The release of Intel’s Clarkdale chip and its accompanying H55 chipset means new boards all round for Intel’s LGA1156 boys. The shiny new P7H55-M from ASUS aims to offer a full-blooded experience at little more than budget price and comes with a raft of overclocking tools to keep the most dedicated explorer of performance tweaks happy.

It has the neat ability to adjust its base clock in 1MHz increments, and you’ve got a Marvell SATA controller running two internal SATA 600 ports, and two external USB 3.0 ports, so you’re tooled-up for fast drives.

The feature list is full of Asus’ unique features; some lovely, some fairly pointless (does anybody on earth use Express Gate?). The two Asus is most pleased about are the new green-friendly Energy Processor Unit, which does clever things to voltage and multipliers across the whole board, and Turbo Unlocker – press a button and get an instant boost with unlocked chips (they tell us).

We tested the P7H55-M with an Intel i7-870, a meaty Radeon graphics card and two sticks of Corsair memory running at 1,333MHz (although it isn’t, true memory speed is arcane knowledge).

Here we’ve pitched the new bug against a Gigabtye H55M-UD2H – not quite as feature-rich perhaps, but using the same Intel chipset and aimed at the same buyer and sells for about the same, too. Both boards were run without any overclocking (not as easy as it sounds; they were quite keen).

As you might expect, it’s a close-run thing. The Asus has a slim but clear lead in the application benchmarks. Why the memory bandwidths differ is a bit of a mystery. An erroneous timing setting perhaps?

CPU rendering

Cinebench R10 – time in seconds, lower is better
Asus P7H55-M: 47
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 52

Cinebench R11 – index, higher is better
Asus P7H55-M: 5.52
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 5.13

Video encoding

X264 V.2 – frames per second, higher is better
Asus P7H55-M: 28.57
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 27.84

Game physics

World in Conflict – frames per second, higher is better
Asus P7H55-M: 239
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 238

Memory speed

SiSoft Sandra – data transfer rate, higher is better
Asus P7H55-M: 16.1GB/s
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 16.7GB/s

We were looking forward to seeing just how the P7H55-M could stretch Intel’s marvellously stretchy i7. The automated overclocking features proved to be damp squibs.

The OC Tuner in the BIOS turned our 2.93GHz chip into a 3.88GHz one, which was a good start. Unfortunately, it did it by dropping the clock multiplier to 20 and pushing the base clock to 194MHz, which was too much for the rest of the system to cope with and stay stable. It booted, but benchmarking revealed that the processor throttled back under the stress.

The software-based TurboV auto-tuner wasn’t any better. This left the multiplier alone and pushed the base clock from 133MHz to – wait for it – 136MHz. We were unimpressed.

Back to the old fashioned way and into the BIOS we went, loaded the defaults and set controls to manual. At an x24 multiplier and a 155MHz base clock, we had a stable 3.72Ghz system.

For the more dedicated speed merchant there was more to come, adjusting the voltages and tweaking the memory timings and so forth. There are many adjustable settings, clock skew, differential amplitude, individual memory timings and more that might require some form of electrical engineering knowledge to use with confidence.

The Turbo Unlocker feature, when you’ve set it all up, should give a boost to CPU performance when you hit the hotkey. We remain unconvinced here. If it will overclock without tears, then why not leave it overclocked?

Motherboards have caught the fashion for ‘green’ features. The P7H55-M boasts an EPU, Energy Processing Unit, this will adjust the core voltage, the FSB, clock multiplier, spin down drives and more.

It’s something Asus appears particularly pleased about, and it’s clever stuff. This new-found righteousness is even accompanied by a little counter which tells you how many mg of CO2 you’ve avoided emitting.

Saving power is good, of course, however, Cinebench R10′s score was crippled, rising from 47 seconds to over 80 seconds running maximum power saving mode, which is rather against the whole point of building a fast PC.

It’s nice but you would do better green work using sleep and low power modes rather than leaving it to EPU to run at reduced ability. There is also something deliciously ironic about watching your CO2 saved meter running.

What else? Well there’s a wonderfully bullet-proof BIOS, it’ll recover from any stupid mistakes you might make (ahem) and you can switch between multiple BIOS set-ups.

We liked

At this price its hard to get too fussy about the P7H55-M, it covers all the bases rather well. It has the all-important high-speed controllers, although an external SATA port is notable by its absence.

As an over-clocking board it has plenty of potential, too: there’s support for 2,000MHz memory and that incremental base clock adjustment is hours of fun.

We disliked

The auto-tuning needs some work though. The small form factor means only one x16 PCIe slot, so no dual-card action, so this isn’t the board for that ultimate games monster you always promised yourself.

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Asus is one of the latest manufacturers to admit they are focusing on Android development, despite working on a Windows Phone 7 device.

Many other companies also seem to be hanging on the fence to see just how these mobile OS wars pan out in the popularity game over the next quarter.

Read More…

Asus Showing Android Some Love

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Another week brings with it another motherboard toting Lucid’s HydraLogix 200 (nee Hydra 200) mix-and-match graphics technology. This time, however, it comes not from MSI, but from archrivals Asus.

It’s taken Asus a while to launch a board based on the technology, but one’s now a reality in the form of the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme.

The Crosshair IV Extreme is the latest addition to the AMD branch of Asus’s RoG (Republic of Gamers) family and – just like the rest of the RoG motherboard lineup – has all the bells and whistles you expect from a top-end Asus motherboard. Like its brethren, it also comes in a box that’s pretty much crammed with hardware.

It’s worth noting that the Crosshair IV Extreme is the new flagship of the Crosshair range and hence is aimed at the higher end of the market, carrying a price tag to match.

The last high-end board to carry Lucid’s technology, MSI’s Big Bang Fuzion, was also the first mainstream board to use it. Ultimately, it suffered from a combination of a high price tag and early-to-market technology.

Asus, by allowing the technology to mature a little and putting it on a RoG board, are hoping they can entice high-end users back to give the technology another try.

Unlike MSI’s AMD AM3-based board offering HydraLogix support, the 890A Fuzion, Asus’s Crosshair IV Extreme uses the full-fat version of AMD’s 890 chipset: the 890FX. So even without Lucid’s chip, you get full x16 dual and triple CrossfireX support, while the SB850 Southbridge provides native SATA6 and USB 3.0 support.

The 890FX Northbridge, Lucid chip and the voltage regulators all sit under what at first glance looks like a large passive heatsink, but which actually has small cooling fans underneath. The Southbridge sits under a heatsink too, with a hefty heatpipe connecting both cooling plates.

There are five x16 PCIe slots. Take care to use the ones that suit whatever graphics setup you’re running. Slots one and three are the ones for straightforward dual-card Crossfire use – these are taken care of by the 890FX, which eliminates the latency within the HydraLogix controller.

The 890FX will also support four cards in a Quad CrossfireX setup, but not at full x16 speed. The HydraLogix chip takes care of slots two, four and five, and can be used in only in dual- or triple-card setups presently, although Quad GPU Hydra support will follow later in Q4 2010.

Nine SATA ports are provided; six SATA 6GB/s ports (coloured red) and two SATA 3GB/s (black) ports are edge mounted at 90 degrees, while the third SATA 3GB/s port is vertically mounted next to them. The SB850 provides RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 support for the SATA6 ports. There’s also integrated Gigabit Ethernet and eight-channel audio.

Since it’s a RoG board, Crosshair IV Extreme comes with a RoG Connect module, which enables you to tweak and overclock the board either from another PC (via the supplied cable) or from the comfort of your armchair via Bluetooth using a laptop.

Unlike previous motherboards we’ve looked at carrying Lucid’s chip, Asus’s Crosshair IV Extreme offers a wide range of options when it comes to setting up the graphics in dual, triple or quad modes.

A word of caution when setting up cards with large third-party coolers to use the Hydra chip, though: we fitted a card into the second PCIe slot and adding a card into the fourth slot proved a problem. There was little airflow around it, which forced us to use the fifth slot. Unfortunately, this runs at x8 speed unlike the other four, which run at full x16 speed.

