Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 review

On the one hand, Samsung will not of course been pleased with all the fuss that the Apple's lawsuit against Samsung around the launch of the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 caused. In the Netherlands is tablet, however, at least until mid-October for sale and also the German ban on the sale of the device in Europe as a whole is reduced to only Germany. So considered, this case Samsung might be not so bad, so around the launch of a product where they get their largest and most expensive advertising campaign ever developed. If we assume that the statement ' there is no such thing as bad publicity "is true, would the lawsuit still good deal for Samsung. The consumer would now think that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 should be very good if Apple so doing are best for your device from the shelves.

However, it is but the question of whether this tablet this extra free publicity needs. If we do open the box, we see a very beautiful, refined tablet. He has not that what clumsy that, for example, the Acer Iconia Tab A500 and (to a somewhat lesser extent) the Motorola Xoom. Grab your tablet out of the box, then you will notice immediately that this is very light. It weighs only 567 grams, which is soon 40 grams less than the iPad 2 and about 10 grams less than the Galaxy Tab 10.1 v, whose production with the advent of this Galaxy Tab incidentally is discontinued. As regards appearance is only a pity that Samsung has opted for a shiny back of plastic.

Compared with the other Honeycomb-tablets that we have had in our test lab is the difference in weight pretty to even very large. With the even though not heavy ASUS Eee Pad Transformer saves the more than 100 grams and with the Acer Iconia Tab A500 almost 200 grams. These are differences that you really will feel if you use the tablet for a long time. We look at the thickness of the tablet, then we also see here relatively speaking quite a difference. With approximately 0.85 inches this device is almost a half an inch thinner than an iPad 2 or an Eee Pad Transformer.

The iPad 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Watch and compare!

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Be Quiet Straight Power E8 CM 580W review

A power supply of between 500 and 600 watts for many PC owners: the sweet spot for a luxury PC with fast processor and one high-end or two mid-range video cards, this is pretty much the capability that you can buy the best. Be Quiet recently sent us their new Straight Power 600W E8 CM, which, of course, we have extensively tested.

Straight Power is Be Quiets mid-range line power supplies. Not as luxurious as the Dark Power Pro 's, but as far as specifications are clearly above average. The new E8-generation is 80Plus Silver certified, uses Be Quiets own SilentWings fans and is equipped with a (in our opinion very tight) new appearance. The power supplies are both not modular if modular implementation. The latter is indicated by the addition CM (Cable Management).

The copy that we got sent works with four 12V rails, each 18 amps can deliver. In total together can the 12V rails up to 45A. This means that the diet almost his complete power on the 12V rails can offer: 540 watt to be exact.

The diet provides standard 5 molex plugs, 5 SATA connectors, two 6-pin PEG-and one 6/8 pin PEG connectors. It is fine with this food as possible to high-end said one or two mid-range video cards to combine. All cables are neat and gesleeved long, so you can do good cable management. The motherboard cables are 57 cm long, the PEG-cables and 59 cm molex and SATA cables are a maximum of 88 and 98 cm respectively.

The diet contains one 12-inch fan on top, who, like Be Quiet because of the brand name itself is mandatory, lekker stil runs his buttons. The rotational speed is, of course, depending on the temperature.

The food costs on average € 104.50. That price is average. If we compare, for example, we see that Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 600W about 20 euros more expensive, but at the same time, we also see that the us with a Bronze Award distinguished OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W about 40 euro is cheaper. In anticipation of the conclusion we can say that this is a price difference is that you very difficult to efficiency difference can recoup.

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ASRock Z68 Fatal1ty Professional Gen3 review

During Computex in June will be shown for the first and now available, Z68 motherboards with support for PCI-Express 3.0. Of course that sounds good on the box, but what does it mean exactly and what have you? We sought it out on the basis of the ASRock Z68 Fatal1ty Professional Gen 3, ASRocks new high-end Z68 Board.

