AMD’s Radeon HD 5000-series cards are already considerably more power efficient than anything in Nvidia’s Fermi lineup, but PowerColor’s Go Green series of cards are engineered to consume even less electrical power than reference design-cards. This passively cooled Radeon HD 5750 (PowerColor part number AX5750 1GBD5-NS3DH, to be precise) draws all the power it needs from the PCI Express bus, so it doesn’t require a dedicated six-pin power cable. No fan means no noise.

The Radeon 5000-series has another major advantage over Fermi cards: They’re capable of streaming uncompressed high-definition audio from Blu-ray discs (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio) over HDMI. Fermi has the hardware for this, but Nvidia has not yet released a driver that will actually do it (although we don’t expect that day is far off).

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Read More

How do you spell slow? P-X-N-A-S-2, according to Plextor. It’s not a proud achievement, but this one-terabyte network-attached storage device is one of the slower devices we’ve ever hooked up to our network. Transferring files is slow. Accessing the Web-based user interface is slow. Formatting the drives to a new storage type is slow. Slow, slow, slow.

We almost couldn’t believe it ourselves—there had to be something wrong with either our test network, a full-fledged Gigabit network run through a single D-Link DIR-825 Xtreme wireless router, or the setup of the two 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives nestled within this two-bay device.

Subsequent tests on other, speedier NAS boxes ruled out the first, and reconfiguring the PX-NAS2’s internal storage setup only brought additional heartache. You get three storage modes to choose from on the NAS box: a JBOD or a RAID 0 “striped” array, which deliver near-identical, slow speeds, or an ice-age-inducing RAID 1 mirror that’s the digital equivalent of taking the dog on a long walk. The numbers speak for themselves: a wee over five minutes to transfer a 2.7-gigabyte file to the NAS box, and three minutes and 30 seconds to read it.

Hit the jump to read the rest of this review. 

Read More

Logitech astounds us on a regular basis with their ability to produce dirt-cheap yet solid-sounding speakers. We can only imagine how thin their profit margins must be; heck, that’s probably why there are so few other players in this market. But the quality of their latest offering, the Speaker System Z623, barely passes muster. It also leaves us wondering what value THX certification really holds for the consumer. 

The Z623 is a 2.1-channel system equipped with a 200-watt amplifier that delivers 35 watts to each of the satellite speakers and 130 watts to the sub. The satellites have a single driver each, 2.5-inch domes with aluminum phase plugs, while the subwoofer utilizes a seven-inch pressure driver with a bass port in its cabinet. As is typical in this category, the satellites have hard-wired cables that plug into the sub, where the amp is located.

Read More

Neither the MSI GX640-098US’s specs nor its $1,200 price tag necessarily scream “mobile gaming rig,” but the notebook’s highlighted W, A, S, and D keys say otherwise. So when the GX480 showed up on our doorstep, we wondered if the moderately powered notebook could muster up enough moxie to satisfy mobile gamers on a budget.

The 15.4-inch display is certainly not the largest-size screen you’re going to find on a gaming notebook; but when you’re making concessions to save some dough, screen size is one of the easiest areas to cut costs. The display’s 1680x1050 native resolution is a pleasant surprise, though, which is higher than the 1366x768 native res of Asus’s 16-inch N61J desktop-replacement.

Other than screen size, the GX640 and N61J share very similar specs. They are both powered by a 2.26GHz Core i5-430M processor and 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM, and both come with 7,200rpm 500GB hard drives. The N61J has at least two distinct advantages over the GX640, however, with USB 3.0 support and a price tag that’s $300 lower.

Read More