Thread: Anandtech News

Last year, Micca released a hard drive based portable media drive called the Slim HDD Digital Media Player (imaginative, I know). Based around a standard 2.5” notebook hard drive, the Slim DMP could handle a wide range of containers and formats and had a 720p HDMI output. For the $59 (no drive) price tag, it represented a solid value and even without too many premium features, it was a very functional media player at its core. Now we’ve got Micca’s followup device, the $79 Slim-HD Portable 1080p Full-HD Digital Media Player, which adds support for 1080p playback, FLAC audio, and a new UI. How does it fare in our labs? Read on to find out.



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Content aggregation has been instrumental in the development of the web. In the early days of the web, destinations held all the power. If you wanted news or reviews you went to news and review sites, consuming the content they had to offer at each individual website. Email newsletters were the first to really change the manner in which content was consumed online. Instead of visiting a website to read the latest it had to offer, you got an email in your inbox with either complete content or enough of a teaser for you to decide whether or not you were interested in it.

These days we have many more ways to get access to written content on the web than a simple newsletter. There’s RSS, Twitter and Instapaper among others. It generally works well. RSS didn’t stop users from visiting websites, neither did Twitter and Instapaper hasn’t spelled the end of the front page either. If anything all of these technologies have helped make consuming content online easier. While the front page of any website today isn’t quite as big of an example of prime real estate as it was 10 years ago, it’s still quite valuable.

I mention this history for one important reason: we haven’t seen the same progress with aggregating and distributing television content on the web. These days you can find a lot of cable TV content on the web, usually posted the day after the shows air live on cable TV. All of the major networks support it. Visit Fox.com, NBC.com or CBS.com and you’ll be greeted with ways to watch all of the shows they air via the web. The content is all out there, and it wouldn’t be too difficult to aggregate it all into one cable-TV-like interface. In theory, with what’s posted online already, you could pull the plug on cable and just rely on video over the web without missing much. It’s just not quite as easy as a cable subscription with a DVR. This is where Boxee comes in.



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Back in April we dissected Drive Extender v2 – Microsoft’s storage pool and data duplication technology for Windows Home Server – based upon the first preview release of Windows Home Server “Vail”. So imagine our utter shock when we found out that Microsoft is going to be removing Drive Extender entirely from “Vail” and the rest of its offshoots.

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Although OCZ was first on the market with a USB 3.0 enabled SSD with its Enyo drive, competitors are knocking down the doors and bridging the gap. We saw the first lower cost USB 3.0 SSD with Kingston's DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0, however the JMicron JMF612 controller it was based on didn't really impress. The only thing the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 had going for it was a lower total cost for the smaller capacity versions.

Hot on the heels of the release of its unusually potent V+100 SSD, Kingston aims its sights at the high end with its second USB 3.0 SSD: the HyperX MAX 3.0. Borrowing a brand from Kingston's enthusiast memory line, the HyperX MAX 3.0 is literally a SSDNow V+100 SSD paired with a SATA to USB 3.0 bridge PCB.

Read on for a quick look at the drive's performance and behavior over time.



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If you are looking to improve your virtualized datacenter, 10Gb Ethernet really deserves your attention. It delivers more than twice as much bandwidth as quad-port gigabit, lower latency, lower power per gigabit, and the ability to greatly simplify your network infrastructure--especially with virtualized servers. 10GbE is a game changer for I/O virtualization; it is much more than “a bigger pipe” for your (virtualized) network traffic. That is the good news.

The bad news is that you have to take quite a few hurdles before I/O virtualization does it's magic. One bad decision and you end up with a power gobbling, CPU hogging monster. We gathered two modern 10GbE NICs, one from Solarflare and one from Neterion, and checked if they are really an improvement compared to the typical Intel 82598 NIC. This article is not a simple throughput and latency benchmarking review, but turned out to be a story about how virtualization technologies like VT-d, IOMMU, Netqueue, SR-IOV and I/O convergence can make sense in the modern datacenter.



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When we first looked at the ASUS Eee PC 1201N last year, we thought it was a unique take on the netbook idea, and possibly one of the first acceptably performing netbooks on the market. Fast forward to 2010, and we have the Eee PC 1215N, basically an updated 1201 with a dual-core Atom D525 and Next-Generation ION. But with the release of the dual-core Atom N550 for netbooks and smaller netbooks releasing with NG-ION in tow, does the $499 1215N still have enough appeal to capture the niche market it had before? Read on to find out.



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Over the past couple of years, Corsair has been branching out from just producing system memory. They've moved into Solid State Disks, power supplies, enclosures, and even brought their first gaming headset to market just this year. Each entry has met with some success, but while the cases in their Obsidian series have proven excellent, they're still prohibitively expensive. The Graphite Series 600T is relatively new, and while the $159 MSRP is still on the steep side, it lines up to compete with the crowd favorite Antec P180 series. I had a chance to take the 600T for a spin, and it may just be worth every penny.

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When someone talks about budget gaming on a laptop, a lot of things might go through your head. Are they talking about ten year old games on netbooks? Maybe by "budget" they mean $1000? Or perhaps they're referring to a pathetically slow IGP that can barely run modern games at 768p (but does reasonably well with 3+ year old titles)? So many options, but today we're talking about a laptop that can legitimately play any modern title at medium to high detail and 768p, and it checks in at a pocketbook friendly price of under $700.

Given the specs and performance potential, it's no surprise that the laptop in question comes from Acer—with everything that implies. The Acer Aspire 5551G also happens to be the best example of AMD's midrange gaming laptops, packing a dual-core P520 processor with a Radeon HD 5650 graphics card. There are certainly some blemishes in the overall experience, but many people are able to overlook those when they see the bottom line—which might explain in part why you can no longer find this model in stock. Yeah. But if you're curious as to how an AMD Vision Premium 2010 notebook stacks up to the competition, read on….



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OCZ and Kingston have already shown us what solid state technology can do for external drive transfer speeds when given the headroom provided by USB 3.0 technology. Now, ADATA bring us the N004, an Indilinx Barefoot based solid state drive that features both USB 3.0 and SATA connectivity. At this stage of proceedings, Indilinx would not be our first choice of controller utilized this way – at the very least we’d like to see something done with Indlinx’s Martini, more preferably Sandforce’s SF1200. However, ADATA's pricing for the N004 series may be enough to warrant closer inspection if you're in the market for a solid state drive that can be used both internally and externally with minimal fuss...

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Google TV launched to high expectations a couple of months back. Users have slowly come to terms with the capabilities of the software as well as the underlying hardware platform. Without doubt, the Logitech Revue was the flagship product for Google TV at launch. However, many of its users are finding it hard to justify a dedicated device for just the functionality provided by Google TV. A detailed review of the Revue will follow in the coming weeks, but the unanimous opinion amongst the editors at AnandTech is that Google TV could only be justified as a value add-on for already existing CE devices in a HT setup such as a TV, Blu-Ray player, media streamer or even an AV receiver.

Sony was one of the first companies to jump onto the Google TV bandwagon, and they debuted some TVs and even a Blu-Ray player with Google TV inbuilt around the same time as the launch of the Logitech Revue. We have had the Sony NSZ-GT1 Blu-Ray player with Google TV in our labs for the past couple of weeks. Read on for our findings about the player.



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