Thread: Anandtech News

A couple of weeks ago we looked at Apple's new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs. We came away happy with the upgrades, however a little disappointed at the performance of the 11-inch system. Today we take a look at what $400 in upgrades will get you. Is it enough to make the 11-inch MBA more of a workhorse? Read on to find out.

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With an all-custom launch for the Radeon HD 6850, the door was immediately opened to a variety of 6850 cards with a wide variety of performance characteristics. In fact you won't even find the reference design for sale in North America, making it all the more important to look at custom cards. As such We have wasted no time in collecting a few cards to see what they’re capable of, and today we'll be looking at those results. After all we’ve seen what the reference card can do, but how about the cards you can actually buy? And how about overclocking, do the latest 6850 cards continue the tradition of the *850 being strong overclockers? Today we’re going to answer all of that and more.

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Back in March 2010, Intel announced an Atom based platform optimized for storage applications. Using either a D410 or the dual core D510, paired with an Intel 82801IR I/O controller, it was touted by Intel to have been picked up by various NAS vendors such as LaCie, LG, QNAP, Synology and Thecus. We have had the LaCie 5big storage server in our labs for the last few weeks. Aimed at the needs of small businesses, the server brings in a wealth of features thanks to the Windows Storage Server 2008 platform on which the NAS runs.

Read on for our review of the LaCie 5big storage server, and to identify whether it would be a good solution for the storage needs of your small business.



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I hate to keep things from you all, but last week I was diligently working in a room at AMD’s new campus in Austin, Texas. You see, AMD wanted to give us more time with the Brazos/Zacate platform we tested at IDF ahead of its official launch. It’s too early for production worthy OEM systems and AMD wasn’t too keen on these reference platforms leaving its offices so it did the next best thing: fly us out to test the systems on AMD’s campus.

The rules were simple. We couldn’t run anything that would harm the system, but other than that we were free to bring whatever we wanted and test however we wanted. AMD dropped by our private room to check to see if we needed anything but other than that, it was all hands off.

The Brazos test platform

While I’d love to share performance data with you today, I can’t. You’ll have to wait another week or so for that. What AMD is allowing us to talk about are the specific configurations AMD’s first Fusion APUs will ship in and general impressions from the testing.

Read on!



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There's little doubt in our minds that the GF100/GTX 480 launch wasn't quite what NVIDIA was hoping for. It did end up being the fastest single GPU card on the market, but when it came to heat and noise it didn't fare so well. What could have been an amazing card became a reasonable card, but a card with caveats.

But they say time heals all wounds. With GF100 out the door NVIDIA has had a chance to examine their design, and TSMC the chance to work the last kinks out of their 40nm process. GF100 was the first Fermi chip, and it would not be the last. With a lesson in hand and a plan in mind, NVIDIA went back to the drawing board to fix and enhance GF100. The end result: GF110, the next iteration of Fermi. Hot out of the oven, it is launching first in the consumer space and the first card to get it is the first card in NVIDIA’s next GeForce series: the GeForce 500 series being launched today by the GF110-powered GeForce GTX 580.

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As we discussed a couple weeks back, Dell has relaunched their XPS brand for laptops, with a focus on quality and "mainstream performance". The latter means that unlike previous XPS laptops, you won't find the highest performing GPUs in the new models—Dell will continue to serve the needs of mobile gamers with the Alienware brand. The former is the more interesting aspect, as Dell's XPS laptops will have better build quality and improved LCD panels. Dell sent us their new L501x, the 15.6" chassis with NVIDIA's Optimus Technology and a new GeForce 420M GPU (our first look at the mainstream 400M parts!), and they included the upgraded 1080p B+GR LCD panel. Read on to find out just how good the new XPS is, and whether it's worth the price of admission.

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Picking up immediately from where we left off yesterday with our review of NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 580, we have a second GTX 580 in house courtesy of Asus, who sent over their ENGTX580. With our second GTX 580 in hand we’re taking a look at GTX 580 SLI performance and more; we’ll also be taking a look at voltage/power consumption relationship on the GTX 580, and clock-normalized benchmarking to see just how much of GTX 580’s improved performance is due to architecture and additional SMs, and how much is due to the clockspeed advantage.

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I'm not sure what it is about SSD manufacturers and overly complicated product stacks. Kingston has no less than six different SSD brands in its lineup. The E Series, M Series, SSDNow V 100, SSDNow V+ 100, SSDNow V+ 100E and SSDNow V+ 180. The E and M series are just rebranded Intel drives, these use Intel's X25-E and X25-M G2 controllers respectively with Kingston logo on the enclosure. The SSDNow V 100 is an update to the SSDNow V Series drives, both of which use the JMicron JMF618 controller. Don't get this confused with the 30GB SSDNow V Series Boot Drive which actually uses a Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller, also used in the SSDNow V+. Confused yet? It gets better.

The standard V+ is gone and replaced by the new V+ 100, which is what we're here to take a look at today. This drive uses the T6UG1XBG controller but with updated firmware. The new firmware enables two things: very aggressive OS-independent garbage collection and higher overall performance. The former is very important as this is the same controller used in Apple's new MacBook Air. In fact, the performance of the Kingston V+100 drive mimics that of Apple's new SSDs.

Read on for our full review.



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Today I have in my hands the Netgear Roku XD media streamer, the latest media streaming solution for the living room to get retail store distribution by allying itself with a company best known for networking solutions. Does the Netgear Roku HD have what it takes to compete with the likes of D-link's Boxee Box or Logitech's Revue? What are the limitations and benefits of this particular media streamer? Let's find out.

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Even though the WP7 official unveiling is quite a ways behind us, we’ve been spending quite a lot of time with the respective Windows Phone 7 launch devices. Anand has the LG Optimus 7 and the Samsung Focus, and I got the HTC Surround. There are a number of other devices bound for other carriers both international and domestic, and we’re getting to them in time.

If you haven’t already, definitely read our Windows Phone 7 launch piece which covers the platform as it exists purely from the software perspective. We promised then that we’d be taking an in-depth look at each of the devices with the usual rigor, and are starting out with the HTC Surround.



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