Thread: Anandtech News

Reviewing the Antec Sonata IV presented an interesting opportunity for me: while the other cases we've reviewed thus far have been experiences with new hardware, the Sonata IV is the next in a line of cases I'm particularly familiar with. I've built machines in every model from Antec's main Sonata range; my dad's computer is in an old Sonata, my ex-girlfriend's computer is in my old Sonata II, and a close friend's machine is purring along in a Sonata III. As a result, it's a chance to see how Antec's design has evolved over time. But it's more than that: the Sonata line has for a long time been a go-to for quiet computing with reasonable thermals. Has that changed with the Sonata IV?

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As part of our Computex coverage, I was invited to attend a specialized tour of the ECS HQ and have a chance to participate in a group Question and Answer session with ECS’ Vice President of their Channel Business Unit, David Chen.

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Along with ECS, ASRock invited me to tour their HQ as well. ECS and ASRock are two distinctly different companies from the inside, compared to what people may think from the outside – there are plenty of comparisons to be made. For a start, where ECS has a 20 floor building all to itself in the middle of Taipei, ASRock have two floors of a relatively smaller building on the outskirts.

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The popularity of Intel's HD Graphics amongst HTPC enthusiasts and the success of the AMD APUs seem to indicate that the days of the discrete HTPC GPU are numbered. However, for those with legacy systems, a discrete HTPC GPU will probably be the only way to enable hardware accelerated HD playback.

In this context, both AMD and NVIDIA have been serving the market with their low end GPUs. These GPUs are preferable for HTPC scenarios due to their low power consumption and ability to be passively cooled. Today, we will be taking a look at four GPUs, two each from AMD (6450 and 6570) and NVIDIA (GT 430 and GT 520), for which passively cooled solutions exist in the market.

Gaming benchmarks are not of much interest to the HTPC user interested in a passively cooled solution, and those will not be presented. Instead, there will take a quick look at the specs of the four cards and a presentation of the HQV benchmarks. We will then see how the cards handle custom refresh rates and fare at deinterlacing. After this, we will proceed to identify a benchmark for evaluating HTPC GPUs and see how the cards fare in the benchmark. We will see how one of the cards springs a surprise and analyze the cause.
Towards the end, we will have a couple of sections to cover some developments in the area of open source softwares for HTPCs.

Read on to find out which discrete GPU fits your usage scenario and how to tweak it for a good HTPC experience.

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I remember standing in the audience of Samsung's CTIA press conference as it announced, for the first time ever, pricing and availability of its unreleased Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9 before shipping. The smartphone (and early tablet) industries have gone this long without having to really compete based on price, mostly because in North America the carriers subsidize much of the cost. If every device costs $199 under contract, why get carried away with details like how much it actually costs?

The Galaxy Tab however was playing in a different space. While Apple ultimately caved to the pressures of carrier subsidies with the iPhone, the iPad remains completely unsubsidized and its followers buy it by the millions. The magical price point is $499 and it was at Samsung's CTIA press conference that it announced it would be matching Apple's $499 price point, and even dropping slightly below it for the 8.9-inch version.

At the time it seemed like a bold move, enough to give Honeycomb the fighting chance it needed. The Galaxy Tab would be thinner and lighter than the iPad 2 but competitively priced as well. This wouldn't be another Xoom.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (top) vs. ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (bottom)

Then ASUS showed up. At $399, the Eee Pad Transformer not only offered a different usage model to the iPad and Galaxy Tab, it brought a lower price tag as well. Availability has been slim thanks to component shortages, but with the Eee Pad selling for $399 the Galaxy Tab at $499 all of the sudden seems overpriced.

Based on specs alone you'd be right. Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 has the same NVIDIA Tegra 2 tablet SoC inside, 512MB of LPDDR2 and 16GB of NAND on-board. You get a 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 PLS display and 802.11n WiFi support.

Where Samsung gives you something more for your money is in build quality and form factor. While Eee Pad Transformer feels surprisingly good for a cost reduced tablet, it doesn't feel nearly as slim or portable as the Galaxy Tab 10.1. It's no wonder Samsung went back to the drawing board on this one, the result is something that in many ways feels better than the iPad 2.



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Today has been a long time in coming; we first heard about Llano way back in 2008, but even then the target date was 2011. Even so, AMD has been hurting for a compelling mobile platform since… well, since ever. Even in the glory days of the K8 platforms, AMD never had a great mobile strategy, a fact that Intel capitalized on with the launch of Banias and the original Pentium M Centrino platform in 2003. Presumably the goal of most laptops is to actually work well as mobile computing platforms, and prior to 2011 the best AMD could do was compete on performance and price, with battery life (e.g. actual mobility) never quite keeping pace with the times. Earlier this year, AMD launched Brazos, their low-power alternative to Intel’s Atom ecosystem. It boasted better performance and much better graphics than Atom, with battery life that checked in at a respectable 8+ hours for a moderate 56Wh battery. Of course, there are Intel laptops that can provide battery life that’s very close to Brazos with general performance that’s 3x faster, so Brazos isn’t a panacea.

Enter Llano, the mainstream alternative to the low-power Brazos that brings AMD’s APU A-series to market with a much faster CPU and GPU. Llano is also AMD’s (GlobalFoundries’) first 32nm CPU, which brings AMD back to parity with Intel in terms of process technology. The process shrink should bring lower power requirements, smaller die sizes, and better performance. Add in power gating, Turbo Core, and expected pricing starting at $600 for quad-core laptops and the A-series starts to sound quite compelling. So just how good is Llano, and can AMD finally start to steal more of the mobile market from Intel? Let’s find out.



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If you haven't gotten the hint, today is all about Llano. The big story is of course Llano's notebook appearance however in the coming weeks you'll be hearing a lot more about Llano on the desktop as well.

This is AMD's Socket-FM1, the brand new socket that'll be used for desktop Llano parts:

If you read our Computex coverage the socket should look pretty familiar. Motherboard manufacturers all over Taiwan are busy readying their Socket-FM1 boards for retail release. In fact, there was so much interest in desktop Llano on behalf of the motherboard manufacturers that a number of Socket-FM1 boards and CPUs made their way off the island as Computex ended.

By now you may have already seen a lot of information leaked from AMD's Llano presentations, as well as its desktop strategy. In the past few days performance numbers have been revealed as well. While we're hard at work on our full review of AMD's desktop Llano APU, we wanted to chime in with some thoughts on Llano's desktop performance.

Read on for our preview!



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It's been a while since we've discussed AMD motherboards at AnandTech - over the next few months, I am hoping to bring them back. To start, we have our first Desktop Llano product on the test bed - the ASRock A75 Extreme6. Unfortunately, what I've been testing is still 'a work in progress' - so there are issues with the BIOS and design still to be decided. For now I'll let you know what I've found, in terms of performance and design. But when the full board comes my way with release information, I'll post a full review. Read more for a sneak peak!





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Back at CES 2011, Samsung showed us something that may have seemed futuristic. They showed us a monitor that connects to your laptop wirelessly and on top of that, the monitor acts as a USB hub and the USB devices connect wirelessly too. Samsung calls this technology Central Station. You simply connect a small USB dongle to your laptop, take the laptop within the monitor’s range, and your laptop automatically connects to the monitor and any peripherals attached to it, wirelessly. You walk away and the monitor goes black. Pretty simple, right? Read on for the further specs and our thoughts.

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