As NewEgg's house brand, Rosewill has been growing in very interesting ways. Being the house brand of a major electronics retailer means dipping your toe into a lot of different markets, and Rosewill has expanded dramatically, to the point where their products are starting to crop up on other vendors' sites. At the same time, those products are gaining attention in their own right. Rosewill's own Thor v2 may not be the best built enclosure, but it's a dynamite performer and can oftentimes be found at a bargain.

Rosewill has also been fairly aggressive about pursuing enthusiasts. It's not enough to simply have a product and offer it; you don't see Best Buy sending out Dynex or Insignia televisions to websites for review. There's also sweet money to be had in chasing mid-to-high end buyers, and that's where the Armor EVO comes in. The EVO is a fairly modestly sized tower capable of supporting E-ATX motherboards and promises healthy cooling performance. It also comes with an unusually optimistic MSRP: $119. Is it worth the money, or did Rosewill misfire?

Every now and then we receive a request from a smaller SSD manufacturer to review their products. We rarely say no to such a request and we try to treat all manufacturers equally regardless of how big they are. MyDigitalSSD is one of the less known SSD manufacturers, although that's not a surprise as they rely on their own distribution channel instead of selling at NewEgg or other major online retailers. MyDigitalSSD sent us two of their mSATA SSDs for review, the SMART and BP3. The SMART is a typical SandForce SF-2281 based SSD but in mSATA form factor while the BP3 is a more interesting drive. It's based on Phison's first SATA 6Gbps controller, which is something we haven't reviewed before. Read on to find out how the drives perform!

Chromebooks have been plagued, until recently, with one major flaw: price. Costing as much as a small Windows notebook but lacking that license, it was hard for users to take the leap of faith that they could live entirely in the browser. Drastically cutting prices while maintaining decent hardware could sweeten consumers on the idea. Hence the Samsung Chromebook costs just $249, and the latest entrant, the Acer C7 Chromebook, rings in at just $199.

The Acer C7 Chromebook is the second collaboration with Acer and Google’s Chrome OS, and though it’s Aspire One roots are plain to see, this is an entirely different beast. Let’s find out how.

The build process and thermal performance of a fanless Ivy Bridge HTPC was covered in detail last month. I had indicated that the piece would be the first of a three-part HTPC series. Today, we are looking at the second part of the series. My original intention was to present the HTPC oriented benchmarks and aspects of the PC as it was built in the first part.

After a few experiments, we had to do some updates to the build in terms of both hardware and software (OS). Is Windows 8 a worthy upgrade for HTPC users? The second part of our HTPC series addresses that question and also provides some guidance to ensure that your Ivy Bridge HTPC performs to its full potential.

It wasn't that long ago that we reviewed NZXT's shiny new Phantom 820, a case that apart from its high price tag and slightly ostentatious design was pretty tough to beat. The Phantom 820 was providing some best-in-class thermal and acoustic performance, and it was a shot fired squarely across the bows of companies like Thermaltake and CoolerMaster, whose respective Level 10 GT and Cosmos II suddenly had a new, less expensive case to worry about competing with. Yet when I visited NZXT at CES 2013, they already had a descendant of the 820 on hand.

The Phantom 630 is just a little smaller, a little more conservative, and a lot cheaper. At $179 MSRP it's still on the expensive side and is clearly an enthusiast case, but unlike the 820, the 630 is using an entirely new chassis built from the ground up. The 820 scored a Bronze Editor's Choice award, but as it turns out, it may not have been a flash in the pan. Once you take a look at the 630, you'll start to understand why I'm beginning to think NZXT is entering a new era and the competition needs to be on their toes.

Apple has the luxury of not competing at lower price points for its Macs, which makes dropping hard drives an easier thing to accomplish. Even so, out of the 6 distinct Macs that Apple ships today (MBA, rMBP, MBP, Mac mini, iMac and Mac Pro), only two of them ship without any hard drive option by default. The rest come with good old fashioned mechanical storage. Given the extremely positive impact an SSD has to user experience, it seems inevitable that Apple would move all of its systems to SSDs.

Moving something like the iMac to a solid state configuration is pretty tough to pull off however. While notebook users (especially anyone using an ultraportable) are already used to not having multiple terabytes of storage at their disposal, someone replacing a desktop isn’t necessarily well suited for the same.

Apple’s solution to the problem is, at a high level, no different than all of the PC OEMs who have tried hybrid SSD/HDD solutions in the past. The difference is in the size of the SSD component of the solution, and the software layer.

