Digital Technology News, Camera, Camcorder and Cool Gadget Reviews

GA-790FXTA-UD5 is a feature-packed ATX motherboard. Its fast AMD 790G chipset isn’t the latest, but matches new AMD 890-based boards with an overall score of 120 in our benchmark tests.

Gigabyte has fitted a dedicated SATA3 controller that provides two SATA3 ports alongside the six SATA2 ports, while another supplies two dual-purpose USB/eSATA connections on the back panel.

You’ll also find eight USB ports, two of which are USB3, and two PS/2 ports. There are six driver-definable 3.5mm analogue audio ports and optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs, plus eight-pin and four-pin FireWire ports and, unusually, two 10/100/1,000Mbit/s Ethernet network ports. Read the rest of this entry »

Gigabyte’s 890GPA-UD3H is a full ATX AM3 motherboard with a whopping six SATA3 ports, plus an extra two SATA2 ports that are served by the same chip that handles the board’s legacy IDE port.

There are two PCI-E x16 slots, which run at x8 if both are populated with cards, three PCI-E xl slots and two PCI slots. Installing a graphics card with a large cooler will block the slot below. Four memory slots allow you to install up to 16GB of memory at a maximum speed of 2,000MHz.

There are just six USB ports on the back panel, including two USB3 ports. There are another four USB headers on the motherboard, which can supply up to eight more ports, but you’ll need brackets or case connectors to use them. There’s also a PS/2 port and a FireWire port on the back. Read the rest of this entry »

This latest incarnation of the Ultra HD has a host of improvements, including 50fps video and image stabilisation, so it handles motion on the part of the operator or the subject far better.

The rechargeable battery lasts for around 90 minutes, and the 8GB memory stores two hours of footage.

Next to the micro HDMI connector is the new FlipPort for connecting accessories.

The smaller Flip Mino 3rd generation is similarly priced and specified, but lacks the FlipPort.

MSI has crammed plenty of features on to this micro ATX motherboard, including USB3 and five SATA2 ports. It supports the latest hexacore AMD Phenom II processors and provides a wide range of overclocking options.

There are two PCI-E x16 slots, but they’ll both run at 8x if you have two cards in them. There’s also one PCI and one PCI-E x1 slot, although the latter will be blocked if you install a large graphics card. Four memory slots can take up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM running at up to 2,133MHz.

The integrated ATI Radeon HD 4290 managed only 3.5fps in Call of Duty 4, so it’s not up to 3D gaming. However, it’s well equipped for dual-monitor or home cinema use, with VGA and DVI outputs as well as an HDMI port capable outputting full HD video, although HD audio will be downsampled to DVD quality. There are also six 3.5mm stereo outputs for the built-in Realtek ALC889, which can be configured for 5.1 surround sound audio with a mic input or 7.1 surround sound without. There’s also an optical S/PDIF output if you need a digital connection to your speakers.

The backplane also provides six USB ports, including two USB3 ports. There’s also an eSATA port.

Asrock’s 880CXH-USB3 is slimmer than most ATX boards, measuring 305x224mm. It’s also somewhat short of ports and uses the budget AMD 880CX chipset.

There’s only one PCI-E x16 slot, but there’s little benefit to be gained by using two PCI-E graphics cards. Most expansion cards will fit into either the two PCI-E x1 or three PCI slots, and a double-height graphics card won’t block any other ports. Other features include five SATA2 connectors and four memory slots capable of taking up to 16GB of RAM at 1,800MHz.

At the back are an eSATA port and six USB ports, including one USB3 port. Confusingly, both the USB3 port and one of its USB2 neighbours are blue. There are five 3.5mm analogue audio ports and an optical S/PDIF port. You can also output audio and video from the HDMI port, which the integrated ATI Radeon HD 4250 can use to output full-quality Blu-ray video and DVD-quality audio. It’s not up to modern 3D gaming and managed just 3.8fps in our CoD4 benchmark.

The 880GXH-USB3 isn’t that fast, but it’s cheap, with lots of features. If you don’t need SATA3, it’s a great way to save a bit of money.