Cinebench R11.5
Ranking 5.90

Cinebench R10
(seconds to complete multithreaded task) 51.01

X264v2
Pass 1 (avr) 84.945fps
Pass 2 (avr) 30.203fps

X264v3
Pass 1 (avr) 75.342fps
Pass 2 (avr) 32.495fps

Games Performance
FarCry2 
(1680 x 1024 small ranch benchmark 4xFSAA, Ultra in-game settings, in average fps)

HD5830 68.05
HD5830 Crossfire 88.86
GTX460 73.64
GTX460 SLI (Hydra) 60.27
GTX460+HD5830 59.56

(1920 x 1200 small ranch benchmark 4xFSAA, Ultra in-game settings, in average fps)

HD5830 59.88
HD5830 Crossfire 76.58
GTX460 63.15
GTX460 SLI (Hydra) 54.39
GTX460+HD5830 55.98

Just Cause 2
(1280 x 1024 4xFSAA, 8x AscF Dark Tower map, in average fps)

HD5830 47.87
HD5830 Crossfire 59.56
GTX460 55.47
GTX460 SLI (Hydra) 55.25
GTX460+HD5830 55.29

(1920 x 1200 4xFSAA, 8x AscF Dark Tower map, in average fps)

HD5830 40.21
HD5830 Crossfire 51.56
GTX460 41.33
GTX460 SLI (Hydra) 41.30
GTX460+HD5830 41.66

DiRT2
(1280 x 1024 4x FSAA, Ultra settings, in average fps)

HD5830 89.59
HD5830 Crossfire 89.30
GTX460 92.14
GTX460 SLI (Hydra) 94.67
GTX460+HD5830 95.21

(1920 x 1200 4x FSAA, Ultra settings, in average fps)

HD5830 84.08
HD5830 Crossfire 88.79
GTX460 90.36
GTX460 SLI (Hydra) 91.03
GTX460+HD5830 91.62

Power (system power measured at wall, peak running Everest burn-in test for five mins)
Idle 132W
Peak 209W

Compared to any of the other motherboards we’ve looked at carrying Lucid’s HydraLogix 200 chip lately, Asus’ Crosshair IV Extreme is packed to the gills with features both visible on the PCB and in the BIOS – as you would expect from a board carrying the RoG label.

Unlike MSI’s 870A Fuzion, which uses an AMD 870/SB810 chipset combination to keep the price down, Asus have firmly aimed the Crosshair IV Extreme at the high-end, fitting it with a flagship AMD 890FX/SB850 chipset combination.

When it comes to how the board performs, it’s pretty impressive. Not quite as fast as Asus’s ‘pure’ 890FX board, the Crosshair IV Formula, but it’s pretty close in terms of overall performance. And with all those graphics slots, the Crosshair IV Extreme is far more flexible when it comes to graphics setups too.

In a pure Crossfire setup using the 890FX chipset you won’t need to worry about frame rates, but when it comes to using the Hydra chipset in SLI there are still some issues. Hopefully, these will be ironed out with subsequent driver releases.

In mix-and-match mode, the performance shows a good deal of promise.

Since the Crosshair IV Extreme is a member of the RoG gang, you shouldn’t be surprised to find extra ‘goodies’ placed around the board and a very interesting group of these appear on the top-right-hand edge, next to the four DDR3 DIMM slots (which support memory speeds up to 2000MHz). Alongside the large start button (which lights up) and buttons for resetting, OC and Core Unlocker are seven Probelt points.

These points enable you to measure the true voltages being used by CPU, memory, chipset bridges and so on when overclocking by using a multimeter directly, or via the extension cables that are included in the box. Next to these sit five small on/off switches, which turn the PCIe slots on and off.

So if you’re feeling lazy and can’t be bothered to remove a card, you can simply switch the slot it’s sitting in off.

Any motherboard carrying a RoG label pretty much guarantees that not only will the board be crammed with features, but the box bundle will be pretty impressive too.

The Crosshair IV Extreme doesn’t disappoint and opening the box shows real skill in the art of packing of nothing if else.

The impressive list includes a RoG Connect Bluetooth module, a couple of thermal sensors, the really useful Asus Q Connector (extension plugs for the front panel case leads, so no more fiddling about), a USB RoG cable, an I/O plate with single eSATA and dual USB 2.0 ports, two 3GB/s SATA cables and three 6GB/s SATA cables.

We Liked
The Crosshair IV Extreme is a well put together board with plenty of features to keep the high-end enthusiast or hardcore overclocker happy, but this should come as no real surprise as it’s what Asus’s RoG range is all about.

The combination of AMD’s 890FX/SB850 chipset combination and Lucid’s Hydra technology together with the multitude of PCIe graphics slots make for an interesting addition to the Asus high-end motherboard collection.

We disliked
There’s not much to dislike about Asus’ Crosshair IV Extreme apart from the price tag. But since Asus hasn’t compromised with any of the hardware, the high price was almost a given.

Verdict
The Asus Crosshair IV Extreme is a mightily impressive board aimed at more of a niche market than the recent MSI Lucid boards we’ve looked at. It’ll be interesting to see how well the Lucid technology goes down with the enthusiasts and/or overclockers this time around.

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The ASUS 1015PN netbook, announced this week, features next-gen Nvidia ION graphics with 1080p playback and Nvidia Optimus graphics-switching technology.

It features a 10.1-inch display (1024×600 resolution), Windows 7 Starter, the new Intel Atom N550 dual-core processor, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a 250GB 5400RPM hard drive plus 500GB of free ASUS web storage. The built-in Nvidia ION graphics have 512MB of DDR3 dedicated memory. ASUS claims the 1015PN can get up to 9.5 hours of battery life. It weighs in at 2.8 pounds and 1.4 inches thin. The Eee PC 1015PN is $429.99 at Amazon, in red, white, black, and blue.

Asus also combines Intel’s Core i3 processor and NVIDIA Optimus technology in the 13.3” U30Jc Notebook ($849 at Amazon). NVIDIA Optimus technology chooses the best graphics processor for running a given application, automatically switching between the NVIDIA discrete GPU or Intel integrated graphics for optimum speed and battery life.

View full post on dailywireless.org

Asus may be best known for its Eee PC range of netbooks, but the Taiwanese manufacturer also offers a solid range of full-sized laptops. The Asus K72F-TY011V is a slightly more sizeable laptop and proves to be a highly usable machine, as well as a decent performer.

Its 17.3-inch screen offers ample viewing space, but is still pleasingly sharp, thanks to its 1600 x 900-pixel resolution. It may not be as bright as some other screens, but it delivers deep blacks, excellent contrast and appealing colours.

The bulky chassis is fairly large, while the 3.2kg weight is also the heavy if you’re thinking of taking this on the commute.

The chassis offers a solid if unexciting build, with a plain black finish, and we only noticed the smallest bit of flex around the area of the optical drive.

Decent battery

Despite the hefty build, we still managed 249 minutes of battery life from a single charge – a better performance than most machines of this size. This is definitely a desktop replacement machine, but at least you can carry it between rooms without lugging the charger too.

An Intel Core i3 350M processor powers this portable, with solid performance as a result. While the Core i5 laptops produce more power, the Asus can comfortably handle the needs of most users. Multi-tasking is no problem, with little in the way of slowdown, even with several applications open at once.

The majority of the laptops at this price have integrated graphics, suitable only for basic multimedia tasks, and the Asus is no exception. Nevertheless, you can still watch HD video and even play basic games.

The wide chassis leaves plenty of room for the isolation-style keyboard which comfortably includes a separate numeric keypad. While the keyboard doesn’t span the whole width of the chassis, the keys are still well-sized and firmly mounted. The touchpad is also generously sized and responsive, making it easy to use.

Networking is comprehensive, with 802.11n Wi-Fi for connecting to wireless networks and Gigabit Ethernet for wired connections.

The 500GB hard drive is also fairly generous, offering plenty of room for your files and media.

Four USB ports are in place and allow plenty of peripherals to be connected. A 3-in-1 memory card reader is also provided and can be used to quickly access your holiday snaps or other portable media.

The Asus K72F-TY011V should satisfy anyone looking for a solid and dependable desktop replacement machine. Portability is limited, despite the impressive battery life, but this is a highly usable and dependably powerful laptop.

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Nvidia has taken its time about it, but now we’re seeing its DirectX 11 Fermi GPU filtering down into the mainstream sector with the £70 GeForce GT 430.

AMD has had its lineup of DX11 cards set up since February this year, around which time the green side of the graphics divide was starting to really nail down its first DX11 part: the GTX 480.

This inaugural seriously sub-£100 Fermi card is from graphics gurus Asus, and the first thing you’ll notice is that it’s designed to cater for the wee machine crowd.

The chip is based on a half-height PCB and in the box you’ll find two spare brackets – both half-height too – for plugging into media-centre/lounge PCs.

With another new CPU design to cover this lower-end card, we’re seeing a GPU that as well as having its PCB halved in size has been almost halved itself relative to the GTS 450′s GF106, which hit us a month or so back.

We say almost, because it’s actually a little bit less than half the chip of the rather impressive GTS 450. The GF108 has two Streaming Multiprocessors as opposed to the GF106′s four, meaning we get half the number of CUDA cores and texture mapping units at 96 and 16.

The big difference is the render output units (ROPs) have been cut by two thirds. This means we only get four against the GF 106′s count of 16.

Still, the GT 430 does come with the same 128-bit memory interface, though, but it’s only running cheaper GDDR3 memory rather than the full-fat and pricier GDDR5.

It’s also worth noting that while the GT 430 can come in passive-cooling trim, this Asus version comes with a dust-proof fan. Essentially, that means there is a protective lip around the bearings to stop any errant dust particles getting inside to clog things up.

