Hardware

GeForce GTX 780 Benchmarks

josh norem — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:12:01 +0000

Team Green captures the single-GPU crown, again

Today Nvidia pulls the wraps off its $650 GK110-based 700 series flagship card, the GeForce GTX 780. This board slides directly into the yawning chasm that exists between the $500 GK104-based GTX 680 and the $1,000 GK110-based GTX Titan, though despite its price it's actually much closer in specs and performance to the Titan than it is to the GTX 680.

Specifications

Like the Titan, the GTX 780 is a GK110 board, so it has all 7.1 billion transistors, a 384-bit memory bus care of six 64-bit memory controllers and two less SMX clusters with 12 for a total of 2,304 CUDA cores. Its 3GB of memory runs at the usual 6GHz clock speed, and its 863MHz core clock speed is just a smidge higher than the Titan’s 836MHz clock. Its 900MHz boost clock is also a bit faster than the Titan’s 876MHz. Overall, it would be fair to refer to the GTX 780 as the so-called Titan LE that has been rumored for a while now, as it’s a basically a slightly neutered version of the Titan, at least as far as gamers are concerned. Performance in games is extremely competitive with the Titan, more so than we thought it would be given its price. When it comes to compute performance, however, the GTX 780 is heavily neutered compared to the Titan, and for good reason. The 1.5 Teraflops of double precision performance that was so welcome in the Titan is nowhere to be seen in the GTX 780, as Nvidia is reserving that feature for the pricier Titan, and is also billing the GTX 780 as strictly a gaming card. The GTX 780 still offers respectable single precision performance though, clocking in at 4 Teraflops compared to the Titan's 4.5 Teraflops. For comparison, the GK104-based GTX 680 can only push 1 Teraflop of single precision, and its double precision performance is just 1/24th of that by Nvidia's design. It wants these "cheap" cards to be used for gaming, period, and its expensive Tesla cards to be used for Compute. This is why the Titan costs $1,000 and the GTX 780 costs $650.

GTX 780 Specs

Otherwise the card looks, feels, and runs almost exactly like a Titan. It has the same 10.5-inch length, the same six-pin and eight-pin PCIe connectors, and the same HDMI, DisplayPort , and DVI connectors. It supports up to three-way SLI. The minimum power supply required is 600w, and the card's TDP is 250w, just like the Titan.

New Technology

Nvidia is releasing the GTX 780 with a fair bit of cool new technology that helps round out the package a bit, so let's look at each of them one by one.

Adaptive Fan Control

Nvidia's all-new Adaptive Fan Control smooths out the speed at which the fans spin up and down, resulting in less noticeable noise during operation.

Even though the GTX Titan was and is a "quiet" GPU by our standards, Nvidia tells us that it's not necessarily fan noise that people notice as much as changes in fan speed, and we have to say there's some truth to that. Once a fan is spinning at a certain RPM we tend to not notice it, especially as the Titan and the GTX 780's fans never really spin very fast. It is certainly noticeable though when the fans spin up or down suddenly; we all hear that. So on the GTX 780 Nvidia has smoothed out the speed at which the fans spin up and down so you don't hear the change in fan speed.

ShadowPlay

ShadowPlay is designed to improve the in-game video recording experience over FRAPS by consuming less system resources and compressing the videos. It will work with any Kepler GPU and will be released this summer.

Now this is a cool feature, albeit one we have not tested as it was not available just yet. This is software that only works with Kepler GPUs to record your gaming sessions by using the GPU's built-in H.264 video encoder. The software will just record everything you do and keep only the portion that you just played, hence it's name, as it records everything that you just did, like a shadow. You can tell the software to just keep the last five minutes, 10 minutes, or 20 minutes, and it'll intelligently delete what is not needed, helping keep file sizes down by both deleting unneeded video and also through video compression. Nvidia also claims the peformance hit from turning on Shadowplay is less than five percent, so it's main advantages over FRAPS are that it only records what just happened instead of everything, and it requires less system resources to do so. This software will be rolling out this summer and will be available via Nvidia's GeForce Experience software, and will be supported on any Kepler GPU. It should be noted that beginning with this launch driver, the GeForce Experience software will replace the Nvidia Update software in the driver package, and though users can opt out of installing it, by default it will be installed with all Nvidia drivers going forward.

Head on over to page 2 to read about the rest of the new features, see the benchmarks, and our final thoughts.

GPU Boost 2.0

The GTX 780 features GPU Boost 2.0 temperature target settings as well as the ability to overvolt the board.

This feature first appeared on the GTX Titan and it works beautifully. Its main goal is to prevent the GPU from throttling itself due to excessive heat, which results in reduced performance. To prevent this from happening, users can now set the peak temperature for a card, which by default is set to 81C but it can be pushed up to 95C if you like (the card can handle it). Nvidia tells us these cards can go all the way up to 105C before the hardware is damaged, but you'd be lucky to push either a Titan or a GTX 780 past 80C typically since their coolers are so effective. However, the GPU will overclock as high as it can until it reaches that pre-determined temperature, so you can nudge the temperature GPU Boost 2.0 also allows for overvolting a card, so you can overclock it as high as you can get away with by pushing the core clock power target, temperature target, memory, and voltage. Only the Titan and the GTX 780 offers these features at this time. If you try to use them on a GTX 680, for example, they are simply greyed out.

Performance

When we first heard of this card we figured it would land squarely in between the $500 GTX 680 and the $1,000 GTX Titan, both in performance and price. Then Nvidia informed us the card was priced at $650, and we looked at the benchmark charts and thought this was either a very competitively priced product, or the Titan is really overpriced, at least for gamers. Looking at the benchmark chart (below) you can see the GTX 780 is within five to 15 percent of the Titan in all benchmarks, which is seriously impressive given it costs $350 less. In general we run all games at 2560x1600 with 4XAA enabled, which is extremely taxing on even the most hardcore systems, and yet the GTX 780 was just on the cusp of playing all games extremely smoothly, with the exception of Metro: Last Light, which will remain a ball buster for the forseeable future it seems. Even though we'd prefer to have at least 40-50fps, that is just not possible with a single GPU at the resolution we run, and only the Titan can get close to achieving it. That said, the GTX 780 is damn close, and easily puts some distance on both the GTX 680 and the Radeon HD 7970, making it the fastest sub-$1,000 GPU available at this time. It should also be noted that the card ran cool and quiet throughout testing, and we were able to run it at 1,084MHz with no problems at all.

GTX 780 Benchmarks

Final thoughts

This is one wicked fast GPU, and if it was $750 or so like we thought it would be you would see us waffling a bit between this card and the Titan. However, at $650 it is very competitive, though we've yet to compare it to dual GTX 660 Ti cards or GTX 670 cards in SLI, but then you have to deal with dual GPUs. Also, add-in board partners will be releasing their own versions of the GTX 780 with custom cooling solutions, but we do not know at this time whether the boards will be overclocked or offer larger frame buffers.

In our opinion, the best news about the GTX 780 is at the resolution we use for testing there was no such thing as an affordable GPU that could handle it. The GTX 680 and the HD 7970 were all stuck around 20fps or so for newer games, though the Titan could handle them much better. With the GTX 780 we have a truly semi-affordable card that can run newer games at these resolutions and AA settings just fine. Nvidia says the GTX 780 is 34 percent faster than a GTX 680 and that seems about right to us, and 70 percent faster than a GTX 580, so people with older cards will see quite a jump in performance by upgrading. There also might be other 700-series cards in the pipeline, so anyone looking to upgrade might want to wait just a bit before pulling the trigger on a new card.

As far as how AMD will respond, that remains to be seen. The company reminded us that the HD 7970 GHz edition is still the fastest card at its price point of roughly $420, and that is certainly true. Whether or not it will respond with a GCN 2.0 board dubbed Radeon 8790 or similar is anyone's guess, but given the ferocity of the GPU wars as of late we'd be shocked if AMD sat on the sidelines for very long.

PS: Here is a promotional video Nvidia sent us that walks you through the GTX 780's hardware and software.

Eurocom Scorpius Review

Jimmy Thang — Fri, 24 May 2013 18:52:27 +0000

3D notebook offers hefty power for a hefty cost

The Eurocom Scorpius lives a dual life. On one hand, it’s a dull-looking workstation; on the other, this highly configurable laptop can also be outfitted with a 3D monitor and killer gaming specs. We opted for the latter.

