Thread: Anandtech News

Our last comprehensive server and server CPU review focused on some of the best and fastest x86 servers on the market. This time, we focus on more humble servers. Performance is not necessarily priority one for many businesses; chances are that low power and budget are higher on the list. So we did our best to get the most interesting power sipping and inexpensive CPUs in the lab.

We selected three AMD Opterons and two Intel Xeons. On the Intel platform we test with the older but very cheap Xeon E5506 and the newer but more expensive low power Xeon L5630. AMD sent us three different Opterons: the low power Opteron 4162 EE, the performance/watt balancing Opteron 4170 HE, and the ultra cheap Opteron 4122. Read on to find out which of the five CPUs make sense in which situation. As always we use very realistisic benchmarking and power measurments to find out.









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With the Cougar Point chipset glitch starting to fade away, we’re starting to get Sandy Bridge systems in for testing. ASUS sent us over an earlier version of their updated G73, the G73SW with i7-2630QM and GTX 460M—still with the B2 chipset stepping, but it won’t matter for our testing, and the B3 versions should be shipping any time now. If you’ve been waiting to pull the chord on a new gaming notebook, there are a lot of fast, new offerings to choose from.

We’ve already looked at the G73 chassis twice now, and the latest version only makes a few minor tweaks other than the CPU/chipset. We’ve also previewed the same hardware combination with MSI’s GT680R. This is going to be a somewhat shorter review, then, but we did take some time to do a bit of extra stress testing, and we’re happy to entertain other requests at this point. Read on for the full rundown.



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The media streamer market is a highly competitive one, where you have the big players like Western Digital and Netgear, and the really small ones like Micca. None of these companies have media players as their sole product, because it is quite difficult to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack in that market. We were surprised to learn of Nixeus, a Los Angeles based company, that was founded in 2010 with the purpose of bringing multimedia solutions to the market.

Nixeus introduced their first media player, the Nixeus Fusion HD, towards the middle of 2010. It made a big splash online, and there were many people on AVSForum singing its praise. The support was great, and reported bugs were looked into quickly. This encouraged us to get hold of a review sample. Read on to find out how the Nixeus Fusion HD fares in our stringent review.



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Anyone who has shopped for a power supply lately has likely come to the conclusion that 80 Plus Gold certification is only for expensive PSUs rated at more than 500W. While that is true in the broad sense, there are a few exceptions. SuperPower for instance has a 350W 80Plus Gold unit, and FSP Group even has a 250W model. Today, we have an interesting alternative from HuntKey rated at 300W. While the name may not be as familiar to most of our America audience, HuntKey is one of the five largest PSU ODMs in the world, with offices in Europe and Asia. They also have customers like Dell and Lenovo.

With a goal of creating a low-cost, high-efficiency PSU that doesn't sacrifice quality, we may start to hear more about HuntKey. Today we're looking at their Jumper 300W power supply. Read on to find out why HuntKey is more than just a purveyor of cheap products in China.



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The AMD Radeon HD 6990, otherwise known as Antilles, is a card we have been expecting for some time now. In what’s become a normal AMD fashion, when they first introduced the Radeon HD 6800 series back in October, they also provided a rough timeline for the rest of the high-end members of the family. Barts would be followed by Cayman (6950/6970), which would be followed by the dual-GPU Antilles (6990). Ultimately Cayman ended up being delayed some, and as a result so was Antilles.

So while we’ve had to wait longer than we anticipated for Antilles/6990, the wait has finally come to an end. Today AMD is launching their new flagship card, retiring the now venerable 5970 and replacing it with a new dual-GPU monster powered by AMD’s recently introduced VLIW4 design. Manufactured on the same 40nm process as the GPUs in the 5970, AMD has had to go to some interesting lengths to improve performance here. And as we’ll see, it’s going to be a doozy in more ways than one.

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I've been working with MSI for nearly as long as AnandTech has been around. So when MSI came to us with a giveaway opportunity we jumped on it. The grand prize? A Sandy Bridge equipped MSI GT680R Notebook. The notebook is powered by a quad-core Core i7-2630QM which runs at 2.0GHz by default but can turbo up to 2.9GHz with only a single core active.

