Posted 11/06/2009 at 12:00:58pm

We’ve long loved Eye-Fi’s series of Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards that allow you to instantly upload pics from your camera to a website, but it has lacked two key features: the ability to select which photos you want to upload and the ability to perform peer-to-peer transfers from the camera to a computer or laptop. This new card addresses those needs.

The card continues to support all the good stuff we’ve seen before in Eye-Fi cards: the ability to connect to open access points to upload your photos to a photo service, Wi-Fi-based geo-tagging, and video sharing. But we’re more excited by the improvements in the Eye-Fi Pro. Now, instead of uploading every image on the card, you select which photos you want to upload by checking the write-protect on the files and the card dutifully uploads them. JPEG, video, and even RAW files are now supported, too. And in case you’re wondering whether RAW is too large to transfer via Wi-Fi, we moved an 18MB RAW file from a Canon EOS Rebel T1i to a laptop in about two minutes using the Eye-Fi Pro’s Ad-hoc mode. Not bad.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Posted 11/04/2009 at 07:45:16pm

It is, perhaps, fitting that Velocity Micro’s new rig is called a Raptor. That’s because anyone who has ever seen the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor in person and on afterburner knows just how overkill the F-22 is.

The same can be said of Velocity Micro’s Raptor Signature Edition. With people overjoyed just to have a $99 Athlon II X4 620, Velocity Micro decided to go shock-and-awe on the spec lists—and the wallet.

First up is Intel’s stellar Core i7-975 Extreme Edition. With a stock speed of 3.33GHz, Velocity Micro uses a custom CoolIt Domino ALC to get the processor to a very stable 4.2GHz. To “balance” this $1,000 CPU, Velocity Micro throws in probably $1,500 in GPUs in the form of three EVGA GeForce GTX 285s. Still not impressed? How about four SLC-based Intel X25-E Extreme 64GB SSD drives in RAID 0?
 
Mind you, these are not the pedestrian X25-M consumer drives; they’re enterprise-class drives that offer more than twice the write performance of the X-25M version and peg the read speeds at the SATA 3Gb/s limit. If you’re afraid of a four-drive RAID 0, you might feel better that the X25-E’s are designed for server use and should have 10 times the life of a consumer drive.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Posted 11/03/2009 at 01:30:00pm

There’s good news and bad news for eBook fans. First up: new eBook readers using Marvell’s ARMADA 166E chip could see triple the frame rate of first generation devices. The bad news: the faster frame rate of 3 fps won’t exactly have you playing Doom just yet but low frame rate animation will possible.

Marvell doesn’t mind though. The company’s new chip isn’t meant to just increase performance, it’ll also offer a cost reduction and power reduction by shrinking what is now a multi-chip board controller board down to a single chip. Marvell showed off several OEM designs including Spring Design’s upcoming dual-screen Alex.

This dual-screen eBook puts Kindle's web-browsing features to shame.

Posted 10/30/2009 at 02:45:07pm

If you were bummed like most of us that Intel’s shiny new P55 chipset didn’t include USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 support, Asus's new U3S6 should make you happy.

More photos, details and our analysis after the jump!

Posted 10/26/2009 at 11:45:40am

Even we have to admit that in this economy, you have to be thankful if you’re not still driving a Pentium 4 rig. Still, for budget buyers today, the choice usually doesn’t get much better than a dual-core machine that takes overnight to encode video and a GPU that can’t push pixels downhill.

Fortunately, it’s no Pentium Dual-Core or Celeron that CyberPower opts to stick you with. Instead, CyberPower reached into its parts bin for Intel’s brand-new, budget badass: the $200 2.66GHz Core i5-750. This chip is like Chuck Norris in a bar fight: It not only wipes the floor with Phenom II X4, it commits a little fratricide against its Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo siblings, too.

To this Two-Buck Chuck, CyberPower adds what is definitely not a budget part: Nvidia’s fastest videocard in the form of EVGA’s GeForce GTX 295. At the foundation is Gigabyte’s new GA-P55-UD5 and 4GB of Kingston DDR3/1600. Storage is left to a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda and a Samsung 22x DVD burner. A Cooler Master V8 cooler and Scout case complete the package.

Read the rest of this review after the jump!

Posted 10/19/2009 at 12:00:00pm

Don’t be fooled by the Vantec ezShare’s unassuming looks. This simple six-foot white cable with its Type A USB plugs on either end is actually one of the easiest ways to quickly moves files between two computers. Just plug one end into an available USB port on a box running Windows (XP and up), and plug the other end into the second box.

A Windows Explorer–like app will auto-launch on each machine, letting you drag and drop folders and files between the two PCs. If this sounds an awful lot like Data Drive Thru’s Tornado (reviewed November 2007), that’s because the two products are pretty similar. The file-explorer UI and software functionality of both products are virtually the same. It’s close enough that we have a pretty strong suspicion that the underlying chipsets and software come from the same factory in China. There are a few key differences, though.

Continue reading this review after the jump!