Friday night topic: Where do you see PC enthusiasts in 5 years?
Had an interesting conversation with some fellow editors of PC hardware sites recently that revolved around the question: will we still be doing this in five years? There was genuine curiosity about whether PCs built from components will continue to make sense, given the rise of highly integrated devices like tablets and smartphones and the ongoing trend toward mobile computing.
My take was somewhat optimistic, since I think the experience of sitting upright at a desk in front of a large monitor, good speakers, and precision input devices continues to be compelling and engaging, especially for creative pursuits and certain types of ...
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Deal of the week: solid-state storage at 59 cents/GB
Our own Geoff Gasior wrote a pretty interesting story about declining solid-state storage prices yesterday. One of the highlights was a graph that ranked a plethora of drives by their median cost per gigabyte over the past week. I'd like to thank Geoff, because that graph made my job of putting together this week's deal post a lot easier.
According to the rankings, the drive that costs the least per gigabyte is OCZ's Agility 4 256GB, which Newegg currently sells for $169.99 with free shipping , or about 66 cents per gig. As if that weren't cheap enough, Newegg throws in a $20 mail-in rebate ...
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Choose your own Dishonored adventure
We have, perhaps, posted too many Dishonored trailers in the past few months. This should be the last one, if only because the game comes out on Tuesday. To whet your appetite, publisher Bethesda has posted a "Path to Revenge" trailer with an interactive twist. The video takes you through parts of one of the game's missions, and it allows you to choose your own adventure at various points. Check it out:
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Intel intros Atom platform for NAS devices
Network-attached storage devices seem to be getting more and more popular these days, not only in the home, but also in small businesses that may not require the grunt of a dedicated file server. To serve these markets, Intel has rolled out an Atom platform tailored for storage devices. Dubbed Milstead, the platform relies on existing Atom D2500 and D2550 processors. Both chips feature dual cores and 10W thermal envelopes, but the D2550 adds Hyper-Threading support and slightly faster integrated graphics.
Intel's press release and accompanying materials make no mention of the platform hub paired with those Atom CPUs. We do know it supports six hot-plug Serial ATA devices, though. RAID is handled in software, and the platform will work with both Windows and Linux. Gigabit Ethernet ...
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AMD teases next ultra-low-power product
Something's brewing at AMD, and the company is trying to drum up publicity with a spooky viral video. Take a look:
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New Skyrim DLC is out, lets you play house
Ever wanted to build a house and raise a family, all while in the comfort of your squalid studio apartment? Then boy, does Bethesda have a treat for you. The latest slice of downloadable content for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has become available on Steam. For the low, low price of $4.99, Hearthfire lets you achieve in-game what your crippling social anxiety and potential glandular problems make all but unattainable in real life. Behold!
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Mozilla releases preview of Firefox for Windows 8
The Windows 8 version of Firefox sure has come a long way since that early demo we saw in April. Now, Mozilla has the browser up and running with a proper user interface in both Windows 8's Metro and desktop environments—and it's looking pretty sharp. See for yourself:
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SSD prices continue tumbling in Q3
For years, PC enthusiasts complained that solid-state drives were too expensive. Call us when prices drop below a dollar per gigabyte, they scoffed. Well, their phones have probably been ringing off the hook lately. SSD prices have plummeted to the point where most mainstream drives fall under the dollar-per-gig threshold.
We took our first look at the decline of SSD prices back in June, illustrating the trend with a mountain of data tracing drives all the way back to early 2011. A full quarter has passed since that article, so it's high time for an update. To find out if prices have continued their downward trajectory, we once again called upon the gracious folks at Camelegg, who provided us with another data dump for analysis—this time with even more drives. Camelegg tracks prices at Newegg, which is a pretty good indicator of prevailing market conditions.
First, let's look at how much prices fell during the third quarter, from July 1 to October 1. Ready your scroll wheel; this graph's a doozy.
But worth it, no? The data is clear: all but one of the nearly 40 SSDs we're monitoring costs less now than it did three months ago. The price drops amount to only single-digit percentages for a small handful of drives, mostly lower-capacity models. However, prices declined by at least 12% for the overwhelming majority.
OCZ appears to be the most aggressive discounter of the bunch. Several of its drives are effectively half-off, and many more have experienced reductions in the 17-42% range. Intel and Samsung SSDs have also benefited from substantial price drops. The cuts haven't been as dramatic on drives from Corsair and Crucial, though.
Our Technicolor chart doesn't tell the entire story, especially when it comes to those OCZ SSDs. Let's take a closer look at the day-to-day price changes for each drive since the beginning of 2012. Pay particular attention to the last quarter, from July onward. You can click on the buttons below each graph to switch between the various drive families.
Seriously, click on a few of the buttons and look at the beginning of July. The price of just about every one of OCZ's drives spiked on July 1, the first day of the third quarter. Those spikes taint our quarterly percentage-drop numbers somewhat, and we don't see similar behavior from any of the other drive makers.
Those brief flirtations with higher prices are just that. There are other spikes here and there, but none lasting more than a few days. Most of the time, the drives spend only a day living large before falling back down to reality. If you ignore those outliers, the decline over the past three months is still apparent, especially for the newer Vertex 4 and Agility 4 models.