The Scorpius has a backlit keyboard that can change to seven different colors.

Along with a 120Hz refresh rate, the 17.3-inch monitor features a built-in 3D emitter that syncs up to a pair of bundled Nvidia 3D Vision 2 glasses. To test the 3D experience, we played the 3D Vision Ready–title Batman: Arkham City and sampled some 3D movie trailers from 3DVisionLive.com. Nvidia’s stereoscopic technology rivals the best that movie theaters have to offer in terms of depth, and never bothered our eyes, but the experience wasn’t perfect. Even though Nvidia purports to have solved the dimming issue with its Vision 2 glasses, you’re still essentially wearing sunglasses, so the experience is going to be darker than viewing content in 2D without glasses. We also feel that wearing glasses in and of itself is cumbersome.

The most vexing problem is that when 3D is enabled, performance suffers greatly. Our frame rate dropped by half, from 50s to mid-20s, when playing Batman in 3D as opposed to 2D. In our opinion, these various issues detract too much from the experience; we’d rather play in 2D mode. As for the TN panel in 2D mode, while some sing the praises of 120Hz’s ability to improve even 2D image quality, we didn’t see any noticeable improvement over 60Hz performance when surfing the web, watching videos, or playing games.

We had little complaint with our system’s internal specs, however, which included a 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-3840QM CPU, 16GB of RAM, and not one, but two GeForce GTX 680Ms in SLI. In our more CPU-intensive tests, the Scorpius scored modest wins of 6–13 percent. However, when it came to the more GPU-intensive applications, our zero-point’s comparatively humble Fermi-based GeForce GTX 670M GPU got severely stung by the Scorpius’s two Kepler beasts. In our STALKER: CoP benchmark, the Scorpius performed an amazing 112.5 percent better than the ZP; the performance gap only widened in our 3DMark 11 test, where it performed an astonishing 248.1 percent better. Because these benchmark stats were so amazing, we loaded up Far Cry 3 to give it a real workout. While the Scorpius wasn’t able to run the super-graphically intensive game on “Ultra” (the game’s highest settings), it ran at “Very High” with frame rates in the mid-40s to low-50s range, and often outperformed a 2.8GHz AMD quad-core gaming desktop armed with a GTX 590. It seems unfair to bring up the fact that the far less expensive ($1,500) GT60 zero-point laptop wasn’t even able to muster a solid 30fps on FC3’s “High” settings. The only performance test where the GT60 bested the Scorpius was in battery life, where Eurocom’s laptop lasted a poor 103 minutes. Something’s got to give when you’re powering two 680Ms.

In terms of storage, the laptop comes with two drives: a 128GB mSATA Micron and 512GB SSD. While the two speedy drives are appreciated, the lack of a hefty HDD really limits the overall package. Luckily, the laptop takes up to three 2.5-inch storage drives and installing an additional HDD requires the removal of just one screw from the bottom of the laptop. Users can also access the motherboard from underneath and swap out the RAM. Eurocom has made the main compartment easily removable, with only four screws holding it in place.

While the laptop certainly performs well, it still has issues. Its trackpad is unresponsive and can be an exercise in frustration to use. Perhaps a bigger problem is that this thing is heavy. With a carry weight of more than 13 pounds, the Scorpius is in backbreaker territory. Finally, at almost $4,000, it’s very expensive.

Fortunately, most of these issues can be mitigated. You can save money by skipping out on the 3D monitor and second SSD. And you can overlook its battery, weight, and trackpad issues by understanding that the Scorpius is best used as a desktop replacement. Its performance is simply off the charts, and complaining about its other problems is like complaining about how a Ferrari is expensive, bad with fuel economy, and doesn’t have enough cup holders. If those issues are enough to bother you, you’re looking at the wrong machine. This laptop is all about performance and here the Scorpius is a stinger.

$3,915, www.eurocom.com

Vizio CA24T-A4 All-in-One PC Review

Michael Brown — Wed, 22 May 2013 22:55:53 +0000

Bringing the sexy back—minus a few key components

Smart TVs are basically dumb PCs, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Vizio—one of the world’s most successful HDTV manufacturers—plans to grow by jumping into the all-in-one PC market. The Vizio CA24T-A4 is a surprisingly good rookie effort, but there is room for improvement.

The tiny keyboard delivers surprisingly good tactile feedback.

The 24-inch, 10-point touchscreen display is crisp, clear, and very thin (about .75 inches). It’s an MVA (multi-domain vertical alignment) model, with an LED backlight. Resolution is 1920x1080 pixels, which is typical of this class of machine (Vizio also offers higher-end models with 27-inch displays at the same resolution).

The display is mounted to a thin stalk rising from the pizza-box base that houses the machine’s guts. The display can tilt from minus-5 degrees to plus-20 degrees, which is fine for using the PC from a seated position, but it doesn’t tilt back far enough to use the machine while standing. Unlike the displays on the Asus ET2300 and Lenovo A720, it can’t be folded flat. It also doesn’t pivot or swivel left to right.

The CA24T-A4’s base is incredibly small—at just 1-inch high, it’s even thinner than the svelte Lenovo A720—but Vizio removed two important components to achieve that profile: The computer has neither a discrete GPU nor an optical drive. You won’t mind integrated graphics unless you’re a hardcore gamer, and the absence of an optical drive won’t matter if you acquire your movies, music, games, and other software online. But Intel’s dual-core 2.5GHz Core i5-3210M CPU and its HD4000 graphics is a 98-pound weakling when it comes to modern gaming with eye candy turned up, and we were grateful to have a USB DVD drive on hand to install some of our benchmarks. Gaming performance on the box could have been helped with higher-clocked RAM, but alas, Vizio went with DDR3/1333.

Vizio outfitted the CA24T-A4 with four USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI inputs (so you can connect both a satellite/cable set-top box and a gaming console or Blu-ray drive), and an eSATA port (which we’d happily trade for Thunderbolt for forward-looking compatibility). Everything except one USB port is in the back of the machine, so you won’t have ugly cables sticking out of its side; and unlike many AiOs we’ve tested, Vizio doesn’t hijack any of its USB ports to host a wireless dongle for keyboard and mouse. Actually, Vizio doesn’t put a mouse in the box—it provides a wireless multitouch trackpad, instead. Vizio tells us that this is to take advantage of Windows 8 gestures, but we can’t say we’re enthused about it: Trackpads are necessary on laptops, but they don’t deliver a lot of benefit paired with a desktop rig (unless you’re using the PC from the couch, and that’s an unlikely scenario with just a 24-inch display).

Vizio’s all-in-one delivers much better sound than we’ve heard from most computers, thanks in part to the presence of a subwoofer cleverly integrated into the computer’s detached power supply (Asus offers a sub for its all-in-ones, but at additional cost with most models). There’s a volume control and an HDMI toggle switch conveniently integrated into both the keyboard and the remote control. That’s a much better solution than integrating these features into the display, as Asus and Lenovo do. You can also use the HDMI display without needing to power up the computer (the keyboard controls don’t function in this situation, but the remote does).

The Vizio CA24T-A4 delivered very weak benchmark numbers. If you care about performance, the similarly priced Asus E2300 crushes it, thanks to its higher base clock, larger cache, and dedicated GPU. But if you anticipate using the Vizio’s HDMI display capabilities as much as its computing power, it’s the better buy.

$1,250, www.vizio.com

Logitech Z323 Review

Michael Brown — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:20:24 +0000

2.1-Channel Speaker System offer cheap thrills

Logitech has built more computer speakers over the years than just about any manufacturer, and it’s learned a thing or two about building decent low-cost models. Take the 2.1-channel Logitech Z323 system: We could name any number of speaker systems that sound better, but few that are priced better.

The satellites tilt up to project sound at your ears.

You can literally see some of the ways that Logitech hit that low price point: The satellite cabinets are made from cheap ABS plastic with permanently attached cables that plug into the subwoofer. Each satellite has dual, 2-inch, concave-dome drivers (one is mounted in the front of the cabinet and the other in the back, to deliver what Logitech describes as “360-degree sound”). So the system performs best if there’s a wall behind the satellites for the sound waves to bounce off. Each satellite also has a front-facing port. There’s a volume control and power switch on the right-hand cabinet, plus one 1/8-inch headphone output and one 1/8-inch stereo input, to support a digital media player.

