Corsair surprised us all at Computex this year when they announced their Neutron and Neutron GTX SSDs based on a so-far relatively unknown Link A Media Devices (LAMD) controller. While LAMD was new to the consumer-grade SSD controller market, the company had been making controllers for hard drives and enterprise SSDs for years, so the LM87800 found inside Neutron SSDs wasn't LAMD's first attempt in the storage world. The experience LAMD has gathered in the enterprise world is definitely visible in the LM8700 because even though its LAMD's first consumer-grade controller, it was not dwarfed by SandForce or Marvell.

We reviewed the Neutron in August when it was initially launched but Corsair only sampled reviewers with 240GB models. While 240/256GB is undoubtedly the most popular capacity at the moment, there is still a good market for 120/128GB SSDs and the market for 480/512GB SSDs is getting bigger all the time as prices come down. SSDs also perform differently depending on the capacity, NAND and controller, which means testing all capacities is necessary. Corsair sent us the remaining capacities of Neutron and Neutron GTX, so read on to find out how they perform!

We've been quietly testing doing more video content on the site over the past year. I've done a few reviews over at our YouTube channel, and we also host all of our smartphone/tablet camera samples over there as well. Going into 2013 we'll be ramping up the amount of video content on the site to go along with Pipeline and the Podcast as some the new features we've introduced over the past couple of years. In doing so we're also going to be hosting videos locally.

When we were looking for the first content to trial our locally served video, I asked Johan de Gelas, the head of our IT/Enterprise testing at AnandTech if he could put something together. Johan came back with a behind the scenes look at the Sizing Servers Lab in Belgium, the back-end for all of our server reviews and testing. 

Johan's video is embedded below and if this goes well he's promised to bring us a look at ARM based servers on video in the not too distant future.

We recently reviewed Dell's top of the line Precision M6700 mobile workstation and found that the overall design left something to be desired compared to HP's high end EliteBooks, but that the price was definitely right for the performance. The M6700 is likely to remain a good value for the enterprise sector (much as Dell's desktop workstations continue to be), and the 10-bit PremierColor display uses a similar LG panel to the ones HP employs in their DreamColor displays. Can we get something like that in a smaller form factor, though?

As it turns out, theoretically at least, we can. We have an HP EliteBook 8570w on hand for review, and the 15.6" 1080p DreamColor display threatens to hit the sweet spot for productivity, with a smaller chassis footprint than larger workstations like the M6700 and EliteBook 8760w/8770w. But is the 8570w able to hit the same value propositions as Dell's mobile workstations, can it offer similar performance, or is our memory of the HP EliteBook line a little rosier than reality?

Corsair entered the enclosure business from the top with a measure of care to establish a solid brand identity. The Obsidian 800D was released as a flagship product and signalled that Corsair was serious about case design and not just looking for another revenue stream, and for the most part it was well received. Since then they've gradually trickled their designs down, with the Carbide series aimed at more frugal users. Yet the least expensive Carbide, the 300R, still runs $79 when most people would peg the price of a "budget" case as closer to $50 or $60. Enter the 200R.

The Carbide 200R is the ultimate trickling down of Corsair's case line. Coming in with an MSRP of $59 and available for just $49 as of this writing, the 200R is Corsair's shot at the extreme value consumer, but this is a very tricky market to address. The balancing act of features, performance, and price becomes substantially more difficult to manage, and Corsair has a reputation to maintain. Were they able to get the price down while keeping up with their standards for ease of use and solid performance, or did they have to sacrifice too much?

Since Computex back in June, Gigabyte has been pushing a new power delivery system across parts of its motherboard range.  This involves an integrated circuit to combine power delivery MOSFETs into a small form factor with great heat dissipation, high efficiency and a smaller PCB space – the PowIRStage IC3550 they have been using is rated up to 60A of current each.  This makes sense in the high end spectrum (Z77X-UP7) where power might be needed, or in low airflow situations (mITX) to ensure longevity.  But is it required on a desktop Trinity board?  These things are expensive, which made me wonder if it is a worthwhile investment in a desktop Trinity system.  Read on for the full run-down of the F2A85X-UP4.

When you think about it, the enterprise workstation market really only has three key players. You have HP, who produce some excellent mobile workstations but have been stagnating horribly on the desktop side. You have Dell, who produce what are in my opinion the best desktop workstations but seem to be substantially less exciting on the notebook end. And you have Lenovo, who excels in neither discipline but offers a fairly balanced portfolio in exchange. This presents a problem, and it's a problem we're looking at today.

What we really want and need is a single vendor to order notebooks and desktops from and be able to call it a day. While HP's desktops aren't bad, they're overpriced compared to Dell's offerings. Today we have the updated Dell Precision M6700 on hand, a robust notebook featuring a full sRGB IPS panel with user-configurable gamma, a Kepler-based workstation GPU, and Intel's Ivy Bridge quad core processor. But with workstations it's not just about the internals, it's about the design and the experience. Did Dell come up with a worthy competitor to HP's EliteBooks, or did they just come up short?

