Cooler Master has spread its wings into a lot of different product lines, but it's still best known for its namesake: stuff that keeps your PC running cool. To that effect, today the company announced an update to the design of its Hyper 412 Slim CPU cooler as well as three new thermal pastes.
The Hyper 412 Slim redesign introduces a pair of appropriately slim fans on either side of the heatsink. Why slim fans, you ask? Cooler Master says the new look will increase cooling performance while still allowing you to plop memory down around the cooler. The Hyper 412 Slim works best with LGA 2011 sockets and should be available next month for around $50.
Of course, you need thermal paste to install a CPU cooler, so Cooler Master announced three new compounds to go with the redesigned Hyper 412 Slim: the gold-colored, IC Essential E1, the grey-colored IC Essential E2, and the white-colored IC Value V1, which offer varying levels of conductivity. All three will join the new-look Hyper 412 Slim on store shelves in June.
Intel's doing a bang-up job and shrinking transistors and packing them in tighter than ever before, but let's face it: it's going to be hard to scale silicon down much further. That eventual wall is why engineers are pumped about the potential of graphene, a substance with more than 200 times the electron mobility of silicon. (Read: better potential performance.) Coaxing graphene transistors into switching off current to create the 1 and 0 signals we know and love has been tricky, however. Now Samsung says it's developed a solution that does just that, without limiting graphene's electron mobility.
That last part is key: most of the previous solutions to graphene's electric current woes involved transforming the material into a semi-conductor, but doing so reduced its electron mobility -- thereby eliminating much of its performance gain over silicon.
Samsung Electronics' R&D arm, the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, created a special three-terminal Schottky barrier (dubbed the "Barristor" by Samsung) that can be raised or lowered in order to allow or impede the flow of electrical. The three-terminal device is basically a gate.
So how does Barristor stop current without mucking up electron mobility? From the abstract:
The key is an atomically sharp interface between graphene and hydrogenated silicon. Large modulation on the device current (on/off ratio of 10^5) is achieved by adjusting the gate voltage to control the graphene-silicon Schottky barrier.
Subscribers to the Science journal can check out the full text for an even more in-depth and jargon-filled explanation. It was published on the website yesterday.
A team of researchers from prominent institutions around the world claim that they've figured out how to make computer processors smaller, faster and more power efficient than ever before: by letting chips mess up once in a while. No, seriously. By allowing "inexact" chips to make a pre-calculated amount of errors rather than striving for absolute perfection, the researchers claim that drastic power reductions can be made -- and they already have a working prototype.
The researchers -- from Rice University, Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, Switzerland’s Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, and the University of California, Berkeley -- use probability to account for the number of errors created by the inexact chip and place limitations on exactly which chip calculations can produce errors, to avoid mistakes during critical processes. Since an inexact chip isn't constantly triple-checking its work for pinpoint accuracy, it also receives a significant processing speed increase compared to traditional processors.
A couple of innovations help inexact chips consume less power than traditional chips. The variance allows the team to "prune" infrequently used sections of the chips to make the hardware smaller, while a technique called "confined voltage scaling" taps into the processing speed increase to reduce power consumption when it isn't needed.
“In the latest tests, we showed that pruning could cut energy demands 3.5 times with chips that deviated from the correct value by an average of 0.25 percent,” study co-author Avinash Lingamneni said in a Rice University press release. “When we factored in size and speed gains, these chips were 7.5 times more efficient than regular chips. Chips that got wrong answers with a larger deviation of about 8 percent were up to 15 times more efficient.”
But what good is a chip that screws up all the time? Plenty of good, as it turns out. While you obviously wouldn't want an inexact chip running, say, critical banking or security systems, the researchers say it could provide significant gains in areas that can have more tolerance for slight errors. Since the human body is hard-wired for basic error correction, the release says that initial markets may include hearing aids and devices that generate pictures.
"We used inexact adders to process images and found that relative errors up to 0.54 percent were almost indiscernible," project co-investigator Christian Enz reports. "Relative errors as high as 7.5 percent still produced discernible images.”
Hey, does that mean Photoshop might get cheaper in the future? In any case, the team hopes to have the first inexact chip-powered prototype hearing aids and educational tablets available sometime in 2013.
This is the best LCD TV we've ever tested. Sony has had a tough ride in the last few years but after a catalogue of mistakes, it's finally come good in the most spectacular of ways. The KDL-46HX853 takes LCD picture quality to a whole new level, particularly where contrast and motion handling are concerned. The set looks gorgeous too, and features what's for our money the best - or at least the most sensibly focussed - online service around. This all adds up to an achievement made all the more remarkable when you consider that this outstanding TV is being delivered at a more aggressive price than the usually ultra-competitive Korean brands are offering on their range equivalents. To sum all this up, with the KDL-46HX853 Sony isn't just back, it's back with a vengeance.
The way the Toshiba BDX3300 doesn't bother to disguise its BBC iPlayer, Acetrax, YouTube and Picasa services as apps is somewhat refreshing, since the functionality is identical to much more expensive - and certainly more polished, usability-wise - smart TVs and Blu-ray players. When it comes to pure Full HD picture quality, the Toshiba BDX3300 delivers, and we also like the fact that it can support an awful lot of digital files via USB and over a network. It may lack finesse and at times appears a tad archaic, but we can't find it within us to criticise anything on a super-slim Blu-ray player that combines the best of the smart TV landscape with a price that hovers under £80/£120. For a simple 2D Blu-ray upgrade with some YouTube goodness, we can't recommend the Toshiba BDX3300 highly enough.
You can't release a £399, 10.1-inch tablet and not expect comparisons with the iPad, so we'll cut to the chase. The Asus Transformer Pad TF300 is currently one of the best 10-inch Android tablets you can buy, and represents better value with equivalent performance than the Asus Transformer Prime. The top-notch benchmark scores, wonderful use of the keyboard docking station, excellent battery life and superb usability make it a top recommendation in our eyes. If you're platform agnostic and are tossing up between this and the iPad, things get trickier. The Transformer is better value, has double the storage, a fantastic keyboard dock which makes it much more versatile, and Ice Cream Sandwich closes the gap hugely. Individual needs and budget will determine if the Asus Transformer Pad TF300 is right for you, but we applaud Asus for marrying value and performance, and the TF300 comes highly recommended.