The compact subwoofer cabinet (it measures 8.7x5.9x7.2 inches) is fabricated from the typical medium-density fiberboard. It houses a small amp and a tiny (for a sub) 4-inch down-firing dome woofer. The amp delivers six watts (RMS) to each of the satellites and 18 watts (RMS) to the subwoofer. The sub has its own volume control, along with a pair of RCA jacks that serve as a second auxiliary input for a gaming console, DVD player, or what have you (handy features in a speaker system priced this low).

The Z323’s favorable price/performance ratio, however, applies to games much more than music. Playing games such as Borderlands 2, we were pleased with the Z323’s ability to render the sound of gunshots and explosions, and the conversations with friendly characters and the taunts of enemies alike were rendered crisp and clear (well, with the exception of those babbling psychos).

When we listened to music, on the other hand, the vocals sounded weirdly detached from the rest of the band—and it didn’t matter whether the singer was male or female or even what style of music was being played. We tried several singer/songwriters, including “Crossing Muddy Waters,” from the John Hiatt album of the same name, Marc Cohn’s “She’s Becoming Gold,” from The Rainy Season, and Nanci Griffith’s cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Techumseh Valley,” from her record Other Voices, Other Rooms (in all three cases, the tracks were ripped from CD and encoded as 16-bit, 44.1kHz FLAC files).

This sonic detachment wasn’t as much of a problem with instrumental selections, but that’s not to say the Z323 system delivered a stellar performance. When we played Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which the composer recently remastered for Bowers & Wilkins’s Society of Sound label, the album (available in both Apple Lossless and 24-bit FLAC formats), sounded somewhat lifeless and flat compared to what we heard on more expensive speakers (including Corsair’s stellar SP2500 system). But you could almost buy four Z323 setups for the cost of one SP2500, so that’s to be expected.

f you’re working with a tight budget and need speakers primarily for gaming, Logitech has a good set in the Z323. If listening to music is your core interest, on the other hand, you should keep looking.

$70, www.logitech.com

Velocity Micro Raptor MultiPlex XL Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:30:48 +0000

Is there still room for big a HTPC?

It’s hard to talk about the Velocity Micro MultiPlex machine without thinking back more than 15 years ago, to the earliest days of “PC-TVs” and “PC Theaters.”

Back in the late 1990s, vendors such as Compaq and Gateway were pushing Pentium II–based PCs capable of watching DVDs, displaying electronic programming guides, and browsing the Internet, along with other futuristic capabilities, on gigantic 36-inch CRT televisions (we say that both literally and sarcastically).

The MultiPlex is a traditional HTPC, but fully capable of playing Big Picture Steam games, too.

In comparison to those early pioneers of living room PCs, the Velocity Micro MultiPlex is like a starship dropping out of warp speed while you look on from a covered wagon trying to get over Donner Pass without having to eat your fellow travelers.

The MultiPlex chassis harkens back to those early PC-TVs, but rather than sporting a 266MHz Pentium II, a whopping 2GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, and an analog TV tuner, the MultiPlex is pretty much state-of-the-art: liquid-cooled Core i7-3770K clocked up to 4.3GHz, 16GB of DDR3/2000, a GeForce GTX 680, 240GB SSD, and 3.6TB of RAID 5 storage. Besides Gigabit and 802.11n, and the Blu-ray drive, Velocity Micro opted for a Ceton quad-channel CableCARD tuner to help fill that massive RAID 5 array.

That RAID array, for the record, is made up of three 2TB WD Caviar Black drives. If one drive fails, you won’t lose it all—we’re just not so sure we’d care if we lost it, though. Since the MultiPlex is intended to quietly sit in the living room sucking up television through the Ceton card, a drive failure wiping out, say, every episode of Glee or The Walking Dead, wouldn’t be as bad as losing 2TB of your family videos and pics. Frankly, we think that a straight 6TB JBOD array would be just fine on a PVR box, but if you do intend to store your memories on the machine, the RAID 5 is warranted.

Performance of the box was in line with our expectations. Obviously, up against our zero-point system’s hexa-core and dual-GPU setup, it’s no contest. But against HTPC/gaming boxes like Digital Storm’s Bolt and Falcon Northwest’s Tiki, it’s pretty much a tie, as all three feature overclocked 3770K parts and GeForce GTX 680 cards. Of course, you might wonder if it’s fair to compare the MultiPlex against those much smaller HTPC machines. That’s a good question. Both the Tiki and Bolt are more likely to be used as simple SFF gaming boxes in your office, or in your living room as “Steam Boxes” running Big Picture mode. Recording terabytes of TV isn’t likely to be high on the list of their usage scenarios.

That’s actually where the MultiPlex comes in. It’s far more traditional-HTPC shaped and sized for the PVR chores, yet has plenty of firepower to run games at 1080p resolutions. Our one complaint might be that it’s a tad loud for pure PVR duties. If you’re watching, say, a Michael Bay flick, you’d never hear the fan and drive noise, but if you’re trying to catch the nuanced acting in, um, Jane Eyre on Blu-ray, you could find those sounds distracting. This won’t be an issue in gaming, of course, but it’s worth noting.

Pricing for the rig is fair. At $3,200 it’s a full grand cheaper than the Falcon Tiki we reviewed last September. The Tiki did, however, pack a pair of 512GB SSDs, which adds up, but then the MultiPlex has three drives plus a CableCARD tuner.

Overall, the MultiPlex brings a lot to the table if you’re still living in a cable world—we’re just not sure how many of us there are in today’s post-cable environment.

$3,200, www.velocitymicro.com

MiniX Neo X5 Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:14:04 +0000

Meet the android on TV box

We have some bad news for you and you’re not going to like it, as few parents ever want to hear anything negative about their baby. Well, here it is: Your so-called Smart TV really isn’t that smart.

The Android on TV box idea may be the future, but probably not this one.

Sure, the guy in the blue shirt said that your fab 60-inch plasma was top of its class and graduated cum laude, but the truth is, your TV spent most of its schooling playing beer pong and is a actually a class-A moron. The only reason it’s called “Smart” is because it was pledged as a legacy.

That’s where the MiniX Neo X5 comes in. Running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, this inexpensive black box gives your TV an actual browser and access to applications that aren’t coded in the language Ass++.

The Neo X5 sports a dual-core Rockchip RK3066 ARM processor with a quad-core Mali 400 graphics chip, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, Bluetooth, HDMI 1.4a, Fast Ethernet, and an optical S/PDIF out. For additional storage, the Neo X5 has an SD slot. MiniX even includes a short HDMI cable and USB OTG cable. For those of you who don’t subscribe to Obscure Ports Quarterly, OTG lets you use the box’s Micro USB port as a standard USB port, or—if we could figure it out—hook the Neo X5 to a PC’s USB port to use as a storage device. Think of it as a USB port that swings both ways.

As we said, we couldn’t figure it out and that’s perhaps one of the most vexing problems with the Neo X5. It’s pretty much stock Ice Cream Sandwich, but a lot of things were simply not intuitive or not working. We couldn’t, for example, figure out how to zoom in or out, and many apps that are intended for touch just didn’t work correctly for us. Granted, we were using it with a wireless keyboard and mouse, but that’s how the device would normally be used in a living room since the remote it ships with feels like it came out of a gumball machine.

The performance of the Neo X5 didn’t impress us, either. It felt sluggish in most instances, with a subpar user interface. Some benchmarks told us otherwise. We compared it to a Tegra 3–based Nexus 7 (admittedly not the most direct comparison, but a good measure of relative Android performance) and the X5 took most of the wins. The Nex7 certainly felt smoother but that’s likely due to Jelly Bean and its Project Butter improvements.

Overall, the Neo X5 feels underspec’d to us. Even the display at 1080p output looked so soft we had to double-check which mode it was in. Security is also an issue, as there is no way to secure the unit. Since you’d be logged into your Gmail account at all times on it, you’re leaving your email fly down for anyone on the device.

The Neo X5 is mainly marketed as a media player and it does fine there—to an extent. We could play various MP4 files, from GoPro cams to handycams to still images without hiccups, and there is an extensive set of codecs supported. Netflix was also fine but did exhibit more compression artifacts than we expected. YouTube videos were also pretty low-res despite being checked off as “HD.”

