Hasta La Gadget!

Intel’s Sandy Bridge chipset hasn’t exactly had a flawless launch, but let’s move past that and take a look at how well it performs before it starts breaking. One of the improvements here is meant to be better memory performance, and The Tech Report ran a variety of sticks through the gamut to see what the benefits of high-cost, high-speed memory is versus the cheaper stuff. The results showed that, in the vast majority of cases, DDR3-1333MHz memory was barely outclassed by the DDR3-2133MHz stuff, exhibiting only a modest improvement in games, just a couple FPS at most. Lesson learned? Save your pennies — or go ahead and spend ’em elsewhere, like that new Thermaltake case.

Sandy Bridge memory performance tested, value of expensive top-shelf memory questioned originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  The Tech Report  | Email this | Comments

It took LaCie nearly a full year to ship the 2big USB 3.0 RAID drive — a device that was announced in the fall of 2009 — but now that it’s here, it’s being accompanied by a concept that actually far outshines the unit itself: USB 3.0 on a Mac. For whatever reason, Apple has refused to offer SuperSpeed USB on any of its machines, even a fully specced-out Mac Pro costing well north of $10,000. We’ve seen purported emails from Steve Jobs noting that USB 3.0 just isn’t mainstream enough to sweat just yet, but coming from the guy who’s still bearish on Blu-ray, we get the feeling that it’ll be quite some time far too long before Apple finally caves and upgrades from USB 2.0. We’re obviously no fans of the holdout — after all, even a few sub-$500 netbooks are enjoying the SuperSpeed spoils already — so we couldn’t have possibly been more excited to hear that a longstanding storage vendor was about to fill the void that Cupertino continues to ignore. We were able to pick up a LaCie USB 3.0 PCIe expansion card as well as a 4TB (2 x 2TB) 2big USB 3.0 drive and put the whole setup through its paces on our in-house Mac Pro. Care to see how it stacked up against USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800? Head on past the break for the grisly details.

Continue reading USB 3.0 for Mac review and benchmarks (with a LaCie 2big USB 3.0)

USB 3.0 for Mac review and benchmarks (with a LaCie 2big USB 3.0) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  LaCie’s USB 3 driver for OS X, PCIe card, ExpressCard  | Email this | Comments

We can’t get enough of Sony Ericsson’s PlayStation Phone (also known as Zeus Z1), and we’re guessing neither can you. We were just sent a new video of the device in action, only now it’s running Qualcomm’s Neocore benchmark app. As you can see, the device managed 24.4 frames per second on average. That doesn’t seem like much — our Nexus S, for example, just pulled off 55.6fps — but bear in mind, this isn’t the final software (or hardware probably), so there’s no conclusions at all to draw from this benchmark right now. Just think of it as another nice view of the phone as we inch closer to a finish line we still can’t make out over the horizon. Sorry, no slide-out gamepad, but you saw that last week — don’t be greedy. Video after the break.

Continue reading Exclusive: PlayStation Phone ‘Zeus Z1’ prototype benchmarked on video

Exclusive: PlayStation Phone ‘Zeus Z1’ prototype benchmarked on video originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 14:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

You saw the key specs slip out a little ahead of time, now it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the GeForce GTX 580 has been thoroughly benchmarked to see if its claim to being “the world’s fastest DirectX 11 GPU” stands up to scrutiny. In short, yes it does. The unanimous conclusion reached among the reviewers was that the 580 cranks up the performance markedly relative to the GTX 480 — with some citing gains between 10 and 20 percent and others finding up to 30 percent improvements — while power draw, heat emissions, and noise were lowered across the board. ATI’s AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 wasn’t completely crushed by the newcomer, but it was consistently behind NVIDIA’s latest pixel pusher. Priced at $499, the GTX 580 is actually praised for offering good value, though its TDP of 244W might still require you to upgrade a few parts inside your rig to accommodate it, while current online prices are closer to $550. Anyhow, the pretty comparative bar charts await at the links below.

Read – HardOCP
Read – Tech Report
Read – Legit Reviews
Read – Bit-tech
Read – PC Perspective
Read – Hot Hardware

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 reviewed: ‘what the GTX 480 should have been’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

What’s after ludicrous speed? If you ask OCZ, the answer is HSDL speed, which is the company’s new interface idea for bypassing the bandwidth limitations of standard SATA/SAS interconnects. Using a high-quality SAS cable to hook up its new Ibis drive to a PCI Express host card, OCZ has managed to deliver a cool 2GBps of total bandwidth — that’s one gigabyte up and one gigabyte down… every second. In order to feed this massive data pipe, the company’s gone and stacked four SandForce SF-1200 controllers inside the Ibis and RAIDed them together for good measure too. The upshot isn’t too dramatic for desktop applications, where’ll you’ll see performance that’s merely world-beating — reading at 373MBps and writing at 323MBps — but if you throw in some deeper queues and enterprise-level workloads you’ll be able to squeeze out 804MBps reads and 675MBps writes. Needless to say, the Ibis scooped up many a plaudit in early reviews, and though it may be expensive at $529 for 100GB, it still seems to represent good value for those who have the workloads to saturate its High Speed Data Link.

OCZ Ibis touts 2GBps High Speed Data Link, vanquishes SSD competition originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 08:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  AnandTech, PC Perspective, Hot Hardware  | Email this | Comments