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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 »

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 »

Kingston HyperX MAX is an external version of the V+100 internal SSD, with USB3 support for lightning-fast data transfers.

It manages a rapid 105.8MB/s write and a very quick 161.4MB/S read according to our test. The demanding small files test produced slightly slower results, but 49MB/s write and 82.2MB/S read speeds are still fast. It’s a shame it doesn’t come with backup software; at these speeds, it would be the ideal backup drive.

The lack of moving parts makes the drive perfect for carrying around, as dropping it won’t mean losing all your data. To get the best speeds you’ll have to use USB3, and the drive is prohibitively expensive, but if speed is all you need this is one of the best options.

A 7in touchscreen tablet PC running Android 2.2. The Streak 2 will dwarf the current 5in model.

T-mobile said it will be priced below existing tablets but didn’t reveal an exact figure – nor did it say when the Streak will go on sale.

The tablet runs an nVidia dual-core processor and has an SD Card slot to permit storage of as much as 32GB.

Research In Motion (RIM) announced their latest offering, the Blackberry PlayBook. The tablet which RIM CEO, Mike Lazaridis described as “the first professional tablet” has a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 multi-touch screen, a dual-core 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM and either 16GB or 32GB onboard storage capacity.

The PlayBook sports a 3MP front facing camera and a 5MP rear camera. It has got a microUSB jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and an HDMI port. No word on when it will be available and at how much, but it looks quite promising.

This one is not new, it has been around for almost a year, but having spent the last month with it in my palm made me feel it deserves mention here.

It has multi-touch capability, and 360 degree scrolling. The only problem is that its meant for Mac only, and I had to go through quite some trouble to get it working with my Windows 7 netbook.

Experience reliable, portable storage with a SanDisk Cruzer USB Flash Drive. Why leave your photos, videos and music at home when they’ll fit in your pocket? Trust the minds behind flash memory to make it easy to store, transfer and share your digital files wherever you go.

With up to 32GB of storage, these drives are built to handle the real world’s bumps and turns-so you can count on them to help you share plenty of photos, videos and other digital favorites wherever you go.