The TX-L42DT50B is a relatively high-end TV - that much is obvious from its slim depth and metallic bezel, the latter of which is some achievement considering Panasonic's rather lacklustre history in this department. Feature-packed inside, we're able to detect that this isn't the brand's flagship set, but there's really no major flaws aside from a stubborn refusal to include 3D specs. It's a decision which rather underlines why most brands - including Panasonic, to some extent - is quickly turning to passive 3D system with its 99p 3D glasses.
Toshiba's 55ZL2 is designed to get any tech obsessive's pulse racing. After all, it breaks new ground in not one but two huge areas. First it can genuinely produce a watchable 3D picture without you having to wear glasses. And second, to help it achieve its first innovation, it employs a native 4K or Quad HD pixel resolution for the first time on a domestic TV.
Thin is in, as it pertains to the tech world, and the current trend is towards increasingly skinny devices. Just take one look at the Ultrabook frenzy, including similar devices that don't carry Intel's official Ultrabook label, but are just as flat and portable nonetheless. Catering to this crowd of thin and light machine owners is OCZ, which is rolling out a line of low profile Vertex 3 solid state drives.
The Vertex 3 LP line features a 7mm high form factor that "easily integrates into the latest mobile computing platforms." Best of all, the shrinkage in physical size doesn't come at the expense of performance or storage space.
These are SATA III SSDs available in 60GB, 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. Depending on the model, they offer maximum read/write speeds of up to 550MB/520MB per second, and up to 85,000 IOPS of random 4K write performance.
No word on when these will be available or how much they'll run.
The world's population of fan controllers grew by two this week, courtesy of BitFenix, including one model the company claims is the world's first Internet-connected fan controller (Recon) and another that sports low profile sliders (Hydra Pro) for compatibility with just about any case, even ones with doors. The Hydra Pro features 30W per channel performance (with five channels), offers push-button LED on/off functionality when combined with BitFenix's Spectre and Spectre Pro LED fans, and boasts BitFenix's SofTouch surface treatment similar to what you find on many rubberized smartphones.
Probably of more interest to most folks is the Recon, an Internet-connected fan controller that also boasts five channels, but offers fan monitoring and control via mobile devices. The mobile interface is browser-based, so you can control it with just about any operating system, including iOS, Android, and Windows.
"Users have been clamoring for these two devices for a while now, and I'm proud to report that the wait is finally over," says BitFenix Product Manager David Jarlestedt. "With Recon and Hydra Pro, BitFenix once again takes our disruptive ideas and brings them into a new design space – fan controllers. Offering never-before-seen functionality at competitive price points, Recon and Hydra Pro are set to become the go-to thermal control devices for enthusiasts the world over."
The BitFenix Recon carries an MSRP of $39 in the U.S. and will be available next week, while the Hydra Pro will run $34.90 when it ships in June.
Last year, Hewlett-Packard briefly toyed with the idea of quitting the PC business. While that didn’t pan out as the powers that be at the company eventually decided against it, HP did launch a major restructuring effort by announcing the merger of its printing and PC divisions in March, 2012. According to recent reports, that restructuring effort also includes job cuts. Hit the jump for more.
These reports come on the heels of a recent research note by ISI analyst Brian Marshall, in which he told clients that he expected a “reduction in force” at HP. But there seems to be no consensus among the various reports, which are all based on unnamed sources, as to the extent of this workforce reduction. The different numbers floating around range from 8 percent to 15 percent of the company’s current workforce of 320,000 employees. According to AllThingsD, whose sources expect the company to lay off around 30,000 people in a graduated manner over a year or more, CEO Meg Whitman will make the big announcement when it announces its quarterly results next Wednesday.
Acer this week rolled out its TravelMate P243 laptop, a notebook designed to meet the needs of SMB and SOHO with a "pleasant yet practical design." On the practicality side, the TravelMate P243 wields third generation Intel Core processor options with Turbo Boost and, according to model, discrete level Nvidia GeForce GT 630M graphics to tear through those multimedia chores (or some gaming in between hammering out TPS reports).
The TravelMate P243 sports a 14-inch display with a 1366x768 screen resolution. Specs will vary by model, though all will come with a USB 3.0 port for high-speed data transfers (provided you're rocking a USB 3.0-friendly storage device), HD webcam, up to 8GB of system memory, at least 750GB of storage space, stereo speakers, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, GbE LAN, Bluetooth 4.0, and various security features, including Acer's ProShield Security lineup, which is a suite of security and manageability tools integrated in a unified user interface (file shredder, pre-boot authentication, and other odds and ends).
Pricing starts at £339 when it launches in the U.K. Acer didn't say when that will be, nor did the company mention whether or not its latest TravelMate will make a trip to U.S. shores any time soon.
One of the complaints some people have with Amazon's Kindle Fire device is that it's only 7 inches. Sure, it's relatively affordable in the land of tablets (or glorified eBook readers, if you prefer to call it that), but certainly a larger screen size would put additional competitive heat on Apple's iPad, the only tablet line that sells better than the Fire. Well, it looks as though a 10.1-inch Kindle Fire is nearing release.
According to DigiTimes, Amazon is "likely" to launch a full-sized Kindle Fire tablet device in the third quarter of this year, and is so serious about the move, it's suspending the launch of the 8.9-inch version that was rumored to exist.
The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire was supposed to compete with Samsung's Galaxy Note tablets, or at least that's what DigiTimes' sources are saying. But with the decision to launch a 10.1-inch Kindle Fire, Amazon scrapped its 8.9-inch plans in order to simplify its lineup while going for the iPad's jugular.
Comcast has fallen under fire recently for the way it handles its Xfinity app on the Xbox 360 console; basically, the company doesn't count the bandwidth against subscribers' monthly data cap. It sounds great for Comcast customers, but critics -- including Netflix's Reed Hastings -- say the practice is a violation of Net Neutrality. Perhaps to silence the screams for blood, Comcast announced today that it plans on increasing its data cap and trying out some new data management approaches.
The current Comcast policy entails a hard 250GB bandwidth cap. Top it too many times and Comcast could cut you off. That looks like it's changing in the future.
Comcast VP Cathy Avgiris described the possible "flexible data usage management approaches" on the company's blog today. One approach involves the data cap being raised to 300GB, with additional bandwidth available at the example rate of $10 for 50GB. (That's obviously subject to change.) The second trial approach is basically the same, but customers with more expensive Internet packages receive even higher bandwidth caps.
If you're not in a trial market, Comcast will "suspend enforcement of our current usage cap as we transition to a new data usage management approach, although we will continue to contact the very small number of excessive users about their usage."
