Daily Reviews Summary 07/13/10 #2

Mobile Hard Disk Drives have gathered popularity in recent times. In fact it is only in the past few years that things have really picked up and this is due to the size of portable media being introduced. Once upon a time 3.5" solutions were the only available products on the market and carrying this size of device around with you is more of a hindrance than a solution. Such a large device can't fit in your pocket, is difficult to transport and in some cases may even be heavy. But now we have a new generation of portable
media hard disk drives - faster in speed and smaller in size.

The drive we are to look at today comes in at just 2.5" which is small enough to fit into your pocket. What's more is that, 2.5" isn't the smallest we can go to in this category of product either. In the last 12 months we have seen devices as small as 1.8" hit the market - the size of a credit card.

We know a lot of you are sitting there contemplating the purpose behind using 2400MHz of DDR3 memory in your computer. And, to be honest, we sometimes sit here wondering the same thing while trying to figure out possible applications for such memory. It's usually only limited by our ability to come up with scenarios that would provide the right kind of test and come up with conclusion that benefit users from gamers to benchmark enthusiasts. Of course there are things such as overclocking that really make such a kit shine. Let's check out just a few more of the things that the Patriot 2400MHz Sector 5 DDR3 can do for your system.

Make way for the new king of mainstream gaming.

ASRock has redesigned their "old" P55 series to include SATA III and USB 3.0 and this way they made them future proof, at least in terms of connectivity; the performance of the P55 Deluxe3 board is decent and has no problem at all reaching 4GHz with an i5 750 CPU.

While SSDs may be all the rage these days, there are still a lot of people chugging along with traditional HDD offerings. In fact in many cases, this is a preferable option as while slower, there are much bigger storage capacities available and they're much heaper when considering the cost per GB. Some downsides to these units though, are noise output - in some of the faster drives - and in some cases heat. There are many products available to aleviate this issue, but today we're looking at one from Nexus.

The ASUS U30Jc is the latest entry for ASUS in the Ultra-Portable Market. With the promise of 8 hours of usable battery life, Intel Core i3-350M 2.26GHz Nehalem derived performance, 4GB of DDR3 memory, all in a 4lb aluminum enclosure, this notebook might just be what you've been looking for. It also sports dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 310M graphics and all for under $1000!

What we have here is a notebook that comes in at $961 (we've seen it in the low $800s), 8 hour battery life while web surfing and working in documents, the power to easily to edit videos and photos, the flexibility to game in a pinch, 4+ hours of DVD playback with the capability of hardware assisted Blu-ray playback, all in a thin and light package. With all of that in mind, I would have no problem recommending the ASUS U30Jc to anyone in the market for a new laptop under $1000...

So your Windows PC is running slow, crashing, or acting funny. You're sure there's no hardware issues. This leaves one big suspect: malware. When XP was ruling the roost, reinstalling operating systems once or twice a year was the norm for a lot of users. However, installing a fresh version of Windows is not always practical or possible. So what do you do? Put on your geek cap, be ready to bring a bevy of anti-virus hammers on the malware infecting your system, and read on!

After publishing our look at the new GeForce GTX 460 we had several requests for an article that quickly compared the relevant NVIDIA and AMD options from top to bottom for the enthusiast PC gamer. I threw together some graphs comparing the $200 cards, $300 cards and $400+ cards from both vendors and added some of our own analysis to help gauge the market as we see it today.

While the GeForce GTX 460 showed power consumption close to that of the Radeon HD 5830 while offering better performance, the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 use a dramatic amount of additional power to get the performance results we showed you above. While the HD 5850 is slower in our testing than the GTX 470, it does use 33% less power than the NVIDIA option and the HD 5870 uses 44% less power than the GTX 480. These are not small gaps by any stretch and the fact that the HD 5870 uses 25% less power than the GTX 470 mainstream option indicates that point further.

Zotac's Zbox HD-ID11 brings a dual-core Atom, Ion GPU, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and XBMC support to a barebones nettop. Is it the ultimate bargain home-theater PC?