But this isn’t a hardcore gamer’s card. Rather, it’s a GPU designed to be dropped into small form factor PCs to play high-def video and do as much video encoding and photo editing as you need in your lounge.

The bonus is that you can get rather decent gaming framerates from this card if you sacrifice a few of the bells and whistles. As you’ll see on the next page.

The key consideration here is the performance of the rival AMD card, the HD 5570. That’s another half-height card at the same price point as the GT 430.

The only places where the Nvidia card has the edge is in the tessellation-heavy Heaven benchmark and in Far Cry 2. The rest of the time, the rather geriatric AMD card is still faster.

It’s only by the very smallest of margins, but that’s from a card that was released in February of this year, which is a veritable lifetime ago in GPU terms.

The Heaven benchmark was done at the usual eye-popping 2560 x 1600 resolution, while the rest were carried out at a more mainstream 1680 x 1050.

While it’s great that Nvidia has finally managed to squeeze its Fermi architecture into the mainstream of the GPU market, our excitement is tempered by the fact we were hoping for more from it.

When the GTS 450 first hit the shelves, we were looking at a card that had been priced to go directly up against AMD’s HD 5770. Unfortunately, it wasn’t fast enough to give it a good thrashing across the benchmark board, with the Nvidia card winning a few tests and the AMD winning others.

A month later, prices have fallen to the point where the GTS 450 is now competing directly with the 5750 – a card it consistently beats.

Hopefully, the same will happen with the GT 430 soon, since at the moment it’s priced up against the eight-month-old HD 5570 and is facing the same benchmark trade-off.

A quick look at the benchmark tables on the previous page will reveal that it’s a pretty much level playing field – demonstrating why all the press presentations spoke of the performance boost over the GT 220 rather than how it fared against the competition.

Oh and we couldn’t possibly comment on why it was launched on the same day as Windows Phone 7…

The GT 430′s problem, then, is that anyone wanting this sort of performance from such a form factor has been able to get it since the HD 5570 landed many moons ago.

Yes, Nvidia will shout about the fact that it offers more in the way of CUDA-based applications and 3D performance for Blu-ray playback, but those are fairly ephemeral plus points, since most mainstream users are unlikely to use them.

With all the above said, we’re basing our opinions on the launch price, which we may see dropping quite quickly. In order to get some volume sales, it really needs to.

Realistically, we may well also be seeing this card shipped in pre-built systems, rather than it being a part that’s going to fly off the shelves in your favourite etailer.

We liked

Having a half-height DirectX 11 card is great, even if it’s by no means new.

The GT 430 isn’t a bad performer either, giving playable framerates in modern titles even with a few bells and whistles turned on.

It’s also got all the CUDA goodness too, with the boost to video encoding and HD video playback prowess that brings.

We disliked

Unfortunately, it’s really no better than the AMD HD 5570, which was released almost at the start of the year. This sort of performance in a half-height card is good, but it’s already been done.

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I was recently loaned an Asus Eee PC 1008P-Karim Rashid edition for one year to use and love and try out in many different ways. I have owned a Dell Mini 9 for a while, but its battery recently died. Not being able to use it wherever I want certainly affects its usefulness, and at this point I can’t afford a replacement battery. So I was thrilled to put off that purchase and to be able to use the Asus, a slightly larger (10 inch diagonal) netbook with a better keyboard. Just having the ‘ ” key in the correct place makes all the difference when I type.

[Read the rest of this post at our companion site GeekMom]

View full post on GeekDad

Over the last couple of decades 3D has spasmed violently in and out of fashion, never quite managing to break free from the sickening effects and dodgy cardboard spectacles that seem to have doomed its every attempt at making it mainstream.

Now, thankfully, technology has advanced far enough for companies such as Nintendo (with the 3DS) to demo 3D content without the need for glasses at all, albeit for more basic games and graphics.

The Asus G51Jx doesn’t quite manage that, but it does employ nVidia’s cutting edge 3D Vision technology, which features a special design of glasses that enable you to play the latest games – and enjoy 3D content – in impressive 3D.

Elsewhere the G51Jx proves itself to be a more than capable gaming rig, offering enough power and performance to play the latest gaming titles at full settings. It’s also a highly versatile multimedia centre, which will suit you if you enjoy high definition (HD) movie editing, for example, when not playing the latest games.

As mentioned above, we were very impressed by Nvidia’s active 3D Vision technology, and the effect it produces. The system works using a set of wireless glasses that are connected to the G51Jx by an infrared module, both of which are bundled with the laptop.

We actually found synchronising the glasses to the infrared module to be quite a fiddly process first time round, despite a setup wizard and instruction manual, and even the nVidia representative had a small skirmish with the equipment when it was first demonstrated to us.

Once you’ve established a connection between the G51Jx and the glasses you’re ready for action, and simply launching a game, opening a 3D video or viewing 3D photos will automatically cause the glasses to click into 3D mode.

The way the glasses work is surprisingly simple. Fundamentally each of the lenses shutter independently, with each eye offered a slightly different version of the image on the G51Jx’s screen. Your brain naturally blends the two pictures into one image and the 3D effect is created.

Of the three types of 3D content you can view on the G51Jx (movies, photos and games), the first two are most consistent in producing a decent effect. In our experience the effect is less forced than when employed on the games, and we’ve been impressed by all the demos we’ve been shown.

But the G51Jx is predominantly a gaming machine, and ultimately it impresses here as well. nVidia’s technology will turn pretty much any game into 3D, but some are more suited to the transformation than others – a comprehensive list can be found on nVidia’s website here.

Many games have been designed specifically with 3D Vision in mind, yet some of the early ones, such as Resident Evil 5 and Batman Arkham Asylum, failed to make a splash when it came to the 3D effect. We especially found that colours were washed out and the screen brightness very dim.

Fortunately developers have reacted to the criticism, and the latest 3D Vision-ready titles such as Just Cause 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 are fantastic ambassadors for the technology, and it’s fair to say that going back to playing these games in 2D is quite a depressing experience.

So there’s no doubt that with the correct software, the 3D effect works great, and it’s also worth mentioning that we suffered none of the nausea we experienced with Acer’s Aspire 5738DZG-434G50Mn, which features a passive screen technology that’ll have you reaching for a bucket after about 15 minutes.

The G51Jx’s 15.6-inch screen is very bright when not in 3D mode, but we’d have expected a full 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution for such a high-spec machine. Nevertheless images are crisp enough, but, as with all screens with a shiny coating, reflections are irritating in bright light.

The G51Jx’s backlit keyboard features the Asus chiclet design, but is a little spongy for our liking. The flex especially affects the centre of the board, and we found these keys to be a little sluggish to our inputs, which isn’t ideal. Nevertheless the board is comfortable enough during everyday use, and you’ll have no problem typing for hours on the G51Jx.

A dedicated number pad is included, which is great for left-handed gamers, and makes it quicker and easier to regularly input data.

The G51Jx boasts a decent array of ports. There’s four USB 2.0 ports for connecting or charging any peripherals you may have, from a smartphone to an external gaming mouse, as well as both VGA and HDMI interfaces. These allow you to hook up to analogue and HD monitors respectively if you want to play games and view content on a larger screen. Obviously the monitor or TV would have to be nVidia 3D Vision-ready to enjoy 3D content on it.

The G51Jx also boasts a Firewire connection for importing video at high speeds from a camera, for example, and an eSATA interface for rapidly transferring data to a compatible external hard drive.

Although not as well built as the superb Alienware M17x, the G51Jx is well put together, and you’ll be able to travel safe in the knowledge it’ll absorb a few knocks and bangs.

Having said that, the 146-minute battery life will mean travel with the G51Jx is limited to the shortest of journeys, even though the 3.7kg machine isn’t as hernia-inducingly heavy as the likes of the Alienware M17x.

As with the likes of the MSI GX660 a garish design with all the bells and whistles has been implemented. Flashing lights and aggressive paint schemes might not endear the G51Jx to everyone, but will certainly appeal to some.

As you’d expect for a high-powered gaming machine, the G51Jx features some eye-wateringly fast performance.

A quad-core Intel Core i7 720QM, with 8912MB of DDR3 memory onboard, produces enough performance for you to multitask a variety of very resource-intensive applications with little problem.

As a result this is an option for those who really don’t want to mess around when it comes to power, and you’ll find this kind of performance also produces a serious amount of futureproofing – meaning the G51Jx will happily tick all the software requirement boxes for most applications for many years to come.

Likewise, the nVidia GeForce GTS 360M – backed up by 1GB of dedicated video memory – provides more than enough gaming power for running the latest titles at full whack. It’s not quite as powerful as the Alienware M17x, which features two ATi chips, but it’s not nearly as expensive either.

The 640GB hard drive spins at a fairly standard 5400rpm, and will provide you with plenty of storage for your multimedia libraries, alongside any work files and folders you might have.

