When it comes to buying a pre-built desktop for the average consumer or gamer, about the only thing the big box manufacturers really have going for them is price. That hasn't stopped them from doing very well, but oftentimes the end user will be better off going to a boutique like iBuyPower for their desktop and enjoying the generally superior build and component quality along with better customer service.

But for small business and enterprise, it can be a whole different ball game, where powerhouses like Dell and HP produce uniquely designed configurations meant for mass deployment...and have the resources to greatly improve support, to boot. We've seen business class machines from both vendors before, but today we have on hand iBuyPower's Professional Series desktop. Can a smaller boutique outfox the big boys?

How do you keep increasing performance in a power constrained environment like a smartphone without decreasing battery life? You can design more efficient microarchitectures, but at some point you’ll run out of steam there. You can transition to newer, more power efficient process technologies but even then progress is very difficult to come by. In the past you could rely on either one of these options to deliver lower power consumption, but these days you have to rely on both - and even then it’s potentially not enough. Heterogeneous multiprocessing is another option available - put a bunch of high performance cores alongside some low performance but low power cores and switch between them as necessary.

NVIDIA recently revealed it was doing something similar to this with its upcoming Tegra 3 (Kal-El) SoC. NVIDIA outfitted its next-generation SoC with five CPU cores, although only a maximum of four are visible to the OS. If you’re running light tasks (background checking for email, SMS/MMS, twitter updates while your phone is locked) then a single low power Cortex A9 core services those needs while the higher performance A9s remain power gated. Request more of the OS (e.g. unlock your phone and load a webpage) and the low power A9 goes to sleep and the 4 high performance cores wake up. 

While NVIDIA’s solution uses identical cores simply built using different transistors (LP vs. G), the premise doesn’t change if you move to physically different cores. For NVIDIA, ARM didn’t really have a suitable low power core thus it settled on a lower power Cortex A9. Today, ARM is expanding the Cortex family to include a low power core that can either be used by itself or as an ISA-compatible companion core in Cortex A15 based SoCs. It’s called the ARM Cortex A7.

The new Kindle Fire may have gotten most of the attention when Amazon refreshed its Kindle lineup this year, but Amazon is still very much in the e-reader market. The fourth-generation Kindle, the Kindle Touch, and the Kindle Touch 3G all promise to deliver the traditional Kindle experience in a lighter and less expensive package - continue reading for our thoughts on the new $79 Kindle.

The original iPhone was designed to address a significant user experience problem with smartphones of the day. The iPhone itself was just the delivery vehicle, what later became known as Apple’s iOS was what made it all happen. At its launch in 2007 many lamented the significant loss of typical smartphone features with the very first iPhone. You couldn’t multitask, there was no copy/paste support, you couldn’t tether, you couldn’t send pictures or video via MMS and there were no apps. Apple of 2007 was very much a Mac company that was gaining strength, looking to dabble in the smartphone world.

iOS 5 has a number of headline features, including a ground-up redesign of the notifications system, a new iOS-to-iOS messaging service called iMessage, and the integration of iCloud, a cloud computing and storage service for iOS, OS X, and Windows. According to Apple, there are a full 200 new features found in iOS 5, with features like Twitter integration, wireless sync, PC Free setup and updating, display mirroring over AirPlay, multitasking gestures, and updates to core applications like the camera, browser, mail and calendar being among the more notable changes highlighted by Apple. It’s a pretty healthy list of things to cover, so we’ll get down to it.

iCloud is Apple's latest attempt at a cloud computing service and a replacement for MobileMe. We talk about how it works for iPhones, iPods and iPads in our review of iOS 5, but that's only a piece of iCloud's functionality. Here, we'll talk in detail about what it does for Mac OS X and Windows, and what you can do through the web portal at iCloud.com.

Rage came out a little over a week ago, and in the aftermath we’ve discovered some interesting pieces of information. We thought we’d chime in with some thoughts on the game itself, a look at various image quality settings, and a discussion of benchmarks with the title and why they’re virtually meaningless. We had high hopes earlier this year that Rage would be part of our new benchmark suite, and it’s the first A-list OpenGL title to come out in quite some time. However, unless something changes, it looks like we might have to return to games like Wolfenstein if we want to have an OpenGL benchmark. Read on for our thoughts on the game as well as the technology and performance.