I spent a month with Apple's Fusion Drive in the new 27-inch iMac. Read on to find out how it compares to other SSD caching solutions and if it can truly approximate a standalone SSD setup.

Most manufacturers are quicker and happier to show us their medium-to-high end cases, but for a lot of users the case is admittedly a steel box they put their computer into. While I personally advocate spending up a bit and getting a quality case, the enthusiast looking to maximize the distance their dollar can go may not be willing to shell out for something big and fancy. For those users, there are cases like the Antec GX700.

When I saw it on display at CES, I was surprised at the incredibly low $59.99 price tag. Now that I've had it in house for testing and review, I see more of how they got there. This isn't necessarily a good or bad thing, but simply a fact of life when you're buying budget. Still, a case at this price point featuring a pair of 140mm fans, a single 120mm fan, a fan controller, and support for increasingly common 240mm radiators? There has to be a catch, right? As it turns out there are a couple of small ones, but not the ones you'd think.

Enthusiasts and speed freaks are always looking for an edge – a little something that will help push their gear that little bit faster.  There is already a market for pre-overclocked GPUs, and now SSDs are coming with internal RAID to push the boat over the SATA connections.  These require little-to-no knowledge of overclocking and are essentially plug and play.  When it comes to pushing GPUs higher, and motherboards, we get a dichotomous nature of ‘easy to OC’ against ‘advanced options to push the limits’.  In order to meet these two markets, the top four motherboard manufacturers have all come out with their respective weapons for Z77 and Ivy Bridge, aiming for either ~$220 or ~$380, and all of them have broken overclocking records at one stage or another since their release.  First up on our battle bridge is the ASRock Z77 OC Formula, designed by ASRock’s in-house overclocker Nick Shih, and commands a paltry $240 for all the goodies.

All the major motherboard manufacturers run different nomenclature when grouping their channel and high end products.  ROG, Fatal1ty and Big Bang are to name a few, and each have an associated meaning with the name.  Thus when products come along with a suffix such as ‘Golden’, we expect the best of the best, something that is number one.  Gold is for winners, and we will not accept anything less, otherwise it would be Silver, Bronze, or a wooden spoon.  The ECS Golden range covers graphics cards and motherboards, the latest of which is the motherboard we are testing today in the FM2/A85X Trinity line up – the ECS A85F2-A Golden.

We're live at the AMD CES 2013 press event! Keep your browser parked here for live updates!

We have looked at LaCie's 5big offering before in late 2010. In that product, the only LaCie signature was the industrial design and choice of hardware components of the NAS. The performance figures were left to Windows Storage Server 2008 R2. The time has now come for LaCie to move forward with their own custom NAS OS based on Debian Linux for their 5-bay configuration.

The 2big NAS offering had impressed us with its performance in a 2-bay configuration for SOHO and SMB applications involving a few users. However, translating that performance to a 5-bay multi-user SMB scenario is definitely challenging. On top of that, the SMB / SOHO NAS market is quite hot, with multiple players competing in terms of features and price. How well does LaCie's 5big NAS Pro perform and what features does it have to differentiate itself? Read on to find out more about the LaCie 5big NAS Pro being launched today.

While 2013 CES is going full tilt, AT&T also holds its developer event and keynote at the Palms, in almost the same place where we were last night for NVIDIA. We just took our seats for the AT&T 2013 Developer Summit Keynote, stay here for the live blog. 

SanDisk is a household name as far as NAND storage is concerned. You can’t walk into an electronics retailer and not be bombarded with SanDisk made CompactFlash and SD cards. Rip open a tablet and you might find a SanDisk solution. Even the new $249 Cortex A15 based Chromebook uses a SanDisk iNAND device on-board. Similar to Intel/Micron, SanDisk and Toshiba jointly develop and manufacture their own NAND.

The brand is well known and its products are prevalent throughout the OEM space, but in retail SanDisk isn’t as strong as some of its competitors. Recently SanDisk has been hoping to change this with the release of several of its own branded SSDs: the SanDisk Ultra (SF-1200) and SanDisk Extreme (SF-2281).

Like many other SSD companies once married to SandForce, SanDisk also looked elsewhere for controllers. And like many of those same companies, SanDisk ended up at the same place: Marvell.

Today SanDisk is announcing the Ultra Plus SSD, based on Marvell’s SS889175 6Gbps SATA/NAND controller. Read on for our full review!

Over the years, we’ve seen many budget-oriented Acer offerings of one form or another. There have also been a few higher-end options, but for most of their products Acer has never quite managed to shake their budget-oriented feel. That changes today with one of the sleekest Ultrabooks to grace our test bench since Intel announced the platform two years back.

