Robert Maloney
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Not too far back, there was a time when it was inconceivable that a motherboard had anything other than a green or mustard colored PCB that had a few sockets for the CPU and DIMMs, maybe a hard drive connector or two, and a floppy drive connection. Keyboards and mice were typically PS/2 based, although a COM port sufficed...
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Quick! Name that one piece of PC hardware that will automatically garner the most "oohs" and "aahs" from enthusiasts and casual-users alike. No, it's probably not the glow-in-the-dark water cooling system or bright LEDs shining from the multiple fans in your windowed case. The quickest path to glory is buying a brand new, flat, large, widescreen...
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There's something to be said for Intel's chipset release practices. Typically, each major revision has consisted of multiple versions: a powerful, enthusiast high-end chipset, and then a number of slimmed down versions. Note, we say "slimmed down" instead of "stripped down", as much of the architecture and feature set remains untouched....
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Heat as you all know is one of the main enemies of the PC and its many components. Just visit any PC Hardware-related site out there today and you will find whole sections devoted to heatsinks, coolers, etc., the sole goal of which is to cool down the ever growing number of heat producing components in a typical PC. Motherboard manufacturers...
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It's probably safe to assert that, by and large, DIY Small Form Factor PCs are still niche products. Although they have been offered by the likes of Shuttle, AOpen, MSI and many others for nearly half a decade now, there's still an audible gasp that's heard from non PC-centric folks when then first encounter one. Questions range from, "What...
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Today at HotHardware, we will be looking at two video cards from Asus. They don't necessarily scream "power user" and they aren't adorned with the flashiest packaging. Instead, these two cards are more like the utilitarian work-horses that one might expect to find in a mid-range PC, or even a DYI build that's...
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About a month ago, we had the privilege of reviewing HIS' Radeon X1950 Pro, a mainstream oriented graphics card that performed well, but we felt ultimately came up short against the similarly priced GeForce 7950 GT. The model we received was outfitted with an oversized cooler dubbed the...
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ATI made quite a splash a few weeks ago, with the introduction of the Radeon X1950 Pro. The RV570 GPU at the heart of the X1950 card is manufactured on TSMC's 80nm node. It's equipped with 36 pixel shader processors, 8 vertex shader units and 12 texture units. ATI's reference design calls for a 575MHz GPU clock and with...
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The recent release of the GeForce 8800 series means two good things for those in NVIDIA's camp: for benchmark junkies there's a new set of cards to put through their paces. And for those with less lofty goals, it means that that the prices for the existing crop of card should soon start dropping. Thus, it's...
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When we first took a look at the Gigabyte GA-SN-SLI Quad Royal motherboard a few months back, we gave it solid praise, yet lamented on what we thought was an exciting opportunity. The board was capable of supporting up to four individual PCI-e based graphic cards, but the Quad Royal was only able to support two GeForce cards running in...
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It can be tough for a company to decide how and where to market a video card in today's demanding retail environment. Price something too high and only a brave few might purchase the card; price it too low and it could be dismissed as a low-end or budget card by some consumers, regardless of its value proposition. These issues can...
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DigiTimes has managed to sit down with AMD's EVP Henri Richard to hear his comments regarding the company's recent acquisition of ATI. In short, it appears as though AMD sees several aspects of the industry which they needed to focus their attention on and be sure to participate in to remain a successful company in five years. Unfortunately,...
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Fudo over at The Inquirer reports that ATI's upcoming R580 refresh of their current flagship R580 GPU will be arriving sometime next month with an initial cost being roughly $750. The cost is expected to drop slightly down to $700 once the initial supply catches up with demand. At this time, performance estimates place the new GPU about...
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Digitimes has reported that Chinese media are confirming Asustek Computer has been shipping production Playstation 3 gaming consoles in small volume since the beginning of July. The first consignment should result in roughly 4 million units in total with a significant amount remaining to ship before the console officially launches on November...
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The never ending see-saw battle between NVIDIA and ATi has resulted in quicker card releases to the market. Whereas such events were met with much anticipation and speculation from the online community, the onslaught of new releases with their various "flavors" have also perhaps confused the average prospective buyer somewhat in...
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Trends in PC hardware usually come about for a good reason. As processor and memory speeds continued to rise, many manufacturers responded by producing more elaborate air cooling apparatuses. Some of them worked well, while others offered almost no improvement at all. In either case, lowering temperatures in this...
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Although performance has been greatly enhanced over the last few years through the use of faster spindle speeds, larger caches, and newer interfaces, hard drives still tend to be a bottleneck in a typical PC. Mechanical devices, by their very nature, require time to seek the data requested, read it, and then transfer that information back...
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For the better part of the last decade, there has only been two major players in the discreet graphics field, and as one of those players, nVidia needs no introduction. The GPU manufacturer has stayed at or near the forefront of technological advances through the years. Although there has been a misstep or two along the way, you generally...
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With all the praise that has been heaped upon NVIDIA for their 7800 series of graphic cards, it was bound to cause a bit of dismay for rival ATi. For nearly two years ATi had been riding high on the success of their 9700 and 9800 series of cards, while NVIDIA had been trying to save face after a few mishaps of their own. ...
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There is a current trend in PC hardware to have two of everything. Whether it's two (or more) drives in a RAID configuration, dual-core CPUs, dual-channel memory, or adding an additional video card to increase frame rates; it's apparent that doubling-up is here to stay. Up until recently, running two video cards simultaneously...
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When NVIDIA first resurrected the term "SLI" from the technology archives, it was welcomed back with open arms. Although the exact definition has changed from it's 3Dfx roots, it boils down to two graphics cards working on the same job. The obvious benefit is that two cards should be able to easily outperform even the fastest single...
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The big headlines in today's video card related articles almost always come down to seeing double; whether it's two NVIDIA GeForce cards connected in SLI or two ATi Radeons running in CrossFire mode. Perhaps it's justified in that people always want to see higher framerates and increased performance, regardless of the cost. ...
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