Our mid-priced and high-end systems are ready to challenge the notion of value supremacy for low-cost parts. Will Intel’s latest architecture provide enough performance to break the $700 machine’s value...
Higher prices and out-of-stock parts caused us to rethink how we could pack more gaming power in our budget build. With cheaper DDR2-800 memory, we bet on the overclocking-friendly Intel Pentium E5x00 with two...
Last quarter, we presented you with four Radeon HD 4850s under $1,250. This time around, we put together a very respectable Core i5 system with a couple of Radeon HD 5850s in CrossFire. Let's see how it...
Can a truly high-end system still be assembled for $2,500? We set out to find the answer and learned some important things along the way. And here's a bit of a teaser: we're going to compare the performance of...
Intel's Atom processor family showed promise when it launched back in 2008, but it certainly wasn't an ideal desktop platform. Atom is back with an integrated memory controller, on-die graphics, and a new...
This holiday season doesn't bring any major processor launches our way, but a handful of price changes do shift some of our sub-$150 recommendations. Come check out the latest Best Gaming CPUs For The Money...
Intel’s P55 Express remains a mainstream chipset, so by breaking through the $200 barrier, we have high expectations of superb overclocking, unsurpassed stability, and uncompromising features. Can all of...
We’ve seen how faster memory scales on Phenom II, Core 2, and Core i7 for LGA 1366. Now it’s time to analyze the impact of different memory speeds on a Core i7-870-based LGA 1156 platform. We test from...
Increasing prices on the most popular graphics card and low availability mark (or mar?) this holiday season, changing some of our recommendations. Also, we're affected by the introduction of a new king of the...
Everyone cares about power consumption, so it’s important to realize that board-level integration has enabled a new breed of extremely small, power-friendly computers. Today we look at two mini-ITX cases and...
What does it mean to build a truly-balanced PC? How great would it be to piece together a machine bottlenecked by neither CPU or GPU? We set forth to measure the perfect balance in seven different games and...
Chris checks in with an update on our 2009 CPU Charts, pricing on ATI's Radeon HD 5800/5900s graphics cards, news of official bitstreaming support, an interesting tidbit on power consumption in Eyefinity mode,...
Welcome to Part One of Tom's Hardware's Holiday Gift Guide. This first episode is geared toward those system builders planning to pool some Christmas cash to construct a powerful (yet value-oriented) system....
Welcome to another edition of our Best Gaming CPUs for the Money. This month we have a handful of AMD-based processor introductions to factor into our recommendations. Moreover, Intel's Core i5-750 finds itself...
What does it mean to build a truly-balanced PC? How great would it be to piece together a machine bottlenecked by neither CPU or GPU? We set forth to measure the perfect balance in seven different games and...
Intel's new quad-core i5 and i7 CPUs for LGA 1156 deliver plenty of performance and impressive efficiency. But how far can they be overclocked? We take the entry-level model Core i5-750 as far as it'll go with...
The new firmware provides very impressive numbers and takes SSDs to a higher level of performance well beyond HDDs as system drives in desktop computers.
Intel’s LGA 1156 processors serve up terrific new levels of performance to the mainstream. Now it’s time to look at how efficiency changed from Core 2 Quad to Core i5/i7. We found Turbo Boost technology to...
One hundred dollars seems like nothing for a new CPU, especially with so many new GPUs calling to us. We put the Athlon II X4 620, Phenom II X3 710, Phenom II X2 550, and dual-core Pentium E6500 to the test to...
Nehalem has finally gone mobile. But despite the advanced manufacturing that has gone into making Core i7 Mobile more efficient, it's still rated at up to 55W TDP and includes features like Hyper-Threading and...
Welcome back to another installment in our Best Gaming CPUs for the Money column. In this month's list of recommendations, a number of new CPUs shake up the mix. Specifically, Intel's new Core i5-750 and the...
Reader suggestions and previous test results defined most of this month’s highest-priced build. Will the extra planning and testing pay off in clear overclocking and performance superiority? We use Radeon HD...
As the Intel Developer Forums winds to a close, Loyd Case checks in for one more round of updates, spanning Intel Research panels, Toshiba and its SSD strategy, more on USB 3.0, plus Intel's Arrandale and...
Loyd Case is back from a second day of IDF 2009 with his impressions on DisplayPort, SATA 6 Gb/s, Intel's upcoming Moorestown platform, Turbo Boost, USB 3.0, and Lucid's heterogeneous multi-GPU rendering...
This year’s Intel Developer Forum conference seems more notable for secondary technologies and what’s absent than about what’s being announced. Or, at least, that’s how it seems. On the other hand,...
Today we're looking at Asus motherboards armed with integrated graphics processors from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia to see which core logic vendor can offer the best Blu-ray playback quality, features, and value for...