Unfortunately, there's no word on when the trials and changes are actually going to take place.
A pretty impressive second act, literally, figuratively, and audibly
We awarded Corsair’s HS1 USB headset a 9 verdict last year, remarking that its huge 50mm drivers, solid and comfortable construction, and $100 price tag added up to a surprisingly good value for a freshman effort. The one element that denied the HS1 a Kick Ass award was its uninspired—nay, downright ugly—industrial design.
Corsair’s new flagship USB headset, the Vengeance 1500, retains all the strengths of the HS1 and eliminates nearly all its weaknesses. The Vengeance 1500 packs the same gigantic drivers as its predecessor, providing top-notch sound quality for this price range. The circumaural design and thick, squishy padding make for a tight seal around your ears that isolates you from the pollution of ambient noise.
The Vengeance 1500 sounds every bit as good as Corsair's earlier HS1 USB headset, and it looks a whole lot better.
While it doesn’t deliver the level of quality that some higher-end products provide—Sennheiser’s PC 333D G4ME, for example—the Vengeance 1500 does provide respectable dynamic range and bass response that’s perfectly suitable for both games and movies. And while nothing can compare to an actual surround-sound setup, Corsair does deliver Dolby Headphone. This software algorithm upmixes stereo and 5.1-channel sources to simulate a 7.1-channel speaker system wrapped around your head, delivering better positional awareness than stereo phones are capable of providing.
Build quality as compared to the HS1 has also improved significantly. The struts connecting the ear cups to the headband feature an attractive brushed-aluminum finish, and the cups themselves swivel to lay flat against your chest when the headset is resting on your neck. They might feel odd if you’re transitioning from an on-ear headset, but after many extended gaming sessions, we’ve found the Vengeance 1500 to be one of the most comfortable headsets we’ve tested. They are quite large, however, so they might not be the right choice if your head is particularly small.
Corsair’s HS1 is a solid headset; the only reason we wouldn’t recommend it today is that the Vengeance 1500 is even better. If you’re looking for a serious gaming headset and can afford to spend 100 bones, you won’t go wrong with this one.
Will this new class of slim, trim, relatively affordable portables be the Next Big Thing?
You’d have to actively be avoiding the tech media over the past several months not to have heard about Ultrabooks. Their coming has garnered a boatload of buzz, fueled in no small part by Intel’s $300 million fund to get hardware and software makers behind the cause.
Ultrabooks are Intel’s answer to the spread of ARM-based tablets—a way to capture the hearts and minds of the masses with an x86-based portable device (of the Intel persuasion, natch). To that end, Ultrabooks are required to meet a few key “desirability” standards. They must be slim, lightweight, have generous battery life, and boot and resume from hibernation in brisk fashion. It’s also understood they should look cool. As Apple products so clearly demonstrate, style sells. And sure enough, Ultrabooks—at least those that have debuted so far—are heartily infused with MacBook Air influence.
So are these new, “cool” devices the next must-have products? Is all the hoopla warranted? We review the first four Ultrabooks to kick off the category. All are 13.3 inch models, but each brings its own brand of hot-newness to the table, with varying degrees of persuasiveness, as you’ll see on the following pages.
Acer Aspire S3
Priced right, but far from perfect
When Ultrabooks were first announced it seemed doubtful that manufacturers could turn out these wannabe MacBook Airs at the sub-$1,000 price Intel was promising. Acer put those doubts to rest with the Aspire S3, which debuted at $900. Given its relative affordability, it’s not surprising that the Aspire S3 makes a few compromises in its Air aspirations.
Measuring .68 inches at its thickest, the ever-so-slightly wedged three-pound chassis is matte silver throughout, save for its black rubber hinge and gray keyboard. An attractive brushed-aluminum lid lends the S3 a solid feel and a classy countenance—at least when the notebook is closed. The inside and underneath are all plastic. Nevertheless, the S3 feels rigid when held by one corner, and we like that it opens almost 180 degrees.
Overall, the S3’s island keyboard is comfortable to type on, although the key press is a bit shallow and many of the oft-used keys around the periphery, such as Enter, Shift, Backspace, etc. are truncated. That’s particularly true of the arrow keys, which also double as volume and screen-brightness controls. Using the S3’s unified clickpad, which supports multitouch functions, didn’t give us any woes.
Closed, the S3 cuts a more impressive figure, with its handsome brushed metal lid on display.
Port selection is spare, a quality of all Ultrabooks, and here consists of a headphone/mic, a media reader, HDMI, and two USB 2.0 ports—the S3 is the only Ultrabook in this roundup not to feature USB 3.0.
Acer tapped the Core i5-2467M for processing duty. While the base clock is just 1.6GHz, it can Turbo up to 2.3GHz, and thus performed better in most benchmarks than the 2.13GHz Core i7-640LM Arrandale CPU in our zero-point ultraportable rig. The S3’s lagging score in Quake III is no doubt the result of its single-channel RAM, which is particularly problematic in older titles. Conversely, its score in Quake 4 demonstrates the advances of Sandy Bridge’s integrated graphics, although the gaming chops of any ultraportable out right now will be pretty limited.
In our video playback test, the S3’s battery lasted five hours; it recharged to full capacity in half that time. Videos themselves looked crisp and color-accurate on the S3’s 1366x768 glossy screen if the screen was tilted just so. Otherwise, color and detail were diminished to varying degrees.
The S3 is unique among these Ultrabooks for featuring a mechanical hard drive, but it’s paired with 20GB of NAND flash for SSD caching, using Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT). Thus, your most-often used programs benefit from the SSD’s faster performance. The S3’s boot time of approximately 39 seconds, however, was a good deal slower than that of the SSD competition.
Acer also offers a $1,300 S3 model with a Core i7 and a 240GB SSD. But truth be told, the body is better suited to the lower-cost category, where it must make due with the modest praise of being a decent budget option.
Plastic insides don't match aluminum outside; no USB 3.0; uses HDD; narrow vertical viewing angle.