In our first run with the Alienware M18x, we sat down and took a look at the notebook itself along with NVIDIA's current top shelf mobile graphics part, the GeForce GTX 580M. We came away from the experience with mixed impressions of the M18x itself, a notebook that is by all means incredibly powerful but also seems to lose a lot of the balance that made the M17x R3 so desirable. On the other hand, the GeForce GTX 580M wound up being the fastest mobile GPU we'd yet tested, made only more formidable through the SLI configuration the M18x enables.

Today, Alienware has graciously provided us with the second half of the current top shelf performance equation in the form of a near-identically configured M18x, this time with two AMD Radeon HD 6990Ms in CrossFire. We'll also take a look at the Intel Core i7-2920XM's stock performance and compare it against the overclocked settings Alienware allows you to configure it with.

Update: Congratulations to AnandTech reader Tidicus for winning HP's $500 Sweepstakes. Your prize will be on its way to you shortly! Thanks to everyone who entered and don't worry, you won't have to wait long for the next giveaway...

I'd like to congratulate AnandTech reader semandjem for winning the grand prize in our Summer of Honeycomb Giveaway. While we're all out of NVIDIA gear, HP just stepped in to offer the latest prize to AnandTech reader. The prize here is cold hard cash...almost: HP is giving away a $500 Visa Gift Card to one lucky AnandTech reader. The giveaway is in celebration of HP's newest blog targeted at small business owners and entrepreneurs called: Input Creates Output. The sweepstakes is available to all AnandTech readers (US residents only) - to enter simply respond to this post with one comment about what piece of hardware you're most looking forward to buying this year. What are you hoping to do with that hardware once you get it? And if applicable, how is this piece of hardware going to help you in your work or business?

The full sweepstakes entry details are below. Good luck!

The entry period has now passed, thanks for entering!

The EW2420 from BenQ is designed for use as a multi-purpose display. While it has the standard DVI and HDMI port you would expect on a current monitor, it also has an additional HDMI port for another video source like a video game system or Blu-ray player, as well as speakers for the audio from these sources.

Of course, if the panel doesn’t perform well then it doesn’t matter how many inputs it has, but the BenQ looks promising with both a VA panel and an LED backlight. The last time we checked out a BenQ LCD, it was an MVA panel that caused us to lament the decline in quality seen over the years. Read on as we determine whether the EW2420 can stand with the better offerings on the market.

AMD has been trailing Intel in the x86 performance space for years now. Ever since the introduction of the first Core 2 processors in 2006, AMD hasn't been able to recover and return to the heyday of the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2. Instead the company has remained relevant by driving costs down and competing largely in the sub-$200 microprocessor space. AMD's ability to hold on was largely due to its more-cores-for-less strategy. Thanks to aggressive pricing on its triple and hexa-core parts, for users who needed tons of cores, AMD has been delivering a lot of value over the past couple of years.

Recently however Intel has been able to drive its per-core performance up with Sandy Bridge, where it's becoming increasingly difficult to recommend AMD alternatives with higher core counts. The heavily threaded desktop niche is tough to sell to, particularly when you force users to take a significant hit on single threaded performance in order to achieve value there. For a while now AMD has needed a brand new architecture, something that could lead to dominance in heavily threaded workloads while addressing its deficiencies in lightly threaded consumer workloads. After much waiting, we get that new architecture today. Bulldozer is here.

Read on for our full review!

The rise of powerful home networking solutions have led to the shift in consumer focus from DAS (Direct Attached Storage) units to NAS (Network Attached Storage) units in the home space. Storage solution vendors such as Western Digital and Seagate were quick to identify the needs of the consumers. We have NAS solutions ranging from simple network attached hard disks to multi-bay SMB / SOHO NAS units from both of them.

Today, we will take a look at the recently introduced My Book Live from Western Digital. It is not advertised as a full blown 1-bay NAS solution, but more as a network attached hard disk. Western Digital stresses the personal cloud nature of the unit (after all, cloud is the hot keyword right now!) and provides smartphone apps to enhance this experience. Read on to find out how the My Book Live performs.

It is something of an understatement to start out by mentioning that the Motorola Droid Bionic was easily this summer’s most anticipated smartphone. The story of the Bionic started at CES, where it immediately attracted attention thanks to its combination of 4G LTE connectivity and a Tegra 2 SoC.