The G51Jx also features a Blu-ray optical drive, for watching HD movies on, and although it can both write and read DVDs, it can only read Blu-rays. It’s also a shame that because of the low pixel resolution of the screen, you won’t get the full HD effect on the laptop.

A host of features include 2.0 mega pixel webcam for video messaging your friends and family, Bluetooth for wirelessly connecting to your smartphone, for example, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. The G51Jx also comes with a dedicated gaming mouse and bag, which is a nice touch.

So it looks like 3D has finally landed, and for good. The Asus G51Jx was one of the first on the scene, but a host of other manufacturers, including Toshiba with the Satellite A665 and Rock with the Xtreme 680, are pushing 3D Vision capable laptops out of their factory doors.

The Asus G51Jx itself is a good machine, with just a couple of quirks that stop it from being a great one. Either way the 3D element of the laptop works well, and we think you’ll be pleased with the results too.

We liked

We like the fact that 3D works well on a laptop, and that the technology genuinely enhances the gaming experience – finally 3D isn’t a gimmick.

The power on offer from both the graphics card and processor is formidable, and will keep you ticking software requirement boxes for many years to come.

The laptop may not be the most portable, but the 3.5kg weight is pleasingly light, meaning travel with the G51Jx is a possibility.

We disliked

There’s not a lot to dislike about the G51Jx. The garish design won’t suit all, but we actually quite liked it.

It’s a shame the panel doesn’t feature a full HD screen resolution for the highest levels of detail, and it is also a shame the keyboard isn’t a bit firmer. But in the grand scheme of things these are minor quibbles.

Verdict

Ultimately this is a great laptop, and kudos to Asus for being the first out the gates with a nVidia 3D Vision laptop. That the technology works well – given the correct content – demonstrates that 3D is now ready to come out of the wilderness and start enjoying some success as a mainstream technology.

There are a few niggles, including the screen resolution and keyboard, but neither are a massive cause for drama.

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Asus has established itself as a player in the high rollers’ hi-fi lounge with Xonar soundcards like the Xense, D2 and mighty Essence ST. Although still relatively new to the audio game, it can look old timers like Creative and Auzentech in the face without shame.

Asus’ latest card, the Xonar DG, features some of the same components as appear on its more expensive boards, just not in such great quantity. It’s specifically aimed at gamers rather than music buffs, though, with basic outputs for 5.1 PC speakers and – crucially – an on-board headphone amp.

It’s a tough job to convince anyone to upgrade from on-board audio, for the very good reason that most integrated sound chips are good enough for the majority’s needs. Having made the decision to upgrade, should you be looking at something a little grander?

We’ve used Rightmark’s Audio Analyzer tool to give a top level breakdown of the card’s performance. It’s worth pointing out that this simply measuring variations in tones via a loopback from the speaker to the mic channel – effectively the card is listening to itself.

RMAA total harmonic distortion 24-bit/48KHz (lower is better)
Intel on board: 0.131%
Creative X-Fi Titanium HD: 0.0020%
ASUS Xonar Xense: 0.0004%
ASUS DG: 0.0027%

RMAA Dynamic range 24-bit/48KHz (higher is better)
Intel on board: 90.4dBA
Creative X-Fi Titanium HD: 113.2dBA
ASUS Xonar Xense: 115.0dBA
ASUS Xonar DG: 103.3dBA

Noise level 24-bit/48KHz (lower is better)
Intel on board: -90.4
Creative X-Fi Titanium HD: -113.4dBa
ASUS Xonar Xense: -116.1dBA
ASUS Xonar HD: -103/4dBa

The Xonar DG gets as close to its claimed stats as any card we’ve tested in the Rightmark tests, which is a good start. Subjectively, it also delivers on its promise of outperforming on-board audio by a long way. The headphone amp in particular, which can be tuned for high impedance headsets up to 150ohms is an exceptionally good touch at this price.

If you game through headphones, this is well worth the upgrade, with a powerful bass blast that doesn’t drown out more subtle midtones and high range effects. For this alone, we’d choose the DG over the slightly more expensive Creative X-Fi Xtreme.

Even better, the DG also supports Creative’s EAX 5.0 effects via Asus’ GX2.5 driver. The driver interface, by the way, is identical to that found in Asus’ other Xonar cards.

Outside of gaming, it’s not a card that will please audio purists, since it doesn’t have the power or connections to drive high end gear. For the rest of us, though, the improvement over on-board sound is appreciable and worth it.

Except for one thing – we had to re-install the drivers several times to eliminate the introduction of some distortion into MP3 playback. It’s not a terminal problem, but it is a little frustrating.

A PCI-E option for newer motherboards without older PCI ports would be useful too.

Still, these are faults that are easy to live with. The Xonar DG costs less than a new PC game, but adds a lot of long term enjoyment, and we challenge anyone to tell the difference between this and a sound card costing two or three times as much.

We liked

The Xonar DG an appreciable upgrade from on-board sound for less than ￡30, and the dedicated headphone amp drives a lot of extra power into your cans without destroying fidelity. It’s a simple and cheap way to make games a little more enjoyable.

We disliked

If you’ve got a newish PC then you may find the PCI port completely incompatible, and you’ll want something better if you regularly hook your PC up to a hi-fi for movies or concert hall music.

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This is the future right now and it’s not even 1983. There’s no red/green outlines here, no the Asus VG236 23-inch LCD monitor represents 3D in all it’s active-shutter glasses, Nvidia 3D Vision trim.

Okay, ‘future’ might be pushing it a bit considering Nvidia has had stereoscopic drivers for years, and the test app is still the same spinning eye logo that’s been in the driver set since the beginning.

But still, you may have noted a certain effusive tone in my opening gambit that was entirely lacking from our previous looks at the world of 3D. And that’s because we are finally seeing things coming together in a more coherent way, more so in fact than the supposedly burgeoning 3D cinematic experience.

Partly that’s down to smart, well-made displays such as the VG236 coming on the scene for a more reasonable price, but mostly because the drivers, and the way the hardware and software work together, is maturing.

Discounting the 3D gubbins for a second, the VG236 is a great little monitor. It’s sharp, clear, offers fantastic definition on colours and boasts an impressive viewing angle. Especially for a TN panel.

The best part about it though is intrinsically linked to its 3D raison d’etre, namely that 120Hz refresh rate. But it’s the 3D performance that really counts.

Now that the driver sets and the games are maturing to an extent that 3D now does make a difference to the experience, a bundle like this is starting to be worth a look. Bizarrely the most impressive 3D game I’ve played has been the RTS RUSE.

Its table-top battles are given a huge amount of depth thanks to the 3D effects, and despite the odd lost mouse pointer in 3D it was hugely disappointing going back to the traditional flat display. It really adds another level of immersion onto the game itself, and with other impressive titles such as Bad Company 2 and the awesome-looking Formula 1 from Codemasters, it’s making a case for itself.

3D included

Now at nigh-on £400 for a 23-inch monitor it does still seem rather pricey to upgrade to a 3D monitor right now, but the saving grace here is that you’re getting the full 3D vision kit in the box. That’s still got a retail price of over a ton on its own, making the VG236 start to sound more appealing a proposition.

Before you do rush out and drop the cash on a 3D monitor though, things still ain’t perfect. There’s still that initial discomfort when you first start using the glasses. You can recreate it for yourself by grabbing the nearest person with worse eyesight than you and borrowing their glasses for a minute. Uncomfortable, right? That stops after a fairly short while and it starts to feel natural.

Unfortunately that bell-curve of discomfort is still there as the strain does return after a few hours of gaming. And the level of disorientation going back into the real 3D world can be jarring…

But even without 3D Vision the VG236 stands up as a quality monitor. It’s a little chunky compared to some more stylish displays, but when the display’s this good you won’t be looking around the panel.

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Asus is a Taiwanese laptop manufacturer which produces a whole host of laptops to cater for a broad variety of requirements. The K52JC-EX089V is a machine that doesn’t stand head and shoulders above the competition, but still makes a genuinely solid option.

The 15.6- inch screen features a 1366 x 768-pixel resolution and pictures are sharp enough to enjoy web browsing and word processing without issue. Unfortunately, it is a surprisingly dim screen, which won’t suit those that work in bright light conditions.

Colours suffer as a result of this and the Medion Akoya P6625 provides much greater vibrancy.

Understated design

An understated but attractive brown design is employed. The lid is very shiny, yet hides smudges easily, but does attract fluff and dust quickly. The matt plastics of the chassis are tough and Asus’ IceCool design successfully keeps the laptop at a comfortable temperature by drawing hot air away from the palmrest.

This is helped by the low heat of Intel’s Core i5 processor which, running at 35 watts, produces less heat than many other available processors. As a result, this is a comfortable machine to use for extended periods of time.

The laptop features the same variant of Intel Core i5 processor as found in the Medion and Packard Bell Bell EasyNote TX86, but proves the most powerful of the three in everyday performance.

