Thread: Anandtech News

ASUS’ Republic of Gamers range is soon to have a new member, in the shape of the ASUS Rampage III Formula. Using the X58 chipset, this board is designed for looks, uncompromised performance, overclocking, and the best possible online gaming experience with the new SupremeFX X-Fi 2 audio solution. However, based on our recent high-end X58 roundup, the X58 market is stagnating between the budget X58 and high end, where the minor features that few people end up using seem destined to create a huge markup price. ASUS hopes to alleviate such issues with the release of the Rampage III Formula, by finding a happy medium.

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There’s a new segment in the ever changing LCD display market, one that readers have been asking us to take an in-depth look at for a while now - 120 Hz panels. We’ve been playing with ASUS’ newest display, the VG236H. It's a 120Hz, 1080P, 23" 3D enabled display that joins a small but growing demographic of similarly speced LCD displays.

ASUS's new contender definitely impresses, and at a competitive price point. It was my first experience with a 120Hz LCD and NVIDIA's 3D Vision technology. Despite going in as a cautious skeptic, I'm completely sold on both. Read on for our comprehensive review.




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For the first time since its introduction in 2005 Apple has significantly updated the design of the Mac mini. The new model is thinner, although it requires a bit more surface area. Basically a 13-inch MacBook Pro without the display, this new $699 Mac promises to be the most energy efficient desktop on the market. We look at its performance, power consumption and even compare it to a five year old Power Mac G5 to see how well Apple's mini update holds up.

Read on for the full review.



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In our smartphone and tablet reviews we make sure to spend a good amount of time talking about the silicon powering these devices. There’s no reason that handset and tablet manufacturers shouldn’t be held to the same standards as the PC vendors we’ve worked with for years.

Today the fastest phones are either based on ARM’s Cortex A8 core or a similar architecture as in the case of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. Starting either late this year or more likely sometime next year we’ll see the first SoCs based on ARM’s first out of order core, the Cortex A9, shipping in phones. The roadmap doesn’t end there though.

Later this year ARM will officially announce the successor to the Cortex A9, codenamed Eagle. Today, Texas Instruments is announcing that it is the first company to license the ARM Eagle core.

The announcement goes further. Not only is TI licensing the core, but it also helped define the specifications for the core. TI has been working on the design with ARM since June 2009. As a result, TI expects to be the first to market with SoCs based on ARM’s Eagle core.

Unfortunately there’s not much to say about Eagle itself until ARM makes its announcement later this year. TI’s Cortex A9 based SoCs (OMAP 4) will be shipping in Q4, showing up in devices in early 2011. Based on that schedule I wouldn’t expect to see Eagle anytime sooner than 2012.

Eagle’s performance is slated to be much more competitive with future derivatives of Intel’s Moorestown SoC, while power consumption should be similar to existing designs thanks to the 2x-nm manufacturing process it will most likely be built on.

We’re still waiting to hear more details about the Eagle architecture but with today’s announcement, something from ARM can't be too far away.


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The giveaways are back! Our previous contest was for a 4GB G.Skill memory kit. The winner? donebu. Check your email and respond to claim your prize :)

Thanks to G.Skill we have even more memory to give away. Today we've got another 2GB DDR3-1066 SO-DIMM for your notebook. It's the F3-8500CL7S-2GBSQ, you can find the full specs on it here (note that page has multiple products on it, we're giving away the F3-8500CL7S-2GBSQ). You can check out Newegg's listing here.

Read on for details on how to enter.



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Finding the best building block for a virtualized datacenter has been our quest for a few years now. In this article, we’ll introduce you to our brand new virtualization benchmark that can better withstand the fast evolution of the server world, and we’ll explore the virtualized performance of Intel’s Quad Xeon 7500.

Another article on Intel’s Xeon X7500 ? Why should you read this article knowing that your budget does not allow for Intel’s expensive RISC killer? We’ll give you three reasons:

1. Buying high-end servers might be a smart choice, even if you don’t normally consider them.
2. You simply want to know how fast a 32-core, 64-thread machine can be. Did I mention that there is more than 72GHz of computing power in there?
3. You want to know whether or not Intel did a good job with the 7500 series. Reviews across the web left a relatively blurred picture. We add a new solid virtualization benchmark so you can make up your mind.

The last two reasons are pretty straight forward. But the first reason needs more elaboration.



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The last couple of years have seen the introduction of many security cameras aimed at the consumer market. However, mass adoption remains elusive due to complications in getting the camera up and running. Some companies have come forward with products which are simple to setup and use for the average consumer. Today, we will look at one such product from Dropcam, the Dropcam Echo.

Dropcam’s offerings are one of the few consumer IP cameras that have ease of usage and cloud integration as their USP. Read on to find out about the consumer IP camera market, and how the DropCam Echo fared in the two weeks we have had to review it.




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Buying an SSD for your notebook or desktop is nice. You get more consistent performance. Applications launch extremely fast. And if you choose the right SSD, you really curb the painful slowdown of your PC over time. I’ve argued that an SSD is the single best upgrade you can do for your computer, and I still believe that to be the case. However, at the end of the day, it’s a luxury item. It’s like saying that buying a Ferrari will help you accelerate quicker. That may be true, but it’s not necessary.

In the enterprise world however, SSDs are even more important. As we've shown in the past, a single enterprise SSD can replace several 15,000 RPM mechanical drives. You get better performance, much lower power consumption, and if you choose your drive well, more predictable reliability. From the manufacturer's perspective, the enterprise SSD market is more lucrative as cost is less of an issue.

Earlier this year Micron released its RealSSD C300, a consumer MLC drive. Today Micron is announcing the enterprise version of the drive: the RealSSD P300. We dive into the announcement to see what Micron has changed to address this market. Read on.



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One day I got the bright idea to benchmark the living crap out of everything I could find. What resulted was a huge Excel sheet of CPU performance results. Then Intel released the X25-M and I realized that I would have much more repeatable and reliable numbers if I used SSDs (don't have to worry about defragging between runs), at which point I re-ran everything in the Excel sheet.

To make a long story short, we launched a feature called Bench. It's a comparison tool that lets you pit products against one another using our own internal test results. If you want to find out whether the Core i5 750 will be a significant upgrade from your Core 2 Quad Q6600 you can head over to Bench and find out. We have over 100 CPUs in Bench today across over 20 benchmarks. CPUs are being added all the time as they come out and we're constantly evaluating new benchmarks to introduce as well.

When I'm not testing CPUs, working with Brian on smartphones or playing with Mac gear, I'm knee deep in SSDs. I've been itching to write a follow-on to the SSD Relapse, however not enough has changed just yet. Plus with all that's happening in the other segments I cover directly, it's easier for me to focus on shorter SSD articles. Adding SSD performance data to Bench was an obvious next step, which I made not too long ago.

You all have been asking for three things when it comes to Bench fairly consistently. You want the ability to have all benchmarks sorted the same way (e.g. higher is better), the ability to compare more than two products and you want a GPU version of Bench. Today I'm happy to announce that the first version of GPU Bench is live.

We've tweaked the landing page for Bench a bit to let you access CPU, SSD and GPU Bench data even easier. As is the case with CPU and SSD Bench, as new cards get released we'll be expanding the GPU Bench database to include them. At present we go back as far as the GeForce 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3870 (at 1680 x 1050).

I hope you enjoy the addition and expect more Bench features to surface as the year goes on. As always, thanks for reading :)



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