Thread: Anandtech News

If desktop graphics hardware can be more than a little confusing, deciphering performance of mobile graphics parts can be (and has historically been) an absolute nightmare. Way back in the day it was at least fairly easy to figure out which desktop chip was hiding in which mobile kit, but both AMD and NVIDIA largely severed ties between mobile and desktop branding. They may not want to readily admit that, and in the case of certain models they still pretty heavily rely on the cachet associated with their desktop hardware, but it's by and large true. So to help you make sense of mobile graphics, we present to you the first in what will hopefully be a regular series of guides.

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Almost exactly one year ago we reviewed and thoroughly explored the Motorola Droid X. At that point, its 1 GHz OMAP 3630 made it a competent performer and a worthy successor to the original Motorola Droid, and likewise competition for 1 GHz QSD8250 Snapdragon. A lot of things have changed since then, and and it’s time for the original Droid X to finally get replaced with something even more powerful, the Tegra 2-packing Motorola Droid X2.

Read on for our full review of the Droid X2.


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Recognizing that many of us would rather have our computers seen and not heard (but still awesome), boutique builder AVADirect is throwing their hat into the ring with a new line of desktop builds engineered for silent operation. Thus far we've only seen acoustic-oriented builds from one boutique (Puget Systems), so it's interesting to see what AVADirect plans on bringing to the table.


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The tablet market is expanding every bit as rapidly as netbooks did when they first arrived, and then some. MSI has announced their entry into the market today, and it's a very different breed of tablet compared to the largely Android-based units available. The new WindPad 110W has a heck of a lot going on under the hood, including some new kit from AMD.


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One by one the barriers to mobile computing have been falling. In the early days you could move to a notebook but you'd give up a lot of CPU, GPU and I/O performance. SSDs really fixed the storage performance issue (2.5" hard drives are horrendously slow compared to their 3.5" counterparts), power gating and turbo boost helped address the CPU problem and I wouldn't be too surprised to see companies have another go at external GPU solutions for those who need the added graphics horsepower.
The idea of external GPUs brings up the current limitation we face in this mobile transition. Although being more mobile is great, we still want the best of both worlds: great performance when we're at a desk, and great battery life when mobile. Enabling the former is going to require new technologies as well as new high speed interfaces.

Intel has been at the forefront of many of the successful high bandwidth interfaces in the evolution of the PC industry. Will Thunderbolt be another feather in its cap? In February we got the first Thunderbolt enabled MacBook Pros and just last week Promise shipped the first Thunderbolt enabled storage device. It's time to put the two together.
Read on for our full review of Promise's Pegasus R6 and Thunderbolt on the MacBook Pro


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We're all out of memory, congrats to AnandTech reader raimondi1337 for winning our last giveaway of 16GB of G.Skill DDR3-2133 memory. Be sure to respond to my email to claim your prize! The giveaways aren't over however, in fact we've got a great month ahead of us thanks to our friends on the NVIDIA Tegra team. Last week a big box full of four new tablets arrived at the office in Raleigh:

In the box were two Eee Pad Transformers and two Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1s, our two favorite Honeycomb tablets. We'll be giving one away every week until they're all gone. We're kicking off the giveaways with the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer.
Read on for contest entry details!


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The last time we took a look at a Compal whitebook (again courtesy of CyberpowerPC), we noted to Compal that their whitebook wasn't a shark, perfect and needing no further evolution. Their 15.6" shell had gone largely unchanged since the dawn of the 15.6" form factor, missing modern connectivity like eSATA and USB 3.0 and exhibiting an aesthetic that seemed like a relic from a bygone era. When Compal updated the exterior of their 15.6" flagship along with the interior update to Sandy Bridge, it sounded like a good opportunity to see just how much the notebook had evolved. Exit the old NBLB2, enter the PBL21.

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Gigabyte has released their Z68 lineup, and I am going to look at the UD3H - a $170 Z68 board aimed at the mainstream consumer market. The Z68 based motherboards are very similar to the P67 equivalent but they have had a few extra features added. They include Virtu and SSD caching as well as allowing you to take advantage of the GPU built into your Sandy Bridge processor. Is it worth switching from P67 to Z68 for a few extra features?

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What's this - another contest during our Summer of Honeycomb giveaway? Indeed it is. We write about SSDs quite frequently here at AnandTech so it's about time that we gave away some modern ones. Patriot was kind enough to send along two of its brand new 120GB Wildfire SSDs. The Wildfire is a SandForce SF-2281 SSD with 32nm Toshiba NAND, giving it a performance advantage over standard SF-2281 designs with 25nm IMFT Flash. You end up with a drive that performs more like a 240GB SF-2281 but has the capacity (and price) of a 120GB drive.

Of course if you are one of our two winners then you don't have to worry about price in the first place :)
Read on for details on how to enter!


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AMD’s last update to their mobile GPU lineup is now over six months old, which means we’re about due for another new part. Right on cue, and not long after NVIDIA’s GTX 580M speed bump, AMD briefed us on their latest update. Prior to agreeing to the NDA, all we got was that AMD Graphics would be making a “major mobile announcement”. That piqued our interest, as it could mean either new mobile GPUs, some other technology, or perhaps both. The major announcement goes by the name of Radeon HD 6990M, but what does it actually bring to the table? Read on….

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