This means, thanks to the Intel Hyper-Threading technology built into the chip, you’ll have no issues multi-tasking all but the most resource-intensive applications, although if you want that little more power for your money maybe consider the Samsung R590, which features the Core i5 450M processor which runs at a faster clock speed.

This laptop also boasts Nvidia’s Optimus Technology, run via a dedicated Nvidia graphics card. Performance is sufficient for photo editing and playing games, but if you’re a multimedia enthusiast, the Medion or Samsung make more powerful options.

Portability is decent, and the 2.4kg chassis won’t be a pain to carry around. Similarly, the 249-minute battery life is useful without being exceptional.

You’ll also find 802.11n Wi-Fi and Gigabit Ethernet included, as is an integrated webcam for taking photos or videochatting with friends and family.

Aside from the disappointing screen brightness, the Asus K52JC-EX089V impressed us on a number of levels. Power and performance are great, while the design, usability and portability on offer make this a great all-round machine for the family.

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The GTS 450 is the latest in Nvidia’s burgeoning DX11 graphics stable. Coming hot on the heels of the superlative GTX 460 this new card has got a lot to live up to.

And a lot of competition in AMD’s HD 5770 too…

Nvidia has a history of making the biggest, fastest most monolithic of PC graphics cards.

The bleeding edge has always been the technology that’s made the big splashes in the tech press, but equally it’s Nvidia’s mid-range cards that have arguably been more important.

With the release of this latest GF106-based card, the GTS 450, it’s tackling the mid-range with its lowest-priced Fermi card yet.

Nvidia has a habit of making big splashes in the mid-range pool; the likes of the 6600GT and especially the phenomenal 8800GT have cemented their place in the hearts of PC gamers for years.

And last month saw the release of a Fermi card that can quite happily sit at that top table, the GTX 460.

In 1GB trim, and with some judicious waving of the overclocking stick, the GTX 460 has managed to single-handedly render all cards in the £150-£300 price range effectively obsolete.

That’s including Nvidia’s own GTX 470.

When you drop a couple of these into an SLI setup too you’re then talking about a system which will happily give a GTX 480 /and/ AMD’s top card, the dual-GPU HD 5970, a damn good thrashing.

For a lot less cash too.

So yay for us end-users and a resounding ‘eek!’ for the resellers hoping to make a bit of cash out of the margins on the top end cards. Sorry guys, but you’re going to have to hope the volume sales of the GTX 460 make up for it…

But that still leaves a gap in the market under that £150 mark. And that is a place that AMD has had sewn up for a good long while.

The HD 5770-shaped shadow that looms like Arthur C. Clarke’s monolith over that price point has been doing so for almost a year now and finally Nvidia has got a product to give it a run for its shader count.

This is where we’re getting into volume territory.

The sub-£150 pricepoint sees some of the biggest number of sales of all graphics cards, certainly more than the rather niche top-end beasties. A lot of folk want an HD 5770 then, and from the look of the GTS 450 Nvidia is one of them.

Compared with the Radeon HD5770 the stock GTS 450 comes in with an easily comparable specs sheet. Both carry the 1GB GDDR5 running on a similar 128-bit bus.

The clock and memory speeds aren’t far apart with the HD 5770 running at 850MHz/1200MHz for the core and memory speeds and Nvidia’s latest coming in at 783MHz/1000MHz respectively.

And importantly both are coming in at almost identical prices. The standard GTS 450 hits the same £120 point the HD 5770 has made its home for the best part of a year.

So what do we get with the GTS 450 that we don’t with the HD 5770?

Well, an almost brand new GPU architecture for starters. The GF104 began life running the show for the GTX 460 and represents a slimline structure compared to the slightly more bloated chip used in both the GTX 480 and the GTX 470 cards.

The GTS 450 is essentially more of the same, but with another new GPU moniker – the GF106.

This new chip is a bit more than half the chip that hummed away inside the GTX 460; with four streaming multiprocessors (SMs) against the bigger card’s seven, there are a full 192 CUDA cores in the GTS 450 versus the 336 cores of the GTX 460.

It’s also got a cut down memory interface too, even more cut down than the chopped 192-bit bus the remedial 768MB GTX 460 housed.

At 128-bit it’s obvious that the GTS 450 is going to have its work cut out at the higher resolutions.

We can expect to see this new GPU rolled out to cover the lower end of the Fermi spectrum going forward.

Though I do still hope to see a high-end refresh coming out based on the GF104 chip with the full complement of 512 CUDA cores we were originally promised with the launch of the inaugural Fermi, the GTX 480.

You do also get all the extra GPU gubbins Nvidia has been chewing our ears off about for the last few years. Namely the extras that the CUDA software stack and the PhysX software gives you.

As you drill down into the lower echelons of the graphics card hierarchy though the extra stresses the PhysX pretties put on the GPU makes this additional feature less important.

The new 260.52 Nvidia drivers come with a host of improvements, giving a boost to the other 400 series GPUs too, and a new driver installer that looks suspiciously like Catalyst…

Still, the rock-solid overclock in the Asus TOP gives it a significant boost over the vanilla GTS 450 as you can plainly see from the 1,680 x 1,050 figures below.

Predictably the 2,560 x 1,600 scores are far lower, but then that isn’t where this card is pointing its arsenal at.

What it is targetting though is the HD 5770 and the overclocked Asus card has it beat in almost all the benchmarks.

Things aren’t so rosy for the vanilla GTS 450 though, which does fall short against MSI’s overclocked HD 5770.

DX11 gaming performance

DX10 gaming performance

But what does that all mean in performance terms?

Does the nearly half-size chip offer us half the framerates too? Thankfully not, if it did then there’s no way this latest card could have a hope in hell against the HD 5770 shaped competition.

In comparison with the GTX 460 then things are understandably slower, though somewhat strangely the biggest difference between the cards can be felt at the traditional 22-inch resolution of 1680×1050.

At this res the difference between the stock-clocked GTS 450 and the 768MB GTX 460 is generally around 10fps and in Far Cry 2 that jumps up to 20fps.

This overclocked TOP edition from Asus though closes the gap, even going as far as to best the 768MB GTX 460 in the tessellation-heavy Heaven benchmark.

At the higher resolutions though the larger memory bus of the 1GB GTX 460 really comes into its own putting a chunk of clear water between it and the GTS 450. For only around £35 more than this TOP Edition that’s a hell of a lot of performance you’re getting out of the larger card.

But the GTX 460 isn’t what this latest card is pitched against; that phenomenal mid-range Fermi stands alone, unchallenged.

What the GTS 450 is really going after is the HD 5770, and that’s the card that NVIDIA is really hoping to kill off with its newest baby.

What it really needs to do is beat the HD 5770 comprehensively to really gain a market share against the AMD card. Unfortunately for Nvidia though it’s almost too close to call, especially at the GTS 450′s stock speed.

The news is better for this overclocked Asus version though, which across the board delivers consistently faster framerates than even the overclocked HD 5770 represented here by MSI’s Hawk version.

Where the TOP Edition of Asus’ GTX 460 was a bit of a weak-heart in the overclocking stakes, giving only a fairly miserly 30MHz boost. That’s miserly considering the huge amount of overclocking headroom that cards boasts.

It’s different with the GTS 450 though, boosting its core speed from 783MHz up to a rather chunky 925MHz.

That means that at 1680×1050 it’s able to beat the all important 30fps mark in the sequel bench-fest of Far Cry 2, DiRT 2 and Just Cause 2. In Far Cry 2 and DiRT 2 it’s able to hit that mark at 2560×1600 too.

In the AvP and Lost Planet DX11 benchmarks though it does struggle to top 20fps, where the GTX 460s can still get another 10fps on top of that.

That said it’s all still incredibly close between the HD 5770 and the GTS 450 in whatever guise you care to compare. The difference, in general, is barely perceptible, only really showing in the figures themselves.

One of the key battlegrounds going forward is going to be how the two stack up against each other in multi-GPU trim.

The HD 5770 is quite frankly awesome in CrossFire, besting the more expensive GTX 470 across the board. If the GTS 450 though can carry on the GTX 460′s good work in SLI it could well be a very tight battle.

But for now, as a single card, it still stands up.

We’d have hoped for a price tag a little closer to the £100 mark though; if it could undercut the HD 5770 then it would have been an absolute no-brainer as to which of the AMD or Nvidia cards get the nod.

At stock speeds the two cards take it in turns to have the couple frames per second advantage dependant on which title your testing.

The pricier TOP Edition though has clear water between it and even the overclocked HD 5770, but then you’re getting dangerously close to the £150 you can pick up the 768MB version of the GTX 460 for. You can even find some flavours coming in for even less than that.

The older AMD card though can be picked up in vanilla flavour for around £100, making the extra £20 you’ll have to pay for the newer Nvidia card a bit of sticking point. All you’re really getting for that £20 is Nvidia’s CUDA and PhysX goodness, which at this low level isn’t any great shakes.

