Daily Reviews Summary 10/01/11

EnGenius has answered the call of media enthusiasts and gamers alike with the Wireless 300N Gaming Router (ESR9855G). With 300Mbps (37.5 MBps) wireless and 1000Mbps (125 MBps) wired speeds this router is aimed at gaming and HD streaming. Lets take a dive and take a look if this router a step above the rest.

With the amount of USB devices that you can attach to your computer, people are always running out of room for them. Well, today we've got the Synology USB Station 2, which plugs directly into your router to allow access to any USB device over your network. It's small and can be placed anywhere, but how well will it perform? Let's find out...

The MSI X460DX is a very portable 14-inch laptop that has a solid, brushed-aluminum design with lots of offer. It has two of the latest USB 3.0 ports, an Intel Core i5 CPU, 6GB of RAM and discrete graphics. This is definitely a mobile laptop for power users, but it's not without some minor flaws.

The CPU cooler is probably one of the most important parts of your computer system; it’s what keeps your CPU cool and working great. Today for review I’ve got the Thermaltake Frio OCK CPU cooler which is big and bold with styling based on Starcraft II actually. The cooler is meant to keep your CPU cool whether you overclock it or not. So read on…

Hey, Hey, I’m back with another review for you. It’s a little review, or an equally little product from Scosche called the boomCAN. This little product is meant to let you take your music with you, or any audio really. The boomCAN is a tiny little speaker with a big sound that comes with a built-in rechargeable battery that you can charge right over USB. So read on…

Today we will take take a look at an interesting product from Startech. Startech Portable eSATA USB to SATA Standalone HD Duplicator Dock is a hard disk duplication device that you can do easy hard disk cloning with. Let’s see how it performs in our tests and how easy it is to use.

When Intel entered the SSD market one of its declared goals was to bring the technology into the mainstream. The goal was so important to Intel that its consumer drive was branded X25-M, with the M standing for mainstream. Intel's desire for SSD ubiquity wasn't entirely altruistic however. Mechanical storage acted as a potential gate to increasing CPU performance. Eventually, without significant improvements in IO performance, CPU improvements would be less visible to most users. SSDs would help alleviate this bottleneck.

It wouldn't be untrue to say that Intel accomplished its mission. The client SSD market was in a state of disarray before Intel arrived on the scene. Although we still have problems today, there are a number of affordable options for end users and lots of competition. Samsung, Marvell, Indilinx, JMicron and even SanDisk are now vying for control of the market.

With healthy competition, significant performance improvements and (hopefully) improved reliability in the consumer SSD space, Intel will actually begin defocusing itself from this market over the coming years. Intel needs to keep margins as high as possible to appease shareholders, and the consumer SSD business is in a race to the bottom. Dollars per GB are all that matter here once you deliver a certain level of performance and reliability.

Intel won't abandon the consumer SSD market completely, it will still compete in the high end space but there's a good reason that the mainstream moniker has been dropped from Intel's product names. Intel will shift more of its attention to the enterprise space, bringing that technology to the high end desktop/workstation users where it can (e.g. Cherryville will be focused on both enterprise and enthusiast desktop users). But as you have already seen, I wouldn't expect Intel to actively compete in driving mainstream SSD pricing down further. That market now belongs to the players I mentioned above.