Specifications
CPU
1.6GHz Intel Core i5-2467M
RAM
4GB DDR3/1333
Chipset
Intel UM67
Display
13.3-inch, LED-backlit, 1366x768
Storage
Hitachi 320GB HDD, 20GB SSD
Connectivity
2 USB 2.0, HDMI, headphone/mic, media reader, webcam
Lap/Carry
3 lbs, 0.3 oz / 3 lbs, 11.5 oz
BENCHMARKS
Zero Point
Acer Aspire S3
Premiere Pro CS3 (sec)
1,260
1200 (5.0%)
Photoshop CS3 (sec)
183.6
162.5 (13.0%)
Proshow Producer (sec)
1,533
1,497 (2.4%)
MainConcept (sec)
2,530
2,591 (-2.4%)
Quake III (fps)
191.7
168.8 (-11.9%)
Quake 4 (fps)
17
38.5 (126.5%)
Battery Life (min)
240
252 (5.0%)
Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Toshiba Portégé Z835
Lightest load, lowest price, least compelling
Toshiba does Acer $100 better, offering the Z835, a Best Buy exclusive, for $800. Its low price is matched by its light weight. At two pounds, 6.6 ounces, it beats all the others here by a good half-pound. But the Z835 also looks and feels the cheapest of the bunch. Its construction seems less solid—particularly the lid, which has a disconcerting amount of flex.
The Z835’s dark-gray and black color scheme is peppered with chrome accents that look a bit dated. All the keys on the Z835’s island keyboard are normal width, but they are also slightly squat, which takes getting used to, as does the shallow travel of all keyboards of this ilk. The keyboard’s backlighting is a surprising feature at this price—and not one currently found on the more expensive Ultrabook models. A traditional touchpad of decent size with discrete right and left buttons stands out among the other Ultrabooks’ clickpads.
The Z835’s hardware specs are another reflection of its low price. The centerpiece is a 1.4GHz Core i3-2367M, which doesn’t benefit from any Turbo boost whatsoever. This renders the Z835 the slowest in the benchmarks of all four Ultrabooks, and even slower than our elderly zero-point, except in Quake 4, thanks to Sandy Bridge graphics.
Only the Portégé Z835 offers a backlit keyboard—a standard feature of the MacBook Air.
The Z835 also skimps on storage capacity, offering just 128GB. It’s full-SSD, but that’s not saying much. The Toshiba NAND flash coupled with a Toshiba controller mustered just 187MB/s sequential reads in CrystalDiskMark—half the speed and then some of the other two SSDs in this roundup. More pathetic still, the Z835’s sequential write speed of 49.23 is 40 percent slower than that of the HDD in Acer’s S3.
On the brighter side, the Z835 offers the most generous array of ports, with full-size VGA in addition to full-size HDMI, two USB 2.0 ports plus one USB 3.0, and an Ethernet port—a rarity in this roundup.
The Z835’s glossy 1366x768 screen isn’t spectacular, but it reproduced pictures and videos without noticeable flaws and the viewing angle is thankfully wider than that of the Acer S3. In our battery rundown test, the Z835 played a continuously looping video for close to five hours. It took about three hours to completely recharge. It booted to Windows in 24 seconds, which isn’t bad.
Even more so than Acer’s S3, the Z835 deserves credit for offering such a svelte and exceedingly portable form factor for its price. But reaching that price entailed compromises—a few too many, in our opinion, to grant this product more than a mild endorsement.
Very slim and lightweight for the price; lots of ports.
SLIM PICKINGS
Too underpowered; sorry SSD speeds; flimsy lid.
Specifications
CPU
1.4GHz Intel Core i3-2367M
RAM
4GB DDR3/1333
Chipset
Intel HM65
Display
13.3-inch, 1366x768
Storage
Toshiba 128GB SSD
Connectivity
1 USB 3.0, 2 USB 2.0, Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, headphone/mic, media reader, webcam, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi
Lap/Carry
2 lbs, 6.6 oz / 3 lbs, 1.2 oz
BENCHMARKS
Zero Point
Toshiba Portégé Z835
Premiere Pro CS3 (sec)
1,260
1,620 (-22.2%)
Photoshop CS3 (sec)
183.6
220.5 (-16.7%)
Proshow Producer (sec)
1,533
2,075 (-26.1%)
MainConcept (sec)
2,530
3,660 (-30.9%)
Quake III (fps)
191.7
159.3 (-16.9%)
Quake 4 (fps)
17
38.4 (125.9%)
Battery Life (min)
240
297 (23.8%)
Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Asus Zenbook UX31E
Now we're talking turkey
With the Asus UX31E, all the fuss about Ultrabooks starts to make sense. Its all-metal chassis, cut from a single sheet of aluminum, is undeniably handsome. And while this attractive metal wedge that’s just .71 inches at its thickest brings to mind the fine craftsmanship of a MacBook Air, it’s by no means a knockoff. The UX31E possesses a unique character that’s admirable in its own right. And at $1,050, it’s $250 less than its similarly spec’d Apple counterpart.
Silver inside and out, save for a black bezel around the screen and black backing to the keyboard, the UX31E sports a faintly etched pattern of concentric circles on its lid, while the deck is adorned with a pattern of brushed vertical lines, interrupted only by a spacious clickpad. While clickpads can be persnickety and frustrating to use, we didn’t have any issues with the pad on the UX31E. As for the keyboard, the size and spacing of the keys feels right, and although the key press is shallow, there’s a satisfying click at the end of each depression.
Another welcome feature of the UX31E is its 1600x900 screen resolution, besting the 1366x768 of the other screens in this roundup and the 1440x900 of the 13.3-inch MacBook Air. Like all the others, the UX31E’s screen is glossy; it produces a bright, vivid picture and holds up well off axis.
The two speakers embedded in the chassis are powered by Bang & Olufsen ICEpower tech and put out surprisingly full audio for a device of these dimensions.
Internally, the UX31E also impresses. Its Core i5-2557M proc is clocked at 1.7GHz, with a max Turbo frequency of 2.7GHz. Combine that with a SATA 6Gb/s SSD and you’ve got a machine that posts healthy gains over our zero-point in the benchmarks and some of the fastest scores in this roundup. To put it in perspective, the UX31E had sequential read and write speeds of 463MB/s and 341MB/s, respectively—pretty darn close to the spec’s max bandwidth. Sadly, the SSD is just 128GB.
The UX31E’s battery life surpassed five hours in our tests. It recharged to 50 percent in less than an hour, and reached a full charge in three. Booting to Windows took 23 seconds.
Asus throws in a tasteful, brown padded carrying case for the UX31E, as well as a matching pouch that holds two connector dongles: USB-to-Ethernet and Mini VGA-to-VGA. Yes, Mini VGA is built into the unit (who knew it even existed?), along with Mini HDMI, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, headphone, mic, and a media reader.
