Thread: Anandtech News

With sales of around 150,000 PSUs each month, Corsair is one of the largest vendors for retail power supplies. They have a lot of experience even if they don't have their own factory. A few weeks ago Corsair presented their latest addition to their power supply lineup, the AX series. The AX brand has the goal of delivering performance, quality, and high efficiency; simply put, it's the best solution Corsair can provide at the moment. Today we take a look at the AX750 and find out if the 80Plus Gold certificate is justified, and just how good Corsair's "best" happens to be.



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When Anand first asked if I wanted to review the Nokia E5-00 (referred to as E5 henceforth), I wasn’t sure what to say. Having used Nokia’s Symbian based smartphones almost exclusively for the first half of this decade, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be happy to meet an old friend after a long time, or loathe it thinking of all the reasons I decided to move away from the platform in the first place. But then again, I realized I may actually be in a better position than some to review this device because of my prior experience with the platform.

So jostling for front-page area on AT along with other, decidedly more exciting, better spec’d and feature-packed smartphones is the almost shockingly simple Nokia E5.



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One last journey into the land of audio yields curious results; when last we spoke with Logitech they gave us the Z515 wireless speaker set, a curio that seemed destined for a niche market. Today we have on hand the Z305 laptop speaker, a far more practical solution to the common problem of dismal notebook speakers. The Z305 is essentially a long barrel that clamps on to the lid of your notebook, plugs in to the USB port, and threatens to improve your listening experience. At $59 it's fairly reasonably priced, so the question is...just how well does it work?

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On the move, or in the groove, SuperTalent reckons they have the product for you. What we have here is a press release for a combination product - a new SuperTalent USB2/3 USB drive; which comes combined with, at a discount, the Ceedo Personal software. SuperTalent is marketing these new drives as their fastest yet, utiliziing four channels of NAND to improve transfer speeds.

16GB Express RAM CACHE - USB 3.0 and 2.0 Performance figures...

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Verizon just announced that on this Sunday, December 5, Verizon will launch its LTE network in the US. The network will launch in 39 cities around the country (listed below) alongside LG's VL600 USB 3G/LTE modem.

The modem will be available in Verizon stores for $99.99 after a $50 rebate with a new 2-year agreement. Service will set you back $50 per month for up to 5GB of data transfers or $80 for 10GB. Overages are billed at $10 per GB.

Verzion stated that speeds on a fully loaded LTE network will range between 5 - 12Mbps down and 2 - 5Mbps up. Latency should be roughly half what it is today on VZW's 3G network.

We'll see more LTE modems ship before the end of the year and LTE enabled smartphones towards the middle of 2011, with devices being announced at CES in January.

What about the rest of the country? Verizon plans to have its current 3G network covered by LTE before the end of 2013.



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We conclude our series of Ask the Experts with four questions you all asked about servers and virtualization in previous posts. Thanks to everyone who participated and we hope you found the series useful!

Read on to read Johan's answers to your questions!



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NAND endurance is on its way down with each subsequent process generation. At the same time unrecoverable bit error rates are on their way up. Companies like SandForce have included powerful ECC engines in their SSD controllers and implemented RAID-like technologies to deal with the problem. Today Micron is providing an alternative solution: ClearNAND. 25nm NAND with an on-package 24-bit BCH ECC engine per device.

Read on for the full story.

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Business centric laptops are something most people have used at some point or another, but they're not always the first devices to get reviewed. The reason is pretty simple: businesses are conservative in nature, so they generally don't want to jump on the latest and greatest technology until they've let it mature a bit. Consumer devices are thus the first to move to new CPUs, GPUs, etc. while the enterprise-class laptops in particular will lag behind and continue to sell long after they're "outdated". The upside to business laptops is that they're built to last, making the plastic consumer laptops look flimsy and weak by comparison.

Packing one of Intel's reasonably fast i5 CPUs and a 1440x900 matte LCD in a mag-alloy chassis, with nary a glossy surface in sight, this is a business laptop in every sense of the word. And if your general use case is Office and Internet work rather than gaming and movies, there's a lot to like with the E6410. Of course, with Sandy Bridge right around the corner this is more about setting the stage to see just how far Intel's new platform improves on the current Arrandale offerings, but we'll have to wait another month before we can take the wraps off of Sandy Bridge laptops.



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The mini-ITX market is gathering pace, and seemingly every motherboard company wants a piece of the action. Some get it almost right, such as the Gigabyte H55N-USB which is the only motherboard this year we’ve given a highly recommended rating, whereas others can get it very, very wrong. Mini-ITX specialists Zotac have recently announced their next two AMD offerings.

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The only aspect of purchasing a Windows Phone that's more difficult than jumping on the iPhone bandwagon is choosing hardware. While the OS may be polished, nearly all Windows Phone manufacturers took the safe route and launched relatively uninspired designs for WP7. I'm sorry to say that none of them quite live up to the total package of the iPhone 4. You make sacrifices in battery life, material quality, camera quality or all of the above. The OS may be solid, but there's still a lot of work that has to be done to achieve perfection.

If you are planning on making the jump before the next generation of Windows Phone 7 hardware, there are reasonable options today. While the perfect Windows Phone may not yet exist, there are some devices that are good enough.

Unlike choosing an Android phone, performance and UI aren't differentiating factors for Windows Phones. They all run the same OS and use the same 1st generation Snapdragon SoC. As a result, they all perform identically. There are no OS level carrier/OEM customizations. The best either can do is supply preinstalled apps. Other than that, the difference is all in build quality, battery life and the hardware in general.

Brian posted our review of one of the more unusual Windows Phone 7 devices a couple of weeks ago: the HTC Surround. Today I want to provide a quick look at two other options: the very popular Samsung Focus and the LG Optimus 7.



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