Review Index Page 39

  • Budget SSD Roundup: The Best SSD for Less Than $100

    This comparison review takes a look at 8 popular SSDs that cost $100 or less, featuring capacities of up to 128GB. The OCZ Vertex 4 128GB, Samsung 840 120GB and Crucial m4 128GB are included, while the most affordable high-capacity SSD featured in our roundup is the Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB.
    By Steven Walton on
  • Halo 4 Review

    When Bungie introduced the sci-fi, FPS franchise over a decade ago, it wowed fans with a perfect formula of alien creatures and versatile weapons. Hardcore Halo fans can rest assured that 343 has stayed true to the core of Halo, and we urge them to keep an open mind when confronted by its new skin.
    By Tina Amini on
  • Medal of Honor: Warfighter GPU & CPU Performance

    Warfighter uses DICE's Frostbite 2 engine -- the same software that powers Battlefield 3 -- which may partly explain the high-end hardware requirements. We are testing MoH Warfighter with 29 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations from AMD and Nvidia across all price ranges.
    By Steven Walton on
  • Medal of Honor: Warfighter Review

    The Medal of Honor series has become, in most every respect, a flagrant imitation of Activision's much ballyhooed Call of Duty series. You play the game from the first-person perspective. You hold a machine gun and shoot bad guys, almost exclusively foreigners.
    By Kirk Hamilton on
  • World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Review

    Mists of Pandaria is best looked at from two different perspectives. One: how is it for the new player? And two: how is it for the experienced player? If someone's been in a holding pattern at level 85 for years, what does Mists of Pandaria offer to that player, and how do its many changes improve or diminish the World of Warcraft experience?
    By Kate Cox & Mike Fahey on
  • AMD FX-8350 and FX-6300 Piledriver Review

    AMD is refreshing its desktop processors with Piledriver, an enhanced version of Bulldozer that focuses on improving instructions per clock and frequency -- just like it did with the new Piledriver-powered Trinity APUs. In other words, instead of a major overhaul, Piledriver picks up where Bulldozer left off.
    By Steven Walton on
    70
  • Windows 8, The TechSpot Review

    Windows 8 remains a nice upgrade, possibly a Service Pack-plus caliber upgrade when you look at the desktop improvements. Metro doesn't make Windows 8 more capable, but it does pave a way for Microsoft to sell slates and appeal to a mainstream user base that craves simpler devices.
    By Julio Franco on
    80
  • Testing Thunderbolt-Enabled External Storage: Gigabyte Z77X-UP5TH meets WD Velociraptor Duo

    With most Thunderbolt products available today being storage-related, we wanted to see what the new Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH motherboard and its dual Thunderbolt ports had to offer in terms of performance. Put to the test: Western Digital's Velociraptor Duo, which boasts of a pair of 10K RPM Velociraptor hard drives.
    By Steven Walton on
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown Review

    XCOM is about as perfect a remake of an old game as I could have hoped for, in that while changes have inevitably been made, they're mostly for the better, and anything genuinely new introduced is only there to improve things.
    By Luke Plunkett on
  • Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Review

    Having attacked the mid-range and upper-end markets, Nvidia has its sights set on the sub-$200 range, unleashing its GTX 650 Ti. At $150, the new arrival is roughly 34% cheaper than last month's GTX 660 and about 7% pricier than the Radeon HD 7770, which fetches around $140 depending on features and rebates.
    By Steven Walton on
    70
  • Guild Wars 2 Review

    With a mix of familiar MMORPG tropes and new, modern approaches to delivering them, Guild Wars 2 is an excellent, welcoming take on the genre.
    By Kate Cox on
  • AMD A10-5800K Trinity APU Review

    AMD is finally prepared to offer a desktop version of Trinity, which brings a new socket and a new high-end chipset. Given that Piledriver improved Bulldozer's power consumption, we expect Trinity to be more efficient than Llano, while Cayman's VLIW4 architecture should boost the GPU's speed -- or so we hope.
    By Steven Walton on
    80
  • Acer Aspire S5 Ultrabook Review

    The Aspire S5 comes with a beefy Core i7-3517U clocked at 1.9GHz, 4GB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage. In most instances, an SSD is the best addition period, for any modern system, but Acer took things a step further with two 128GB SSDs in RAID0. It goes without saying that the storage subsystem should be blazing fast.
    By Shawn Knight on
    75
  • Apple iPhone 5 Review

    The sixth-generation iPhone has finally landed. Apple has almost completely redesigned the phone's exterior, yet it still looks very much like the iconic handset everyone is familiar with. There's a larger 4-inch screen, LTE, a faster processor, and a new dock connector not everyone is a fan of.
    By Shawn Knight on
    90
  • Samsung 840 Pro SSD Review

    While the Samsung 830 SSD and many of its year-old peers may still be attractive, Samsung is ready to move on to bigger and better things. The new flagship offering, the SSD 840 Pro, refines the 830 Series' firmware with faster random and sustained performance as well as improved reliability.
    By Steven Walton on
    90
  • Borderlands 2 GPU & CPU Performance Test

