Product Round-up While there’s no escaping the fact that solid-state drives are still expensive, they are steadily getting cheaper and the capacities are increasing. For the average PC user to be convinced that it is a must-have upgrade, the performance benefits would really need to be experienced.
Costs aside, no doubt concerns as to whether a system would actually benefit significantly from installing an SSD without the latest and greatest I/O bus is another factor and an area that this round-up examines.
To give you an idea of what’s out there that can deliver those super sweet performance numbers, without draining your savings, this round-up looks at mostly 128GB drives with a focus on Sata 2 performance measured with Crystal DiskMark. If budget is of no concern to you, a couple of the latest Sata 3 models are included for good measure. Read the rest of this entry »
The YoYoTech Warbird i750CX is a juiced-up version of the Warbird i750X. Both models are bare towers that come without a display, mouse, keyboard, speakers or operating system, although our review unit was supplied with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit already installed to save us the effort. Everything else is included.
YoYoTech’s Warbird i750CX: it’s what’s inside that counts…
The i750X has an AMD ATI Radeon 5850 graphics card and a price of £800, while the i750CX combines a pair of Radeon HD 5850 cards in CrossFire mode. The power supply has been beefed up to 850W to ensure there’s plenty of juice to keep things humming along.
Dual HD 5850s have the potential to offer epic levels of DirectX 11 gaming power, provided your CPU is up to the task. This is where YoYoTech has taken a bold step by overclocking the i750CX’s Intel Core i5-750 processor from 2.67GHz to 4.0GHz. In our experience, you can overclock a ‘Lynnfield’ Core i5/i7 or ‘Penryn’ Core i7 900 to 3.8GHz with the minimum of effort and 4.0GHz shouldn’t be any harder. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Sleek aluminium housings are all the rage with hard disk manufacturers, and Freecom’s Network Media Centre is no exception. Available in capacities from 1TB to 2TB, this single-disk Nas box promises to be your ultimate home media server thanks to the inclusion of UPNP/DLNA streaming support, an FTP server, a BitTorrent client and customisable multi-user work areas.
Freecom’s Network Media Centre: aesthetically unexciting
Aesthetically, the Network Media Centre isn’t overly exciting. Instead, it’s pleasantly simple with a smooth brushed-aluminium finish and glossy black faceplate framing a single status LED. Designed to sit horizontally, it’s inherently stable, with a reasonable footprint of 155 x 148mm and a height of only 43mm. Read the rest of this entry »
Reviewing the RNDX400E was difficult from start to finish, not least because we were sent the RNDX4210 instead first. It’s an easy mistake to make though, since both the RNDX400 and RNDX4000 (notice the extra zero) series share pretty much identical hardware.
The former (reviewed here) is Netgear’s new ‘Pioneer Edition’ Nas, which is essentially the same as the 4000 series but without hard drives and without Windows Active Directory, snapshot, iSCSI, NIC teaming/failover, SNMP and secure rsync features. Removing all those features make it inappropriate for many business environments, but there are still plenty of areas where the RNDX400E is extremely competent.
Once we had the right Nas in our hands, we were presented with a “corrupt root” message and no access to its configuration pages. Our first check was to see whether the Ram was dislodged, which can happen in transit. This is an easy check as Netgear exposes the Ram just behind the top panel. However, the Ram was fine and it turned out that pre-formatted hard drives were the culprit. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The Seagate Barracuda XT is the latest 2TB hard drive to land on our test bench, following on from the WD Caviar Black and Green and the Hitachi Ultrastar. It’s the largest capacity Seagate we have seen since the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 so you may think that Seagate was as keen as mustard to scatter review samples to the waiting world.
Seagate’s Barracuda XT: Sata 3.0 supported
In fact, our Barracuda XT came from an unusual source. It was sent to us by Gigabyte, the manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards. The explanation for this unusual state of affairs is that the Barracuda XT is the first hard drive that supports 6Gb/s Sata 3.0.
Sata initially had a nominal bandwidth of 1.5Gb/s which was increased to 3.0Gb/s with Sata 2.0. Now we have Sata 3.0 and a further doubling of bandwidth. There’s potential for confusion as Sata encodes eight bits of data as a ten-bit symbol so the ‘true’ bandwidths for those SATA standards are 150MB/s, 300MB/s and 600MB/s, respectively.
Naturally enough, you need a suitable controller to support the new Sata standard and this is where Gigabyte enters the equation. There is no system-logic chipset at present that natively supports Sata 3.0 and we don’t expect to see native support until 2011. In the meantime, we have to rely on motherboards from the likes of Gigabyte that have been updated with a discrete Sata 3.0 controller. Read the rest of this entry »
