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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Monday, May 26, 2008
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Imagine this: You are an engineer working at Asus. As a member of the team to design and engineer boards for the company's Republic of Gamer line, you and your team are given a task to create what the world will soon define as the ultimate enthusiast motherboard on the Intel platform. The goal of this project is to make a board that totally dominates the competition in the market as a flagship enthusiast motherboard, which naturally has to be completely-really-uber-1337 in all areas. Did you say performance? Check. Did you say features? Check. How about the looks? We got that covered. Anything else a hardcore computer enthusiast will appreciate? That's quite a challenge -- you got to be creative and imaginative. Fortunately, none of us here at APH Networks works in quite a department that requires such superior engineering skills and imagination at hand. The great thing of being a reviewer is that instead of thinking about what to implement in the design, we were instead given a product as a result of such marvelous work -- the Asus Striker II NSE motherboard, based upon NVIDIA's 790i chipset -- and we can have all the fun in criticizing (And praising, what were you thinking?) the hard work of these people. So we present to you our review of the Asus Striker II NSE motherboard, a product that's based off the Striker II Extreme that the Asus bosses probably told their engineers, "Make the ultimate motherboard. Go absolutely nuts, good luck, have fun." So they did. Just don't pass out when you see the price tag.
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Friday, May 23, 2008
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If you are like me, and have been happy with mid-range cards, spend a few hours at your favorite game played at the highest settings, using AA, and higher resolutions while using an upper end card, and you'll probably realize that you've been in denial for all of this time. Today I will be looking at the Asus EN9800GTX Top, a factory overclocked version of nVidia's latest top-of-the-line single-GPU video card, with 512mb of DDR3 memory. Will this video card finally make me realize that rather than being practical when buying mid-range cards, I've just been cheap? Read on and see!
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Thursday, May 22, 2008
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ASUS has done it again with their P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP@n motherboard. The board features everything you could possibly want from a new motherboard today including DDR3 support, external SATA support, Crossfire support, and saves energy while delivering the features and performance you want from a new motherboard. The P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP@n board has a high price online but you get what you pay for when paying that price. Performance is in line with the P5E3 Deluxe board which uses the same chipset but has similar performance though the other board has with the exception of SYSmark 2007 Preview. One important consideration with new motherboards is the official support of the 45 nanometer 1600MHz FSB Yorkfield CPUs and the P5E3 Premium supports those new CPUs which gives a nice upgrade path.
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Wednesday, May 21, 2008
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The HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc format war is finally over. Now that Toshiba and Mircosoft have both jumped ship on HD-DVD, for the first time in at least a dozen introduced media types Sony finally has its moment of glory with their Blu-ray Disc format. This news is exactly what movie buffs and storage moguls have eagerly awaited for more than a year, and now that the casualties are cleared it's time to get productive and introduce new products built from the blue laser technology.
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As many of you are no doubt aware, Intel is planning to officially release a new mainstream chipset in a few weeks, the P45. From a feature standpoint, the new P45 is somewhat similar to last year's P35. The P45, however, will have official support for PCI Express 2.0, with a more flexible lane configuration for multi-GPU graphics, and the chipset itself is being manufactured at 65nm as opposed to 90nm. Using the more advanced process to build the chips should result in lower power consumption and lower operating temperatures as well. The P45 will also be paired up with a new ICH10-series southbridge, which is similar to the ICH9 sans a few legacy features. Asus showed off a few P45-based motherboards at the CeBit show a while back, but at the time, the boards weren't quite ready for the market. We have, however, gotten our hands on final production version of the Asus P5Q Deluxe, which should be available soon. Head on over to the site and check it out...
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As the computing industry has evolved over the years, people have begun to care more and more about what their PC looks like, as well as how it performs. But it's not like what it was like several years ago, where the 'cool' happened to be flashing neon tubes and fans that glow various colours. The tacky disco era has moved on now, it's now the age of pure quality that performs well, is silent and ultimately, looks good. One of the products on the current market that boasts to do all this is the Asus Triton 79 Amazing. Now let's see how "amazing" this CPU cooler really is.
