I fought the law and the law won. Moore’s Law that is. As proof, Intel on Tuesday demonstrated both desktop and mobile CPUs running an OS using a new 32nm process some of which are due as early as this year. Intel’s updated roadmap for performance desktop, mainstream desktop and mobile features a few new twists and turns from the company’s accelerated 32nm process.

Intel updated its public roadmap of the 32nm “Westmere” family. Like the switch from Conroe to Penryn, Westmere is a smaller “tick” that offers some upgrades from the current 45nm Nehalem CPUs.

Find out how this affects power users and Intel's desktop  mainstream lineup. Plus, a first look at LGA 1156 details!

Who says AMD moves too slowly? Just a month after releasing its well regarded Phenom II mid-range CPUs, the company is back with no fewer than five new P-II chips and its new AM3 socket that support DDR3.

War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Well, except when it’s a CPU war. In that case, it’s good for consumers. Really good for us. With the unveiling of five new AMD’s latest Phenom II CPUs supporting DDR3, it’s pretty clear that the CPU war that started with the unveiling of the Phenom II in January is escalating.

AMD’s new lineup includes the 2.6GHz Phenom II X4 for $175, the 2.8GHz Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition at $145, and the 2.6GHz Phenom II X3 710 for $125. AMD’s two other new chips: the 2.6GHz Phenom II X4 910 and the 2.5GHz Phenom II X4 805. The 910 and 805 are OEM only CPUs and pricing was not released but you can expect that gray-markets will carry them and that the prices will follow the numbers. The 805, for example, should be slightly cheaper than the $175 810 and the 910 should be cheaper than the $195 Phenom II X4 920.

Lost in the numbers? So where we. AMD’s lineup is so bewildering to us today that we had build a spread sheet just to sort it out! We give you the skinny on AMD’s latest quad and tri-cores and help you sort through AMD’s bewildering array of CPU choices.

Overclocking can kill your CPU. It can corrupt your OS, melt your motherboard, and cause you to lose a month’s work or more. Despite those dire orange-alert warnings, however, overclocking has moved on from the Nerd’s Only Club to become practically a mainstream hobby in the last few years.

So why overclock if the risks are so great? For some folks, it’s about bragging rights. Like drag-strip racers who burn up an engine just to set a quarter-mile record, there’s a small community who will overclock a CPU to the brink of destruction just to run a benchmark and take a screen shot of the result.

The bulk of overclockers, however, are more concerned with the cost dividends. If you can take a $300 CPU and make it as fast or faster than one that costs $1,000, the money you save can go toward other components in your system. For these folks, it’s like getting a free high-end videocard.

Whether you’re a cheapskate or a drag racer, you’ll find that Intel’s new Core i7 CPU is unlike any previous Intel CPU, and overclocking this beast requires more tinkering than you might expect. Follow along as we explore what it takes to push this chip hard.

It’s been almost a year since we tested Pinnacle’s original PCTV HD Pro Stick TV tuner. In that time, Pinnacle has fixed many of the original product’s shortcomings. The new PCTV HD Mini Stick is even smaller than the original HD Pro Stick, which was itself the size of a fat USB memory key. You could easily chuck the 1”x0.5” PCTV HD Mini Stick in your bag and never notice it. The remote is also slimmed down considerably and could slip into your back pocket comfortably.

Read on for the rest of the review!

Asus’s P6T Deluxe isn’t the most over-the-top Core i7 board we’ve tested, but it certainly has a leg up on Intel’s bare-bones DX58SO. For one thing, it finally brings us graphics reunification by supporting both two-card SLI and CrossFire X configurations.

And instead of the gimpy four-slot DIMM setup of Intel’s DX58SO, the P6T Deluxe features six DDR3 DIMM slots. The board, of course, supports all Core i7 CPUs. Since Intel is the sole chipset provider for X58 and the memory controller is in the CPU itself, most performance differences will be the result of BIOS tweaks each manufacturer implements. We found Asus’s BIOS to be far friendlier than the Intel board’s, which at first glance seems designed for engineers. Truth be told, though, the Asus BIOS can be just as daunting if you tread into the Advanced section.

Read on for the rest of the review!

Uberclok takes a mighty gamble with its Fury PC. Instead of burying Intel’s hot, new Core i7 in the heart of its machine, Überclok reaches for something that’s beginning to show its age: Intel’s midrange Core 2 Quad Q9650. Why didn’t the company go with, say, an Intel Core i7 940, which costs the same as the Q9650? We’re not entirely sure, but Überclok makes the most of its choice.

Despite its age, the chip is no slouch. At its stock 3GHz speed, this quad core would make most people happy, but the new E0-step core used in this chip series is a heckuva overclocker. In fact, Überclok ubers the chip a full gigahertz using simple air cooling, which is quite a feat—although the execution isn’t flawless. The machine completed all of our benchmarks without a hitch, but a Prime95 stress test blue-screened the box within a few minutes. A quick call to Überclok provided the solution we expected to hear: Give her more voltage. Three-tenths of a volt later, the Fury was stable in our stress test.

Read on for the rest of the review! 