All told, the UX31E weighs in at three pounds, 2.1 ounces (or 8.3 ounces, if you add the power supply). If going toe-to-toe with Apple’s Air on both design and specs, while beating its price, is what it takes to achieve product hotness, then Asus has done it.
Stunning design; strong performance; SATA 6Gb/s SSD.
HAUGHTY
128GB storage and no way to upgrade it.
Specifications
CPU
1.7GHz Intel Core i5-2557M
RAM
4GB DDR3/1333
Chipset
Intel QS67
Display
13.3-inch, LED backlit@1600x900
Storage
SanDisk U100 128GB SSD
Connectivity
1 USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0, Mini VGA, Mini HDMI, headphone, mic, webcam, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi
Lap/Carry
3 lbs, 2.1 oz / 3 lbs, 8.3 oz
BENCHMARKS
Zero Point
Asus Zenbook UX31E
Premiere Pro CS3 (sec)
1,260
1,080 (16.7%)
Photoshop CS3 (sec)
183.6
168.3 (9.1%)
Proshow Producer (sec)
1,533
1,347 (13.8%)
MainConcept (sec)
2,530
2,354 (7.5%)
Quake III (fps)
191.7
217.3 (13.4%)
Quake 4 (fps)
17
46.6 (174.1%)
Battery Life (min)
240
310 (29.2%)
Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Lenovo IdeaPad U300s
Hits all the right notes except price
Lenovo also brings its A-game to the Ultrabook party. And well it should, since it’s asking almost $1,500 for the IdeaPad U300s. That’s premium, business-ultraportable price territory. It’s therefore apropos that the U300s has the most businessy aesthetic, although not at the sake of sleek design. Like the Asus UX31E and the MacBook Air, the U300s is crafted from a single-sheet of aluminum. It eschews the wedge form factor established by Apple and instead uniquely mimics the lines of a hardbound book, with the top and bottom edges protruding slightly all the way around the perimeter, the way a book’s covers protrude past the pages. It makes for a distinct and pleasing silhouette.
Both bottom and top are dark gray—Graphite Gray, to use Lenovo’s parlance (Clementine Orange is also an option)—while the deck and screen bezel are matte silver. The inside is clean and minimalist, consisting of a power button, island keyboard, and large clickpad. The Shift, Enter, Caps, Tab, and Backspace keys are all slightly shortened, but typing on the U300s was a mostly comfortable, trouble-free affair, and the glass-surfaced clickpad is sublime.
We love that the U300s's deck is free of third-party branding, but that tack helps pay the rent.
Ports include one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, full-size HDMI, and a headphone/mic combo. Lenovo is alone in this pack for excluding a media reader. A small button on the notebook’s left side launches Lenovo’s OneKey Recovery, which walks you through creating a system image that can be launched from the same button should your system fail. The U300s also supports Intel’s Wireless Display technology. So with a WiDi adapter (purchased separately) attached to your TV, you can stream any content from your notebook via Intel’s software.
Enough with the extras, how 'bout the hard stuff? The U300s is powered by a Core i7-2677M, which is clocked just a hair above the Core i5 in the Asus UX31E, at 1.8GHz. The two units traded wins in the benchmarks, although the U300s performed significantly better than the UX31E in Photoshop, for inexplicable reasons. In Quake III, the U300s suffered the fate of all single-channel RAM configs. For storage, Lenovo taps a comparatively spacious 256GB SSD. It’s a SATA 3Gb/s device using a year-old J Micron controller, but it comes close to maximum bandwidth, and subjectively speaking, the U300s feels plenty snappy. It was the quickest to boot to Windows, posting 17 seconds flat.
The U300s’s screen quality is on par with the UX31E’s, albeit at a lower res of 1366x768. Battery life for the two was also similar, exceeding five hours. Lenovo, however, had the speediest recharge, hitting 50 percent in 30 minutes.
So, yes, the U300s offers a good deal of quality for the price. But it’s nonetheless costly, and by contrast, the Asus UX31E is the better Ultrabook value.
Attractive design; high quality; Core i7 and 256GB SSD.
ULTRABROKE
Expensive; no media reader; lower-res screen than UX31E.
Specifications
CPU
1.8GHz Intel Core i7-2677M
RAM
4GB DDR3/1333
Chipset
Intel QS67
Display
13.3-inch, 1366x768
Storage
256GB SSD
Connectivity
1 USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0, HDMI, headphone/mic, webcam, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi
Lap/Carry
2 lbs, 14.7 oz / 3 lbs, 8.4 oz
BENCHMARKS
Zero Point
Lenovo IdeaPad U300s
Premiere Pro CS3 (sec)
1,260
1,140 (10.5%)
Photoshop CS3 (sec)
183.6
111 (65.4%)
Proshow Producer (sec)
1,533
1,396 (9.8%)
MainConcept (sec)
2,530
2,259 (12.0%)
Quake III (fps)
191.7
185.3 (-3.3%)
Quake 4 (fps)
17
41.9 (146.5%)
Battery Life (min)
240
310 (29.2%)
Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Inside Out: Anatomy of An Ultrabook
On the whole, Ultrabooks aren't the most upgrade-friendly devices. Of the four we reviewed, only the Asus and the Toshiba models seem to grant interior access that doesn't entail potential damage to the machine—and even those devices each require the removal of 12 screws, plus the use of a tiny security bit, in the case of the Toshiba. Here's what Toshiba's Z835 packs under the hood.
USB 3.0: Like most of the Ultrabooks here, the Z835 features USB 3.0. It comes compliments of an NEC controller.
CPU: To save space, the Z835's Core i3-2367 uses a ball-grid array, soldered to the board, rather than a higher-profile socket. That negates a future CPU upgrade.
RAM: The memory configuration is interesting, consisting of a 2GB SO-DIMM that can easily be upgraded, as well as 2GB of memory soldered to the board.
SSD: A standard mSATA drive allows a future swap out—a nice consolation since the 128GB Toshiba drive that comes with the Z835 is small, as well as slow by SSD standards.
The Upshot on Ultrabooks
Where do they stand in the "must-have" product universe?
Now that we’ve seen what Ultrabooks have to offer, we can fairly say the category has promise. Intel’s success with Sandy Bridge, its strong desire to keep the ARM crowd at bay, and its deep pockets have spurred impressive strides in device development—shoot, two months ago, we couldn’t have imagined an ultraportable as capable and attractive as Asus’s UX31E fetching anything less than $1,400. To see a first-gen product of that caliber hovering just above a grand says something.