In order to get more popularity with the audience of gamers is ASRock echoing ABIT-who still remember them? -in sea gone with pro-gamer Fatal1ty to under his name motherboards on the market. Although Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendell since 2005, no game tournament has won more State, ' ie still known as the best gamer in the world and still seems to be that a Fatal1ty logo on products for more turnover.

Thanks to some extra features (which we will discuss later) this directive ASRock Z68-sign clearly on gamers. The most important feature is, however, PCI-Express 3.0, which the Board must be prepared on the next generation of video cards.

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HP ProBook 4330S review

If you're looking for a laptop and you're far more demanding than the average user then you will be able to do what disappointed coming back from a walk along the offer in the shop. Shiny screens, moderate housings and screaming colors. For those who want something else, there seems to be not an offer to be in the shop. Fortunately, there are also still laptops that some more aimed at business users, such as the HP ProBook 4330S.

The ProBook 4330S is aimed at small business users as it is called and will for smaller companies as possible the first acquaintance with a business laptop. The difference with a more consumer-oriented Pavilion-laptop goes beyond just another operating system install. That is in this case, Windows 7 Professional, but if you compare this 13.3 inch model with, for example, the previously tested HP Pavilion dm4-2000ed than is good to see the difference. The ProBook appearance just what behoudener, but you can certainly not boring; the dark aluminum finish on the wrist support and the back of the screen give the device a neat impression and that goes also for the bottom: that's neat black finished, and the ugly stickers are located under the battery.

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HP Pavilion dm4-2000ed review

The average consumer in the Netherlands usually chooses for a 15.6-inch laptop. Thus you get the best price/quality ratio in the House. At least, that thinks the buyer may, which obviously liked a lot for little. But a slightly smaller laptop is often a better choice, because it is easy to take. The performance you need not to let, as long as you have at least a quad-core processor need. Look to this HP Pavilion dm4-2000ed, a 14-inch laptop with decent specifications.

An Intel Core i5-2410M, 6 GB working memory and an AMD Radeon HD6470M you according to our very good call. All these components are contained in a pretty slim enclosure with a nice finish. So you can find aluminium on both the hood of the screen and the keyboard. The brownish (HP calls the amber) hue with silver accents reminiscent of Dell, which its Vostro also in such a colour scheme. Nevertheless, this HP a lot fuller style thanks to the rounded corners. Although the luxury materials do think that the housing, that is actually a bit disappointing. Around the touchpad moves the enclosure after a slight pressure is already pretty.

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Apple 21,5 inch iMac (2011) review

Say the word iMac and almost everyone knows immediately what you're talking about. That is something else if you have it on a Packard Bell OneTwo or ASUS EeeTop ET2400, to name but a few examples. Since the introduction of the glorious, colorful first models with CRT tube, there is the necessary changed this all-in-one systems, though the design fairly constant in recent years. The latest edition of the iMac is like its predecessor, available in two screen sizes: 27 inches and 21.5 inches. Those big version we have tested earlier, this time it is the turn of the entry-level model, the 21.5 inches.

If you see the two side by side, then it is really like you David with Goliath, but if you compare him without the comparison material, is also the ' small ' iMac yet best a large device. That feeling is partly a bit optical illusions, that is caused by the black borders around the screen. Thanks to the smart design seems the 21.5-inch iMac slim and a bit on the aluminium foot to float. Standard on our iMac Mac OS X 10.6, installed via a free code you supplied with the system get when you buy him new now you can upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

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The AMD A8-3500M APU Review: Llano Is Unleashed

Code-named Llano, AMD’s first desktop-class APU arrives today. This single-chip combination of the Stars CPU architecture and Radeon graphics brings unique strengths (and weaknesses) to the table, and we’re here to compare them to Intel's Sandy Bridge.

Just after the turn of the century, AMD took a big gamble on K8—better known as Athlon 64—and gave up the pursuit of clock speed in the interest of successfully executing more instructions per clock, in addition to introducing native 64-bit extensions. Meanwhile, Intel leveraged its manufacturing superiority to push the NetBurst architecture as fast as possible. It expected to see the Pentium 4 hit 10 GHz, in fact.