    Borderlands 2 benchmarks and performance analysis -- Borderlands 2 succeeds at building on the foundation laid three years ago, delivering new characters, more weapons, smarter foes, and the same addictive loot-driven co-op first-person shooter action. We take the game for a spin on today's finest hardware.
    By Steven Walton on
  • Crucial m4 mSATA 256GB SSD Review

    We took notice when Crucial announced its m4 mSATA SSD in a 256GB capacity at under $1/GB. The mSATA drive is tiny compared to Crucial's standard 2.5-inch m4, and despite the size difference, both 256GB models feature the same read and write speeds of 500MB/s and 260MB/s.
    By Steven Walton on
    90
  • Torchlight II vs. Diablo III: The Ultimate ARPG Shootout

    Torchlight II is much more of a beast than its predecessor; in terms of scale and ambition, it's right up there with the biggest names in loot-collection and click-based combat. And so of course, Blizzard's Diablo III looms large over the entirety of Torchlight II. How could it not?
    By Kirk Hamilton on
  • Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Review

    Ever eager to keep AMD on its toes, Nvidia continues its push into the mid-range market with a Kepler-based card that is expected to retail for about $230 -- right in-between AMD's Radeon HD 7850 and 7870. The GTX 660 is based on the new 28nm GK106 architecture which inherits all the key innovations introduced by the flagship GTX 680.
    By Steven Walton on
    85
  • LG Optimus 4X HD Review

    The question is, does the phone manage to outshine its Bruce Banner exterior to show off what it's Hulk-scale guts are capable of? In short: yes. It turns out that what the Optimus 4X HD lacks in external appeal is more than made up for by its good nature and brainy innards.
    By Michael Oryl on
    85
  • Cooler Master Silencio 650 Case Review

    The Silencio 650 not resembles a cleaner version of Cooler Master's more aggressive HAF series, but it touts many attractive features, chief among which is sound absorbing foam mats and specially designed air vents to minimize noise while maintaining low operating temps.
    By Steven Walton on
    90
  • Crucial v4 256GB vs. OCZ Agility 4 256GB SSD Shootout

    By mid 2012, SSD prices fell through the floor, costing approximately half as much as last year. Granted, that's still nowhere near as economical as standard hard drives, so companies have continued to offer affordable solutions such as the OCZ Agility 4 and the Crucial v4 reviewed today.
    By Steven Walton on
  • Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review

    Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 660 Ti has its crosshairs set on the HD 7870. Assuming it's priced competitively, the GTX 660 Ti seems like it could put a real hurting on AMD's offering, as it features the same DNA as existing Kepler products and boasts the same number of CUDA cores and texture units as the GTX 670.
    By Steven Walton on
    90
  • Windows 8 vs. Windows 7 Performance

    For comparing Windows 7 and Windows 8 we will measure and test the performance of various aspects of the operating system including: boot up and shutdown times, file copying, encoding, browsing, gaming and some synthetic benchmarks.
    By Steven Walton on
  • Acer Aspire TimelineU M5 Review

    More than last year, 2012's ultrabooks have been and will continue to be about tradeoffs: low-res screens vs. high-res, snappy SSDs vs. capacious HDDs, power-sipping IGPs vs. muscle-bound GPUs, and so on. Acer's new TimelineU makes its own compromises to manage an attractive $830 price tag.
    By Matthew DeCarlo on
    70
  • MMO Gaming Mice Roundup

    Massively multiplayer online gamers have different needs than those of first-person shooter or real-time strategy fans. They need social interaction. They need extremely comfortable chairs. But most of all they need buttons. So many buttons.
    By Mike Fahey on
  • Acer Iconia Tab A700 Tablet Review

    The Iconia Tab A700 is Acer's latest update to its Android tablet line-up. Featuring Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and a quad-core processor, the A700's claim to fame is its new 1920 x 1200 pixel, full HD display.
    By Dan Seifert on
    60
  • Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display Review

    Apple’s coveted Retina display has finally found its way to a full-size notebook courtesy of the latest MacBook Pro. But anyone familiar with this new system knows that Apple didn’t simply add a higher resolution display to the standard MacBook Pro frame. Instead, there’s an entirely reworked chassis that’s nearly as thin as the MacBook Air and weighs more than a pound less than the standard Pro.
    By Shawn Knight on
    90
  • Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 SOC Review

    Armed with five fans, nine heatpipes and a king-sized vapor chamber, one might consider the HD 7970 SOC to be overkill, and to that we say: hell yes! Our inner enthusiast has a penchant for all things impractical -- even if they're tough to recommend from a value perspective.
    By Steven Walton on
    80
  • Motorola Atrix HD Review

    Motorola's new Atrix HD has some seriously stiff competition in AT&T's smartphone lineup with the Samsung Galaxy S III and the HTC One X. The Atrix HD has most of the specs to match the top tier Android smartphones, but does it put them together well enough to be a real competitor?
    By Dan Seifert on
    80