Crysis 3: Are its system requirements too high?
Posted by Harrison Garovi on March 28th 2013 | Permalink
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Software Review
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video games
crysis 3
To see more you have to have more; consoles are a practical alternative The Crysis series has always been known for its groundbreaking graphics and top notch physics engine. But when is enough, enough? PC gamers generally want the most powerful rig to purchase or build to their heart’s desire. Many newcomers might be discouraged when they learn how expensive all the necessary parts may be in order to play Crysis 3 at maximum settings. System requirements—such as the necessity of using a DirectX 11 graphics card—don’t play fair to loyal fans of the series, at least in economic terms. If…
Visio service and support
Posted by Jon Peddie on March 20th 2013 | Permalink
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nvidia
graphics
mt. tiburon testing
qualcomm
tegra
htc one x+
We bought a 60-inch Visio smart TV in November to watch the election (we’ve since found other uses for it). It’s a beautiful looking device, with a thin bezel and an overall thickness of just 1.9 inches. And it is smart—it found our network and connected itself almost instantly. I won’t bore you with the spec, you can read them online. The only problem with the machine was it would randomly turn itself off, after 3 minutes, or 5, or 20, you’d never know when, or if, it was going to do it. In the process of trying to figure it…
The pen is mightier than the finger
Posted by Jon Peddie on February 13th 2013 | Permalink
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nvidia
graphics
mt. tiburon testing
qualcomm
tegra
htc one x+
Re-visiting N-trig and the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet Of all the tablets we’ve tested (and certainly not all that are in the market), one of my favorites is the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet. One reason is because it has excellent pen input capability. Introduced in late 2011 with a 2.1 GHz Tegra processor and Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich), the device has proven rugged, reliable, and useful. However, the pen input has been challenging at times, and I thought it would be interesting to look into that a bit more. The catalyst for my enquiry was N-trig. They visited us a few months…
Lenovo C30 workstation with Nvidia’s Quadro K5000
Posted by Alex Herrera on February 13th 2013 | Permalink
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nvidia
graphics
mt. tiburon testing
qualcomm
tegra
htc one x+
In our nearly two decades tracking the market and researching technology, we’ve reviewed plenty of workstations. Comparing and contrasting models from competing vendors hasn’t always been an easy or particularly revealing exercise, because the plain truth is the silicon guts of today’s workstation models from leaders HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu are very much the same. Intel CPUs and chipsets ship in 100% of Tier 1 OEMs workstations, while Nvidia commands anywhere from 85% to 90% of GPUs (depending on the quarter). With all working off the same set of building blocks, OEMs have to work overtime engineering and marketing workstation…
The HTC One X+: A review
Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 30th 2013 | Permalink
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nvidia
graphics
mt. tiburon testing
qualcomm
tegra
htc one x+
The latest object of serious geek lust is the HTC One X+, the successor to the somewhat adored One. The phones are identical and they look nice. They are a critical bit bigger than most other phones, and especially the iPhone 4s, and OMG they have Beats audio. The latest version is available in flat black. The HTC One X+ features the Tegra 3 1.7-GHz quad-core processor and 64GB of internal memory. It has a 1 GB of RAM. Offsetting that huge advantage in storage is the lack of an SD slot, but in emergencies you can add USB memory with…
Synergistic ScreenShare dual displays from Spring Design: 1+1 = 2.5+
Posted by By Jon Peddie and Harrison Garovi on January 7th 2013 | Permalink
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Did you ever wish you had a larger display on your smartphone, especially when browsing? Or have you wished you could type with a larger virtual keyboard than the one on your phone? Well, dream no more, your wishes have come true with ScreenShare from Spring Design, a device that provides a second screen to most Android-based mobile devices. ScreenShare is not the first product from Spring Design (which neither designs nor manufactures springs). The company introduced one of the world’s first dual-screen electronic readers, the Alex Reader, in 2009. The Alex Reader shared some similar features to Barnes & Noble’s…
The Surface is a start
Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 12th 2012 | Permalink
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Is Microsoft too far behind to catch up? Microsoft’s Surface has finally arrived, and we have finally gotten around to writing a review of the new tablet designed to be an Apple killer. It’s just as well; we’re late, we’re slow learners, and we’ve been using the Surface Tablet as a working tool rather than the traditional, tear open the box, run benchmarks, write the review, and toss the thing aside to review the next thing. We don’t think that’s a valid approach for the Surface, or any tablet device, really. There aren’t that many available benchmarks, for one thing. Most…
Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon
Posted by By JPR Staff on November 7th 2012 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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The X1 Carbon is an aesthetic beauty in a “form follows function” kind of way. Its chassis is not bright and flashy. It’s the black Ducati 1199 Panigale or Heckler & Koch MP5 of notebooks and gets the job done without a lot of fanfare in its aesthetic impact. Light handling and accurate, all these machines have the power to put away the competition with the right operator. The masses can “think different” all they want, but some folks have no interest in being another brick in the wall of style or computing choices. MacBooks, at least in some neighborhoods, are generally the standard laptop seen at a café.
Benchmarking the FirePro W9000
Posted by Alex Herrera on November 7th 2012 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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{image_8}AMD’s FirePro W9000, one of the first members of a full family of new professional-caliber graphics cards from AMD, is out in the market. JPR got its hands on one and ran it through our standard battery of workstation-relevant tests. We’ve got numbers to review, not only stand-alone, but in context with results from benchmarking the company’s previous family of cards. Launched under the company’s Radeon brand in the first quarter of 2012, AMD’s “Southern Islands,” a.k.a. “Graphics Core Next,” might be viewed by gamers as old news. The consumer ranks tend to see the newest technology first, while professional/workstation-caliber products…
Review: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 and GTX 650
Posted by By Robert Dow and Harrison Grovy on September 26th 2012 | Permalink
Categories:
Hardware Review
Tags:
nvidia
graphics
aib
3d
opengl
gforce
developers
computers
kepler
Nvidia rounded out their Kepler line of GPU AIBs last week with the introduction of the GeForce GTX 660 and the GeForce GTX 650. We've taken the time to write up two reviews, one review on GeForce GTX 660 and one review on GeForce GTX 650.
