ATI Radeon X850 XT PCI-Express Review

By Ian Bell December 4, 2004

Quote from the review:

“The most important conclusion: we shouldn’t expect anything cardinally new from ATI now! In the first place the company is concerned with market saturation and the shortage of video cards based on R420 (with 16 pipelines). That’s why today’s attack on the market is intended to capture more various niches. R480/430 chips contain nothing cardinally new from the architectural point of view.

We can only note that the new solutions have an integrated system that switches off the 3D-part of the chip when operating in 2D. It must have a positive effect on heat emission and temperature conditions of video cards, for example in office applications. Previously, a similar feature to disable parts of VPU units to reduce heat emission and power consumption could have been found only in some mobile solutions from ATI. “

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Publisher

I work with the best people in the world and get paid to play with gadgets. What's not to like?

Computing

Acer Swift X 16 hands-on review: A tantalizing preview

An Acer Swift X 16 sits open on a coffee table.

I received a preproduction Acer Swift X 16 to look at, and it's driving me crazy. Why, you ask? Because Acer put a lid on benchmarking, meaning I can't run the Intel 12th-gen Core i7-1260P CPU and the Intel Arc graphics through our usual tests. I'm dying to see how they perform, and they're right there in front of me and yet entirely out of reach. That's OK, though. I can still give some impressions of the laptop's design in anticipation of its release in June 2022.

As a preproduction machine, all specifications are subject to change. I received a configuration with the Core i7, Intel Arc graphics, and a WQXGA (2,560 x 1,600) 16:10 IPS display that should cost $1,250 when released (with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage). That's a fair price for a beefy 16-inch laptop, and there's plenty to talk about even if I can't dig in the way I'd like.
Design

Computing

Lenovo ThinkPad X13s hands-on review: ARM-powered ThinkPad

thinkpad x13s hands on new specs price photos x13 gen 1 featured image

Lenovo's best laptops have always had Intel or AMD inside, but in a first, there's now a new ThinkPad powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform.

More specifically, it is the ThinkPad X13s, an ARM-powered device that's unlike a regular ThinkPad in more ways than one. With promising always-on, always-connected performance and a fantastic sustainable design, this Lenovo laptop feels different from past Windows on ARM devices, and after trying one ahead of Mobile World Congress, it dares to take on Apple's M1 MacBooks in the business realm.

Computing

Asus Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition hands-on review: To the stars

Asus Zenbook 14X OLED with its accessories.

It’s not often we see collectors' laptops like the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition. Announced at CES 2022, it’s an updated version of the already-released Zenbook 14X OLED, fit with new 12th-gen Intel processors and a more robust build -- but hardware isn’t what makes the Space Edition special.

The machine is inspired by Asus’s own P6300, which launched into space in 1997 and managed to stay outside the atmosphere for 600 days without any defects. It’s an homage, a celebration, and a retrospective on how far laptops have come.