What we have here is essentially a work in progress. As is, it’s still far more usable and much faster than 95 percent of the “Smart” televisions on the market, but there’s much improvement to be had. MiniX is promising a Jelly Bean update at some point that may greatly change the experience—which it needs.

$110, www.polywell.com

Computer Cases Roundup

David Murphy — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:39:27 +0000

7 computer cases reviewed: Cooler Master HAF XB,Thermaltake Soprano, Corsair Carbide 200R, and more!

If you thought that the only innovation in modern chassis design was the (long-awaited) switch from USB 2.0 ports to USB 3.0 ports at all price levels, you haven’t seen anything yet. The cases in our roundup this time around really run the gamut of features: From inexpensive cases that attempt to deliver a lot of functionality without fattening up the price tag, to simple-looking chassis that hide a wealth of must-haves, to some of the most eye-opening cases we’ve seen – that don’t quite stack up once you look beyond their crazy offerings. In other words, it’s a typical computer cases roundup.

Just to lay out our criteria a bit, here are some of the elements we’re typically looking for when we run the magnifying glass over a computer case: Features that take time and effort out of the installation or upgrade process, like screwless drive bays. Minimal annoyances – like having to snap off a case’s entire front panel just to remove its drive bay covers. Adequate cooling, ideally positioned such that one’s hard drives, video cards, and general motherboard area all receive a steady stream of air. And, of course, strong cable management: Nobody likes to open up a case and find a Medusa.

Beyond that, the great computer case race is anyone’s to win. As for how each manufacturer balances “cool” with “functional,” you’ll have to read on for all the gory details!

Cooler Master HAF XB

Don’t call this case “stumpy.” It bites.

Cooler Master’s HAF XB computer case is a hybrid design that attempts to kill two PC birds with one stone: An open-air design for system builders who want to be able to swap out their components like a pit stop, and a standard, covered chassis for those who like having four walls and a roof around their system’s precious parts from time to time. For the most part, it works—but we would have love to have seen a few tweaks to make the system even easier to use for the frequent parts-swapper.

The cube-like case leaves little room for error. Its 17.5x13x16.5-inch size split into a top and bottom half on the inside: Your ATX, Micro-ATX, or Mini-ITX motherboard rests up-top—pray you don’t have a huge cooler overtop your CPU, as you get just under six and a half inches of vertical space (from the silicon on your motherboard) to play with if you have any intention of attaching a 20-centimeter fan to the case’s top. The bottom portion of the HAF XB is where you’ll precariously thread your 7-inch-or-shorter power supply; connect up the case’s two front hot-swap bays; stuff your optical drive in one of the case’s two, tool-free 5.25-inch bays; or slap some SSDs in the four additional 2.5-inch bays provided.

It’s not very often you see a manufacturer going for the fabled, “cube design,” but this is not your standard case by any stretch of the imagination.

As for the hybrid bit we previously mentioned, Cooler Master has designed the open-air case to work just like that, with the case’s sides and top bare to the world. However, when you want to transform the chassis into a normal, box-like enclosure, you just need to reattach the case’s sides and top with the provided thumbscrews.

While the process is certainly easy for those who have ever screwed in a side panel before (that’s most of you reading this), we wish that Cooler Master could have used the kind of thumbscrews that remain attached to the case (or panel) after you’ve loosened them. Losing those at a LAN party would be a real nightmare. That, or Cooler Master could have used quick-snap latches instead – an even stronger match for this Transformer of a computer case.

The beauty of Cooler Master’s split-insides concept is that you only have the annoyance of stringing cables around the lower half once. Most of the parts you’ll likely manipulate sit up top.

The case gives you a lot of expandability for its size— including room for seven PCIe devices in all and videocards up to 13.1 inches in length—as well as two USB 3.0 ports on the front and two beefy, 1,800-RPM, 12-centimeter fans directly behind that for air intake. If you’re crazy enough to try water-cooling given the tight confines of this chassis, it does support a single 24-centimeter radiator on the front if you first remove these fans in addition to a single 12-centimeter radiator on the case’s rear. While indentations on the rear of the chassis indicated a place where tubing could have been threaded, Cooler Master oddly omits any rubberized holes for doing so.

The Cooler Master HAF XB isn’t for beginners. You’re going to get to pretend you’re a surgeon when you try to thread wires around the inside of this tight chassis, even given the HAF XB’s system-builder focus. It’s still a compelling case for tinkerers that comes with plenty of useful features, and one that’s worth looking into for those afraid to (or uninterested in) making the switch to a fully open-air design. Just don’t try to water-cool it.

Cooler Master HAF XB

Hot-swap drive bays, easy-to-access motherboard maintenance, excellent cooling

Removable panels need more than thumbscrews, tight chassis for huge CPU coolers and basic PSU installation

$99, www.coolermaster.com

CoolerMaster Scout 2

Cooler Master makes it easy to carry this case around.

There’s no doubt in our minds that the design of Cooler Master’s Storm Scout 2 chassis is going to draw eyeballs. On the outside, it’s a beautiful case – punctuated ever-so-slightly by red LED fan viewable through the case’s windowed side panel and ever-so-dramatically by the case’s unique, rubber-coated steel handle up top.

Looks can be deceiving. From the outside, this case is a winner. But from the inside, we’re a bit skeptical.

The case’s inside is less eye-catching. We love the three screwless 5.25-inch drive bays that merely require you to flick a switch from “open” to “lock” to secure your components in place. However, we’re a little turned off by the flimsier rails that Cooler Master delivers to secure up to seven, 3.5-inch hard drives in place; drive trays would have been better. Additionally, four of the drive bays have to go if you’re using a video card that’s larger than 28.7 centimeters in length – and there’s no easy way to just pull them out sans screwdriver.

Thumbscrews are your new friends for the case’s seven PCIe expansion slots, and you’ll have to install both standoffs and screws for your motherboard. That said, the Storm Scout 2 makes cable management easier with the five holes (three rubberized) Cooler Master cuts right into the motherboard tray–though they could have been a little bigger.

Our biggest problem with the Storm Scout 2 is its cooling—not due to its potential, as the case supports up to nine fans in total (a mix of 12- and 14-centimeter fans, but mostly 12-centimeter). Rather the case ships with just one fan preinstalled: The aforementioned 12-centimeter LED fan on the case’s rear. You can toggle the light on and off, as the flames shooting out from your hot components will be all the dramatic lighting you really need.

Two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports adorn the case’s front, which you can hide with a little pull-down cover if you so desire. It’s another one of the many tricks Cooler Master stuffs into the Storm Scout 2’s hat; we just wish we could have some more fans, too.

CoolerMaster Scout 2

Super-mobile case, easy cable management and good connectivity

Poor prebuilt cooling (one fan!), requires sacrifice of drive bays for larger videocards, flimsier rails for hard drive installation

$99, www.coolermaster.com

MSI Stealth

You’ll love this case’s color scheme, we promise

Were there an award for “best case color scheme,” MSI’s Stealth computer case wins by a mile from its lovely black and light-blue-accented aesthetic. As for the case’s design, however, MSI packs in a few problems to balance out the good bits.

Just wait until you pop off the side of this chassis: a pretty world of black and blue awaits you.

We never thought we’d have to struggle so much with this case just to get a simple optical drive secured into one of its three free bays. That involves popping off the front panel just so you can remove the 5.25-inch bay covers–annoyance number one–and then somehow use the case’s big, blue locking mechanisms of fail to roughly secure your drive in place. Spoiler: They not very secure.

MSI does provide full trays for the four hard drives the case supports, which alleviates our frustration somewhat. It also packs two graphics card stabilizers right above that–a fun and quasi-useful addition that allows the case to support video cards up to 31 centimeters in length, but some extra 2.5-inch bays might have been more useful in general.

What the case lacks in big, fat cable routing holes (you get four small, thin ones), it makes up for in the ludicrous amount of space between the rear of the motherboard tray and the case’s right side panel. You could hide a garden hose in this case, not just your power supply cables.

A single 12-centimeter fan in the front balances out a similarly sized blue LED fan in the front, positioned directly next to the hard drive bays. On the top of the case’s front are two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and a special USB port that dovetails with your MSI motherboard’s “SuperCharger” functionality for speedy device charging. If you haven’t drunk MSI’s Flavor Aid, however, it’s just a standard USB 2.0 connection. Great looks, polarizing design: The MSI Stealth chassis leaves us feeling a little blue.

