ATI Radeon X850 XT PCI-Express Review

By Ian Bell Updated 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

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Computing

Lenovo Slim 7i Pro X hands-on review: A do-it-all laptop

The Lenovo Slim 7i Pro X Laptop

When you're looking for a new laptop, you might be after a device that does something very specific. You might want something for video editing, light gaming, and day-to-day work or video conferencing.

The great thing about the PC industry is that there are tons of laptops for each of those end-use cases, but Lenovo might have just made a laptop that combines everything we just mentioned and some more.

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.