The GT680R includes three USB 3.0 ports and a pair of 500GB 7200RPM drives in RAID-0. The system will ship with 8GB of DDR3 memory making it a pretty beefy desktop alternative. The integrated GeForce GTX 460M is paired with 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory and it drives a high resolution 1920 x 1080 15.6-inch panel.

Read on for the full specs as well as details on how to enter.



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In the competitive media streamer market, we have been covering products with a huge US presence. Today, we will look at an offering from DViCO in the TViX series. DViCO is a Korean company with a big presence in the Asia-Pacific and European multimedia markets. DViCO's media streamers / tuners / PVRs are available under the TViX label.

We have had the TViX Slim S1 in our labs for more than 6 months now. Based on the Realtek RTD1283, it was introduced in July 2010. The initial firmware versions were not upto the mark, and the unit went into the review backburner. With streamers based on the next-gen Realtek chipsets starting to make an appearance, it was time to dust off the old review unit. Our friends over at MPCClub rank the TViX Slim S1 as one amongst the top five media players right now. Is it really that good? Read on to find out about our experience with the TViX Slim S1.



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While the drought of Sandy Bridge notebook hardware is thankfully approaching its sweet, merciful end, there are still a healthy amount of AMD-based notebooks on the market at good prices awaiting happy homes. Toshiba was kind enough to send us their L645D, a 14" notebook sporting a mobile Phenom II dual-core processor running at a speedy 3GHz, Radeon HD 4250 integrated graphics, and a Blu-ray drive: all yours for a potentially exciting value proposition of just $619. Is it worth it?

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Earlier today, Apple made the iOS 4.3 available to its customers via iTunes, two days ahead of its previously announced March 11th release date.

The new iOS revision, which will also come installed on the iPad 2 when it begins shipping this Friday, is a modest update to the mature iOS 4 operating system. It drops support for some older devices and speeds up some newer ones, but I don't think there's any one feature here that will fundamentally change the experience for the iOS userbase. Read on for details!



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We try not to bring you too much news about product announcements unless there's something particularly intriguing about them; we get inundated by them and most of the time it's the most generic of refreshes. Happily that's not the case with Lenovo's shiny new ThinkPad X220 notebooks.

Inexplicably Lenovo is opting to label these two very different notebooks under the same X220 header: one is a tablet clocking in at 3.88 pounds with a 4-cell battery; the other is an ultraportable that weighs less than three pounds. Both come with support for either SSDs or mechanical hard disks (with a 4GB SSD option as a special order).

We'll start with the ultraportable X220. Lenovo is shipping it with a 12.5" 1366x768 LED-backlit screen, but you can upgrade to an IPS panel. It maxes out at 8GB of DDR3 and has a strong spread of Sandy Bridge mobile processors to choose from, starting with the Core i3-2310M at 2.1GHz and going all the way up to the i7-2620M at 2.7GHz. Strangely, only the i7-equipped models come with USB 3.0 connectivity. Reviews of the X220 are already popping up on the internet and the IPS screen is proving as impressive as you'd expect, but not nearly as impressive as the battery running time: Lenovo claims up to 15 hours on a 9-cell battery, a hyperbolic figure to be sure but not as crazy as you'd think. NotebookReview's test model came with a 6-cell battery and was pushing nine hours.

You can see and eventually order the ultraportable X220 here, and MSRP is expected to start at a not-unseemly $899.

The other X220 is the tablet model. Again it ships with a 12.5" 1366x768 LED-backlit screen, but in this case the only choice is the finish you want on the IPS panel: Infinity Glass or Corning Gorilla. Yes, the X220 tablet comes with an IPS panel standard, proving that Lenovo understands what ViewSonic couldn't figure out with their tablet: that viewing angles are really important. Unfortunately the X220 tablet is nearly a pound heavier than its ultraportable cousin and doesn't come with an option for USB 3.0 connectivity. Lenovo quotes nine hours of running time with the 8-cell battery.

The X220 Tablet isn't up on Lenovo's site yet, but MSRP is expected to start at $1,199.



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