Of course, the Pentium 4’s high clocks quickly ran into the immovable walls of physics and power usage, and the realistic limit turned out to be closer to 4 GHz. If you wanted the highest-performing CPU money could buy at that time, you probably bought an Athlon 64; back then, Pentium 4 processors cost more and achieved less. It took a while for the market to accept it, but AMD’s David was beating Intel’s Goliath.

But Goliath didn’t give up; rather, it woke up. Intel moved on from the Pentium 4’s doomed NetBurst design and started over with the Core architecture—though it wasn’t really starting over at all. The tenets of Core were born from earlier efforts in the mobile space. Naturally, it came out better, faster, and less power-hungry. If you do a lot of fast-forwarding, the Nehalem-based Core i7 came next, followed most recently by the Sandy Bridge-based 32 nm desktop Core i3/i5/i7 CPUs.

Somewhere along the line, AMD allowed its unexpected advantage in computing to shrink and then disappear. Now, to be brutally honest, AMD’s fastest Phenom II processors fare better against Core 2 Quads than modern Core i7s. In fact, the $125 dual-core Core i3-2100, manufactured at 32 nm, stands right up to AMD’s $150 quad-core Phenom II X4 955 (a 45 nm part) in many benchmarks. AMD is more than a generation behind when it comes to desktop CPU performance, and continues to leverage the same Stars architecture that it first introduced more than two years ago. Squeezing out an extra hundred MHz every couple months kept the company’s momentum moving forward. However, when your main competitor is launching new architectures, it’s almost impossible to compete through incremental speed-ups. Frankly, it’s hard to recommend the AM3 platform for a new build today.

Perhaps realizing that it didn’t have the R&D resources of its primary competitor, AMD made another gamble back in 2006: it acquired ATI, the graphics card company responsible for the Radeon products many of you know and love. Shortly after the merger, AMD’s Fusion initiative was announced. The plan was to combine central processing and graphics processing resources on the same die. It took five years, but the first commercial Fusion processors were released earlier this year on the Brazos platform, and the E- and C-series APUs have already proven very viable in the notebook and netbook space. AMD even claims that it sold out of these APUs in Q1 2011. From the graphics angle, no Intel Atom-based platform can compete. Brazos even outclasses Atom when it’s complemented by Nvidia’s Ion 2 platform. 

While low-power netbooks are an ideal market for Fusion, the laptop and desktop segments are far more competitive. All Sandy Bridge-based Core i3/i5/i7 processors are equipped with Intel HD Graphics, which is fairly capable when it comes to basic productivity tasks in Windows, video playback, and even light gaming. If Fusion is to prove itself on its own terms, it has to deliver something special: true discrete-class graphics performance, along with competitive CPU performance.

Today we get our first taste of the Llano APU, which is intended to address mobile and desktop customers. Here’s where we see if the gamble pays off. And it needs to. The current Phenom II and Athlon II have little to offer beyond the $100 price point compared to the competition. Sure, a case can be made for the $160-and-over Phenom II X6 processors if you’re into heavily-threaded applications. But in general, Sandy Bridge-based chips are kicking butt in comparisons based on performance, power, and value.  

AMD needs a way to differentiate itself from Intel in order to woo customers. The Fusion initiative might be the key to that goal in the notebook space. After all, the company claims Llano offers better battery life and graphics performance compared to a similarly-priced Sandy Bridge-based platform, with the added promise of OpenCL compute potential from the Radeon core’s shaders. AMD is serious about Fusion's future; over half of its notebook processors are APUs right now, and it anticipates that these will represent more than 90% within a year (Ed.: This isn’t surprising, of course, given AMD’s lack of a commanding presence in the notebook space up until now).