Nvidia and AMD (formerly ATI) are certainly fighting for the attention of gaming enthusiasts, releasing numerous cards around the £200 mark. Back in July 2010, Nvidia launched the excellent GeForce GTX 460  for just shy of that amount. More recently, AMD waded in with its HD 6870 for around £180 and the Radeon HD 6950  for £220. Now Nvidia is back with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, again at around £200.

In fact the 560 Ti is available at a range of prices. This is because Nvidia has encouraged manufacturers to produce overclocked versions of the card, so much so that there are few stock versions available. Our benchmarks below were run on the reference card from Nvidia, which has a core clock speed of 822MHz and 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1GHz. However, cards with higher clock speeds are available at the same price as the reference cards.The Palit GeForce GTX 560Ti Sonic Edition, for example, has a core clock speed of 900MH. Read the rest of this entry »

The PicoPix looks like a miniature version of a standard projector and is designed to be carried everywhere. It uses an LED lamp and liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) technology to project a 52in diagonal image at 7ft. It can run on batteries for two and a half hours, and play MP4 videos from USB drives.

LCoS is much like digital light processing (DLP) technology, but where DLP uses an array of moving micro-mirrors to reflect a light source either through the lens or away from it, depending on whether the pixel is on or off, LCoS uses liquid crystals on top of a reflective surface. These block light or allow it to reach the reflective surface below – if light is allowed to hit the mirror, it’s reflected out through the lens. In DLP projectors, the light then passes through red, green and blue filters in a spinning colour wheel to produce three colour images, one after another. The fast speed of the wheel tricks your eyes into seeing a full-colour image. Read the rest of this entry »

Adding an automatic document feeder (ADF) to a scanner is a great way to capture multiple documents with the minimum of fuss. Plustek has a reputation for producing low-cost products, so it had a chance to undercut the competition with its SmartOffice PS286 Plus.

The PS286 Plus comes with several spare parts and a software package that includes optical character recognition (OCR), business card and image-management applications. Although it’s not aimed strictly at use on the road, it’s supplied with a hard-wearing bag.

The scanner has a flip-up input tray with two sets of adjustable paper guides and a fold-down output tray. The output tray feels sturdy, but the input tray is made from a flimsy silver plastic.

The TWAIN driver is easy to use, but you must manually select simplex or duplex scanning, colour or mono. We received further driver warning messages during a multi-page duplex job, after which we discovered that a side of one sheet failed to scan and the auto-rotate hadn’t worked.

Kyocera Mita’s FS-C5150DN is a workgroup colour laser printer that’s broadly competing with the OKI C310DN and Brother’s HL-4140CN.

It’s a single-pass device, laying down black, cyan, magenta and yellow images at once to produce a full-colour sheet at the same rate as a monochrome one. It has an Ethernet port for network sharing and a built-in duplexer so it can print automatically on both sides of a sheet.
Kyocera’s low-cost printers have become more competitive, but the FS-C51SODN seems like a breakthrough. While it’s not the cheapest printer in its class, its specification is impressive, with PCL support and PostScript 3 emulation, plus support for PDF and XPS direct print. There’s a quick 667MHz processor and a generous 256MB of RAM, even if the 21 pages-per-minute speed is a shade behind the competition.
Furthermore, there’s plenty of scope to upgrade. Paper handling can be improved with one or two 500-sheet cassettes for a maximum 1,300-sheet input capacity, memory can be upgraded up to 1,280MB, and there are optional wireless network, fibre-optic and gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Read the rest of this entry »

Sony’s latest external Blu-ray drive supports dual-layer burning, so you can write a massive 50GB of data to a single disc. The BDX-S500U will play Blu-ray movies on a laptop or PC and supports 3D content on a compatible display.

Disc writing speeds were very close to Sony’s estimates, managing 4x when writing 25GB of files to a Blu-ray disc. A 50GB, dual-layer disc took around 45 minutes to burn, which is average for a 4x writer. DVD write speeds were also reasonable, taking 12 minutes for single-layer and 25 minutes for dual-layer discs. Read the rest of this entry »