Monday Reviews

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The EPIA series from VIA has really come a long way since its initial inception years ago. When the series was first released, it was a unique formfactor. The problem is that it was slow and the expandability was not there. Fast forward a few years and the later designs are nothing like what it was. You get speed and expandability in a great size. If Windows is your thing, this board is Vista certified.

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Noctua is a new company that promises quiet cooling with good performance. Their first entry into the market is very well built.

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SOYO was established in 1999 at the time when computer hardware was easy to list off in your head. Their Dragon series of motherboards were excellent and many enthusiasts employed their boards for computer builds. Today, SOYO is a vastly different company. Gone are the motherboards but SOYO has reinvented itself and now produces displays. They have a partnership with Honeywell for dual branding. Today, we are looking at the Topaz S 24" LCD Widescreen Monitor.

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When browsing the shelves of your local B&M you will find there are several different sizes and brands to pick from. Some drives are small enough to fit in the front pocket of your shirt and there are other units that can house numerous drives. These types of unit can be a big as shoe box or two. Depending on your needs someone will have you covered. Besides storage size another major factor would be what brand of drive to buy. Seagate and Maxtor seem to be two of the more popular brands. Personal preference usually is the deciding factor in this case.

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Bgears has burst onto the case modder/enthusiast scene with some pretty innovative products. With the new b-Envi Small Form Factor (SFF) case, Bgears tosses its hat into the ring and wants to spar with the other manufacturers in a crowded case market for the SFF crowd. Does this case have what it takes to make your friends b-Envious? I think you will find this to be a special case in many ways, so... step on through and learn about one of the best kept secrets in town!

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Currently, the high-end motherboards are fairly similar her in terms of performance and features. Unlike old motherboards where they differ from each other in terms of overclockability, amount of ports, bundles, and features. Current motherboards seem to be performing so close to each other that often motherboards with same chipsets will have performance less than 5% from each other. In order to differentiate themselves among other boards, motherboard manufactures are starting implement different approaches. Asus is probably the most ambitious with their motherboard bundle and avant-garde chipset cooling and designs. MSI, on the other hand, tries to stands out by incorporate Audigy onboard audio. Gigabyte is doing something slightly different than either Asus or MSI. They have decided to produce greener motherboard with their latest DES motherboard family. In fact, Gigabyte is commented to the greener products as many of their current line-up of products (graphic ! cards and motherboards) are designed to reduce power consumption.

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Linux on Sony hardware has been done before, but not to any great success. Some of you may remember that the PS2 could run a strange version of the open source OS with a bought package that gave you a 40GB HDD, a keyboard and a mouse. However, it did not allow for any functionality of the DVD-ROM because Sony thought you might start using your PS2 to rip off all their games. There was a lot of noise in the beginning of the PS3's marketing-hype-launch that the console would have Linux pre-loaded, but Sony came to their senses when they realized how much more work that was going to be for them. So we are left to figure this one out for ourselves.

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One of the most interesting things about the growth of Skype is the development of Skype-specific devices, which are (presumably) meant to ease the shock of talking on the phone using a microphone and some computer speakers instead of a headset, but take away the free aspect of Skype and impose a more organized, made-for-business feeling on the VoIP network. Of course, appearances can be deceiving, so today's task: find out whether or not one particular Skype phone - the IPEVO Trio - makes the tradeoff of more features worth paying extra for your Skype hardware.

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* *After finalizing my key bindings for CoD4, it went great. I was actually able to complete the last three quarters of the game using only the mouse on normal difficulty. There were parts of the campaign I knew I could not complete on higher difficulties because of lack of a controller I was used to *cough* keyboard *cough*. For casual play, however, I could relax quite comfortably while playing my favorite game. *

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When you think of discrete graphics, your probably don't think low-end. It's very common, as with most things we can buy, for people to immediately shoot for the stars. In the video card world, this usually means discussing only the best money can buy, and this is the start of a bigger mistake. Very recently NVIDIA released their newest addition to the GeForce family: the 9600 GT. While it offers solid performance for the lower mid-range of discrete graphics, NVIDIA's 9th generation of video cards has only one offering thus far. Essentially, the latest is by far not the greatest.

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With a big video card comes a lot of information I suppose and the HD3870X2 is amongst the biggest available at this time. We have learned a lot about this card today and thanks to some immature drivers, there is plenty to learn down the road. Overall though, the experience we had with the HIS HD3870X2 is a rather positive one. ATI has done well with the reference design and HIS stuck to that design to the letter. The performance of the HD3870X2 is quite impressive and as we saw in the benchmarks, pretty much the same as a pair of HD3870s in CrossFire. Performance issues aside, the HD3870X2 looks to be ready to play with the big boys in the GPU market and with future driver updates and game patches, things will only get better.

