Thread: Anandtech News

Up to this point, our experiences with AMD's Phenom II mobile line haven't been very favorable. In the desktop world AMD's chips can compete and succeed based on price, but in notebooks thermal properties get added to the mix. Intel's been very aggressive about controlling the mobile market, but is AMD's "we'll sell you more cores for less" strategy going to translate well? On hand is the ASUS X72D, an entry-level desktop replacement notebook designed for media enthusiasts. Is a triple-core mobile AMD chip paired with budget Mobility Radeon graphics and a Blu-ray drive enough?

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Western Digital has become a noted player in the media streamer market over the last two years. Instead of resting on the laurels received for the WDTV, they have continued to introduce new products periodically. Their flagship product lineup started with the WDTV. Introduced in November 2008, it used Sigma Designs 8635. The second generation (2G) product (WDTV Live) added a 100 Mbps wired ethernet port. It used the next generation Sigma chipset, SMP 8655. By then, Netflix became an indispensable requirement for media streamers in the US market. This led WD to introduce the WDTV Live Plus, a 2.5G product which used the Macrovision enabled SMP 8654. Today, Western Digital is introducing their 3G flagship product, the WDTV Live Hub.

We were fortunate enough to gain early access to the WDTV Live Hub (only after it was leaked in Canada by Best Buy, though). WD claims that the 3G product takes all the features from their previous flagship products, and adds a host of attractive features at a price point of just US $199.99. How effective are these new features, and more importantly, are they worth the additional cost? Read on for our review of the WDTV Live Hub.



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Last week Apple introduced its first significant upgrade to the MacBook Air since it was introduced two years ago. The announcement was met with the arrival of a new form factor for Apple: the 11.6-inch MacBook Air starting at just $999. The 13.3-inch model got an update and a price drop as well. It starts at $1299.

The hardware has both remained the same and changed significantly. The CPUs are mostly unchanged in terms of specs, but differ wildly in performance. The GPU is much faster and the battery life is improved. Weight is down, the chassis loses some features and gains others.

There's a lot to talk about, so read on for our full review of these two notebooks.



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I realize I've been very slow with these. My travel schedule as returned to unexpectedly ridiculous once again. You've been seeing the results of those travels on the site, most recenty with the Windows Phone 7 coverage. There are a few more exciting trips left in the year for me so I appreciate your patience as always.

Last month we held a giveaway for an ASRock 890GX Extreme 3. The winner? MUluke. Respond to my email to claim your prize :)

Today's giveaway is going to be a media streaming box we reviewed not too long ago: Patriot's Box Office. The full spec sheet is here. Patriot was kind enough to even throw in a WiFi adapter with the Box Office.

Read on for entry instructions!



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A couple of months ago we shared with you the CPUs that are going into our new server farm. We've actually started physically installing the machines (hence the brief outage over the weekend) so it's time to share another piece of the server puzzle.

The final configuration we decided on was 12 machines. This is a significant reduction of the number of systems we have installed (currently nearly 30) but the performance per box is much higher, allowing for consolidation through virtualization.

We are building two private clouds: a lighter cloud of 8 machines for our application serving needs (including some redundancy in the cloud), and a 4 machine DB cloud to handle the heavier IO. We'll dive into our infrastructure design in the later, full article but for now let's talk about memory.

The application server cloud is light on memory. Each system in this cloud has 12GB of memory (6 x 2 DDR3-1333 DIMMs). The DB server cloud on the other hand has 48GB of memory per box (12 x 4GB DDR3-1333 DIMMs).

Kingston was nice enough to supply the memory for our project with. The 96 sticks of memory were broken down into 48 x KVR1333D3D4R9S/4GI and 48 x KVR1333D3D8R9S/2GI. If you want to see what 288GB of memory looks like, check out the gallery below.

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Note that for all of the components we selected for this project, we decided upon the components first and then petitioned the manufacturers second. The stipulation was that the AnandTech server farm would be a publicly visible test bed. Any failures of the hardware are public failures and would obviously reflect poorly on the manufacturer. For CPUs and memory it's not so big of a deal - physical failures there are fairly rare, but for SSDs this provided an interesting challenge. More on that in our next installment.



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"You get what you pay for!" Is this maxim realy true? On the one hand there are more than enough expensive PSUs with high ripple and noise results with a noisy fan thrown in as well; on the other hand, you can't get the best capacitors without paying a premium. So let's see how three different 550W power supplies compare, particularly in light of their pricing. There's quite a spread here in terms of cost; how much PSU can you get for your dollar?



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Intel's been making a decent amount of noise with their Intel Wireless Display, or "WiDi" technology, something our own Vivek Gowri is a big proponent of. But WiDi has limits, specifically 720p resolutions and Intel HD graphics. Now ASUS brings another solution to the table, the WiCast, which can be connected to any computer and any television and promises latency-free 1080p video and audio. That's no small promise, and the big question is: just how well does it work?

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The original ASUS G73Jh was an instant classic: a great performer with a good screen, build quality and cooling at an amazing price. Six months later, ASUS is coming out with a “new and improved” version with a few updates to make things interesting. Most of the upgrades are straightforward but sensible: the i7-720QM has been replaced with the new i7-740QM and USB 3.0 support is now part of the package. The far more controversial changes come courtesy of the GPU: AMD’s HD 5870 is out and NVIDIA’s GTX 460M is in, which also means HDMI 1.4 is now included. While the HDMI update is nice (but mostly useful if you want 120Hz 3D output), the GPU performance is a tougher call. Is this a better overall notebook or mostly a lateral move? That’s what we’re here to find out.

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At the risk of sounding like a puff piece and marketing drivel, Corsair has been essentially synonymous with quality hardware for a while now. If you were having trouble with cheaper RAM and just wanted to save yourself a headache, or if you wanted kit that you could push as hard as your wallet would allow, you'd buy Corsair. When Corsair jumped into the power supply market, there was another big splash. Cases? The Obsidian series isn't cheap but it's reviewed well the world over. So now what are we to make of Corsair's first stab into the consumer audio world, the HS1 gaming headset?

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Over the summer we previewed OCZ's first affordable PCIe SSD: the RevoDrive. Made of a pair of SandForce SF-1200 controllers behind a PCI-X RAID controller and a PCI-X to PCIe bridge, the RevoDrive performed well and ended up being only slightly more expensive than a pair of SF-1200 SSDs.

The original RevoDrive had an expansion connector on it that was never used. That's where the RevoDrive x2 comes in. You get twice the number of controllers, making the x2 identical in performance to OCZ's recently announced IBIS drive. But without the HSDL interface. Read on for our quick look at OCZ's latest PCIe SSD.



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