MSI Stealth

Lovely aesthetic, plenty of room for huge videocards, front-panel connectivity with an MSI-themed bonus

Videocard stabilizers seem silly, horrible 5.25-inch bay locking mechanism (and installation process)

$99, us.msi.com

Click the next page to check out our new kick-ass best-of-the-best case!

ThermalTake New Soprano

A soprano could sing inside of this case and you’d never hear it.

Find a chassis that successfully combines practical noise dampening, useful features, and cooling can be a bit of a needle in the haystack sometimes—but in this case (pardon the pun), that’s Thermaltake’s New Soprano. The solid construction of this chassis creates an upgrading or installation experience that’s free of frustration. Our only complaint with the case, if you could really call it that, is that it lacks pizazz.

This case might look fairly simple on the outside, but it has just about everything you’d ever want or need. Trust us.

That said, give us function over pretty lights any day.

The jet-black exterior of the case uses a front-panel door to create a sleek, uncluttered aesthetic by allowing you to hide your components when you aren’t specifically using them. The door doubles as an excellent noise-dampener and, we argue, a heavier-than-you-might-expect blunt object for use when squaring off against midnight intruders or zombie hordes.

Two USB 3.0 ports sit alongside two USB 2.0 ports on the top-front of the case; we’re even more enthusiastic about the built-in hot-swap hard drive docking station for 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives that Thermaltake’s constructed on the top of the chassis itself. It’s a delightful and unexpected addition to the case that brings a lot of additional connectivity without harming the case’s overall look or feel.

On the inside, Thermaltake uses four simple locking mechanisms to keep your 5.25-inch device held tightly. Installing an optical drive requires you to remove the drive bay’s front panels— easily done without having to rip off any part of the case’s front. Four screwless hard drive trays rest behind the case’s secret weapon: A huge, blue-LED, 20-centimeter fan that delivers plenty of air over your drives without blowing out your eardrums to do so. Above the primary 3.5-inch bays rests a single additional 3.5-inch drive bay and a single 2.5-inch bay for your solid-state needs (both not screwless). Thermaltake positions the thumbscrews for the case’s seven expansion slots on the exterior of the case. While that saves you a little room on the inside—giving the case space for a video card up to 12.2-inches in length—it also means that it’s really hard to actually use your fingers to tighten or loosen the screws.

Thermaltake pulls out all the stops to make it as easy as possible for you to install or upgrade parts—minus the expansion slots, which will require a screwdriver.

Motherboard standoffs are built directly into the case–an excellent touch that saves would-be system builders a bit of time and hassle. A huge hole on the upper half of the motherboard tray exposes your CPU area for easier installation of aftermarket coolers, and that’s joined by five other holes on the tray itself (four rubberized) for cable management. There’s plenty of room between the rear of the tray and the case’s right side panel, even including the acoustical foam that Thermaltake’s attached to the panel to give your ears a respite.

The only other fan in the case is a single, 12-centimeter exhaust fan attached to its rear, and the only other fan you can install beyond that would be an optional 12-centimeter intake fan on the case’s bottom. That’s the trade-off of having a “sound-proof” rig: more potential for heat. However, Thermaltake’s done a masterful job of addressing this issue while building out a case that’s packed with just about everything you’d want to have—assuming you care more about function than flash.

Thermaltake New Soprano VO900M1N2N

Good cooling, great soundproofing, mostly easy installation, slick aesthetics

Expansion slots a little fussy with thumbscrews, case isn’t extraordinarily “flashy”

$119, www.thermaltakeusa.com

Xclio Touch 787

Meet the future, and the past, of cases.

This kills us—it absolutely kills us. The Xclio Touch 787 has one of the most innovative, fun-to-use, Star-Trekian features we’ve ever seen on a case. And the substantial air-cooling on this case feels just a few miles per hour short of a category four. It looks good; it’s one of the few cases that we actually really enjoy interacting with on a daily basis.

Words fail us. The touchscreen controls on this case must be seen to be believed.

But why, oh why, does Xclio have no idea how to build hard drive mounts?

Allow us to explain. The single most noteworthy and compelling feature of the Touch 787 is—as the name alludes—the giant touch-sensitive panel on front of the case’s top. It looks as if it was ripped out of a standard Star Trek: TNG episode, and it functions about as well. After wiring up the panel with a standard Molex connection, you can tap its huge, circular buttons to turn the case’s fans on and off; adjust their speeds to low, medium, or high; turn the fans’ lights on and off; or lock and unlock the panel itself (to prevent accidental bumping).

Call it gimmicky if you want, but the responsiveness of the controls – and pretty blue lighting when you’ve activated an option – is just downright cool. Unfortunately, Xclio seems to have spent most of its R&D on this case on just that— the panel. Or perhaps the fans, as this system comes with no fewer than ten 12-centimeter fans in total: One on the case’s rear, two on the top, one in the front, and six (!) on the case’s side panel. Cooling overkill? Yes. We appreciate the enthusiasm, but one large fan on the side panel (for example) could have pushed plenty of air at a lower RPM and noise level.

All the standard features on this case are the same as what you’d expect to find in this price range: Cable mounting holes, motherboard tray cutouts behind the CPU, locking mechanisms for the case’s three free 5.25-inch bays, et cetera. We’re not going to waste words going over these, simply because the design of the case’s 3.5-inch bays—or lack thereof— presents a critical flaw in any user’s enjoyment of this wind tunnel of a chassis.

It’s too bad that Xclio didn't put some more thought into this case’s internals. As is, they’re not very good.

To access the case’s two actual hard drive bays, you have to unscrew and take apart a stupid bar of-sorts that runs vertically from the case’s bottom to just under its 5.25-inch bays. Upon further inspection, however, Xclio actually wants you to mount your drives to this bar as well, just floating out there in mid-air. Presumably, Xclio wants to put nothing between the intake fan and your system’s motherboard, but it’s a bad design concept that’s ugly for cable management, annoying to work with, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever: It’s the very definition of, “If it ain’t broke…”

If it wasn’t for Xclio’s choices in designing its mounting “system” for hard drives, we’d consider this case–loud and over-the-top as it might be–to actually be something worth considering if for nothing else than its uniqueness. The more we think about it, however, the more Xclio’s design decisions tease the idea that they don’t actually know how to build a functional case, just a really cool-looking one.

Xclio Touch 787

Amazing touch-panel controls, good cable management, more cooling than you’ll ever need.

Very loud, horrible design for hard drive mounting, plenty of wiring to manage even before you put any parts into the case.

$149, www.xclio.com

Click the next page to read reviews on the budget computer cases.

The Battle of the Inexpensive Cases

Want a case on the cheap? Be sure you don’t get what you’re paying for…

Here we go—a descent into the budget barrel. It’s understandable that you might be a little concerned about the quality of offerings you’re going to see in the sub-$100 case market. You have every right to be: Just go to your local geeky retailer of choice and check out some of the horrible cases on the shelves that get offered up at rock-bottom prices. We wouldn’t want to put our worst enemy’s motherboard into those; why should you install yours?

Of course, you can find some real diamonds in the rough, but you’re definitely going to have to do a little digging to uncover quality, inexpensive cases – especially given the sacrifices manufacturers typically have to make in order to hit these low price targets. We’ve dragged up two of these budget cases to show you just what we mean by the differences you’ll find at this end of the spectrum: Take a look!

Antec One

This case might be inexpensive, but there’s so much more Antec could have done

One… singular sensation is not this chassis. The mid-tower Antec One feels a little flimsy in a few areas, which otherwise detracts from some of the better elements in this ultra-inexpensive case.

The Antec One comes with three 5.25-inch bays that use pre-attached locking mechanisms to keep your devices all snug and attached. However, this is the kind of case that requires you to pop off the entire front panel in order to remove the grilled covers over the empty bays— be careful with that, as we definitely broke off some of the tabs on these covers when trying to remove them ourselves.

The Antec is light enough that you could probably balance it on your fingers and spin it like a basketball. (You-Tube that, if you try).