All it takes is an errant foot strike or a power spike and poof—you’ve lost gigabytes of photos and memories in a single hard-drive crash. Let’s face it, few of us ever actually take the time to copy those photos to a backup drive. And if you don’t do it, do you really think your mother-in-law will? Verbatim’s PhotoSave DVD aims to solve this problem with a solution that even your newbiest relatives can handle.

Read on for the rest of the review!

Sometimes it’s OK not to take the medal stand in the race to get a product out first. Take the case of Western Digital’s new 5,400rpm Scorpio Blue 500GB notebook drive. It’s the fourth 500GB mobile drive to hit the market, after Hitachi’s Travelstar 5K500, Fujitsu’s MHZ2 BT, and Samsung’s Spinpoint M6, but the Scorpio is, arguably, better than its competitors.

The production of a sequel typically implies that the original creation is worth revisiting. However, considering that the original Phenom was the hardware version of Ishtar, many enthusiasts didn’t think Phenom deserved to be revisited.

AMD certainly thinks it does—and it hopes Phenom II is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn to Phenom’s  Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And why shouldn’t AMD be able to pull off a reversal of fortune? Phenom II isn’t just Phenom joined by a Roman numeral—it’s a die shrink with a boatload of additional cache and an improved core. In short, AMD hopes to erase memories of the original Phenom and put smiles on the faces of disappointed overclockers with its reimagined Phenom II chip.

Come with us as we review, critique, and dissect Phenom II and find out how it stacks up against a stack of Intel CPUs.

 Its official name is Core 2 CrossFire DDR3 Gaming System, but you can just call it the Quad Meister or Quaderino, if you’re into the brevity thing. What else could you possibly call a PC equipped with two ATI Radeon 4870 X2 cards (quad GPU cores), four Velociraptors (quad hard drives) and an overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (uhh, quad cores)? Maybe we’re stretching here, but our nickname is certainly sexier than the PC’s official moniker.

Read on for the rest of the review!

When we reviewed Eye-Fi’s original wireless SD card (March 2008), our verdict was that this device, which lets you automatically upload images to the Internet via Wi-Fi, was a cool gee-whiz item hurt by a number of flaws. This update fixes those weaknesses and turns this wireless card into a must-have item for photo-sharing.

Read on for the rest of the review. 

Pardon us, but crowing that your integrated graphics chip is better than your competitor’s integrated graphics chip is a bit like bragging that your D is better than your friend’s D-.

As sad as that is, it’s the tack AMD is taking with its 790GX chipset, which Gigabyte’s MA790GP-DS4H mobo is based on. While the chipset features DirectX 10 support and indeed might be faster than other integrated graphics solutions, it’s still slower than the ancient GeForce 7600 GS we compared it to.

Read on for more.

Stop. You had us at oil submersed motherboard, CPU and GPUs. You didn’t even have to dunk the SSDs, PSU or create a custom motherboard and bullet resistant tank too to convince us that you’re really hard core, umm, Hardcore.

Of course, if you stare too hard at the tank, you’ll miss all the heavenly glory that the Hardcore PC truly is. From its beautiful aluminum case, to its top port routing and the easy to access hard drives, every centimeter of the machine oozes custom computing. And we can honestly say that after tinkering with the most exotic PCs available on Earth for a decade now. What Hardcore is trying to do is so over the top that no one has ever tried it before on a production machine.

But before Hardcore can ascend to take its place among the top performance PC makers, there are an awful lot of questions to answer. Like can they really make and sell these babies for how much the company claims it can? Does it really work? To find the answer to that read on.

 A fast car won’t make you turn better laps at Laguna Seca. A pair of $200 sneakers won’t help you outplay Lebron James, and installing Photoshop CS4 won’t make your photos magically better. While that may be true, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 7.0 will almost certainly make the average person’s photos better. Now in its seventh iteration, Elements 7.0 uses the guts of the extremely powerful Photoshop and tries to make it friendly to everyone.

How big a deal is Intel’s entry into the solid-state-drive game? The announcement of the company’s new X-25M SSD, and a faster version for enthusiasts, all but overshadowed details of the company’s next-generation CPU at its fall developer conference.

After testing Intel’s entry-level SSD, we can understand why. The X-25M offers the fastest read speeds we’ve ever seen from a single SSD or hard drive.

How fast? The 10,000rpm Western Digital Velociraptor (reviewed September 2008) offered sustained transfer speeds of 98MB/s. The $1,500 MemoRight MR25.2-32/64S GT from our SSD roundup (November 2008) turned in read speeds of 112MB/s. The Intel X-25M hits 206MB/s read speeds.

Jump ahead to read the rest of the review.

It’s official: People who buy motherboards with mainstream chipsets such as the P45 don’t want to pay for DDR3. At least, that’s what it seems like to us. Asus’s impressive Maximus II Formula is the third P45-based board we’ve tested, and not one of them sports DDR3 slots. But that doesn’t take anything away from the MIIF, the coolest P45 board we’ve encountered.

Hit the jump for more.

Is there no such thing as bad news or is no news good news?

