Is ASRock’s all-in-one Home Theatre PC (HTPC), the CoreHT 252B-4G50/B, the perfect living room companion to sit by your TV? Depending on how you measure it, it’s smaller than an Apple Mac Mini (the Mini is about half the height, but the CoreHT wins from the overhead dimensions) and has the advantage of coming with a Blu-ray drive built in and front-facing USB 3.0 ports for other media. It looks good too, in its tiny tin enclosure that’s been lacquered in a glossy black. Attach a USB TV card and it’s realistically a replacement for most of your set-top boxes in a chassis [...]

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While the cost of desktop computing has been driven down over the course of many years, there’s one area that seems unaffected – all-in-one PCs. The nature of the niche these machines fall into means that they never seem to become popular enough to bring the price down. The Sony Vaio L Series is the Japanese firm’s latest stab at this expanding market and it comes in two powerful derivatives – the VPC-L21S1E and VPC-L21M1E – the latter of which we’re focusing on here. The S1E costs just under £1,500, while the M1E is a touch more down-to-earth at £1,200. A touch of overkill? [...]

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Got £600? Current PC collecting more dust than Peter Andre’s little black book? You could pop into a local electrical superstore and peruse endless rubbish computers, bracing yourself against the barrage of cheap coffee breath, plaque and misinformation spewing forth from a furtive salesman standing two inches away from your face. Or, you could entrust your budget with a respected system builder, who knows how to put performance parts into a £600 PC. It’s no easy task, after all. Powerful components don’t come cheap, and £600 is a small outlay in PC terms, performance expectations [...]

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Intel’s new Z68 chipset has a lot to offer. In short, P67 and H67 functionality are combined onto one board, with SSD caching. It might not have a tremulous impact on gaming performance, but that increased functionality is surely welcome in any desktop PC. There’s also serious power saving potential with Lucidlogix’s Virtu software, which can turn your GPU practically off when it’s not needed. This is where AdvanceTec has made its first mistake: the ATFX-Tron doesn’t come with Lucid Virtu installed. Sure, you can install it yourself by digging out the motherboard’s [...]

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Not only do they make a ruckus, they collect dust too. That dust can slow down and damage systems over long periods of time. So to get round these problems, NoFan has created a fanless system. The SET A40 is a really interesting bundle for your eyes, ears, and tech geek glands. Just look at that CPU cooler for starters. What’s going on there? Well, it’s a passive cooler. Most current generation air coolers contain a passive cooler with a fan attached to disperse the heat. In case you’ve never destroyed your CPU cooler to look inside, the heat pipe strapped to your CPU works by [...]

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  You don’t need a touchscreen PC. You just don’t. But perhaps you don’t actually need a reason. Maybe all you need is a machine with a compelling form factor, a bright screen and a bargain-basement price, which just happens to have touch tacked on. Maybe you need the Advent Discovery MT1804. Maybe. The fold-out hinge means that the Discovery is useful in a host of situations; you can angle it backwards if you’re placing it on a kitchen worktop, for instance, or fix it at 90 degrees to your desk. You can even, if you really want, lie it flat on a surface without any [...]

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The dual-chip, single card war rages on between AMD and Nvidia – both the HD 6990 and GTX 590 are ridiculously expensive and powerful, so which do you choose? There’s so little difference in performance terms it’s nigh-on impossible to call a winner by simply analysing benchmarks. But with the arrival of the Define XL from Ginger6, we’ve now seen gaming PCs built around both cards. Perhaps it’s here, in the real world, that we can establish the better of the two cards? Well, perhaps if Ginger 6 had paired the HD 6990 with Intel’s all-conquering i7 2600K CPU we’d [...]

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We’ve been impressed by just how far system builders have been able to push the latest Core i5 and i7 2K series CPUs, especially after the initial commotion about locked clock multipliers upon release. Just as it seemed Intel were about to hobble a phenomenally powerful processor series, the Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K chips were released, fully unlocked and featuring serious headroom for performance boosts. It’s been the more expensive i7 2600K that’s enjoyed most of the limelight and found its way into some fantastic systems, such as last month’s Dino PC Evolution [...]

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You know that moment where you’re sitting at the tiny desk your landlord provided, enduring the sickly warm vibration of your PC pressing against your thigh, knees firmly clamped together, feet bound hopelessly in cables, thinking, ‘I’m unhappy with this’? Well, you could always go and get a bigger desk I suppose, but that’s letting the space-hogging PC win. It’ll never respect you after that moment. The other option is to buy a PC like this, the catchy SH67H3 from Shuttle. The system we have here is built by Ambros, and though the component choices are entirely [...]

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Hard to believe that we spotted OCZ Technology’s original Z-Drive at CeBIT 2009. Just over two full years have passed, and already we’ve seen the 600MB/sec claims offered on that fellow eclipsed by a few successors. Today, the latest in the line is making its debut, with the Z-Drive R4 offering 2,800MB/sec and over 500,000 IOPS with a single SuperScale controller; step up to a dualie, and you’ll see 5,600MB/sec transfer rates coupled with 1.2 million input-output operations per second. Not surprisingly, this guy’s aimed squarely at enterprise users — folks who can [...]

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