GTX 480M SLI graphics to provide what is easily the fastest notebook we've ever tested--with a "UPS battery" to match.

Given the high-end nature of the CPU and GPU options, we asked AVADirect to send us a no-holds-barred system for testing, and that's exactly what we got. Take Intel's fastest i7-980X CPU and add in 480M SLI with a couple of SSDs in RAID 0, and watch the mobile benchmark records topple one by one. If you want the (currently) fastest notebook on the block and are willing to pay the piper, meet the latest heavyweight champion of the world. We’ve got one of the very first review units to hit the streets, and we’re going to see what this bad boy can do. Ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to rummmmble!



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For months SandForce has been telling me that the market is really going to get exciting once its next-generation controller is ready. I didn’t really believe it, simply because that’s what every company tells me. But in this case, at least based on what SandForce showed me, I probably should have.

What we have today are the official specs of the second-generation SandForce SSDs, the SF-2000 series. Drives will be sampling to enterprise customers in the coming weeks, but we probably won’t see shipping hardware until Q1 2011 if everything goes according to plan. And the specs are astounding.

Read on for our analysis.



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T-Mobile’s G2, the long awaited successor to the G1, is finally here. This is a pretty big launch for T-Mobile, probably the biggest since the original G1. The G2 is really the first high end HTC device hitting an American GSM network since the Nexus One, so it’s a pretty big deal (the HD2, in its blaze of WM 6.5 glory, doesn’t count). The G2 is basically the European-market HTC Desire Z, except with twice the internal NAND and a stock version of Froyo instead of the Sense UI-infused build running on the Desire. We got ours last night, and we can now bring you some preliminary impressions and benchmarks.



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Today we’re wrapping up our coverage of last month’s NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, including the show’s exhibit hall. We came to GTC to get a better grasp on just where things are for NVIDIA still-fledging GPU compute efforts along with the wider industry as a whole, and we didn’t leave disappointed. Besides seeing some interesting demos – including the closest thing you’ll see to a holodeck in 2010 – we had a chance to Adobe, Microsoft, Cyberlink, and others about where they see GPU computing going in the next couple of years. The GPU-centric future as NVIDIA envisioned it may be taking a bit longer than we hoped, but it looks like we may finally be turning the corner on when GPU computing breaks in to more than just the High Performance Computing space.

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If you’ve got more than one PC in the home, having a network drive to share files, stream media and create backups can make a lot of sense. Seagate released the GoFlex Home series of NAS drives a couple of months ago, aimed at those of us who need copious amounts of storage, easy setup with simple user access and control features. We were sent the the 2TB GoFlex Home, and have had it on a network for a couple of weeks now, finding that there’s plenty to like and also a few things that could be improved...

Click to enlarge

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It’s been 7 months since the launch of the first Fermi cards, and at long last we’re here: we’ve reached the end of the road on the Fermi launch. Today NVIDIA is launching the final GPU in the first-generation Fermi stack into the add-in card market, launching the GeForce GT 430 and the GF108 GPU that powers it. After months of launches and quite a bit of anticipation we have the complete picture of Fermi, from the massive GTX 480 to today’s tiny GT 430.

For the GT 430, NVIDIA is taking an interesting position. AMD and NVIDIA like to talk up their cheaper cards’ capabilities in HTPC environments but this is normally in the guise of an added feature. Rarely do we see a card launched on one or two features and today is one of those launches. NVIDIA believes that they’ve made the ultimate HTPC card, and that’s the line they’re going to be using to sell it; gamers need not apply. So just what is NVIDIA up to, and do they really have the new king of the HTPC cards? Let’s find out.

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There are currently many choices in IP cameras for those looking to monitor their homes and business locations. Today we are looking at an IP PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) camera offering from Compro Technologies, the IP540.

The IP540 aims to provide advanced features geared towards small businesses and technical home users, while still paying close attention to the ease of installation for the end user. Read on to find out about our experience in using the Compro IP540.



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Laptop speakers are pretty notoriously terrible. With the odd exception, very few notebooks have speaker systems that can do any kind of justice to music, movies, or even video games. All of us are aware of it, but how do you fix a problem like that? Logitech seems to think they have a good solution in the form of their Z515 wireless speaker set. At an MSRP of $99 it's not exactly cheap: does Logitech offer enough to part you from a crisp Franklin?

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Apple fans, please forgive me, and feel free to skip this post. I have been testing out a MacBook Pro 13 running Windows 7 and have put it through our entire PC notebook benchmark suite. We were pretty interested to see how the NVIDIA 320M IGP in the MacBook and MacBook Pro 13 fared compared to low end dedicated cards like the G 310M and the HD 4330, and also to see how much the old Core 2 Duo processor hamstrung the MacBook Pro compared to newer and faster PC notebooks. And on a more subjective level, we wanted to see how the latest MacBooks were as BootCamped systems running mostly in Windows. For those willing to fathom the idea of running Windows 7 as the primary operating system on a Mac portable, keep reading to see how the latest MacBook Pro 13 fares as a Windows 7 laptop.



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The cat is out of the bag, so to speak, after today's earnings conference call for AMD. One of the things that ended up being discussed by AMD CEO Dirk Meyer in today's call was the future of AMD's graphics division, where AMD's "second-generation DX11" GPUs were mentioned.

We will be launching our second-generation DX11 graphics offerings next week.

Later on, he also had the following to say about what's launching and what the expected volume is:

We'll be introducing our second-generation of DX11 technology into the market with some launch activities actually next week. We'll be shipping all the family members of that product line I'll call it, by the end of this quarter, and total volume think in terms of several hundred thousand, or hundreds of thousands of units.

No further details were given, so we'll have to see what they're up to next week.



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