Antec positions the entrance for the case’s five 3.5-inch bays on the opposite side of the chassis–the right of the case, if you’re looking at it from the front, rather than the left. This decision boggled us at first, but the more we thought about it, it makes sense: You would have to pop off both sides of the case anyway were you to install the drives from the left side of the chassis (using the provided rails) and this method allows Antec manages to build in some additional space for much-needed cable management. It’s just a little weird at first.

The case’s seven expansion card brackets don’t come with screws pre-installed into the case; a bit of an annoyance for those looking to ensure that the flimsy tabs stay on at all times. We do, however, like the recessed side pane that sits behind a huge hold cut out for the top half of one’s motherboard: Cable-management and CPU cooler installations are a breeze.

Antec slaps two 12-centimeter fans in the top-rear corner of the case; none over the hard drives. You get two USB 3.0 ports on the case’s front; that’s it. That’s the Antec One: A price-conscious chassis that’s good in a pinch, but could be a lot better.

Antec One

Hard drive bay design is odd at first, but functional; screwless 5.25-inch bays; good cable management

Lacks screws on PCI brackets, no cooling on hard drives, frustrating 5.25-inch device installation

$49, www.antec.com

Corsair Carbide 200R

It’s not “super” inexpensive, but it’s worth saving pennies for

Delightful. Truly delightful. That’s the best way to sum up Corsair’s sub-$100 Carbide 200R mid-tower chassis. It’s roomy, it’s well-designed, and—most importantly— it doesn’t invite any annoying features or ill-designed elements along for its inexpensive ride.

The Carbide 200R doesn't win huge points for its looks, but there's a lot going on inside this chassis for its low price.

All of the Carbide 200R’s drive bays are completely screwless, a wonderful touch for those looking to make modifications to their system without busting out the tool kit. Popping off the flat, solid panels covering the case’s three 5.25-inch bays is easy and destruction-free— almost as easy as it is to slide and lock up to four 3.5-inch hard drives into the case’s left-facing bays. You can use screws to attach up to four 2.5-inch drives into a provided internal enclosure if you really don’t want your solid-state-drives to jiggle.

Motherboard standoffs are built directly into the Carbide 200R: Just slap down your board, grab a few screws, and you’re set. Five different cable routing holes cut directly into the tray make it easy for you to hide your ugly wires, and a large area cut out behind the top of the motherboard tray speeds along the (often agonizing) process of aftermarket CPU cooler installation.

The case comes with a single 12-centimeter fan in the rear and the front. While we would have preferred that the front fan was placed to push some air over your hard drives, at least it’s able to direct much-need cooling on your video card (up to 11.8-inches long). You can also stick up to five additional 12- or 14-centimeter fans around the case’s top, side, and bottom, as well as one more 12-centimeter fan in the front (covering your hard drives).

The case comes with two USB 3.0 ports on the front—more importantly, popping off the front panel to do any modifications to the Carbide 200R doesn’t result in a tangle of wires coming with it. It’s these little touches, and more, that make this case such an inexpensive delight.

Corsair Carbide 200R

Plenty of drive bays, lots of options for additional cooling, a great emphasis on reducing the amount of screwdriver time needed

Front preinstalled fan could have pushed more air over the hard drives directly, 2.5-inch bays still require screws

$60, www.corsair.com

Ceton Echo Windows Media Center Extender Review

Michael Brown — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:45:01 +0000

Xbox? We don’t need no stinkin’ Xbox!

Until the Echo hit the street, the Xbox 360 was pretty much the only Windows Media Center Extender still on the market. Companies such as D-Link and Linksys discontinued their extenders years ago—probably because they couldn’t compete with the subsidized price of Microsoft’s gaming console.

You’re looking at the best Windows Media Center Extender we’ve tested.

In case you’ve forgotten what a Windows Media Center Extender is, here’s a quick refresher: Plug one of these networked devices into your TV, pair it with a Windows computer on the same network, and the Windows Media Center user interface from that PC—along with all the movies, photos, and music that PC can access—will stream though the extender to the TV.

If the paired PC is outfitted with a TV tuner, you can also stream live TV. We tested the Echo with an over-the-air USB ATSC tuner (AVerMedia’s model H826SK) connected to an outdoor antenna and got great results. If you subscribe to cable TV and equip your Media Center PC with a CableCARD tuner (from Ceton or any other manufacturer), you can stream any channel you subscribe to, including premium channels such as HBO and Showtime (but not on-demand programming). On top of that, you can record live TV onto the PC’s hard drive, much like a TiVo or other brand of DVR that you might rent from your cable company.

The Echo sells for $180—about the same street price as a 4GB Xbox 360. But being about the size of a paperback book, the Echo is a fraction of the Xbox 360’s bulk, and Ceton claims that it draws about 90 percent less power.

The Echo connects to your TV via HDMI, and it draws power from a supplied USB power adapter. It requires a hardwired Ethernet connection, and the company recommends that the host PC also be hardwired to your network. If you don’t have CAT5 cable in your walls, the company recommends deploying either a powerline or MoCA (Multimedia over Coax) network.

The Echo user experience is pretty much identical to using a DVR, with a couple of exceptions: Ceton’s remote control is craptastically generic. More importantly, you can fast-forward and rewind recorded TV; but unlike a DVR, you can’t rewind live TV unless you’re also recording it. You can cure the first problem by purchasing Ceton’s Companion app for Android or iOS devices ($5 each) to turn your phone or tablet into a remote.

As with those “whole-home DVR” systems you see advertised on TV, you can pause playback on the TV that’s connected to your PC in one room, go to a TV connected to an Echo in another room, and pick up where you left off. Up to five Echo devices can be linked to a single PC running Windows Media Center, and if that PC is equipped with multiple tuners, each Echo can tune to a different channel.

If you want to stream Internet video and media stored on your network, something like Western Digital’s WDTV Live is a better choice; out of the box, the Echo supports only the media formats that Windows Media Center supports. That list includes codecs such as MPEG-2, H.264, and MP3, but not container formats such as MKV or lossless audio codecs such as FLAC. If you want to tune into and record cable or broadcast TV, and you don’t care about Xbox games, the Echo is the way to go.

$180, www.cetoncorp.com

Adata DashDrive Elite 500GB HE720 Review

Josh Norem — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:04:25 +0000

The Adata drive is one of the sexiest USB drives we have ever tested, and is certainly the thinnest USB drive too, at just 8.9mm thick. It might not sound like much in today’s world of super-thin everything, but this puppy is thin. In fact, our research indicates it is the thinnest USB drive currently available.

If this roundup were a beauty contest, the DashDrive would easily win.

Since life isn’t fair, there’s a major downside to the drive’s flatness, which is that its single-platter capacity is limited to 500GB. When compared to its 1.5TB and 2TB rivals here, 500GB is but a morsel, really, but that’s the price you pay for its slim form factor. To that point, 500GB is the only capacity available for this model.

Despite its HE720 model name, which to our eyes suggests a 7,200rpm hard drive, this puppy sports a 5,400rpm drive inside its stainless steel chassis. Its physical size is 4.6 inches long and 3.1 inches wide, and it’s less than a half-inch tall. Its exterior shell is made with 9H stainless steel, which is resistant to scratches and looks slick but is too prone to fingerprints. The drive itself has only two mildly interesting features: a small, blue LED for activity and a tiny button located next to the USB 3.0 plug labeled “Backup.” Tapping the button triggers the included syncing software to open so you can configure and run backup routines. It would be handy if the backup button were in a more easily accessible location, as putting it right next to the USB plug makes it hard to reach.

The included Adata Sync software is PC-only and gets the job done for syncing, restoring, and backing up files, but it’s easily the most unpolished software in this roundup. As an example, if you try to open the software when it’s running in the background, you’ll see a pop-up error that contains what we can only assume is either a foreign language or gibberish. The Window also looks like it was built for Windows 98 and lacks the ease-of-use and look-and-feel of modern software, as it just gives you a split-window with “Source” on the left and “Destination” on the right, and you have to check boxes in a Windows Explorer interface to get it configured. This is not software we’d want our parents to use, that’s for sure. That said, we actually appreciate its unvarnished nature. You just tell it which folders you’re interested in and choose Backup, Restore, or Sync. You can then either manually back up everything you want or just schedule the software to run. It’s not glamorous or grandma-friendly, but we dig it.