We expect the Fusion initiative to struggle for a foothold a little more in the desktop space, where it’s relatively easy to add discrete graphics. But AMD has a benefit to offer here, too: Llano’s graphics engine can work in conjunction with an add-in card in Dual Graphics mode. In layman’s terms, Dual Graphics is a flexible asymmetrical version of CrossFire that allows the APU’s resources to render in cooperation with a Radeon HD 5000- or 6000-series board for a frame rate boost.

Of course we’d be remiss to ignore AMD’s next-generation micro-architecture, code-named Bulldozer. The Stars replacement should arrive in the third quarter of this year—within the next three months, basically. This represents the first fundamental retooling of AMD’s CPU design since the Athlon 64. So, right out of the gate, Llano’s days are numbered, and its replacement (code-named Trinity) is already slated to swap the CPU block with Bulldozer-derived silicon.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’ll be 2012 before we see Trinity, and that’s if it’s on time. Let’s just focus on the here and now.

What are Llano’s sexiest attributes? Roughly half of its die is a Phenom II X4 CPU stripped of the 6 MB L3 cache, but with L2 cache doubled to 4 MB. The other half is composed of something very similar to a Radeon HD 5570, with up to 400 Radeon cores (what AMD used to call Stream cores; apparently that name went out of vogue already) and an updated UVD3 video block. All of this is plumbed together on a single 32 nm chip. 

That’s the short explanation. Of course, there’s a lot more going on here and we’re about to dig in to the details. Having said that, if you know what a Phenom II X4 and a Radeon HD 5570 can do together then you already have a pretty good idea of where we’ll end up in this piece.

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AMD A8-3850 Review: Llano Rocks Entry-Level Desktops

Earlier this month we previewed AMD's Llano architecture in a notebook environment. Now we have the desktop version with a 100 W TDP. How much additional performance can the company procure with a loftier thermal ceiling and higher clocks?

Editor's Note: As we've done so many times before, we're partnering up with CyberPower to give away one of the first Llano-based desktop machines, which the builder calls its Gamer Ultra, to one of our readers. Flip through our review and, on the last page, enter to win a brand new PC, compliments of CyberPower!

A8-3850 Makes Its Desktop Debut

Don Woligroski did an absolutely killer job on our first look at AMD’s Llano architecture. If you haven’t yet read that story and you want to know more about the plumbing inside the company’s first mainstream APU, you really owe it to yourself to check out The AMD A8-3500M APU Review: Llano Is Unleashed before diving into this piece.

Because Don covered the underlying architecture so well, I’m going to use our first experiences with AMD’s Llano-based desktop platform, code-named Lynx, to dive deeper into the stuff I know you guys love: benchmark results and analysis. What kind of performance can you expect out of Dual Graphics? How does Sandy Bridge with discrete graphics compare? What effect does memory performance have on gaming frame rates? How does integrated USB 3.0 support measure up to some of the add-on controllers we’ve seen? I’ll answer all of that.

But first let’s go over the basics of AMD’s first desktop-class Llano-based APUs.

Llano: The Recession-Friendly APU

Oh, Audi would be so proud (or maybe not, given the entry-level pedigree of these processors). AMD is using the same A8 and A6 designators to distinguish between the perceived performance levels of its four launch SKUs.

There are two A8s and two A6s. The Llano-based flagship is A8-3850, a 100 W part with Radeon HD 6550D graphics, four execution cores with 1 MB L2 cache each, and a 2.9 GHz clock rate. That part does not offer Turbo Core support—the only way to get it running faster than 2.9 GHz is through overclocking. AMD says to expect pricing around $135.

The A6-3650 is also rated at 100 W, even though it’s armed with Radeon HD 6530D graphics and a more conservative 2.6 GHz clock rate (again, Turbo Core isn’t available). The -3650 boasts four cores as well, includes the same 4 MB of L2 cache, and support DDR3-1866 data rates, just like the other three models. That one is expected to run $115.