Are Ultrabooks ready to overtake tablets? Probably not—right now. Granted, even the current crop’s mix of stylishness, generous battery life, fast boots, and real PC performance will give some tablet shoppers pause when weighing the pros and cons of each device class. But the prices of Ultrabooks are still a little high (particularly for the more lustworthy models) to compete with $200-$500 tabbies.
And then there’s that little matter of touch. For the time being, Ultrabooks don’t come with touchscreens—a primary factor in tablets’ appeal. Nor do Ultrabooks hook into an app marketplace. Expect those things to change with the release of Windows 8 in 2012. Win8’s Metro UI will not only look the part of a mobile OS, but also be optimized for touch, and rumor has it the OS will include an integrated app store.
Yes, a touchscreen has the potential to add to an Ultrabook’s cost, but Intel is already working on that. At the Intel Capital Global Summit in November, CEO Paul Otellini made it clear that touch-based Ultrabooks will be a big focus for the company in 2012. Part of that includes getting the cost of touch down. Intel’s $300 million Ultrabook fund will help with that. Ultimately, Otellini wants to see Windows 8 touch-based Ultrabooks starting at $699.
Ivy Bridge will also figure prominently in Ultrabooks’ future. Intel’s next CPU will be manufactured on a 22nm tri-gate process, making it more power efficient than Sandy Bridge chips, and it will feature an entirely new graphics core that’s reportedly going to offer 50 percent better performance than Sandy Bridge in 3D games and feature DirectX 11 support, to boot.
All told, there’s potential here for these devices to be tablet killers—if value and functionality mean anything. For now, though, Ultrabooks should at least make portable-PC shoppers happy. All the models we reviewed here represent a big shift in the laptop landscape, from design, to form factor, to price. Yes, Asus’s UX31E offers the most compelling mix of all these factors, but we believe that Ultrabooks as a whole have serious merit as ultraportable general-purpose PCs.
If you can’t beat Apple’s iPad, change the rules of the game. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are taking a bath on sales of the $199 Kindle Fire and the $249 Nook Tablet, respectively, and making up for it with profits on sales of electronic merchandise (e-books, videos, music, and apps). The strategy has succeeded in moving a lot of hardware, with each company on track to sell millions of units (although the ratio of Kindle Fire to Nook Tablet sales is greatly in Amazon’s favor so far). Both tablets feature nearly identical 7-inch, 1024x600 LCDs and rely on Wi-Fi for connectivity. Which should tempt you away from the high-end tablets? Only a bloody-knuckled deathmatch will tell.
Like the Nook, the Kindle Fire experience relies on your burning desire for consuming magazines, books, videos, and more through its compact form factor.
At 14.1 ounces, the wider, longer, thinner Nook Tablet weighs a half-ounce less than the Fire.
Round 1: Design
If a plain black slab with a screen is your cup of tea, then drink in the Kindle Fire. Its headphone output and power button (its lone hardware control) are uncomfortably close to its Micro USB port (used for charging and file transfers) across the bottom of the tablet.
No doubt the prettier option, the Nook Tablet sports a raised silver-gray bezel and coated backplate that, in concert with the hollowed-out corner for the microSD slot, give the Nook a visual flare and render it the grippier tablet. The Nook’s hardware volume controls and menu button also score it points. The Kindle Fire offers two speakers to the Nook’s one; but the difference is negligible, and only the Nook offers a built-in microphone.
Winner: Nook Tablet
Round 2: User Interface
Both tablets break a sweat obliterating the UI confines of the Android 2.3 OS they’re built on. The Kindle Fire’s bookshelf-themed homepage displays your favorite and most recently visited web pages, apps, documents, and more, with menu tabs labeled Books, Music, Video, Apps, Web, and so on. It’s a departure from the stock Android UI, but it’s more user friendly than the Nook Tablet’s storefront-feeling UI, which also insists on using “shelves” to display your various media, apps, and files.
The Nook Tablet, on the other hand, preserves more Android functionality, including customizable home screens that help you bypass its convoluted Library shelves. The Nook Tablet’s browser displays more web-page content per screen; and we like its hard menu button, which calls up a shortcut menu for apps, URLs, settings, and more.
Winner: Nook Tablet
Round 3: Storage
You might think that the Nook Tablet’s 16GB of onboard memory combined with its microSD slot means game over for the 8GB, nonexpandable Kindle Fire. But the Nook Tablet reserves most of its onboard memory for content purchased from Barnes & Noble, leaving you just 1GB for everything else. The playing field levels further when you take into account Amazon’s free cloud storage for all Amazon media purchases, plus the 5GB of free cloud storage the company provides for storing your files.
The Nook Tablet can accommodate a microSD card with up to 32GB of capacity, but no card of any capacity is included in the purchase price. What’s more, you must use a computer to transfer files from a memory card to its internal memory. Such lameness defies description, leaving this round a push.
Winner: Tie
Round 4: Performance
While both contestants enter the ring armed with 1GHz dual-core CPUs, the Nook Tablet packs 1GB RAM while the Fire has just 512MB. The Nook Tablet’s additional memory resulted in smoother screen refreshes while reading, web browsing, playing games, streaming video, and so on. Netflix video streams looked much better on the Nook Tablet, and it delivered slightly longer battery life: We streamed Netflix videos on it for more than six hours. B&N’s device delivered better touchscreen responsiveness, too; there were far too many times when we had to repeatedly tap the Fire’s screen before it would register.
Amazon’s much-hyped Silk browser put a hurt on the Nook Tablet’s browser in terms of the SunSpider and BrowserMark benchmarks, consistently outperforming the Nook by 25 to 40 percent. In real-world use, however, the Nook Tablet loaded websites as fast or faster than the Fire.
Winner: Nook Tablet
Round 5: Content Ecosystem
Barnes & Noble claims to stock “thousands” of apps in the Nook store. After browsing the entire site, we’d say “hundreds” is more like it. A vast number of popular Android apps are MIA here, and many apps that are free in other marketplaces must be purchased for the Nook Tablet. Unlike the Fire, the Nook Tablet will not sideload apps, either; it refuses to even recognize .apk files. Amazon’s app store, by comparison, is a Shangri-La of software choices. While it could be argued that the Kindle and Nook e-reader systems are roughly equal in both features and inventory, Amazon’s music and video marketplace is far more robust, and Amazon has the aforementioned cloud storage plus superior tools for synching your purchases to multiple devices. And for $79 per year, Amazon Prime serves up thousands of free movies and TV shows, Kindle book borrowing, and free two-day shipping for Amazon orders.
