By now ASRock is a familiar household name for many enthusiasts, noted by generally decent product quality, budget-friendliness, and tendency to equip with innovative, if not interesting, features. Of course this did not happen overnight, and in the past ASRock's offerings were rather known for experimental features that were rarely seen on other vendors’ products. Boards like 4CoreDual-SATA2/VSTA are prime examples of such endeavors, and these products enjoyed enormous popularity among forum enthusiasts. Over time, ASRock’s efforts have expanded to cover wider market segments and lately much of the focus has shifted toward high-end offerings on various fronts. Products like the X58 SuperComputer and X58 Extreme series are a testament of ASRock’s determination to reach the high echelon motherboard market.

With this short background today we’re taking a look at ASRock’s latest and ongoing attempt to tackle the high-end motherboard market: ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4. In the past ASRock’s portfolio on the AMD platform pretty much remained in budget and mid-range sectors, largely based on IGP-based products.  ASRock attempts to rectify the situation with the 890FX Deluxe 4, a product squarely aimed at AMD enthusiasts and power users. They even try to one-up the big players by giving more features, while maintaining a reputation of wallet-friendliness.   Whether (or to what extent) ASRock succeed, is what we’re going to find out today.  We are also going to take this opportunity for a short brush up of AMD’s Leo platform and a quick inquiry into Thuban’s performance relative IMC scaling.

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We continue discussing the duel of the best cooling products for processors. Today a cooler from Thermalright will be fighting against the solutions from Noctua.

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Thermalright is trying to regain its leading positions in the market by launching two new air coolers for central processors. Have they managed to accomplish their ultimate goal ?

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Last year one of the most exciting product combinations to grace consumer shelves was the NVIDIA’s ION platform teamed up with an Intel Atom processor. The ultra-low power consumption, low heat output and ability to play HD video better than competing solutions of the time made it a difficult combo to ignore. Zotac took full advantage of this and successfully filled a niche demand with a slew of ION based products, offering various levels of plug and play functionality.

It was only a matter of time though before Intel would present us with something new and at the turn of 2010, Clarkdale was launched. In many ways, Clarkdale turned out to be the perfect successor to Atom + ION based systems by doing almost everything better. Clarkdale’s IGP is capable of delivering high definition video and the platform also offers Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-MA bitstreaming over HDMI - the latter a feature that eludes NVIDIA’s ION. Clarkdale also manages to deliver a lot more grunt should there be a need for the odd file zip or encode and can also be used to deliver a decent gaming experience with the addition of a discrete GPU thanks to an on-die PCIe controller. To boot, all of this comes within a rather attractive power consumption curve thanks to comprehensive power gating.

Naturally, Zotac jumped on the Clarkdale bandwagon, and pulled the first H55 chipset based mini-ITX motherboard out of the hat back in February this year. Since then, several motherboard vendors have followed suit, and we’re at a point now where it makes very little sense to consider anything ION based for desktop use unless you’re on a really tight budget. It’s rather surprising then that Zotac are launching new ION based motherboards and media solutions today based around Intel’s CULV processors.

We’ve got the IONITX-P-E model in house, and that’s what we’ll be looking at today.

The IONITX-P-E teams up a 1.2GHz CULV Celeron SU2300 with the ION GF9400 chipset. The MSRP for the P-E model is $170, while the Pentium SU4100 model will cost around $200. The SU4100 based board is a built on retail demand only product, though. So we’re not sure if you’ll see it on sale at all considering the $200 MSRP. At the lower end of the scale, a single core Celeron 743 running at 1.3GHz should in theory appeal to uber-low power consumption enthusiasts.

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As video cards have grown in complexity and power consumption, so has their size. What started with small cards compared of bare chips has grown in to the modern dual-slot megacard that we’ve seen today. And it doesn’t stop there.

Within the last year in particular, manufacturers have been toying with the concept of the triple-slot card. This has come both with cards that are informally intended to use a 3^rd slot such as the toasty GeForce GTX 480 (where NVIDIA highly recommends leaving the adjoining slot empty) to cards that formally take up a 3^rd slot to afford bigger heatsinks and fans. With more space for cooling gear, manufactures can push more powerful cards than before thanks to the extra cooling afforded by this gear.

We have a few different triple-slot cards in-house that we’re going to be looking at over the next few weeks. But to kick things off, we decided to start small, looking at an interesting product from PowerColor that takes the triple-slot concept and attaches it to the normally cooler Raden HD 5770: PowerColor’s Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Vortex .

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fter a pretty lengthy break the Japanese Ninja cooler comes before us in its third reincarnation. We are also going to talk about other two new cooling solutions from Scythe: Rasetsu and Mugen 2 Rev B.

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I’ve spent so much of the past two years covering SSDs that you’d think I’d forgotten about traditional hard drives. All of my work machines have transitioned to SSDs, as have all of my testbeds for reliability and benchmark repeatability reasons I’ve mentioned before. What I don’t mention that often is the stack of 1TB hard drives I use to store all of my personal music/pictures/movies, AnandTech benchmark files that drive my lab and to power my home theater (yes, final update on that coming soon). Hard drives haven’t lost their importance in my mind, their role has simply shifted.

My OS, applications, page file, documents and even frequently played games (ahem, Starcraft 2) all end up on my SSD. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for anything else, and for that bulk data there’s no cheaper or better alternative than mechanical storage.

One and two terabyte drives are now commonplace, the former selling for $60 a pop. Recently Seagate announced the next logical step, a five platter three terabyte drive with a catch - it’s external only.

The FreeAgent GoFlex Desk is a mouthful of branding that refers to Seagate’s line of external 3.5” drives. The drives themselves are standard 3.5” hard drives in a plastic enclosure designed to mate with GoFlex Desk adapters that add USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 800 or Ethernet connectivity to the drive.

Currently the GoFlex Desk is available in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities. We’ve spent much of the past week testing the latter both as a look at 3TB hard drives as well as the external device itself.

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After the launch of GF104 Nvidia got a real opportunity to design a dual-processor graphics card with Fermi architecture that would offer acceptable thermal and electrical specs. Our today’s article will discuss the performance of a solution like that.

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When they launch new drive series, it is especially interesting to find out what innovations they made to justify the appearance of the entire new series. With Seagate Momentus XT we knew right from the start: this drive combines magnetic platters and flash memory in one package. How cool is that?

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This review will talk about a compact mainboard on Intel H57 Express chipset that doesn’t boast any specific advantages, but has no serious drawbacks either.

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