Model
GPU
TDP
Cores
Base CPU Clock
Max. Turbo
L2 Cache
Shaders
GPU Clock
Turbo Core

Interestingly, dipping down to the 65 W level doesn’t seem to sacrifice much in the way of functionality. AMD’s A8-3800 includes the capable Radeon HD 6550D engine, quad-core Stars architecture, and 4 MB L2 repository. However, Turbo Core helps compensate for a fairly severe drop to 2.4 GHz, kicking frequency up to 2.7 GHz in situations where thermal headroom allows for it. Unfortunately, AMD didn’t send over any Turbo Core-equipped processors for testing, so it’s impossible to gauge how much time this four-core part spends at its elevated setting.

Finally, the A6-3600 is also a 65 W component. It scales way back, though, giving up not only processor clock rate—its four cores running at 2.1 GHz by default and up to 2.4 GHz with Turbo Core—but also graphics performance via the less-complex Radeon HD 6530D engine. Is still includes 4 MB of L2 cache though, complementing each core with 1 MB.

What's the difference, exactly, between the Radeon HD 6550D and Radeon HD 6530D GPU engines? One SIMD engine, for the most part.

Graphics Processor Classification
Radeon HD 6550D (A8-Series APUs)
Radeon HD 6530D (A6-Series APUs)

When you look at a block diagram of the Llano's GPU component, it's easy to see how AMD differentiates these two lineups. Each SIMD hosts 80 ALUs and is associated with four texture units. Turning one SIMD off yields the 320 shaders and 16 texture units offered by Radeon HD 6530D.

A Small Launch Gets Smaller

With four SKUs in the initial Llano-based desktop portfolio, a zero-hour revelation that the 65 W A8-3800 and A6-3600 won't be available until an undisclosed date narrows the family down to two models: A8-3850 and A6-3650, both 100 W parts. As a result, it won't be possible to test Turbo Core functionality on Llano until AMD addresses the availability of its lower-power offerings.

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Apple's iPad 2 Review: Tom's Goes Down The Tablet Rabbit Hole

I bought the 16 GB WiFi-equipped iPad when it first came out. Like many others, I returned it a month later.

As much as I liked Apple’s latest gizmo, I just couldn’t find a way to consistently use it. Sure, the iPad was more portable than a notebook, but it doesn’t run OS X. Instead, Apple decided that the iPad should run on iOS, the mobile version of its desktop operating system.

And therein lies my problem. OS X applications don't run on iOS. That means I can't run Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, the two tools that I need to stay productive. There are applications in Apple’s App Store that serve as quasi-substitutes, but paying more for a program that I already have (with fewer functions) isn’t what I need.

Whatever I gained in portability, I lost in productivity. The iPad is a solid content consumption device; it's not nearly as suited to creation. If you want to be productive, you still need a computer.

The next time you’re at an airport, watch the professionals in suits. If they’re typing a Word document, editing a spreadsheet, or uploading a file to the corporate VPN, they’re still using a notebook to do it. Meanwhile, tablet users are working on crossword puzzles, writing email, playing Cut the Rope, or browsing the Web. That’s the limitation of a tablet; it’s really more about passing time.

To be fair, there are people who can be productive with a tablet (even in the office here, there are Tom's Hardware staff who do most of their communication on an iPad). But that group is eclipsed by the number of people using tablets for entertainment. We admit it: sharing photos at a party is more fun (and easier) on an iPad compared to a notebook. If you work all day in front of a computer, plopping down in front of the TV with an iPad to surf the Web somehow feels relaxing. Pulling out the notebook and balancing it on your lap still feels like a remnant of work. 

However, “fun” only stays fun if you color within the lines. As they exist today, tablets suffer a number of shortcomings, including limited Adobe Flash and multitasking support. Performance is nothing to write home about, either. Fortunately, tablets are constantly evolving. The tablets we see today are going to be followed by many more. But if you want the latest and greatest now, let’s see how far this development segment has come with an extremely in-depth look at Apple’s iPad 2.

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