Patrick Schmid

Intel's Xeon is certainly taking a beating from AMD's Opteron performance-wise, and the new dual-core Xeon Paxville likely won't make much of a difference. But Intel's upcoming Bensley platform launch next year could represent a new dawn in the era of x86 server processors - or so Intel says.

It looks like an ordinary external hard drive, but the latest product from Western Digital comes with variable lighting effects, which help it show off from dusk til dawn.

Having looked at Intel's upcoming 65 nm Pentium 4 Cedar Mill, we had to also check out what its dual core counterpart, Presler, would be able to do with its doubled L2 cache.

The Cedar Mill core is months from being released, but THG managed to secure a sample anyway - and it didn't come from Intel. What we discovered was that Intel's next-generation Pentium 4 is capable of bringing Prescott's single-core meltdown to an end.

It's the coolest nForce4 SLI motherboard you have ever seen. The GA-8N SLI Quad is capable of running as many as four (!) x16 PCI Express graphics cards, and allows the attachment of ten displays!

The new WD top model offers neat features and a whopping 400 GB, but little performance improvement over the 320 GB version. How does it compare to other 400 GB drives?

We put 14 SATA and 8 UltraATA models through their paces in the THG test labs. The result is a familiar look and feel for a new product category round-up: hard disks.

In this second article in a two-part series, we complete our comparison test of the best premium motherboards on the market, by examining five high-end boards based on the Intel 955X chipset.

Which chipset: Intel or NVIDIA? We start our big comparison test of the best premium motherboards on the market with three nForce4-based Pentium motherboards.

Thecus's current NAS box houses up to four hard drives and offers a Gigabit Ethernet LAN connection. It works well, but our real-world test also revealed some weaknesses.

ULi's M1695 chipset shines thanks to simultaneous support of AGP and PCI Express. The first motherboard to use the platform comes from ASRock - can the budget Asus brand exploit the chipset's potential?

Connected via serial ATA and equipped with up to 4 GB of DDR memory, the i-RAM plug-in module from Gigabyte is supposed to open up the way to undreamt-of hard disk performance.

Intel's chipset family has come a long way to offer the broadest feature set ever. And yes, we're making it official: Intel is closing the price/performance ratio gap vs. AMD. Our tests involving six 945P motherboards tell the story.

Though not yet available in retail channels, Windows XP x64 is a tempting solution for enthusiast users. We discuss its pros and cons and compare how it and conventional Windows XP handle 32 bit applications.

Seagate's new Momentus allows notebooks to be equipped with hard disks featuring up to 120 GB of capacity while setting new records for transfer rates and access times. We test both versions: Serial ATA and UltraATA/100.

Sometimes a single manufacturer offers a wide selection of motherboards, all able to host your desired processor. This leaves the user with an essential question: are premium motherboards worth the extra money? We compared MSI's budget motherboard with its highest-end model to find out.

Memina elicits superlatives with its record-shattering Rocket 4 GB USB flash drive. Kingston counters with its DataTraveller II Plus Migo Edition, which carries your e-mail and Windows installation files around and imports them onto other desktops. Which is better, and why?

You can find CompactFlash memory cards today with capacities of up to 8 GB, and 4 GB Secure Digital flash (SD) cards are just around the corner. While rather small, their size still makes them unsuitable for use in ultra-small devices like cellphones, smart phones, PDAs, and so forth. Here, we take a look at smaller memory formats, including MMCmicro and MicroSD, which promise mass data storage in truly tiny packages.

External hard drive capacities continue to grow and their prices certainly don't break the bank. Now, vendors such as Fastora, Maxtor and Smartdisk are designing in value-added features that make these devices that much more exciting.

AMD's initial release of dual-core processors revealed only one weakness: they were too expensive. But today there's a new entry-level model, the pricing of which should make the buying decision easier. We take a look at the new Athlon 64 X2 3800+, and also compare and contrast all the members of the X2 family.

In response to Intel's Celeron D 351, the latest Sempron 3400+ not only implements more cache memory, it features AMD64. Sounds good, but does it really make sense to choose it over an entry-level Athlon 64?

What can you expect when AMD launches the Athlon 64 FX-59 by the end of the year? We overclocked AMD's FX-57 to 3 GHz to see what you will get. AMD's Socket M2 should also soon come into the picture.

Providing a RAID array containing up to four SATA hard disks, the Acuta 4S is designed to meet the storage needs of small businesses.

In a bid to gain supremacy in memory for the Athlon 64, the GeIL ONE Series DIMMs offer CAS latency of 1.5 clocks or DDR600 speed. We tested to check the merits of their strategy.

Does DDR2-800 deliver the hoped-for performance boost for Intel PCs? With DIMMs from Adata and Corsair in hand, we experimented with slower clocks but very short timings.