Acer’s third-generation Ultrabook leaves behind the S3 and S5 models of yesteryear and goes all-in on quality, with a 1080p IPS touch screen, Gorilla Glass 2 on the cover, and a sturdy yet extremely thin chassis that can lay claim to the title of “thinnest Ultrabook” for the time being. With some help from Windows 8, Acer has also managed to improve on boot times and you can be up in running in under 10 seconds flat. With all the good, however, you’re probably wondering if there’s a catch. There is, potentially, but it’s the same old concern we’ve raised before: cost. Read on to find out what we think about Acer’s S7 and whether it’s the right Ultrabook for you.

We just sat down for NVIDIA's Pre-CES press event. Things are running a bit late now, but we expect the event to start in the next 15 minutes. Keep yourself here for the live blog!

Browsing through a manufacturer’s website can offer a startling view of the product line up.  Such was the case when I sprawled through Gigabyte’s range, only to find that they offer server line products, including dual processor motherboards.  These are typically sold in a B2B environment (to system builders and integrators) rather than to the public, but after a couple of emails they were happy to send over their GA-7PESH1 model and a couple of Xeon CPUs for testing.  Coming from a background where we used dual processor systems for some PhD CPU workstation throughput, it was interesting to see how the Sandy Bridge-E Xeons compared to consumer grade hardware for getting the job done.  Read on for the full review.

A little over a month ago, Qualcomm flew me out to San Diego to talk all about cellular modem, specifically their baseband lineup, testing, and later their RF and transceiver in what would become their largest RF disclosure ever. In the past few years, we’ve made considerable headway getting SoC vendors to disclose details on the CPU and GPU side of their products, and mobile enthusiasts now are starting to become increasingly cognizant of the SoC inside devices, and in turn the blocks inside that SoC. In a short term the industry as a whole went from smartphones largely being impenetrable black boxes to devices with understandable platforms inside. The days of an OEM not disclosing what SoC was inside a device at all are largely behind us, and for the most part vendors are open to discussing what’s really inside most of their silicon quite publicly.

The last real remaining black box from my point of view is the cellular connectivity side of things. So much of what drives smartphone design and OEM choice lately is, unsurprisingly, how the device gets connected to the cellular network, and baseband remains largely a black box by design for a number of reasons. The focus of this article is specifically about Qualcomm’s newest transceiver, WTR1605L, and some more details about MDM9x25 and MDM9x15.

Late last month, Intel dropped by my office with a power engineer for a rare demonstration of its competitive position versus NVIDIA's Tegra 3 when it came to power consumption. Like most companies in the mobile space, Intel doesn't just rely on device level power testing to determine battery life. In order to ensure that its CPU, GPU, memory controller and even NAND are all as power efficient as possible, most companies will measure power consumption directly on a tablet or smartphone motherboard.

The process would be a piece of cake if you had measurement points already prepared on the board, but in most cases Intel (and its competitors) are taking apart a retail device and hunting for a way to measure CPU or GPU power. I described how it's done in the original article.

The previous article focused on an admittedly not too interesting comparison: Intel's Atom Z2760 (Clover Trail) versus NVIDIA's Tegra 3. After much pleading, Intel returned with two more tablets: a Dell XPS 10 using Qualcomm's APQ8060A SoC (dual-core 28nm Krait) and a Nexus 10 using Samsung's Exynos 5 Dual (dual-core 32nm Cortex A15). What was a walk in the park for Atom all of the sudden became much more challenging. Both of these SoCs are built on very modern, low power manufacturing processes and Intel no longer has a performance advantage compared to the Exynos 5.

Read on for our analysis.

Clover Trail was late by about a month to the Windows 8 launch. Most of the traditional PC partners were delayed either by Intel or by burdens of their own. As much as we wished Surface RT would’ve launched with a different SoC, truth be told I don’t know that anyone else outside of NVIDIA could’ve met the aggressive schedule that Microsoft set. Qualcomm and TI were both design partners working on Windows RT devices, but neither of them had solutions available at launch.

Now that we’re two months out from launch however, things are starting to change. We’ve already reviewed one of the first Clover Trail tablets, with another on the way. And just before the holidays last year, this thing showed up:

It may look like the Samsung ATIV Smart PC that Vivek is working on, but it’s the smaller 10.1-inch ATIV Tab featuring Qualcomm’s APQ8060A SoC. Yep, this is the first Windows RT tablet we have in house to use Qualcomm silicon.

Read on to see how Qualcomm's APQ8060A handles Windows RT.