The new Motorola Droid Bionic (codename Targa)

That Bionic doesn’t exist anymore, instead the phone that launched in its stead is codename Targa, which was further down the roadmap and no doubt accelerated to take the Bionic’s place. Until now, 4G LTE and dual core SoCs have been mutually exclusive, and the result is performance now gated by the SoC instead of the last mile of air between you and a base station.

Finally with the Bionic things change, and we have a smartphone that combines a dual core SoC with the fastest air interface around, 4G LTE. It’s been a long and arduous wait for the Bionic, but it’s finally here. The only lingering question is whether the wait has been worth it.

SilverStone is a well known brand for high-quality (and expensive) cases. Beyond that they offer a large selection of power supplies. They have SFX-PSUs for HTPCs, redundant PSUs for server and workstations, and standard ATX PSUs for "normal" PCs. Today we take a look at a product from the latter category. The SilverStone Strider Plus 500W is a fully modular PSU with 80 Plus Bronze certification, going for a very affordable $60. That sounds interesting so far, so let us see if the internal design and measurements can satisfy.

Let's recap the current smartphone/tablet SoC landscape. Everything shipping today is built on a 4x-nm process, built either at Global Foundries, Samsung, TSMC or UMC. Next year we'll see a move to 28nm (bringing better performance and power characteristics) but between now and the end of 2012 there will be a myriad of designs available on the market.

The table below encapsulates much of what you can expect over the next 12+ months:

The key is this: other than TI's OMAP 5 in the second half of 2012 and Qualcomm's Krait, no one else has announced plans to release a new microarchitecture in the near term. Furthermore, if we only look at the first half of next year, Qualcomm is the only company that's focused on significantly improving per-core performance through a new architecture. Everyone else is either scaling up in core count (NVIDIA) or clock speeds. As we've seen in the PC industry however, generational performance gaps are hard to overcome - even with more cores or frequency.

Read on for our analysis of Qualcomm's Krait architecture and the MSM8960.

The more enclosures we get in, the more amazed I am at just how competitive the market is for $99 cases. That market is made only more competitive by younger, hungrier companies like BitFenix and Fractal Design, along with new entries from Corsair and NZXT. In another welcome change of pace, these enclosures tend to be slicker, more streamlined, and less gaudy than the gaming cases of yore while providing oftentimes excellent thermal and acoustic performance. With those things in mind, today we look at our first of hopefully many cases from Fractal Design: the Arc Midi.

We've heard a lot of requests for a Fractal Design case review, and the company answered by sending us their $100 offering. Targeting the popular mid-tower segment with a reasonable price and good features, let's see just how well this newcomer can stand up to the competition.

Marking the fourth time we’ve taken ASUS’ G7 gaming series for a spin, the G74SX actually changes up the formula from the last-iteration G73Sw in some meaningful ways. Superficially, the two notebooks look the same, but when you crack open the spec sheet and take a closer look you’ll find some nice updates. It’s pretty easy to list what exactly has changed: the keyboard layout is better—nearly perfect in my opinion—and ASUS has finally decided to ship a high-end notebook with an SSD + HDD storage combination. ASUS also bumps the GPU up to the GTX 560M from the GTX 460M, and memory in our test unit checks in at a hefty 16GB (4x4GB).

There’s one remaining update we expected to see that’s still missing, however: NVIDIA’s Optimus Technology. This tends to be a polarizing technology, and while the best-case solution would be a GPU that can run as fast as the GTX 560M when needed but drop down to HD 3000 power use levels when it’s not, for the time being such a solution doesn’t exist. ASUS has taken the “safe” approach of using only the discrete GTX 560M GPU, which means you sacrifice battery life and Intel’s Quick Sync technology, but you gain some simplicity at the same time. Is the end result worth your hard earned pennies? Read on.

While we've had a chance to check out a few cases in the $200+ club and the majority of the enclosures we've tested have floated around the $99 price range, we haven't really put the screws (so to speak) to a truly budget case. That changes today, when we tackle the least expensive case we've yet tested: the BitFenix Merc Alpha. At just $39 it would be reasonable not to expect much, but as you'll see this case can hang with enclosures at twice the cost or better.