Posted 11/02/09 at 08:07:18 AM by Paul Lilly

One of the biggest challenges of staying within a budget is not even knowing what you're allowed to spend. That's exactly the situation most IT managers find themselves in, suggests a new white paper by Digital Fuel.

The study the white paper is based off of pinged over 130 IT managers who were directly involved with the related costs and budgets of more than $10 million. And while 84 percent of the respondents classified detailed insight in IT costs as critical, more than half of those polled complained that their level of IT cost visibility isn't where it should be.

This type of environment presents a frustrating challenge in figuring out how to manage IT costs, as evidenced by the respondents indicating that coming up with a cost-model and breaking down the IT costs ranked as the most difficult. IT managers who took part in the study also noted a strong desire to better assess cost inefficiencies in their IT departments.

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Posted 10/29/09 at 08:04:33 AM by Paul Lilly

Security firm Symantec reported revenue of $1.48 billion for its second fiscal quarter, beating out most analysts' expectations, but down 3 percent from the same quarter one year ago. Earnings were also better than expected, which checked in at $294 million, or $0.36 per share.

Symantec attributed the growth to its consumer business and increased IT spending, which bodes well for the company, considering a recent survey by Intuit Payroll suggested that the majority of SMBs have been spending less on security, even as cybercrime continues to rise.

"We're definitely seeing the U.S. market stabilize," Symantec CEO Enrique Salem noted in an interview on Wednesday. "We've seen China and parts of Asia continue to do well, and we're seeing some weakness in western Europe."

While consumer revenue was up 6 percent year-over-year, Symantec may have a tough time pushing its storage products. According to data from research firms IDC and Gartner, server sales were down roughly 30 percent last quarter.

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Posted 10/28/09 at 01:05:31 PM by Paul Lilly

Mid-sized businesses are finding themselves in a precarious position as of late. Forced to cut back spending because of the ongoing recession, many firms are spending less on security, but at the same time, cyber attacks are on the rise, according to a McAfee report released today.

McAfee surveyed 900 mid-sized businesses around the globe with workforces ranging from 51 to 1,000 employees, and more than half of them reported an increase in security breaches over the past 12 months. The United States, along with India, ranked at the top of the charts with 63 percent of organizations noting an increase in attacks, and only China was higher at 68 percent.

But what's most frightening is how many of those same organizations think they're only a single serious security breach away from being put out of business. Of those surveyed in the U.S., 71 percent said it's a real possibility, yet IT budgets have either dropped or remained the same.

"An organization's level of worry and awareness about increasing threats has not overcome the downward pressure on budgets and resources," said Darrell Rodenbaugh, senior vice president of global midmarket for McAfee, in a statement. "But this creates a vicious cycle of breach and repair that costs far more than prevention."

While most companies note that a single attack could do them in, McAfee notes that most businesses may underestimate the risk. Over 90 percent of those surveyed felt they're protected from cybercriminals and aren't in as much danger as larger businesses.

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Posted 09/16/09 at 10:00:00 AM by Gordon Mah Ung

Even the Intel fanboys have to hand it to AMD once in a while. After Intel deftly dropped a Core i5 anvil on Phenom II’s head, AMD did a quick drop to floor and now fires back slo-mo style with its own chip: a $99 quad core.

Dubbed the Athlon II X4 620, this 2.6GHz quad core isn’t just leftover parts swept off the factory floor, either. The Athlon II X4 is based on the familiar K10 microarchitecture in the Phenom and Phenom II, but it’s actually a newer, smaller die. In fact, the new chip has less than half the transistors of a Phenom II X4 processor. Much of the shrinkage comes at the expense of cache. While the Phenom II packs 6MB of L3, the budget Athlon II X4 features none.

The TDP of the new Athlon II X4 chips (there are two, but only one is sub $100) is also considerably lower than the top-end Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition chip at 95 watts versus 140 watts. Other than the TDP and lack of L3 cache, the CPUs are essentially the same as their Phenom predecessors.

Read on for our full analysis, review, and benchmarks!

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Posted 04/22/09 at 11:30:00 AM by Florence Ion

Back in December, we gave you the low-down on how to build a kick-ass $800 gaming PC. Well, lately the economy has been in a bit of a shamble, so we’ve lowered our price ceiling to spec out a tightly budgeted $500 rig that will deliver admirable gaming framerates and still leave you some cash to actually buy some games and pay off that credit-card debt.

The last time we conducted a $500 PC build-off (October, 2007), we matched a Allendale-based Core 2 E4300 CPU with a Nvidia 8500GT, which gave us pathetic FEAR and Quake 4 benchmark results. That build cut so many corners that we even opted out of a case and used a cardboard box instead (in retrospect, a really bad idea). Almost two years later, the tech is better and prices for some component categories have dramatically dropped. A bit wiser and gutsier, we were determined to build a PC that could actually play modern games.

In order to keep the machine under $500, we factored out the price of purchasing an operating system, and assume that you already have a copy of Windows XP, Vista, or the Windows 7 Beta lying around. And obviously, we were forced to restrain ourselves from choosing the high-end premium parts that we would normally recommend to readers. But despite the low cost, we actually didn't have to make any real compromises to get a solid gaming machine. Our (relatively) cheapo PC actually surprised us in our benchmark tests -- scoring close to our zero-point system -- and made us feel confident that a rock bottom price doesn’t automatically mean rock bottom performance.

Join us as we take on the $500 Gaming PC Challenge!

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Posted 03/10/09 at 12:30:00 PM by Norman Chan

It's been far too long since we've run a Parts and Price Guide on the website, but we're now ready to get back into the groove of monthly component recommendations for your next PC build. This month, we're starting off with a $1000 PC. You'll be surprised at how much power and storage you can get for a grand -- even we're hesitant to call it a mere budget rig. In the following weeks, we'll also be running guides for $1500, $2000 systems, and will even try assembling and benchmarking a $500 configuration for the really budget-conscious (the troubled economy pretty much mandates it!). But for now, take a dive into our choices for a respectable system, and sound off on how you would build your PC differently! 

Read on for our parts and price list!

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Posted 10/30/08 at 11:00:00 AM by Benson Hong

As some of you may recall, we featured a Budget Badass Buyer’s Guide at the beginning of the month to provide some guidance to those looking for solid performance at what we, Maximum PC, would consider to be a reasonable price. We read your responses to the build and many felt that $1500 was a bit over what the typical user would consider “budget.” So, we took it a step further and created a Budget PC below the $1500 mark. In fact, we even dropped it under $1000. At $800, we couldn’t quite figure out if it would even be possible to construct a PC that could play the latest games or even do some basic photo-manipulation in Photoshop. We stepped up to the challenge and built this Budget PC and put it to the test against our hardcore, $5000 machines to see how they match up.

Since we are still in the process of assembling the rig, benchmarks have yet to be run. For now, we give you our parts list. Check back soon for the results from our tests!

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Posted 10/01/08 at 11:00:00 AM by Benson Hong

Since our last Budget Badass update back in July, the hardware industry has made some dramatic turns as far as new technology goes. With the release of the energy-efficient Penryn core from Intel, we took a side step away from the Kentsfield core and took a swing at the Q9300. While the Q9300 sports a slightly smaller cache than the Q6600, we found the Penryn to perform better in our tests. With the extra leeway we had in the budget from the previous configuration, we also swapped out the Radeon 4870 for a beefier GTX 280 while keeping the final price tag under $1500. Now this, my friends, is what we would like to call a Budget Badass!

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