This TOP Edition’s overclocked loving though does give it the edge, but the cost here too is going to make things tricky when you’re making your buying decision.

It’s still a good card, but it’s really only as good as the AMD offering.

Unfortunately then for Nvidia it’s not quite the card-killer that it might have hoped it would be; maybe worth a look in SLI but for now it’s still far too close to call definitively.

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Product: Eee PC 1018P

Manufacturer: Asus

Wired Rating: 6

If you’re heading out on a field trip, the last thing you want to lug around is a big, bulky 17-inch laptop. At the same time though, doing on-the-fly “research” on the web on your smart phone’s tiny 3-inch screen just doesn’t cut it. The solution? Get a netbook.

Sure, most netbooks out there are so underpowered, cheaply made and downright fugly looking they’ll get you laughed off the school bus. That’s changing as manufacturers learn that along with supreme portability, students want power and style in their mobile rigs. Netbook pioneer Asus has tried to meet those needs with a slick little machine boasting decent specs that costs just a hair under $350 — the Eee PC 1018P.

We took the Eee PC 1018P on a self-imposed field trip to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and found that, despite some limitations, this chic netbook has the goods to be your next travel companion. Sporting a black brushed-metal lid and a digit-friendly, if cramped, chiclet-style keyboard, the 1018P looks and feels pricier than it is. With a fairly standard 10.1-inch screen, the ultra-slim Eee PC is less than an inch thick and slid easily into our backpack. It’s also lighter than other netbooks in this class, at just a smidgen under 2.5 pounds.

At the Botanical Garden, the 1018P booted up into Windows 7 Starter in less than a minute. The brushed metal on the lid is carried over to the netbook’s snazzy bezel and palm rest, giving the Eee PC some quality interior styling. Though the raised keyboard was easy to touch type with, the right shift key is annoyingly small. We also hated the single bar mouse button that was so stiff we had to use two fingers to press it down.

Otherwise though, the 1018P with its 1.66-GHz Intel Atom N450 processor and 1 gig of RAM is more than adequate to handle basic tasks while out in the field whether it’s surfing the web or word processing. The 1024 x 600-pixel glossy screen could be better — especially under afternoon sunshine, which caused it to wash out — but for this price, it’s not bad. The 0.3-MP web cam utilizes a sliding plate over the lens as an “on/off” switch, is pretty ghetto though and unless you’re recording yourself in good light, you’ll look like a pixilated shadow.

On the bright side, the 1018P runs extremely cool — that’s a huge plus on the 90-degree day we spent with it tromping around the garden. Battery life was also excellent, giving us over eight hours of internet use, word processing and assorted sophomoric shenanigans on a single charge.

WIRED The 250-GB (5400 RPM) hard drive offers more than enough room to store your field notes. Memory card reader and three USB 2.0 ports will help you show off those photos and videos you shot of insects and plant life. Stylish, sleek design means you’ll be Mr./Ms. Popularity in the back of the bus.

TIRED HD video clips jittery in playback. Black metallic lid gets easily smudged by sweaty fingers. Script font used for Eee PC badge on bezel looks cheesy.

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With its highbrow hi-fi spec, Xonar Xense from Asus is part of a relatively new trend of sound cards that are looking to win back audio buffs who have been avoiding the pitfalls of PC sound processing by offloading everything to an external amp, or sticking to vinyl.

Armed with processors and other components more commonly found in stacking amps and CD players, it began with cards like Auzentech’s Prelude and Asus’s own Xonar DX2, and includes Creative’s new X-Fi Titanium HD.

By their very nature, these sound cards are niche, and in danger of falling over into the dreaded audiophile category, where power conditioners and dowsing rods supposedly make a difference to the perceived sound.

Gamers, and anyone who never owned a pair of speakers larger than their car will, wisely, look to spend their money elsewhere.

Audiophilia isn’t just about profligacy, though. The Xonar Xense does throw in a Sennheiser PC-350 headset and all the features you’d expect in a quality headphone amp, which makes the overall price just about bearable.

The Xense card itself has a basic spec similar to Asus’ own high-end Xonar Essence STX (£150) or Creative’s X-Fi Titanium HD (£160), and includes a pair of £100 headphones. That’s an overall saving of roughly £70, and delivers something close to a studio experience.

What’s not to like about that?

The Xonar Xense is so similar in terms of component make up to last year’s Xonar Essence XT that it’s hard to spot why some of the key ratings – like signal to noise ratio (SNR) – are different.

Both cards are based around a C-Media CMI-8788 OxygenHD processor, which is rebadged as an Asus AV100. Likewise, there’s a Texas Instruments 6120A2 headphone amp with 192KHz/24bit DACs and a pair of JRC 2114D op-amps.

These latter chips can be removed and swapped for a different set. It’s the current vogue for audio enthusiast gear, in the event that a particular piece of silicon has a signature sound that you prefer.

The Xense supports all the Dolby standards necessary, comes with ASIO drivers for low latency recording and, cheekily, a proprietary version of Creative’s EAX 5.0 gaming API, DS3D GX 2.0.

Essentially, this does the work of Creative’s ALchemy software, and adds in environmental effects lost when Vista dumped DirectSound, without the need for the dedicated DSP of an X-Fi card. DTS Connect is missing, but its absence unlikely to be mourned.

Physically, the bulk of the card is hidden beneath a shiny EMI shield to protect the sound processing hardware from the ambient noise of a PC chassis. It’s around the back of the card that its true nature is revealed, though.

There’s a coaxial S/PDIF port for hooking up to digital decoder, and an unusual DVI-like connector.

In the box, there’s an adaptor that turns this into four 3.5mm jacks for 7.1 surround. The rear is dominated, however, by two quarter-inch jacks that serve as the headphone output and mic in.

To match them, the Sennheiser PC-350 headset is a slightly customised version of the retail kit, with matching quarter-inch plugs to fit.

The headphone amp, which requires a separate four-pin molex connector, is rated with an impressive SNR of 118dB, slightly less than the 122dB of the Creative X-Fi Titanium HD or 124dB of the Xonar Essence STX.

The key thing about the socket here, however, is that it can drive high impedance studio headphones up to 600ohms. Curiously, it doesn’t have an unamplified line out socket.

The most important benchmarks are those that we can’t print – playing games, listening to music and watching movies in a room set up to be as acoustically neutral as possible.

Here, though, we can show that there’s no benefit to offloading sound processing in terms of frame rates any more, and using Rightmark’s excellent Audio Analyzer tool shows us how close to the claimed specs the electronics are.

Far Cry 2 – Frames per second (higher is better)

RMAA total harmonic distortion (lower is better)

RMAA Dynamic range (Higher is better)

We haven’t talked much about the Sennheiser PC-350s yet, and with or without the Xonar card in tow, they’re an astoundingly good set of cans.

Everyone has their own particular preferences when it comes to reviewing audio gear, but to our ears the balanced tone of the Sennheisers – which don’t overplay the bass, and leave high frequencies crystal clear – can make any old on-board sound chip sound like you’re sitting in the Royal Albert Hall.

If you prefer something with more of a big bass punch, however, then you’re clearly better off choosing your own scalp-clamping sound boxes.

The bigger issue is that the breakout cable for speakers feels slightly inelegant, and may need another adaptor if your speakers don’t have 3.5mm inputs. It doesn’t quite feel in keeping with the quality of the headphone channel, and makes the whole package slightly inflexible.

Anyone who wants to hook up an external amp will prefer the RCA connectors of the Creative X-Fi Titanium HD or Asus’ similar Xonar Essence STX, which also has an excellent on-board headphone amp.

Both high-end Xonars can match the impedance output of the amp with the input requirement of the headphones too. You can dial down the power from 600ohms to 150ohms in the driver settings to match the PC-350′s requirements.

Just make sure you do that before plugging them in or you could blow out the speakers.

The overall soundscape produced by the card and cans, though, is warm, rich and with an excellent dynamic range that’s a fair rival for a much more expensive stack of audio separates.

It benchmarks better in Rightmark’s Audio Analyzer than Creative’s ostensibly superior X-Fi Titanium HD, and is great for gaming, with easily located positional effects, and the clarity to hear voice chatter above background explosions.

The Xonar driver suite is also easy to set-up and configure, with equalisation presets for different games, films or spatial settings.

As with any sound card review it’s very easy to point out that similar quality which is almost indistinguishable to the casual gamer is available for less elsewhere, and there’s a small stack of perfectly serviceable options ranging from the £40-odd Xonar D1 or Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer.

It’s hard to fault the Xense on the value-for-money front, though, since bought separately, the total price of the headset and sound card would be around £260.

So if you want an excellent quality set-up and don’t mind the diminishing returns over a much cheaper sound card and headset combo, the Xonar Xense is actually the most sensible way to get into high quality headphone hi-fi for gamers and music buffs alike.

We liked

By adding in one of TechRadar’s favourite gaming headsets that almost comes close to studio quality sound, the Xonar Xense dodges the value-for-money bullet which makes it so hard to recommend high end PC audio gear to anyone but the most fanatical phonic fan.

