Review The Sapphire Vapor-X HD 4850 is a reference Radeon HD 4850 with an after-market cooler. That might not sound like a big deal, but Sapphire has come up with something special.
Most graphics card manufacturers try to differentiate their products from the competition and they often use the trick of changing the reference cooler for their own design to add some visual impact. Sapphire has plenty of history in this department and seems to be constantly developing new coolers for its range of AMD ATI Radeon HD-based graphics cards.
The starting point with the HD 4850 is the reference ATI cooler:
It’s very compact. The GPU and memory are covered by a copper heatsink with a slim line cooling fan at the far end that draws air across the heatsink. This allows the HD 4850 to be manufactured as a single-slot design but the downside is that the cooler sheds its heat inside the casing and it runs unpleasantly hot at all times. Once the HD 4850 has warmed up, the GPU operates at a constant 80-82°C regardless of whether your PC is displaying the Windows Desktop or working hard playing Crysis. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Still alive yet often ridiculed, tablet PCs haven’t exactly had the easiest of times since their conception at the turn of the century. HP is attempting to breathe new life into the tablet by aiming its new TouchSmart TX2 at home users, but Toshiba’s Portégé M750 takes a more traditional business-oriented approach.
Toshiba’s Portégé M750: sturdy
With an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 clocked at 2.26GHz and 2GB of DDR 2 memory, the M750-10K sits in the middle of Toshiba’s M750 line up. As far as physical looks go, very little has changed from last year’s Portégé M700.
This does come across as being a little lazy on Toshiba’s part, especially since the chassis is by no means perfect – we’ll cover this in more detail in a moment. We were also hoping to see improvements in the weight and thickness of the design, but at 2kg and 305mm wide, 239mm deep and 39.4mm tall, there are no changes here. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The world is not exactly short of portable iPod speaker systems, ranging from the merely adequate – such as Logitech’s Pure-Fi Anywhere – to the rather good – such as Intempo’s InSession. Generally, they sell for about £100, are about the size of a large house brick and produce a sound that while fine for the odd hour or two in a hotel room when you’re on the road, isn’t really what you’d choose for prolonged, serious – or loud – listening.
Altec Lansing’s inMotion Max: battery powered
Altec Lansing reckon it has spotted a gap in the market for device that while fully portable – and battery powered – is also large enough to hold its own in the sound quality stakes alongside larger, fixed-location systems. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this year LG pledged to start integrating Freesat tuners into some of its TVs. And now the firm’s made good on its promise by launching the LF7700 series.
LG’s LF7700: Freesat inside
Freesat’s selection of free-to-air standard-definition and HD channels can be viewed on a 32in, 37in, 42in or 47in LF7700. An integrated Ethernet port will also let you access “future IPTV services”.
But if you can’t find anything on Freesat or IPTV worth watching then you’ll be able to watch Blu-ray films – provided you’ve got a player or PlayStation 3 – on the LF7700’s 1080p screen. The set has four HDMI ports. Read the rest of this entry »
However you try and package it, ancient, scratch-prone vinyl just ain’t hip. So digitise those decades-old discs with Denon’s time-travelling turntable.
Denon’s DP-200USB: turns vinyl into MP3
The ION-style DP-200USB “fully automatic” turntable’s most appealing feature is that it’ll convert your analogue records into MP3 files and store them directly on a Flash drive. Read the rest of this entry »