Winner: Tie
And the Winner Is…
The Nook Tablet was ahead on points going into the final round, but the Kindle Fire unleashed a flurry of value-added blows in the form of Amazon’s cloud storage, massive music and video library (available for sale or rent), and decent app store that knocked the Nook into sweet oblivion. Superior hardware empowers the Nook Tablet to beat the Kindle Fire in some areas (particularly video streaming), but Barnes & Noble’s device is just too limited to be a full-featured tablet. Our opinion might change once we can jailbreak it and install a custom ROM, but the Kindle Fire is the better tablet right out of the box.
Media streamers like the Western Digital WD TV Live and Netgear NeoTV make just a little less sense than they did a couple of years ago. In those days, they were the perfect alternative to stuffing a home theater PC into your entertainment center. These days, you can get nearly all the same functionality from a new Blu-ray player or a Smart TV.
On the other hand, the latest incarnations of these two products cost less than a new Blu-ray player, and they’re several orders of magnitude cheaper than a new HDTV (or a home theater PC, for that matter). And while they do have some features in common, the NeoTV delivers far fewer features than the WD TV Live and is priced accordingly, so we’re not making a direct head-to-head comparison between the two here.
Western Digital WD TV Live
For a company whose primary business is manufacturing hard drives, Western Digital sure knows a lot about digital media and how to stream it over a network. Each succeeding generation of the company’s WD TV Live product has led the market in terms of features, price, and performance, and this one is no different.
With this incarnation, WD adds several new services (including Hulu Plus and Spotify), a collection of simple online games, an integrated Wi-Fi adapter, and even the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD. Unlike the pricier WD TV Live Hub, which remains in Western Digital’s lineup, this product does not include any local storage. But it is equipped with two USB 2.0 ports, so you can easily connect a portable drive. You can also connect a USB keyboard, which makes initial setup (entering Wi-Fi and network user IDs and passwords, for instance) considerably easier than hunting and pecking using the remote and the onscreen keyboard.
The third-generation WD TV Live is thinner and more capable than previous models, and the remote is significantly better.
Most people will connect the WD TV Live to their entertainment system using the HDMI 1.4 port (you’ll need to provide your own cable), but the device will happily accommodate older equipment with its analog A/V and digital S/PDIF outputs. There’s also an Ethernet port in the back panel, but the integrated 802.11b/g/n wireless client adapter proved plenty fast for streaming video at 720p—an impressive achievement, considering that we tested the box in a room-within-a-room home theater at Maximum PC Lab North. We needed a hardwired connection to stream video at 1080p. Image quality was excellent.
The remote is easily the best that WD has come up with so far, with a molded grip that feels very natural in either hand. We needed to bend our thumb to reach the alpha-numeric keypad on the bottom half the device, but we seldom use those buttons, anyway. We used the home, arrow, mute, and transport (play/pause, stop, fast forward/rewind, and skip forward/back) buttons far more frequently, and those are all within easy reach. The remote also has four shortcut buttons—labeled A, B, C, and D—that can be custom programmed.
Plenty of device support here, with both analog and digital audio and video outputs.
Western Digital offers a strong collection of online movie and music services in addition to the new ones mentioned earlier. You’ll find all the old standbys here, including Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora; but you’ll also get CinemaNow, Blockbuster on Demand, Live365, and several others. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to tap what we consider to be the best online, on-demand movie service of them all: Vudu. Western Digital does deserve praise for its broad media file and container file support, which includes the video standards AVI, MKV, MPEG-1/2/4, h.264, VOB, and M2TS (the container for Blu-ray movies); the audio formats AAC, FLAC, OGG, and MP3 (including 24-bit/48kHz FLAC); and the digital photo formats BMP, JPEG, and PNG. The device supports playlists and subtitles, too.
The WD TV Live is the best full-featured media streamer you can buy today, but we’d like it even more if it included Vudu.
(Note: After our review went out, Western Digital added Vudu as well as remote control via Android and iOS devices via a firmware update.)
Western Digital WD TV Live $120 street www.wdc.com
Netgear NeoTV NTV200
Craving a spot at the commercial online media buffet, but not at all interested in ripping your own media? Netgear has just the right dish. The NeoTV taps your broadband connection to serve up Netflix, Vudu, Pandora, YouTube, Picasa, and plenty of other online services; but it can’t tap media stored on your own network, and it doesn’t have any USB ports to access local storage.
We initially considered this to be a major disappointment: If you own a late-model Blu-ray player or a Smart TV, the NeoTV has very little to offer. But plenty of us haven’t made such investments, and if online entertainment is all you’re looking for, Netgear’s device costs $40 less than Western Digital’s. You’re not getting as many features, but you’re also not being forced to pay for features you won’t utilize.
Anyone considering buying one of Roku's streaming boxes should take a long look at what Netgear has to offer with the NeoTV NTV200.
The NeoTV’s built-in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi adapter performed just as well as the one inside the WD TV Live—we had no problem streaming Netflix and Vudu movies without wires (although we were once again limited to 720p resolution; we needed to plug in a CAT5 cable to enjoy Vudu movies at 1080p). The only other connectivity features on the box are HDMI and S/PDIF—there’s no support for analog audio or video devices at all.
Netgear provides a very basic remote control with the NeoTV. We have no complaint with the button layout, and we like the clicky, tactile feel it provides much better than the mushy buttons on Western Digital’s controller; but there’s no alpha-numeric keypad for typing search queries (you must use the arrow buttons to navigate an onscreen keyboard), and there’s no mute button. But Netgear redeems itself with a free app that will turn your iPhone or Android phone into a compatible remote. That’s sure to come in handy when the regular remote’s two coin batteries crap out late one evening.
Netgear's app lets you use your smartphone as a remote.
There's also a very good collection of streaming media services on tap. While Western Digital scores a big win with its support for Spotify, Netgear can deliver movies in HD and in surround sound on demand via Vudu. And if you’re a Napster subscriber, you can listen to your tunes on the NeoTV, but not on the WD TV Live. There’s a long list of other less interesting services, including a host of video podcasts (does anyone actually watch those?) and some very basic online games (the same ones that Western Digital offers, including Black Jack Royale, Kaboom, Sudoku, and Texas Hold ‘Em).
Enthusiasts will want more than what the NeoTV delivers, but this is a good product to recommend to friends and family who just want an easy way to stream media from the Internet to their entertainment center.