During testing, the drive was the slowest here by a small margin, taking 11 minutes and 31 seconds to move 30 gigs of data onto its lone platter. We know people don’t buy these drives for speed, and they are all relatively slow compared to our desktop HDDs and SSDs, but we do take speed into consideration.

The DashDrive is a decent package despite its flaws. We like its simple software, hard steel shell, and thin size a lot, making it a solid drive, both literally and figuratively.

$150, www.adata-group.com

Toshiba Canvio Plus 3.0 1.5TB Review

Josh Norem — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:54:27 +0000

In this group, the Toshiba Canvio initially came across as the vanilla stepchild—nothing to get excited about, at least in this company, given its bland exterior and specs. We tested the 1.5TB version of the drive, which is the highest capacity offered by Toshiba. Surprisingly, it’s almost as thick as the 2TB WD drive despite its 500GB capacity deficit, so the lesson here is that if you’re going big on a USB drive, prepare to be toting around a Hot Pocket-size enclosure. The 1.5TB drive is only available in black, a decision we are just fine with since we don’t need nor want fancy colors on our USB storage. If you favor a splash of color attached to your USB port, you’ll have to get by with less capacity, as only the 500GB and 1TB models are available in red, blue, and gray (as well as black, natch).

The Toshiba drive wins the contest of lamest names for devices and software, but is still the best drive here.

On the software front, the Canvio comes with a well-rounded package that includes backup software with encryption, drive utilities, a cloud storage option, and a movie-editing app called Muvee Reveal. The NTI Backup Now EZ backup software is for Windows only, though the drive includes an NTFS driver that lets you use it with both Macs and PCs. Despite the software’s odd name, it’s actually our favorite of this roundup, simply because it offers an intuitive interface and many options for configuring backups, whether you want to back up to the Canvio drive itself or to the cloud. You can also choose to back up categories of files, individually selected files and folders, or entire drive images. You just select the files you want to back up and let it run. You can also schedule backups, and see the status of the drive onscreen in the software, which is handy. It’s also easy to password-protect the drive. The only problem we had in our tests was that the cloud option didn’t work for us—you get a 30-day free trial of cloud storage with the drive but we couldn’t activate ours. Note: The Basic model of this drive does not offer cloud storage as an option.

In our file-copy test, whereby we hustle 30GB of data over its fat USB 3.0 pipe, the Toshiba took second place overall with a time of 10 minutes, 34 seconds, which was almost two minutes slower than the WD drive, but faster than the Adata unit.

All in all, this is an excellent all-around backup drive. It’s not the highest-capacity or the thinnest drive ever, but it has great software, decent capacity, and is affordable—we don’t ask for much more in a USB storage device.

$110, www.toshiba.com

WD My Passport 2TB Review

Josh Norem — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:40:12 +0000

At 2TB, WD’s My Passport is the largest-capacity USB hard drive we’ve ever tested, and its four chunky 500GB platters rotate at 5,400rpm. In the palm it feels about as thick as a huge English muffin with a piece of ham in the middle, or a water-logged deck of cards; it’s the thickest drive in this roundup, but only by a tiny margin over the 1.5TB Toshiba. Though this drive is pudgier than the rest at 0.8-inch thick, it’s noticeably shorter than the other two drives at just 4.2 inches long. It comes in a variety of pleasingly subtle, matte color finishes (red, blue, black, gray, white) and is available in sizes ranging from 500GB to 2TB.

Hello, sexy. We’re talking about its capacity, not its looks.

The software package included with the My Passport is well-rounded, and includes backup software, an encryption utility, and a diagnostic tool. It should be noted that software for both Mac and PC are included, though obviously we’re only testing the PC version. The backup software is called WD Smartware and is based on Memeo Backup—it backs up everything instantly without any user intervention, so you just tell it to keep an eye on “Documents,” for example, and it automatically copies any files it sees that are documents. We learned the hard way, though, that “Documents” means .doc files, and not just any files placed into the Documents folder, which was confusing. Adding to the confusion was a lack of information about whether a backup had taken place once new files had been added to a monitored directory. You also can’t create a backup image of your entire drive, which is another flaw. We rarely use bundled software, so this isn’t that big of a deal for us, but it’s a strike against WD nevertheless. The software does include a file-retrieval service in case you lose data, and it works well, letting you put files back into their original location or just dump them into a predetermined folder. Other bundled software includes a password-protection utility that requires a password to access the drive, and a drive-health monitor, which is useful.

To test the drive’s mettle we copied 30GB of media files to it from our desktop PC running a Samsung 830 SSD boot drive, and it took top honors by taking just eight minutes, 46 seconds to complete the job. This was the fastest speed in our roundup of these drives, even though all the drives have roughly the same specs, so kudos to WD for the victory. Its time was almost three minutes faster than the Adata drive and two minutes faster than the Toshiba, so the performance difference is significant.

Overall, there’s a lot to like about the WD drive, but we’re dinging it pretty hard for having flaky backup software. The password-protection function is nice, but our favorite two things about it are that it’s the biggest USB drive available, and of these three, it’s also the fastest.

$150, www.wd.com

External Hard Drive Head-to-Head

Josh Norem — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:01:46 +0000

Three USB hard drives: WD My Passport vs Toshiba Canvio Plus vs Adata DashDrive Elite

There are times when a USB key can’t handle the action we’re throwing at it and we need something bigger to step in and get the job done. Like a police officer calling for backup, it’s at these times that we summon a USB 3.0 external hard drive. This latest batch of drives offers something for everyone, from WD’s huge 2TB jobbie to Adata’s super-thin, sexy little thang. Toshiba’s 1.5TB drive is thrown into the mix, too, for folks looking for a basic, affordable, high-capacity solution.

WD My Passport 2TB

Hello, sexy. We’re talking about its capacity, not its looks.

WD My Passport 2TB

Huge capacity; great speed; full-featured software package

Backup software is not reliable or good for advanced users; can’t make backup images

$150, www.wd.com

Toshiba Canvio Plus 3.0 1.5TB

The Toshiba drive wins the contest of lamest names for devices and software, but is still the best drive here.

Toshiba Canvio Plus 3.0 1.5TB

Sizable capacity; great software, affordable

Cloud storage trial didn’t work, no specs stand out

$110, www.toshiba.com

Adata DashDrive Elite 500GB HE720

If this roundup were a beauty contest, the DashDrive would easily win.

The DashDrive is a decent package despite its flaws. We like its simple software, hard steel shell, and thin size a lot, making it a solid drive, both literally and figuratively.

Adata DashDrive Elite 500GB HE720

Looks cool; rugged; amazingly thin; software is straight-forward

Software could confuse people; drive is slower than the others; small capacity; loves fingerprints

$150, www.adata-group.com

HP Envy TouchSmart 4 Review

Katherine Stevenson — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:40:39 +0000

The most enviable part is the price

This we know: Windows 8 is more usable with a touchscreen, plain and simple. Whether that’s a practical scenario for tower-and-monitor setups is arguable, but it turns out that using touch on a laptop comes pretty naturally—even more so than we expected. So it’s good news for consumers that touchscreen laptops are now legion, and that they run the gamut in features and price.

Optional keyboard backlighting spruces up the Envy 4’s black and brushed-metal interior.

Representing the midrange is the HP Envy TouchSmart 4 Ultrabook. What you see is what you get with this 14-inch clamshell—it doesn’t assume the persona of a tablet with the twist of a hinge, like some of its higher-profile touch brethren. That keeps the price in check—the Envy TS 4 starts at $800—but there’s more to a laptop than a modest price.

Since the touchscreen is such a key feature of the Envy 4, let’s start there. It’s 14 inches on the diagonal, has a native resolution of 1366x768, and consists of a TN panel with a glossy finish. If that sounds thoroughly ho-hum, you’ve got the picture. It looks pretty down-market—not very crisp, not very bright, with an annoyingly narrow vertical viewing angle. It’s redeemed to some extent by the highly responsive capacitive-touch overlay, which registered our every tap, swipe, and poke at the screen accurately. Be warned, however: All that touching on the glossy surface makes for some spectacular fingerprintage.

Thank goodness for the touchscreen, though, because the touchpad had some issues—the usual sort of inconsistent performance found in many clickpads. Sometimes Win8 gestures registered, sometimes they didn’t; other times programs seemed to launch just because the pointer drew near—that kind of thing. You can do some tweaking of the pad in the control panel, but we found ourselves just using the touchscreen for many chores.