We’ve provided some buyer’s guides for system builders so far, but today we’re going to ditch the DIY sector and instead look at pre-built laptop options, with a focus on Ultrabooks and other ultraportables. Not everyone needs or even wants an ultraportable, so we recognize that the recommendations here are for a specific subset of users, but if you’re looking for something highly portable and you don’t mind paying a bit more for quality, we have some suggestions.

The A85X chipset and FM2 socket is supposedly here to stay for Trinity plus one more generation. As a result, AMD needs to make sure that the platform is right so that the new processors can slot straight in (whenever that may be). While they may have missed the ship on PCIe 3.0 (despite AMD pioneering it on the GPU side), we do get a tasty array of eight SATA 6 Gbps ports from the chipset with RAID 5 support and a promise that the integrated graphics part of the APU is powerful. In the next installment of our series of FM2/Trinity motherboard reviews, MSI sent us their top line motherboard to test. The FM2-A85XA-G65, while a rather lengthy classification, is a full sized ATX motherboard using the FM2 chipset in an MSI Military Class black and blue theme. At a mid-pack price of $100, MSI gives us the full eight FM2 SATA 6 Gbps ports, 5 fan headers, a full array of video outputs, and special features such as voltage read points and an OC Genie button. Read on for the full review.

When migrating away from 4:3 screens for home video, the 16:9 aspect ratio was chosen as a compromise between all the common formats at the time. For many film fans, this meant finally being able to watch movies in their original aspect ratio without putting up with black bars. However many films are shot using aspect ratios even wider than 1.78:1, such as 2.20 for 70mm film or 2.39 for modern cinemascope films. While the letterboxing of these titles was improved over 4:3 sets on new 16:9 sets, the black bars remained. Now we are starting to see panels that also address this audience, including the LG 29EA93 21:9 LCD monitor.

While cinephiles may rejoice, traditional computer users might be wondering if this makes any sense for a desktop display. There is still a lot of resentment over the transition from 16:10 to 16:9 displays, as the loss of vertical space means less room for word processing documents, spreadsheets, and other data, even if it might be slightly more ideal for HDTV. If the layout of many operating systems and programs hasn’t adapted yet to properly utilize 16:9, what will using 21:9 be like? Is the LG 29EA93 a one trick pony for those that want to watch scope films, or does it serve a larger purpose as well?

Plextor released their M5 Pro SSD in August, which we reviewed shortly after the release. Now nearly four months later, Plextor has released an updated firmware (v1.02) for the M5 Pro that promises performance improvements. The M5 Pro with the original firmware did well in our tests but there was still room for improvement as the difference between the M5 Pro and the older M3 Pro was not magnificent. With the new firmware, Plextor is claiming up to 100K random IOPS and also increased sequential write speeds. Read on to find out how the updated M5 Pro stacks up with the current speed kings: Samsung's SSD 840 Pro and OCZ's Vector!

Though mobile devices continue to consume more computing marketshare at the expense of traditional desktop PCs, phones and tablets, and to an extent even laptops, simply cannot compete with desktops for getting work done. Workstation productivity systems aren't particularly sexy like powerful gaming computers or svelte small form factors HTPCs, but very few people earn a living playing games or watching movies.

The systems outlined in this guide are built to produce, not to consume. Whether you're interested in producing and editing HD video content, prosumer-grade photography work, financial data analysis, scientific computing, or something else, you need a desktop computer. In this guide we outline three productivity machines at a range of prices, featuring the latest CPUs from both Intel and AMD.

For years, almost a decade in fact, we've been asking for higher quality displays in notebooks. With most of our pleas left ignored for the value notebook segment, smartphone and eventually tablet makers capitalized on the opportunity. These days the $399 - $499 tablet display experience tends to be superior to the $399+ notebook experience. Things are beginning to change, but not quite fast enough. At the forefront of driving tablet display performance is Apple with its Retina Display equipped iPad. While the company has never really competed in the low-cost notebook or netbook market directly, the iPad has been Apple's solution for consumers who want a computer at a $500 - $700 price point. By focusing on areas that have been neglected by PC makers in the past (e.g. display, wireless connectivity, ease of use), Apple has managed to be quite successful in this space with the iPad.

As a big part of its overall strategy, Apple has done a good job of issuing regular updates to the iPad family since its initial unveil in 2010. Now, just seven months after the release of the 3rd generation iPad, Apple followed up with a 4th generation model. It's the relentless execution cycle in addition to focusing on the integration of high quality tangibles like the display that has made the iPad a formidable competitor in the $500 - $700 consumer computing space. 

Read on for our full review of the 4th generation iPad.

There have been many interesting developments in the small form factor market segment since our last SFF buyer's guide. Specifically, current-generation Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs and AMD Trinity APUs use less power than their respective predecessors, and GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA are similarly less power hungry than last year's architectures. Using less electricity translates to emitting less heat, meaning small form factor systems are more viable than ever. Further, there are many new mini-ITX cases available to house the latest products from Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD. In this guide we outline budget-friendly general use tiny desktops, a small file server, and svelte gaming systems.