You can’t truly appreciate the paint job on Falcon Northwest’s Mach V unless you can fondle it. We mean it—you just can’t comprehend how damn smooth the paint is without lovingly stroking your hand on the side of this beauty as if you were a presidential candidate.
Inside the Mach V, you’ll find a pedigree of hardware to match its stunning exterior. Intel’s top gun—the 3.3GHz Core i7-3960X—gets top billing, of course. This hexa-core chip simply makes all other chips before it—quad- or hexa-core—seem downright weak. Falcon mates the chip with a top-end Asus Rampage IV Extreme board. In addition to sporting the very cool ability to update the BIOS from a USB key without a CPU or RAM installed, the Rampage IV caters to extreme overclockers with such over-the-top tricks as an “overclocking key.” The overclocking key is an external video dongle that lets you display an overlay of any of the CPU’s temps and various voltages on a single-link monitor in real time.
Sometimes, it's the outside…
Why would anyone ever want to do this? Believe it or not, extreme overclockers need the information in real time during their liquid-nitrogen escapades, and this feature can save them the price of buying a very expensive Fluke meter.
The Mach V, of course, doesn’t run on liquid helium or liquid nitrogen; it uses a Cool-It Eco II ALC cooler, which enables the CPU to go from a stock 3.3GHz all the way to 4.4GHz. Falcon takes full advantage of the Intel X79 chipset’s support for eight DIMM slots, too, fully populating the board with 32GB of DDR3/1600 RAM. We know 32GB is overkill, but there’s some appeal to it: We’re talking RAM disk, baby! Sure, an SSD can post read speeds of 500MB/s, but a RAM disk can post a staggering 4,000MB/s! It’s a small RAM disk, but it delivers phenomenal disk I/O. For graphics, Falcon outfits the Mach V with a pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Classified cards. These aren’t just overclocked cards, mind you, they also pack massive 3GB frame buffers—double the size of a standard GTX 580 card.
…AND the inside that matters.
So how does the Falcon stack up? It’s wicked fast and handily pounds the crap out of our elderly zero-point system, as well as the majority of the Core i7-990X boxes we’ve tested in the last year. But how does it stack up against the Digital Storm HailStorm we reviewed in the Holiday 2011 issue? There’s the rub: Digital Storm clocked its Core i7-3960X part even higher, to 4.7GHz. That 7 percent edge gives DStorm’s system a boost in just about everything that’s processor bound. Digital Storm also takes the lead in gaming performance, thanks to its tri-SLI GTX 580 configuration. That design choice endows the DStorm with a 20 percent boost in most high-res games. Yeah, we know, a pair of GTX 580s is crazy fast for every game out today; but three of a kind trumps a pair, no matter how you cut the benchmarks.
We have to note, however, that the Digital Storm rig costs about $400 more than this Falcon. Still, when each price tag is pushing $7,000, it’s hard to snivel over a few hundred bucks. The Falcon Mach V is the sexier beast, though; and make no mistake: She’s fast enough for you, old man; she’s just not the fastest machine we’ve tested.
Cooler Master has spread its wings into a lot of different product lines, but it's still best known for its namesake: stuff that keeps your PC running cool. To that effect, today the company announced an update to the design of its Hyper 412 Slim CPU cooler as well as three new thermal pastes. 
Intel's doing a bang-up job and shrinking transistors and packing them in tighter than ever before, but let's face it: it's going to be hard to scale silicon down much further. That eventual wall is why engineers are pumped about the potential of graphene, a substance with more than 200 times the electron mobility of silicon. (Read: better potential performance.) Coaxing graphene transistors into switching off current to create the 1 and 0 signals we know and love has been tricky, however. Now Samsung says it's developed a solution that does just that, without limiting graphene's electron mobility.
A team of researchers from prominent institutions around the world claim that they've figured out how to make computer processors smaller, faster and more power efficient than ever before: by letting chips mess up once in a while. No, seriously. By allowing "inexact" chips to make a pre-calculated amount of errors rather than striving for absolute perfection, the researchers claim that drastic power reductions can be made -- and they already have a working prototype.
Thin is in, as it pertains to the tech world, and the current trend is towards increasingly skinny devices. Just take one look at the Ultrabook frenzy, including similar devices that don't carry Intel's official Ultrabook label, but are just as flat and portable nonetheless. Catering to this crowd of thin and light machine owners is OCZ, which is rolling out a line of low profile Vertex 3 solid state drives.
The world's population of fan controllers grew by two this week, courtesy of BitFenix, including one model the company claims is the world's first Internet-connected fan controller (Recon) and another that sports low profile sliders (Hydra Pro) for compatibility with just about any case, even ones with doors. The Hydra Pro features 30W per channel performance (with five channels), offers push-button LED on/off functionality when combined with BitFenix's Spectre and Spectre Pro LED fans, and boasts BitFenix's SofTouch surface treatment similar to what you find on many rubberized smartphones.
Last year, Hewlett-Packard briefly toyed with the idea of quitting the PC business. While that didn’t pan out as the powers that be at the company eventually decided against it, HP did launch a major restructuring effort by announcing the merger of its printing and PC divisions in March, 2012. According to recent reports, that restructuring effort also includes job cuts. Hit the jump for more. 
Acer this week rolled out its TravelMate P243 laptop, a notebook designed to meet the needs of SMB and SOHO with a "pleasant yet practical design." On the practicality side, the TravelMate P243 wields third generation Intel Core processor options with Turbo Boost and, according to model, discrete level Nvidia GeForce GT 630M graphics to tear through those multimedia chores (or some gaming in between hammering out TPS reports).
One of the complaints some people have with Amazon's Kindle Fire device is that it's only 7 inches. Sure, it's relatively affordable in the land of tablets (or glorified eBook readers, if you prefer to call it that), but certainly a larger screen size would put additional competitive heat on Apple's iPad, the only tablet line that sells better than the Fire. Well, it looks as though a 10.1-inch Kindle Fire is nearing release.
Comcast has fallen under fire recently for the way it handles its Xfinity app on the Xbox 360 console; basically, the company doesn't count the bandwidth against subscribers' monthly data cap. It sounds great for Comcast customers, but critics -- including Netflix's Reed Hastings -- say the practice is a violation of Net Neutrality. Perhaps to silence the screams for blood, Comcast announced today that it plans on increasing its data cap and trying out some new data management approaches.
