Month: October 2010

Consumer SSD Battle: WD, Kingston, OCZ, Intel

The WD SiliconEdge Blue 64GB, Kingston SSDNow V G2 64GB, OCZ Vertex 2 60GB, and Intel X25-V 40GB offer small capacities but big speed compared to most hard drives. One model ultimately rose to the top, both in real world performance and energy efficiency.

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Gigabyte H55N-USB3: De Facto LGA1156 Mini-ITX Board?

With the limited and expensive selection of mini-ITX LGA1156 motherboards, the affordable Gigabyte H55N-USB3 has enough features and general appeal to charm most SFF PC builders.

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AMD HD6800 Series + Tech Day in LA

The HD 6800 series cards are officially launched today, as any tech media reader is well aware. The 6870/50 cards are featured in umpteen reviews already — AMD feted a hundred tech journalists in Los Angeles for two nights last week. Our brief report and musings on the new cards and on the event.

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WD Caviar Black 2TB & VelociRaptor 600GB

The Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB and VelociRaptor 600GB are two of the fastest SATA hard drives money can buy. HDD performance almost always comes at an acoustic price, but are these drives quieter than the predecessors, and do their speed/capacity/acoustics compete well against an SSD plus low cost high capacity HDD of similar cost?

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Samsung EcoGreen F4 & Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB Hard Drives

The Samsung EcoGreen F4 2TB emphasizes low noise and energy efficiency, while the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB is all about performance, with 64MB cache and new SATA 6Gbps interface. We examine the noise, vibration, energy efficiency, and performance of these two equally large, but very different drives.

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