The chiclet keyboard is nicely sized and spaced, and the keys have a slightly rubberized surface. All-in-all, typing on the Envy 4 was fairly comfortable and error-free. Our model featured the optional keyboard backlighting, which can be switched on and off with a top-row key, but not otherwise adjusted.

Our model also featured another upgrade option: the 1.7GHz Core i5-377U (versus a Core-i3). This makes its configuration very similar to the Lenovo Yoga Ultrabook. As with that device, the Envy 4 fell behind our 1.8GHz zero-point in every benchmark test—not surprising, given the ZP’s slightly higher base and Turbo clocks. More interestingly, the Envy 4 performed about 10-15 percent faster than the Yoga in our computing tests. That’s the result of thermal management. While the Yoga’s CPU had a tendency to throttle down at regular intervals of testing, the Envy 4 held its high clock speed consistently. Of course, the Yoga is also a bit smaller at 13 inches, and a bit thinner (not to mention more than a pound lighter), so it makes sense the thermals would be adjusted accordingly.

Despite the Envy 4’s slight speed advantage and its lower price, we’d be inclined to plunk down the additional $100 for the Yoga. That laptop has a far superior screen, a better keyboard and touchpad, a sturdier build quality, and the ability to fold into a tablet for times when that makes sense. And did we mention that it weighs more than a pound less? But, if you really need to count your sheckles, the Envy 4 is a serviceable touchscreen option at an affordable price.

$905, www.hp.com

Geekbox Ego Maniacal Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:13:01 +0000

A matte-black benchmark bruiser

Geekbox’s Ego Maniacal system pays homage to Maximum PC’s Dream Machine—but probably not the one you’re thinking of.

Sure, last year’s Dream Machine featured the same Silverstone TJ11 chassis as the Geekbox Ego Maniacal, but we’re told that the actual inspiration for this custom-built box was 2002’s Dream Machine, which was painted to match a classic BMW 2002 Turbo. Except Geekbox has updated its tribute to the car by nodding its head to the more current special edition BMW M3 in “frozen black.”

The Ego might owe its inspiration to that Dream Machine of old, but its internals are a closer match with 2012’s DM. Full details of the Ego’s specs are down below, but the highlights include Intel’s new king, the 3.5GHz Core i7-3970X, a pair of liquid-cooled GeForce GTX 690 cards, two 240GB Corsair Neutron GTX SSDs, 32GB of Corsair DDR3/1866, and a 1,200W Corsair AX1200i PSU. The most impressive part of the Ego may be its liquid cooling, which uses both a quad-rad and dual-rad to keep the parts cool—that includes the voltage regulation modules on the Asus Republic of Gamer board.

That’s probably a good idea, too, because the Ego pushes the new 3.5GHz Core i7-3970X to a very stable 4.8GHz. That’s about 1GHz further than our zero-point’s overclocked six-core, and with its 25 percent higher clocks, the Ego offers that much more of a performance edge. In fact, the six-core Ego gave our zero-point—which is certainly no slouch in specs—a pretty good pummeling in every single benchmark. What about something a bit beefier, such as DM2012?

Geekbox individually sizes and sleeves the cables for each PC it builds.

Between the two, it was a classic battle of cores vs. frequency, with DM2012 sporting eight cores at 3.1GHz vs. the Ego’s six cores at 4.8GHz. In the apps that can’t exploit all the cores of the DM2012 (or even the Ego, for that matter), clock speeds won out, with the Ego pulling up a score 27 percent faster in Stitch.Efx 2.0 and 30 percent faster in ProShow Producer 5.0. When you get into the heavily multithreaded tasks, however, the cores-vs.-frequency argument gets interesting. The Ego was faster than the DM2012 in Premiere Pro CS 5.0 by about 4 percent and about 1 percent faster in the x264 HD 5.0 benchmark. That’s a victory for frequency, but at the same time, we’re talking about a 1.7GHz difference between the six-core and eight-core chips, so the core crowd can claim a moral victory. We also have to acknowledge that the Ego set benchmark records in all six official benchmarks we run. Although not everything was by a large margin, it’s still one hell of an accomplishment for one single system to sweep all six.

The real magic of the Ego is in the phenomenal amount of detail paid to its construction. Geekbox says it spends no less than 40 hours to build its high-end custom machines and it shows, from the washers on the case-door screws that prevent scratches to the paint, to the custom-length cables that are each sleeved and heat-shrunk by hand (nary a zip tie is present). There are other loving details about the case that we just don’t have the space for here, but we must admit we were a bit let down by the decals. Rather than covering them with a clear coat, Geekbox just stuck them atop the matte-black paint job, which is decidedly less impressive—you can feel the decals’ edges when you slide your hand over them.

It’s also odd for the company not to include mass storage, but Geekbox says that’s more of lifestyle statement. In your garage, you’ll have your M3 for weekends and your minivan for weekdays, so why clutter the M3 with baby seats? We understand that rational but we don’t buy it, because while this machine is fast, it’s also expensive at $7,995. Yeah, that’s a deal next to DM2012’s $11,055 but one HDD couldn’t hurt.

Despite the interesting storage configuration and heart-stopping price, we can’t argue with the raw performance and attention to detail that might take custom rigs to the next level.

$7,995, www.geekbox.com

Crucial M500 480GB SSD Review

Josh Norem — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:30:54 +0000

A winning package of low price and high performance

The Crucial M500 is the company’s third-generation 6Gb/s SSD, and the successor to the often-praised M4 SSD, which we named the best Bang for your Buck SSD in December of 2012 due to its well-rounded package of decent performance at a great price. In our estimation, the new drive fulfills the same well-rounded role, though with much improved write speeds and massively increased capacities at lower prices thanks to its move to smaller process NAND flash. Not only does it come in the standard 120GB, 240GB, and the 480GB version you see before you, but it’s also offered in a pant-tightening 1TB version at just $600, making it the market's first truly affordable 1TB SSD. Since the terabyte drive was not available at press time, we’re taking a look at the 480GB version which sports the exact same specs as its big brother.

The move to 20nm NAND has allowed Crucial to bump capacity up to 960GB with the M500

The drive itself comes in a shiny 7mm silver enclosure, so you can jam it into an Ultrabook. A 9.5mm spacer is also included, but there is no 3.5-inch adapter in the box, nor is there any software in the box or online aside from a firmware updating tool, which is disappointing. Inside the M500’s shell we find Crucial has moved from 25nm NAND to 20nm MLC NAND flash. Smaller process NAND offers benefits such as lower power consumption and increased capacities, but also reduces the NAND’s life span somewhat. Still, Crucial offers the drive with a 3-year warranty and says the drive can handle 40GB of data written to it every day for five years, so the drive’s NAND should last long enough even for hardcore data mongers. Crucial is still using a Marvell controller, though this is an updated version of the one used on the M4, and of course it has updated firmware.

In testing we saw the M500 post very respectable scores across the board, though none were the fastest we’ve seen, nor would we expect them to be at this price. The biggest improvement we see over the M4 is its write speeds, which have gone from 193MB/s in CrystalDiskMark to 422MB/s, and that difference shows in the AS SSD compressed data test as well, showing almost a doubling of speed from its successor. The ATTO test mirrors our other results, showing the drive capable of around 500MB/s read speeds and 422MB/s write speeds, which is superb for a "value" drive. Its IOmeter score of 83,354 IOPS is also top-of-its-class as well, as is its PCMark Vantage HDD test score of 71,619. Oddly, its Sony Vegas score is unchanged from the M4 however, so it's possible the Marvell controller still has a tough time with data compression duties when writing huge files, 20GB in our scenario.

Overall the M500 shows just how far value drives have progressed, since this drive is about as fast as the fastest SSDs available a year ago. When compared to its most direct competitor though — the Samsung 840 500GB — the two are pretty evenly matched though the Crucial drive was a little faster in more tests. The Samsung drive costs about $40 less though, has the same warranty and better software support, making it a nail-biter between them.

MSRP: $400, www.crucial.com

Benchmarks

Best scores are bolded. Test system consists of Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 motherboard,

Intel Core i5-3470, 8GB of RAM, Windows 7 64-bit.