Thread: Anandtech News

Just 9 months ago, almost 1500 out of a total of 3146 readers (46%) told us in a poll that they feel that "Cloud Computing is hot air, it will blow over". And that is understandable given the confusing buzz surrounding the "Cloud".

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Don't worry, this article is not about philosophizing about the "Cloud Computing" hype. That is definitely not the Anandtech way. We will focus on the infrastructure part, the part that we know best. We visited VMworld Europe 2010 in Kopenhagen just a few days ago. Talking to a lot of different vendors in a few days made the light shine brighter through the clouds. Think Cloud Computing is crazy rambling? Meet the hybrid cloud with VM teleportation, extremely stretched virtual networks and unified communications...

But we should not forget that most Anandtech readers are still hardware enthusiasts. Why should you care about "fluffy" cloud computing? Let us give you a crash course before we dive into the underlying technology.



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We happen to have the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 in-house for testing at the moment. We wanted to play Show & Tell, but the nice people from AMD’s Legal Department say that we’re not allowed to tell you anything about these cards quite yet. But they are letting us go ahead and show you the cards, and as an added bonus they're also allowing us to show you pictures of AMD's Llano Fusion APU in action. So without further ado:

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Zotac has become quite popular in recent times for their entry level products in the mini-ITX motherboard, Atom / ION nettop and nVidia GPU space. Their mini-PC lineup started with the Zotac MAG series last year, and this year's refresh comes in the form of the ZBOX.

Zotac sent us their highest end model in the ZBOX lineup, the Zbox HD-ID34. Its specifications satisfy the requirements of an entry level Blu-Ray playing HTPC, but how does it really fare? Read on to find out our impressions after putting this HTPC through the paces.



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Two months ago I looked at the world’s first 3TB desktop hard drive. It was a 5 platter, 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT inside an external GoFlex Desk chassis. The performance of the drive wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but the poorly ventilated chassis seemed ill equipped to deal with the thermal load a 5-platter, 7200RPM 3TB drive would throw at it. I wasn’t terribly pleased and I wondered if Western Digital’s external enclosure might be better suited for heat dissipation. WD’s 3.5” external drives fall under the My Book brand and they have visibly more ventilation than the GoFlex Desk I reviewed.

As luck would have it, last week Western Digital announced its own 3TB external drive: the My Book Essential. The Essential suffix somehow implies USB 3.0 support.

Today, Western Digital takes it one step further and announces availability of the internal drive as well. The Caviar Green line is now home to a 2.5TB and a 3.0TB model, priced at $189 and $239 respectively.

Let’s go ahead and review both shall we?



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Seasonic has a well-deserved reputation for building quality power supplies, with semi-passive cooling models delivering near-silent operation. Now they're launching their first fanless series, the "X-series Fanless", for users that want absolute silence rather than nearly-silent operation. Like the previous high-end Seasonic X-series offerings, the new generation is 80 Plus Gold certified. As for the fanless part, you'll want to be careful if you try for a complete silent (i.e. fanless) PC—it's one thing to have a fanless PSU when there are case and CPU fans to compensate, but entirely fanless systems will need some big heatsinks and an open chassis if you want reasonable performance (i.e. not Atom). Today, we have the X-460FL on our test bench; join us for a look at Seasonic's latest and most efficient topology to date, and let's see if a fanless PSU actually means a silent PSU or not.



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It took Microsoft a long time, but it’s finally here - Windows Phone 7 (now sans the ‘Series’). It’s the software giant’s spiritual successor to Windows Mobile, its answer to iOS and Android, and Redmond’s chance to once again vie for a piece of the smartphone market.

We’ve been following Windows Phone 7 closely since its inception, fleshing out at MIX 10, and carry through to its official debut earlier this month. Now it’s finally time to really see what Windows Phone 7 has in store, and what Microsoft’s vision for the future of handheld computing really looks like. The competition is fierce and getting fiercer, and Microsoft already had one false start with its ill-fated KIN series of devices. We’ve been playing with three Windows Phone 7 devices - the HTC Surround, Samsung Focus, and LG Quantum 7, and thus far WP7 looks like it’s headed for success.



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Dell's first XPS system debuted way back in 1993, with the first XPS laptops coming a decade later. The past several years have been quiet on the XPS front, while Dell pushed their Alienware brand into the high performance segment. Now, Dell is ready to relaunch the XPS brand with several new high performance laptops designed to compete in the "premium laptop" market, going toe-to-toe with the likes of HP's Envy and the various MacBook Pros.

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After announcing it earlier this year, NVIDIA has finally released their 3DTV Play software add-on for 3D TV owners. 3DTV Play enables consumers to take full advantage of the HDMI 1.4a port on their 4xx GPUs / 3D Vision GPUs by enabling 3D over HDMI, allowing 3D TV owners to fully utilize NVIDIA's 3D VIsion technology, after previously being limited to just Blu-Ray 3D.

Till now, the 3D PC experience had been restricted to NVIDIA 3D Vision capable monitors with specialized glasses. 3DTV Play now shifts this experience to the big screen. Read on to find out more about 3DTV Play.



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All things considered, the Radeon HD 5000 series has gone very well for AMD. When they launched it just over a year ago, they beat NVIDIA to the punch by nearly 6 months and enjoyed a solid term as the kings of the GPU world, with halo parts like the 5870 and 5970 giving them renewed exposure at the high-end of the market while mainstream products like the 5670 redefining the HTPC. Ultimately all good things come to an end though, and as NVIDIA has launched the GeForce 400 series AMD has needed to give up the single-GPU halo and lower prices in order to remain competitive.

But if spring is a period of renewal for NVIDIA, then it’s fall that’s AMD’s chance for renewal. Long before Cypress and the 5000 series even launched, AMD’s engineers had been hard at work at what would follow Cypress. Now a year after Cypress we get to meet the first GPU of the next Radeon family: Barts. With it comes the Radeon HD 6800 series, the culmination of what AMD has learned since designing and launching the 5800 series. AMD may not have a new process to produce chips on this year, but as we’ll see they definitely haven’t run out of ideas or ways to improve their efficiency on the 40nm process.

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Last night we published our Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 review. In it we made a decision to include a factory overclocked GeForce GTX 460 from EVGA (the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW). For those who aren't aware, NVIDIA has allowed a number of its partners to ship GTX 460s at higher than stock clock speeds. A practice that has been done in the past. The cards are available in retail with full warranties.

A number of you responded in the comments to the article very upset that we included the EVGA card. Even going as far to accuse us of caving to NVIDIA's pressure and demands. Ryan and I both felt it was necessary to address this front and center rather than keep the discussion in the comments.



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