From ATI’s point of view, it’s no news. Speaking Thursday at AMD’s analyst day, ATI’s graphics chief, Rick Bergman said it would continue with a steady as she goes path. That’s no surprise as ATI has recently seen a resurgence in market share, revenue and reception by power users.

Next year, Bergman said ATI would build on its “sweet spot” strategy. Instead of building huge monolithic graphics cards as Nvidia does, it would continue to concentrate on great $200 to $300 parts and combine them to take on Nvdia’s high-end parts.

With no firm hardware to reveal, Bergman took a few shots at Nvidia’s widely reported mobile GPU failures and lack of DX10.1 support which, he said, is the easiest way for developers to get to DX11 next year.

ATI also expects to be the first to get to 40nm with its graphics and chipset parts, Bergman said. He noted that ATI was the first to 65nm, 80nm and 90nm for graphics parts. What isn’t clear is where those 40nm parts would be fabbed. Although strongly hinted that ATI’s graphics chips and chipsets would made on AMD’s recently spin-off fabs, neither Bergman nor Doug Grose, the new senior VP of The Foundry Company, would commit to it. Grose did say that in 2009, The Foundry Company would have the capability to produce those 40nm parts.

Depite the lack of hardware news, Bergman said ATI would have an early present for its users; in December, the company expects to release a free GPU-based encoder that runs on modern Radeon cards. Based on the company’s new Stream API, the Avivo Video Encoder uses the parallel processing power of the GPU to transcode or encode video. Similar functionality has been available for Nvidia products under its CUDA API for months but the encoder is not free and published by Elemental Technologies.

Bergman also said that Avivo Video Encoder with a mid-range Radeon HD 4870 card will actually outperform Nvidia’s top-end GeForce GTX280 card in encoding tasks using Elemental’s Badaboom Media Converter. ATI’s Free Avivo Video Encoder will run on any 4000-series Radeon HD card.

AMD will dub the 45nm die shrink of its consumer enthusiast CPU as Phenom II X4 and laid out plans for its first CPUs with integrated graphics core.

The Phenom II X4 is on tap for late this year and will follow the company’s smaller, faster 45nm Opteron chips. The new chip will feature 8MB of cache and support both DDR2 and DDR3 in the AM3 and AM2+ sockets. Phenom II X4 will be part of AMD’s “Dragon” platform that combines the new chip with DX10.1 graphics, the company’s new Stream GPU processing, OverDrive and Fusion for gaming utility.

AMD also announced plans for a 32nm family of chips as early as 2011. On the top end, a quad-core Orochi with 8MB of cache and DDR3 will hopefully keep enthusiasts happy. Orochi is part of AMD’s Bulldozer family that mysteriously disappeared from the company’s roadmap earlier this year. Until Orochi is available, the 45nm Phenom II X4, previously codenamed Deneb  will hopefully fight off Intel’s Core i7 chips.

The move to 32nm will also see the Llano chip. The CPU will feature four cores, 4MB of cache, DDR3 and an integrated graphics core. AMD, meanwhile, confirmed it would be taking on Intel’s Atom chip with its Conesus CPU next year. Conesus will be dual-core, feature 1MB of cache and DDR2. In 2010, Conesus will give way to Geneva which doubles the cache to 2MB.

We thought thermal paper was dead and buried along with mimeograph paper, but look out, it’s back!

Folks who are nostalgic for the ’80s can get their curly thermal-paper fix with Planon’s portable PrintStik printer. Designed for road warriors, the PrintStik is a self-contained, battery-powered portable thermal printer. It’s small enough to fit in your bag, and if your expectations are low enough, it does the job. How low? It’s a gray-scale thermal printer, so you won’t be printing color graphics with it.

More on why this should be your last resort after the jump!

Tick tock? More like ding-dong, mutha—shut your mouth. What baby? We’re talkin’ about Core i7.

Our apologies to Isaac Hayes, but if he were alive, we’re almost certain he would have been tapped to hammer out a theme song for Intel’s most significant CPU launch in, well, ever.

Why is this CPU more significant than the 8088, Pentium, or Pentium M? As the second new chip produced after a series of embarrassing losses to archrival AMD, the Core i7 will answer for the world whether Intel is prepared to ride the momentum of its Core 2 launch with another winning chip or if it’s content to rest on its laurels, as it did with the Pentium 4.

Core i7 also represents a major new direction for Intel, which has stubbornly clung to the ancient front-side-bus architecture and discrete memory controller for years. Indeed, with its triple-channel integrated DDR3 memory controller and chip-to-chip interconnect, the block map of a Core i7 looks more like an Athlon 64 than a Core 2 chip.

Intel actually has three quad-core Core i7 CPUs ready: the top-end 3.2GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, the performance-oriented 2.93GHz Core i7-940, and the midrange 2.66GHz Core i7-920. For the most part, all three are exactly the same except for clock speeds, multiplier locking (only the Extreme is unlocked), and QuickPath Interconnect speed. See the chart on page 42 for details.

The bigger issue is how Core i7 performs. To find out, we ran the Extreme 965 against AMD’s fastest proc as well as Intel’s previous top gun in a gauntlet of benchmarks. Read on for the results.

Continue reading for our comprehensive review and benchmarks!