Sceptre’s 27” X270W-1080P LCD is targeted primarily at PC gamers and desktop productivity segments of the market. To that extent, it packs a TN panel for higher refresh rate and lower processing lag (we’ve shown in previous tests that, for whatever reason, S-PVA panels show a significant amount of input lag), and for meeting that relatively low price point. There are caveats we’ve repeated time and time over about the TN choice, but it actually makes sense here; Sceptre wants a fast panel for gamers that likely don’t care about super accurate color tracking, and they want it to meet gamers’ budgets.
Futuremark confirmed that the next version of their popular graphics benchmark will be 3DMark11, due out later this year. Unlike previous releases, the "11" refers to DirectX 11, and the new suite will require DirectX 11 hardware. This follows on from 3DMark05/06 that benchmark DirectX 9 and 3DMark Vantage that benchmarks DirectX 10 hardware.
A few years ago it seemed as if Hybrid Hard Drives were the future. Yet after a bunch of announcements and hope today we find ourselves in a world with two distinct markets: HDDs and SSDs. If you're willing to pay the price premium and limit maximum capacity, today's SSDs are very fast and if you choose well, reliable.
For a desktop PC this isn't a tough choice to make. I've been advocating a setup where you have a SSD for your OS + applications and a separate RAID-1 array of 1TB or larger drives for all of your music, movies and photos.
Notebook users don't usually have a ton of drive bays and thus only have room for a single drive. It's not a lost cause though, if your notebook is your only machine you can get away with an internal SSD + external storage whether in the form of a NAS or just something you attach via USB when you're at your desk.
For the very portable users that don't want to lug around another hard drive, or for those who refuse to pay the high dollar per GB rates that SSDs command, there hasn't really been an option other than mechanical storage.
Today Seagate is attempting to change that with its latest Hybrid HDD: the Momentus XT.
Fans of custom video cards have undoubtedly found themselves a bit disappointed with the Radeon HD 5800 series. Due to a perfect storm of low GPU yields from TSMC and NVIDIA’s late arrival with the GTX 400 series, the first 6 months for the 5800 series was nothing other than bonkers. AMD was selling GPUs to their partners as fast as they could come out of TSMC, and their partners were selling finished boards to OEMs and-end users alike as fast as they could be assembled. Even at prices over MSRP, the 5800 series flew off the shelves, leaving AMD’s partners with little-to-no supply of GPUs to tinker with. Custom 5800 series cards effectively took a 6 month vacation.
That wait finally came to an end in the Spring of 2010, as an increase in GPU supplies allowed AMD’s partners to catch their breathes and focus on their custom cards. With 6 months under their belts AMD’s partners were able to come up with a variety of designs for their custom cards, and today we’re going to be looking at a trio of custom Radeon HD 5870s: Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870 Toxic 2GB, MSI’s Radeon HD 5870 Lightning, and Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 5870 Super Overclock.