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Sunday, May 18, 2008
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You can call it a fad, but the latest craze is not about the latest quad core laptop with a 8800 series graphics accelerator, several hard drives in RAID, or a 20" screen and whatever. Ever since the announcement of the Asus Eee PC, and its official launch just a few months prior to Christmas 2007, hardcore enthusiasts and general consumers alike have expressed immense interest in this piece of low cost, ultra portable laptop. Do a Google search. Read a tech blog. Log in to your latest forum. Engage in a conversation with a few friends. To be honest, being a reviewer for quite a few years now, there's not many products which have made me sit there just to eagerly anticipate. The Asus Eee PC is one of those rare products -- and after using it since March and showing it off to quite a number of friends, I can see where all the excitement lays. That is, a few months after its release, I finally managed to get a hold of a unit of the Asus Eee PC 4G; previously known as the Eee PC 701. Using it almost daily for a month and a half, we now present to you our detailed long-ish term test of the popular fully loaded Asus Eee PC.
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Even though it's a P45-based Republic of Gamers board, it?s curiously not fallen under the Blitz branding that was used for the P35-based RoG boards - Asus is changing things around slightly by slotting all Intel-based boards under either the Rampage or Maximus nomenclature, with the Striker branding saved for Nvidia chipsets on Intel platforms.
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Unlike conventional laptop computers, the C90S is an upgradeable laptop, meaning that the user is free to replace many of its core components including the processor and the graphics card. Possibly even more interesting than this is Asus' choice of platform, not quite the standard for a mobile system. The Asus C90S is powered by Core 2 desktop processors rather than the 'Merom' mobile variety. That includes support for the 800MHz FSB Allendale models, as well as the 1066MHz FSB Conroe processors. It is possible, then, to configure the C90S with a Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor operating at 2.93GHz if you'd choose to do so, which certainly makes the C90S a very unique laptop, or should we say mobile desktop replacement.
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Friday, May 16, 2008
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Today we are checking out a smartphone that features GPS and more from Asus called the Asus P527. This phone has some very interesting GPS software that comes with the device. The software included with the Asus P527 is very interesting though with the ability to capture images with the camera on the phone and append them to a GPS route that can be uploaded to Google Earth. The software also allows for reporting your GPS position to contacts on pre-defined lists.
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Wednesday, May 14, 2008
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I was a bit surprised that Asus asked us to review their *flagship budget* -- it's weird just writing that -- 8600 GT TOP. It's new SKU for a card closing in on its end of life; the model being about a year old now. Just the same, with a hundred-dollar price tag, it's definitely got an audience, no matter what cards there are competing against it, or what cards have been released since. And it's a pretty highly-regarded card; go on any hardware forum and there's a dozen NVIDIA people extolling the virtues of the 8600 GTs when it comes to budget gaming. Now, I'm not saying that they're all wrong, but it is worth finding out if new drivers and some moderate factory overclocking can put value on an otherwise dated video card.
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ASUS introduces their latest 3.5G smartphone offering, the M930, with an upgrade option in anticipation of the upcoming Windows Mobile 6.1.
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Fancy a bit of excitement? If you're looking to jazz up that mainstream graphics card, you may well consider these two non-reference GeForce 9600 GT cards from ASUS. Each has an unique proposition for the consumer but which path would you choose? We give you our take on them.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008
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Making sure every possible niche is covered, Asus provides AMD users a high end, SLI capable motherboard with several unique features. The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe dishes out goodies like the brand new 780a chipset, 3-way SLI capability, Hybrid SLI, ESA, HyperTransport 3.0, PCIe 2.0 and the sexy Cool Mempipe. Is this the motherboard you've been waiting for? HardwareLogic straps the M3N-HT onto the test bench and drops the knowledge on you, raw and uncut.
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Friday, May 9, 2008
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It's the beginning of the summer blockbuster season and Intel's P45 chipset is a month away from wide release. Like Intel's recent chipsets, will this new mainstream chipset take the gloss away from the higher-end variants? Find out how it performs with the ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe.
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