The sound card itself is truly excellent, matching Asus and Creative’s best.

We disliked

By emphasising on the headphone use, the card is slightly crippled elsewhere. It just seems unlikely that anyone spending £200 on audio kit is going to accept the dodgy dongle and 3.5mm jacks for everything else.

Final verdict

Essentially a £160 sound card for £100. If you haven’t got a high end set of headphones, it’s a good way to buy into hi-fi audio.

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Any manufacturer producing a sub-£299 laptop should be commended for making mobile computing as financially accessible as possible. Yet, while the Asus X5DC-SX025V is a very comfortable machine to use, it is largely outperformed across the board by the other laptops of a similar price.

Despite featuring 3072MB of memory, the 1.2GHz Intel Celeron 220 processor proved the least powerful against its rivals here. As a result, performance is akin to that of a netbook – a very low-powered mini-laptop – and you’ll be limited to running basic applications one at a time.

While typing out a document in a word processor works fine, listening to your music at the same time will cause the laptop to slow down.

Poor graphics

Similarly, the SiS graphics card is the least powerful here by a long way and, while DVDs run fine, photo and video editing is out of the question. If this is a priority for you, the eMachines G420 offers significantly more in terms of graphical performance.

The 250GB hard drive is generous, however, and provides room for storing thousands of MP3s and photos, so you’ll have plenty to keep yourself occupied with when you’re not busy working.

Usability is generally impressive. The 15.6-inch screen isn’t as sharp as the Acer Aspire 1410-742G25n, but is very comfortable to work with nonetheless. We were pleased by the colour reproduction, suiting those who enjoy watching DVDs on the move.

The large keyboard is a little spongy compared to the Acer, but still very usable and we typed for extended periods of time with little issue. A dedicated numeric keypad has also been included, which should please serious number-crunchers.

The matt-black plastics employed may not be the most attractive, but they are very functional and pleasingly resilient to dust, dirt and scratches – unlike the Acer’s glossy lid – making the laptop suited to the rough and tumble of a life on the road.

Unfortunately, the machine provides poor battery life and you’ll get just over two hours between charges, which is awful for such a low-powered machine. The 2.7kg weight also means it’s not that light to carry, further hindering mobility.

The inclusion of 802.11n Wi-Fi is welcome though, and there’s also a multimedia card reader which makes downloading photos from your camera, for example, easy.

We were slightly disappointed by the Asus X5DC-SX025V. It’s difficult to complain at such a low price, but the machine is outperformed by most other machines, and its decent usability just isn’t enough to compensate.

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Yeah you read that right. The eePad will launch in March for $400. Asus also reported that the tablet will run Android, although we don’t know which version. No more information is available about the Asus tablet, but then again, the release date is March, so official details are still far away.

Is anyone interested in the Asus eeePad? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Asus eeePad to launch in March

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Yeah you read that right. The eePad will launch in March for $400. Asus also reported that the tablet will run Android, although we don’t know which version. No more information is available about the Asus tablet, but then again, the release date is March, so official details are still far away.

Is anyone interested in the Asus eeePad? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Asus eeePad to launch in March

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Not a great deal of information is known about Asus’ entry into the Android tablet arena (the above is an image of their similar Windows tablet), but that doesn’t mean we can’t know the pricing and release date. What we are looking at is a $400 price tag accompanying a release in March 2011. Yes, you read that right. March. Either this tablet has a long way to go and will feature specs competitive to whatever the generation of devices being released at that point next year, or it will end up being another among the many Android tablets featuring an outdated OS version and sub-par hardware. Since no technical info has emerged we’ll hope for the former.

[via CrunchGear]

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Asus is the name, impossibly slick motherboards is the game. Even this modest M4A88TD-V Evo model is still quite a looker.

For starters, like nearly all Asus boards it’s immaculately arranged. Wherever possible, components are positioned in near-perfect little rows. It must make motherboard engineers from other companies weep onto their MOSFETs.

Then there’s the natty blue-and-black colour scheme and expensive heatsinks for the northbridge and voltage regulation circuitry. It’s nearly enough to make you assume this is a fine board without dissecting the details or seeing the benchmarks. Nearly enough, but not quite.

Not that the M4A88TD-V Evo doesn’t stand up to close inspection. Asus has dropped in the SB850 southbridge rather than the older SB710 chip seen on some boards based on the AMD 880G chipset. Consequently, all five of the SATA ports are 6Gbps.

Further adding to the big bandwidth cred is the NEC USB 3.0 chip pumping 500MB/s per port to two sockets on the rear panel.

The only significant drawbacks involve graphics. The 880G’s Radeon HD 4250 integrated GPU runs at 560MHz to the 890GX’s 700MHz Radeon HD 4290 core. The 880G also plays second squaw to the 890FX discrete chipset in terms of PCI-e lanes.

Where the 890FX can pony up two x16 electrical links, the 880G can only manage two x8 or a single x16. Of course, it’s questionable whether the full 16 lanes is essential for dual-GPU gaming thanks to the enormous 500MB/s per lane delivered by PCI-e 2.0.

Other features

As for non-chipset-related shortcomings, you don’t get a handy hardware switches for power, reset and clear CMOS. However, what you do get is the TurboV Evo auto-overclocking dip switch.

In practice it doesn’t deliver terribly impressive results. Bumping up a Phenom II from 3.2GHz to 3.45GHz is hardly worth the bother. Still, Asus’ comprehensive set of BIOS features and options goes a long way towards making up for that.

The core unlocker ensures you can make the most of AMD CPUs with hidden cores, while the Express Gate embedded Linux OS divvies up a quick booting option for fast access to the internet and media files.

All of which just leaves space for the minor matter of performance. Strictly speaking, the M4A88TD-V Evo delivers slightly patchy results in our application tests. It’s joint fastest in video encoding, but a second off the pace in Cinebench. It’s also a couple frames slower than the best in World in Conflict.

Likewise, sub-300MB/s in HDTach and a maximum bus overclock of 300MHz relegate this board to a mid-table position overall. But let’s be clear. The margins are incredibly tight.

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Asus released its first bamboo laptop featuring a tough wood-based chassis back in 2008, and now it has given us a peek at its latest plant-based portable, the Asus U53F Bamboo.

The chassis is immediately striking with the entire lid and palmrest coated in bamboo. Not only does it look great with a natural, grainy appearance, but it’s also pleasingly firm to protect the display. The chassis shows no flex at all under pressure and the wood covering reduces plastics usage by 20 per cent.

A weight approaching 3kg limits mobility, but the surprisingly thin chassis can be fitted into a briefcase if required.

The bamboo design even stretches to the touchpad, with the surface of the pad and the mouse buttons given the same textured finish. The pad is smooth, responsive and wide, and usability is further enhanced by an excellent isolation style keyboard with the keys pushed up through individual holes in the chassis.

The gaps between keys mean it’s difficult to hit the wrong key by mistake, and we managed some impressive speeds when touch-typing. The separate numeric keypad is a little small, however – we would have preferred a keyboard that stretched the entire length of the chassis to give these keys some extra width.

The bright and colourful 15.6-inch widescreen display is a pleasure to watch movies on. This pre-production model sadly doesn’t have a Full HD display to take full advantage of the built-in Blu-ray drive, but hopefully the final product will.

The screen is somewhat reflective thanks to the glossy Super-TFT coating, but it’s not as noticeable at top brightness levels.

Core power

Our pre-production model came fitted with an Intel Core i5 520M processor, which provides more than enough power to comfortably multi-task with a number of resource-intensive applications. The final product will apparently offer a choice of Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs, so performance should be assured.

Unfortunately, there’s no dedicated graphics, just an integrated Intel GPU, but this may change in the final release.

Other features are standard for a machine like this, with VGA and HDMI connections for outputting to an external display, three USB ports for adding peripherals, and a memory card reader for backing up the 500GB hard drive.

Users can also boot up to a basic ExpressGate OS to browse the web or their photo library, which prolongs battery life.

We’re looking forward to seeing the full release of the Asus U53F Bamboo, as this pre-production model is a slickly designed and solidly built home laptop.

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Asus released its first bamboo laptop featuring a tough wood-based chassis back in 2008, and now it has given us a peek at its latest plant-based portable, the Asus U53F Bamboo.

The chassis is immediately striking with the entire lid and palmrest coated in bamboo. Not only does it look great with a natural, grainy appearance, but it’s also pleasingly firm to protect the display. The chassis shows no flex at all under pressure and the wood covering reduces plastics usage by 20 per cent.

A weight approaching 3kg limits mobility, but the surprisingly thin chassis can be fitted into a briefcase if required.

The bamboo design even stretches to the touchpad, with the surface of the pad and the mouse buttons given the same textured finish. The pad is smooth, responsive and wide, and usability is further enhanced by an excellent isolation style keyboard with the keys pushed up through individual holes in the chassis.

