Tag: Hardware

I'll be honest, when I was using ReadyBoost I really don't recall a significant noise difference…but…my system is pretty darned quiet to begin with. If I had the available setup, I would try this out with just a super noisy drive. Hopefully SilentPCReview picks this up & does one of their in-depth tests. I'm sure that would increase ReadyBoost usage […]

How "low cost" is $866 is beyond me, but GearDigest seems to think so, and their Day2 build will be a high end system which I can only imagine how much it's going to cost. Oh, and for $866, you get a 200gb hard drive, and that's to store HD shows as well…it's just baffling. Maybe someone else can make […]

I just got an interesting email from the support folks at Auzentech that I thought might be worth sharing. This is the first I've seen of sound card manufacturers discussing a timeline for supporting HDMI (real full bandwidth HDMI, not just SPDIF pass-through). I'm quite happy as the X-Tension is an add on board that should work with either the […]

You can check out this Engadget Post for a round-up of HD 2000 reviews. It kind of came out to a very loud fart for the gaming crowd and a little bit worse for the HTPC crowd. While the video capabilities do look good, the mid-range cards are not due out for another month and a half. For a little […]

Being a PMCE owner, I'm really not all that surprised about this. The V1's were clunky and kind of a hassle if you wanted to get anything on there. Just couldn't compete with the thin, small & efficient Archos or Ipod Videos. Especially considering the lack of publicity. Oh well, rest in peace PMCE. Jason Tsang To summarize, the Portable […]

Not sure how we missed this the first time around, but Anand did a follow up to the 8600 launch with a write up about the decoding abilities of the 8600 series from Nvidia. Needless to say after reading a few articles you get the feeling the 8600 series is one kick ass lineup for Media Centers. Anandtech Note that […]

EngadgetHD has a couple of stories may interest you today. Pioneer announces 8th-gen plasmas with 20,000:1 contrast Engadget HD Pioneer has announced its 8th generation of plasmas in Europe, with six 720p sets available in June in 42- and 50-inch sizes, and four 1080p sets in 50- and 60-inch flavors coming in September. All models have integrated DVB-T tuners and […]

As the title reads, Firingsquad has a decent article covering what is new in the PureVideo for the 8500 and 8600 series. It explains the differenet video processors in the 8800 and 8500/8600 series. Firingsquad The real innovation is the new H.264 Bitstream Processing Engine. This dedicated unit provides full H.264 decoding, including context-adaptive variable-length coding and context-adaptive binary arithmetic […]