Industrial PCs come with stringent requirements that are not satisfied by generic PCs. It is customary for builders to use active cooling in order to ensure that the components are in proper working order. Ventilation slots are also provided to keep airflow up. Chassis size is also not always a concern. However, these flexibilities are not always possible in industrial PCs. Operating environments for such systems usually call for passive cooling, dust resistance, rugged nature and minimal size (read, mini-ITX).

We have already covered the launch of a few industrial PCs including that of the Aleutia Relia which is being reviewed today. The specifications of the Aleutia Relia also make it attractive to users who are picky about having a completely silent machine in their media center. How well does the Aleutia Relia fare in our benchmarks? What are the effects of going in for a fully passive thermal solution? Read on to find out.

When we reviewed Intel's SSD DC S3700 I started looking at consistency of IO latency, an area that Intel's latest controller specifically targeted for significant improvement. In our review of OCZ's Vector I took the same methodology and applied it to the current crop of high-end consumer drives. As I believe improving IO consistency is a good optimization practice for all SSDs, the hope is that we'll see improvements in this area on both client and enterprise focused drives.

In the comments thread for the Vector review, jwilliams4200 posted some very interesting data. The S3700 has 264GiB of NAND on-board but only exposes 186GiB of it (200GB advertised capacity) as user accessible storage, the rest is used as spare area to improve performance, consistency and endurance. Most client drives on the other hand only feature about 7% of their total NAND capacity set aside as spare area (256GiB of NAND, 238GiB of user storage). The obvious hypothesis is that a big part (if not all?) of the S3700's advantage in performance consistency is due to the large amount of spare area.

We've understood the relationship between spare area and write amplification for quite some time now. The real question is what's the relationship between spare area and IO latency/performance consistency.

To find out, I repeated jwilliams4200's tests. I took a bunch of 240/256GB drives and filled them to various percentages of their capacity, and performed our IO consistency test with an identical span of LBAs. The goal was to simulate worst case IO consistency while taking into account greater percentages of spare area. Read on for our analysis!

The answer to the question ‘What makes a good motherboard?’ can generate an alarming number of responses.  When a manufacturer starts with a new chipset, the idealized view is that they partition the market off into segments – system integrators, HTPC, gaming, enthusiast, overclocker, legacy et al, and then try and get a fixed number of SKUs to target each one but encompass several others.  This is not always true – design can be driven by sales of particular regions where certain features go down well, for example in the Chinese Internet Café market only one HD video output is needed.  Today we look at the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6, the high-end ASRock solution to Trinity.

We recently reviewed Acer's Aspire V5-171, a notebook that proves that there's a life (and a market) after netbooks but before ultrabooks. The essential gap that's materialized has been between the fast decaying netbook market (its death spurred on by Intel's Atom coupled with the high price of Brazos), and the expensive ultrabook market. More than that, though the 11.6" form factor is basically as small as a notebook can get while still featuring a full-sized keyboard, it's a gap that's essentially been going underserved for roughly a year now.

Acer wasn't the only one to spy this gap and try to fill it. ASUS has a notebook in stores right now that sports either an Ivy Bridge i3 or a Sandy Bridge i3 and touchscreen for Windows 8, and HP has an offering in their enterprise line that we have on hand for review today: the EliteBook 2170p. These notebooks have all been released with very little fanfare, and that's a shame, because there's definitely a niche for them. But while the Acer offering turned out to be a remarkably good deal for cost-conscious consumers, did HP misstep with their unusually pricey EliteBook 2170p?

In early September, we published a piece detailing our SMB / SOHO NAS testbed. Subsequently, we received extensive feedback from readers regarding the testbed as well as the proposed testing methodology. The universal consensus was that the VM (virtual machine) density could be increased (given the dual Xeon processors and the minimal load on the CPU from the workload). Readers also helpfully pointed out traces that could potentially replicate NAS (Network Attached Storage) usage in typical home scenarios.

We set out to implement the suggestions within the constraints of the existing workstation. Between the set up of the original testbed and the beginning of the update process, NAS vendors also started offering rackmount units with 10 GbE capability. Netgear graciously accepted our request to participate in our upgrade process by providing us with a 10 GbE capable switch. Read on to find out the how we went about updating the testbed and some results from putting the Thecus N4800 under the scanner with the new environment.

While AMD's second generation "Trinity" APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) have been available in pre-built desktops and laptops for many months now, the chips and accompanying motherboards themselves have only been available in retail channels for DIY desktop builders for a few weeks. Trinity is based on AMD's newest "Piledriver" CPU and "Cayman" GPU architectures and uses socket FM2. Like its Llano APU predecessor, the Trinity APU offers respectable CPU performance and discrete-level GPU performance on the same die, all with low power consumption. While APUs have been very popular in laptops, we outline in this guide how Trinity can be pressed into service on the desktop. Read on for our recommended general home/office usage, HTPC, and budget gaming system builds.