The gaps between keys mean it’s difficult to hit the wrong key by mistake, and we managed some impressive speeds when touch-typing. The separate numeric keypad is a little small, however – we would have preferred a keyboard that stretched the entire length of the chassis to give these keys some extra width.

The bright and colourful 15.6-inch widescreen display is a pleasure to watch movies on. This pre-production model sadly doesn’t have a Full HD display to take full advantage of the built-in Blu-ray drive, but hopefully the final product will.

The screen is somewhat reflective thanks to the glossy Super-TFT coating, but it’s not as noticeable at top brightness levels.

Core power

Our pre-production model came fitted with an Intel Core i5 520M processor, which provides more than enough power to comfortably multi-task with a number of resource-intensive applications. The final product will apparently offer a choice of Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs, so performance should be assured.

Unfortunately, there’s no dedicated graphics, just an integrated Intel GPU, but this may change in the final release.

Other features are standard for a machine like this, with VGA and HDMI connections for outputting to an external display, three USB ports for adding peripherals, and a memory card reader for backing up the 500GB hard drive.

Users can also boot up to a basic ExpressGate OS to browse the web or their photo library, which prolongs battery life.

We’re looking forward to seeing the full release of the Asus U53F Bamboo, as this pre-production model is a slickly designed and solidly built home laptop.

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Asus released its first bamboo laptop featuring a tough wood-based chassis back in 2008, and now it has given us a peek at its latest plant-based portable, the Asus U53F Bamboo.

The chassis is immediately striking with the entire lid and palmrest coated in bamboo. Not only does it look great with a natural, grainy appearance, but it’s also pleasingly firm to protect the display. The chassis shows no flex at all under pressure and the wood covering reduces plastics usage by 20 per cent.

A weight approaching 3kg limits mobility, but the surprisingly thin chassis can be fitted into a briefcase if required.

The bamboo design even stretches to the touchpad, with the surface of the pad and the mouse buttons given the same textured finish. The pad is smooth, responsive and wide, and usability is further enhanced by an excellent isolation style keyboard with the keys pushed up through individual holes in the chassis.

The gaps between keys mean it’s difficult to hit the wrong key by mistake, and we managed some impressive speeds when touch-typing. The separate numeric keypad is a little small, however – we would have preferred a keyboard that stretched the entire length of the chassis to give these keys some extra width.

The bright and colourful 15.6-inch widescreen display is a pleasure to watch movies on. This pre-production model sadly doesn’t have a Full HD display to take full advantage of the built-in Blu-ray drive, but hopefully the final product will.

The screen is somewhat reflective thanks to the glossy Super-TFT coating, but it’s not as noticeable at top brightness levels.

Core power

Our pre-production model came fitted with an Intel Core i5 520M processor, which provides more than enough power to comfortably multi-task with a number of resource-intensive applications. The final product will apparently offer a choice of Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs, so performance should be assured.

Unfortunately, there’s no dedicated graphics, just an integrated Intel GPU, but this may change in the final release.

Other features are standard for a machine like this, with VGA and HDMI connections for outputting to an external display, three USB ports for adding peripherals, and a memory card reader for backing up the 500GB hard drive.

Users can also boot up to a basic ExpressGate OS to browse the web or their photo library, which prolongs battery life.

We’re looking forward to seeing the full release of the Asus U53F Bamboo, as this pre-production model is a slickly designed and solidly built home laptop.

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Asus is renowned for producing a wide range of high-quality machines at all price points, with its K701O-TY014V proving a great choice for those after an entry-level multimedia laptop.

To be clear from the outset, this isn’t a machine for frequent travel use. The laptop weighs 3.3kg and we squeezed just 145 minutes from the battery. Those after a laptop for the commute into work or school would do better to check out the Samsung X420.

Criticising the Asus too strongly for this would be counter-productive, however, as it’s primarily designed as a large and comfortable desktop replacement system. It is a very comfortable laptop to use.

The 17.3-inch screen is bright and provides an absorbing experience for watching DVDs on. It boasts a 1600×900 pixel resolution, which means that images are very detailed, while colour and contrast also impress.

The very spacious keyboard exhibits quite a bit of flex, but you’re unlikely to notice it unless you have a very firm typing action. A dedicated numeric keypad is included, which is great for left-handed gamers, while the touchpad has a comfortable mottled texture.

The use of an ageing Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 processor can’t provide the cutting-edge performance of the Sony Vaio VPC-EB1S0E/WI and Packard Bell EasyNote TM86′s Core i3 chips, but there’s plenty of power for running office applications, meaning you’ll have no problem browsing the internet and word processing.

Graphical power

This laptop features a powerful Nvidia GeForce GT 120M graphics card, helped along by a group-leading 1024MB of dedicated video memory. This means editing your family photos won’t be a problem.

In fact, you’ll have no problem running the latest games, although you’ll have to turn the graphical settings down a little, making this laptop the only option in this group for gamers.

The 320GB hard drive provides plenty of storage space for all your files, folders and multimedia libraries, while the DVD rewriter optical drive offers you an alternative back-up solution if you don’t want to use an external hard drive to backup your data.

The laptop doesn’t feature an eSATA port, which the majority of new machines now do, but an HDMI out port allows you to connect your laptop to a high-definition (HD) external display, such as your TV or projector, to show off your photos or even play games on the big screen.

Overall, we enjoyed our time with the K701O-TY014V a lot. It isn’t as powerful as some of its rivals when it comes to everyday use, but it’s very comfortable to use and provides more graphical punch than most other laptops at this price.

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We’ve already seen the stock GTX 460 768MB, and now it’s the turn of the overclocked cards in the shape of Asus’ GTX 460 768MB TOP edition.

The GTX 460 looks set to be the most successful iteration of the Fermi architecture that Nvidia has released to date. That’s mainly thanks to a redesigned chip, still based on the same technology that made the GTX 480 such a blisteringly fast, and hot, card.

This new GF104 GPU is a far more streamlined chip compared to the fairly bestial GF100.

It still has the same basic premise running through it, but more cores have been squeezed into fewer streaming microprocessors (SMs) and more texture and special funtion units have been jammed in there too.

Nvidia has also created two versions of the card; a full-fat 1GB version, like Zotac’s, and a cut-down 768MB version.

It’s not just the memory that’s been cut for these cheaper cards; the memory bus has been changed from 256-bit to 192-bit, the L2 cache has been dropped down to 384kb and the ROP count has been cut from 32 to 24.

We’ve already looked in depth at the GTX 460′s GF104 chip architecture.

The out of the box performance of Asus’ TOP edition is only marginally faster than a stock GTX 460 768MB.

Obviously with the overclocking headroom in the chip and with that improved cooler design you can hit the same speeds as the stock 1GB card, but then that card can be pushed even further again.

With a simple overclock the 1GB card can be pushed to the sort of speeds the GTX 470 can achieve.

DirectX 11 Performance (2560×1600)

DirectX 11 Performance

DirectX 10 Performance

Compared to the original GTX 460 768MB version the clocks haven’t really been upped that much for Asus’ overclocked TOP edition.

The 670MHz core speed has had a fairly minimal boost up to a rounded 700MHz with a 1,400MHz shader clock up from 1,350MHz. The memory, too, has had a wee boost up to an effective 3,680MHz.

This factory overclock alone doesn’t really garner much in the way of performance improvements over the stock GTX 460 768MB card.

You’re talking at most a boost of only a couple of frames per second, which is hardly earth-shattering.

Compared with EVGA’s Superclocked GTX 460 768MB card the factory overclock really doesn’t deliver much, and out of the box the EVGA card gives another 5fps over Asus’ card.

It’s a shame Asus hasn’t had more confidence in its TOP edition’s ability to overclock, so you’re not getting much for the extra cash bar a different cooler and a picked GPU that should be capable of a healthy overclock.

As it turns out the TOP edition can deliver on that overclocking promise. We managed a hefty 150MHz overclock on the core speed and another 120MHz on the memory.

This gave us benchmarking results that were almost on par with a stock-clocked 1GB GTX 460. Granted a stock-clocked 1GB GTX 460 is only another £5 on top of this TOP edition, so that kind of nullifies these gains.

It’s a shame then for these lower memory cards that the superior 1GB card exists at all, especially at the same price.

If the 768MB cards were significantly cheaper than their more well-endowed brethren then they could gain some traction in the market-place. As it is though they’re little more than also-rans.

We liked

There is a significant amount of overclocking headroom in the chip, and that re-designed GPU cooler should help you maintain a hefty overclock for longer.

We disliked

The minimal factory overclock on these cards compared to the competition means you’re really not getting a lot extra in the TOP edition. It also means there’s little warranty protection as you’re more likely to overclock them further to justify your purchase.

Final word

Despite the hefty overclocking headroom the GTX 460 768MB TOP is not the card you’re looking for. Out of the box it’s not much faster than a stock 768MB card and is another £20 more expensive.

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