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It's not something that we in the enthusiast world really think about, but there is a market out there for high-end computers that will probably never do any gaming, be overclocked, water cooled, or any other of the cool stuff that geeks do with their rigs. For example, a design engineer might desire a CAD workstation using multiple large screens...as many as six or eight...at high resolution. Anyone designing animation would like such a rig. So, what does someone desiring to build a modern upper-end graphics workstation do? Asus has an answer with the P5K64 WS, a workstation motherboard based on the very successful Intel P35 chipset. Today we will be looking at the P5K64 WS, to see if it has anything that would hold the interest of the enthusiast. Can it satisfy the geek? Read ahead to see.

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We're all still waiting on an official supporting Crossfire X driver from AMD (said to come in next month's Catalyst 8.3 drivers) which will allow a couple of HD 3870 X2s to be paired up. AMD are going to run into a problem when they release the HD 3870 X2 driver. That problem is that the hype is going to be gone on the card and everyone will be waiting for the 9800 series of cards from NVIDIA.

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Graphics Tablet, which is more than just a graphics tablet, the pen has built in mouse buttons so it can act as a mouse, and Adesso included a small travel mouse to be used with the tablet as well so there's no need to carry an additional mouse with you. One of the great things about this product is the price, I honestly expected it to cost much more than it does, coming in at around seventy dollars it is well worth that price and could easily sell for more.I've been using it for a couple weeks now and have come to enjoy what it can do for me to make my life a bit more easier and even enjoyable. It's been a long time since I've used a graphics tablet at all, and I had forgotten just how useful they can be...

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Starting off the X.Org talks at FOSDEM 2008 was AMD's John Bridgman, who has been leading the AMD GPG open-source efforts. John had talked briefly about the history of their open-source efforts for the R500+ series and the evolution of AMD GPU hardware. Among the interesting comments made were that TexturedVideo/X-Video support for the R500/600 may be coming quite soon, DRM and Mesa work forthcoming, open-source multi-GPU CrossFire support is on the road-map, and they will be re-releasing R200 programming documents. The RV620 and RV635 documentation is expected in the near future.

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Today for review I've got what is probably the world's smallest Bluetooth USB adapter, it's not much bigger than a dime, and that's only because of the USB part of it, the actual Bluetooth chip is a fraction of the overall size. It's called the Super Mini Bluetooth v2.0 + EDR USB Adapter, but don't let it's diminutive size fool you, it's fully loaded, being Bluetooth v2.0with Enhanced Data Rate it allows for longer range and faster file transfers.

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For the past several weeks we have been referencing AMD's tcore in several of our articles, which is a user-space software suite that has been developed and used internally at ATI by engineers to work on various aspects of their binary drivers. Tcore is primarily used for testing prior to the availability of the actual silicon for their forthcoming graphics processors. John Bridgman and Alex Deucher have been working tediously to get this tcore source-code sanitized and cleared for public release, and finally they have reached this milestone. AMD has just published the first bits of open-source 3D programming documentation for ATI GPUs. This 3D programming documentation covers the R500 series and even goes back with information on the R300/400 series as well. The R600 3D programming guide will also be out soon. This information available today is what will foster the growth of open-source R500/600 3D support for the Radeon and RadeonHD drivers as well as R600 2D acceleration.

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We sometimes forget that not everyone has the money or the need to use these higher end cards. So that's what we're doing today, we're going to look after the people on the other side of the fence, who don't need big 3DMark numbers or 200FPS in Half Life 2 at 2560 x 1600. Today we'll simply have the two cards together. We won't be comparing them against each other as such, but rather just simply looking at exactly how they perform and how much extra performance a HD 3650 gives you over the HD 3450.

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Many may not recognize the Tuniq brand name in the North American market but they are planning on changing that. If their recent power supply releases are any indication, they will have no problem making a name for themselves. This product comes with a large 140mm fan so it remains quiet and cool even under load. It's also small so not only would this be great for a server environment, but it would be well suited in a HTPC or a SFF PC.

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Microsoft's acquisition of Danger could be a game changer. Danger, before the iPhone, was arguably the hottest Smartphone for the young celebrity and under-20 set of teen phone users. This is the company that created the extremely popular SideKick series of phones for T-Mobile (and often used by stars like Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan etc). Vastly easier to use than any other previous Smartphone, and actually still better than the iPhone for anything that is text related, the Danger phone only lacked two things: The elegance of the iPhone's hardware, and Steve Jobs to make it as big as the iPhone.