Mathew Miranda
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
When we reviewed our first 3TB hard drive almost a year ago, the market wasn't quite ready for the huge storage capacity being made available. Fully compatible motherboards featuring the unified extensible firmware interface (UEFI) were still months away, and having to use a separate host bus adapter (HBA) card was inconvenient and added...
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It's becoming more difficult to justify the purchase of Intel's X58 Express chipset with all the new technology looming on the horizon. This chipset came out almost three years ago. Time sure flies, especially in the hardware industry. We still like the fact that the X58 offers support for the six core processors in Intel's...
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Motherboards are arguably one of the more difficult PC component to shop for. The magnitude of choices available can make the shopping experience confusing and frustrating. Take for example Intel's heralded Sandy Bridge line of processors and the Cougar Point chipset used on a wide variety of motherboards. A popular online e-tailor,...
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It has been a while since we last evaluated a workstation-class graphics card from the FirePro product line. The V9800 launched in September 2010 and was officially the last card to sport the ATI logo. Since then, AMD has released its Cayman-based Radeon HD 6900 cards for the consumer market, among many other Radeon HD 6000 series cards....
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Is there anything sexy about PC components? For about 99% of the population, the answer is probably no. But since you're reading this, chances are that you've fallen in love with the design of a component at least once. Maybe the draw was strong enough to reel you into the world of enthusiast computing, where the skill of overclocking is revered,...
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When the GeForce GTX 580 arrived, it extended NVIDIA's lead in the single-GPU graphics card market. Although the green team's own GTX 480 previously held the title of fastest single-GPU, its reign was temporary as the first generation Fermi card required some tweaks in order to unleash all 512 shader cores, reduce heat output and...
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With the massive amounts of digital content now at our disposals, spend enough time in front of a system, and eventually it'll require a storage upgrade. We live in a digital world where games take up more storage space, cameras generate larger images, and camcorders produce higher definition videos than ever before. It's only a matter...
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Once you've been bit by the enthusiast bug, a funny thing happens. Graphics cards are never fast enough. Processors will never be too powerful. And motherboards will never have too many features. Manufacturers continue to push the envelope and make enthusiast level products because of demand. Along with the goal of being the best in their...
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As enthusiasts, one of the things we can always count on is the never-ending progression of computer hardware. Year after year, video cards get faster, processors offer more cores and / or performance, and motherboards provide additional features. That top of the line, $500 GPU you bought a few years ago can't touch the...
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The MSI Master Overclocking Arena 2011 was held in Las Vegas last week, during CES. It's where nine teams go head to head to find out who the best overclockers are in North and South Amercia. Each team was made up of two participants that had to qualify for this event by first taking part in an online competition. The team that wins in Las...
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At the annual Asus press conference held a couple of days before CES, Jonney Shih gave us a sneak peek of the company's tablet lineup. If you haven't jumped on the tablet bandwagon yet, 2011 might just be the perfect time to do so. Let's take a look at what Asus has to offer. Is it a tablet? Or a notebook? The Eee Pad Slider is...
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Lenovo recently celebrated the milestone of selling 60 million ThinkPad notebooks. That's a ThinkPad for every person in the United Kingdom, to put it in perspective. Moreover, the PC maker claims these things sell like electronic hotcakes, to the tune of 14 per minute. Those are iPad sort of rates. But Lenovo doesn't reach these...
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Just when you think you have everything figured out, you come across something that turns your world upside down. Long known for their blue motherboards, Gigabyte has finally decided to enter the dark side and will release mainboards featuring black PCB. Up to this point, it was the only major motherboard company that...
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You have to love competition. With the release of AMD's affordable HD 6870 and 6850 graphics cards, the folks over at NVIDIA decided to respond with a move of their own. In case you missed it, the same day the Radeons launched, NVIDIA dropped the price of their mid-range GeForce products to gain a competitive advantage in the market, and more...
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While solid state drives get faster, mechanical hard drives get larger. Not long ago, we celebrated the first 1TB hard drive, and since then, welcomed 1.5TB and eventually 2TB drives to the consumer market. Yes, the performance increase that SSD's offer is more than impressive. However, they still can't touch the capacity that traditional...
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If you're an AutoCAD or 3ds Max user, you'll find this information out of AMD today to be very interesting. ATI's FirePro application support team have devised a way to drastically increase the performance of FirePro or FireGL workstation graphics cards when running AutoCAD or 3ds Max. AMD has just...
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Hardware aficionados know there is more to performance computing than just buying the most expensive parts available and throwing them altogether in the same system. There's overclocking, case modding, cooling, and performance tuning to consider, among many other thigs. Of course, everyone has their opinions on these aspects of the hobby,...
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Thanks to yesterday's announcement, we know that NVIDIA will be pushing out Tegra chips annually, or at least that's the plan at this point, but what about GPUs? Like the title says, the next big thing coming down the pipeline according the NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will come along sometime next year, and...
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While there are only a select few devices that currently sport NVIDIA's Tegra processor, the GPU giant obviously hasn't stopped R&D on their series of SoCs. For the uninitiated, the various flavors of Tegra integrate an ARM processor core, with a GPU, and northbridge and southbridge...
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It didn't take AMD long to respond to the release of NVIDIA's new line of Quadro workstation-class graphics cards. The new flagship FirePro V9800 we'll be showing you here is the latest ultra high end professional graphics card from AMD, and competes in the same space as the 6000 and 5000 models from NVIDIA. It replaces the V8800 as the flagship...
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As summer winds down, the professional graphics market, it appears, is just starting to heat up. About a month ago, we tested the Fermi based Quadro 6000 and 5000 graphics cards from NVIDIA. Although they were a few months late to the party, our results revealed the Quadro models held a measurable performance advantage over ATI's then flagship...
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If you're in the market for an X58 motherboard, there are plenty of options available. A quick search fetches countless results that fill a wide range of price points. Budget conscious enthusiasts looking to save some scratch will be happy to find that almost every motherboard maker offers an X58 model under $200. On the other end of the spectrum,...
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