Intel has had success in holding CPU prices steady, but there's a lot more competition in the SSD market. The ongoing price war between makers of SandForce-based drives has put downward pressure on the 520 Series, which uses the same controller silicon. Even after the deep cuts that followed the 520 Series' launch, there was still room for prices to drop substantially over the course of the third quarter.
The Intel 330 Series hasn't been around for as long, but the 60GB and 120GB versions both got notably cheaper in the past three months. The 240GB model only arrived in August, and it hasn't seen much action since. Neither has the 320 Series, whose prices have largely flat-lined, save for occasional cuts to the 300GB model.
Corsair's Force Series 3 and GT SSDs have been around for a while now, and they're getting more affordable with each passing month. The magnitude of the recent price reductions isn't as big as for some of the other drives, but the prices are very low overall. Corsair has added a number of new models to its SSD lineup since these Force Series drives were introduced, and we may need to track the fresh additions in our next update.
Our last set of plots covers a collection of popular favorites. The Crucial m4 is more than a year and a half old, and its days of dramatic price drops seem to be over, apart from one-day discounts. Samsung's 830 Series is only about a year old, and it's due to be replaced by the 840 Series in a couple weeks. Perhaps to prepare for the newcomer's arrival, the 830 Series' price has fallen over the past three months. As we've seen with all of the other drive families, the higher-capacity models are dropping more than those in the 64GB range.
We added the M5S to get a sense of the latest from Plextor. This particular model has only been on the market since August, and it's interesting to note that prices have been slashed and have then bounced back a couple of times during that relatively short span. Only the 64GB variant has resisted rebounding. There aren't enough data to call it a trend just yet, though.
Since I opened with a discussion of cost per gigabyte, that's a fitting place to end. We've run the numbers on all the drives using the median price for the last seven days.
The higher-capacity models dominate the top of the chart, as do most OCZ offerings. What impresses me most is the sheer number of SSDs costing less than a dollar per gig right now. 22 of the 38 drives meet that arbitrary mark, and all but two of those run $0.86/GB or less. A handful of drives is just a few cents shy of the $1/GB threshold, too. Indeed, only Intel's 320 Series, plus a collection of 40-64GB models, cost north of $1.11/GB.
We should note that Camelegg's data doesn't include specials like coupon codes or mail-in rebates. Those deals can lower prices even further, and there's usually at least one every week.
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Nvidia program ties GPU warranty support to voltage limits
EVGA's GeForce GTX 680 Classified is a beast. The card combines a hot-clocked GK104 GPU with 4GB of RAM on a custom circuit board with 14-phase power delivery circuitry. An oversized blower keeps the thing cool, and there's a port for EVGA's EVBot remote overclocking tool—well, there was when we saw the card at Computex earlier this year, anyway. In the EVGA forums, Product Manager Jacob Freeman confirms that the EVBot functionality has been removed from the card "in order to 100% comply with NVIDIA guidelines for selling GeForce GTX products." Voltage control, even via an external device like the EVBot module, is verboten, Freeman says.
Overclockers.com was the first to cover the story, and Bright Side of News has done some further digging . Turns out voltage control limits are part of Nvidia's Green Light program, a certification process designed to ensure cards meet certain requirements. According to Nvidia Senior PR Manager Bryan Del Rizzo, overvolting is supported "up to a limit," in ...
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Acer unveils pricey 11.6'' Win8 tablet
Earlier this morning, Acer took the wraps off the Iconia W700, an Intel-powered Windows 8 tablet with a whopper of a price tag: $799.99 for the base model and up to $999.99 for the flagship variant. That's quite a bit more expensive than the iPad and competing devices, but hardware-wise, the Iconia W700 seems to have more in common with ultrabooks than anything.
It's powered by Intel's latest Core i3 and i5 processors—of the Ivy Bridge variety, of course—and it features either 64GB or 128GB of solid-state storage. The speedy x86 CPUs mean the Iconia W700 will run Windows 8, not Windows RT. Acer has also outfitted the ...
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Lenovo to start making some PCs in America
American companies outsourcing manufacturing to China is a fact of life these days. But Chinese companies outsourcing manufacturing to America? Now that's worthy of a headline.
Yes, believe it or not, Lenovo announced earlier this week that it's going to open a manufacturing line in Whitsett, North Carolina early next year. There, some ...
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AMD's A10-5800K and A8-5600K 'Trinity' APUs reviewed
AMD's Trinity chip is making a debut, but it's not exactly a fresh face. We reviewed the mobile version of Trinity back in May and had mostly positive things to say about it. The second generation of AMD's do-everything, converged APU offered solid progress over the first-generation "Llano" chip on many fronts. Not too long after Trinity's mobile release, desktop versions of it started shipping exclusively in systems from large PC makers. Those wishing to build their own systems based on the chip, or to buy them from smaller PC vendors, had to wait. AMD took its time ushering this chip into broader sales channels, but the time is finally upon us. Trinity is now available as a retail product, as are motherboards based on the new Socket FM2 platform.
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