But that doesn’t mean I’m not still interested. It’s more that not much that I’ve found interesting has happened in the last few years. Sure everything is getting faster, but at least in the PC space, the slow incremental march forward has no practical impact on my usage because a five year old CPU is way more compute than I […]
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AMD has struggled mightly over the last few years to define a niche where they could be profitable and sell CPU+GPU (aka APU or IPG depending on your preference) at the same time. This “Godvarai” based APU (AMD’s term) runs $118, so in the middle of AMD’s Kaveri lineup. Over the past couple of years, AMD has slowly released their […]
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For home theater PC (HTPC) enthusiasts, the 4th generation Intel Core “Haswell” family of processors has been greatly anticipated. Expectations have been set both for its GPU performance, and that the long-standing issue with refresh rate accuracy will finally be put to rest. Unfortunately time with the new integrated processor graphics (IPG) was limited to just a few hours, but […]
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As interesting as the third generation of Intel Core integrated processor graphics (IPG) were when they arrived in April, as home theater PC (HTPC) enthusiasts it was disappointing that the more applicable two core/four thread models were not available. We gleaned what we could about the minor processing improvements and major changes to the graphic processing unit (GPU) from the […]
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Finding a good low profile heat sink and fan (HSF) that isn’t also incredibly wide is a lot harder than it should be, especially for AMD’s FM1/2 socket. Fortunately this will be much easier now that Noctua has announced its NH-L9 HSF for that platform (NH-L9a) and Intel’s LGA 1155 socket (NH-L9i). It’s hard not to like Noctua’s cooling solutions, […]
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It’s been a while since we last talked about IVB, and for good reason as none of the more interesting HTPC chips were available at launch (or trickled out of OEM status later on). That has chanced, at least in part with HD 2500 Core i3’s available from Newegg and Amazon right now. If you’re holding out for the HD […]
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Last year Intel’s Sandy Bridge “TOCK” married the graphics processing unit (GPU) and CPU on the same die, making it a first class citizen in the system and introduced a true integrated processor graphics (IPG) solution. With HD audio bit steaming introduced in the previous generation, full hardware acceleration of VC-1, AVC (H.264), MPEG2 as well as 3D Blu-ray (MVC) […]
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Those crazy engineers over at Intel are at it again. They have officially launched the followup to Sandy Bridge, the Sandy Bridge-E, along with the new X79 chipset to support it. Sandy Bridge-E looks set to bring some nice performance increases, at least at the high end. Of course, these new Sandy Bridge-E processors aren’t likely to make their way […]
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Not that long ago it was a significant challenge to build a small and quiet home theater PC (HTPC). Mini-ITX was an option, but case selection was limited and more importantly the form factor was held back by the lack of decent integrated video performance and the power/heat dissipation requirements of the processor (CPU) and graphics (GPU). With both of […]
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Scythe has been around a while now, after bursting on the scene with their awesome tower cooler. But luckily they understand the need for quiet cooling in HTPC chassis. Here’s a new one that’s pretty darned tiny. The Scythe Kozuti is the first candidate we’ve seen that might have the capability of beating one of these low profile stock coolers […]
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