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Techradar |
- LG Optimus Black coming to Europe this month
- Violence breaks out at China iPad 2 launch
- Brit Week: British tech: the media eye view
- In Depth: PC water cooling guide: all you need to know
- Review: Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus HD
- Review: HP EliteBook 2540p
- Review: Dell Adamo XPS
- Buying Guide: Graphics card upgrade: your options explained
- Review: Onkyo BD-SP808
- Brit Week: British computing: cakes, codes and creativity
| LG Optimus Black coming to Europe this month Posted: 08 May 2011 12:13 PM PDT The LG Optimus Black Android smartphone will be available in the UK by the end of May, says the Korean tech giant. The company's latest Android big-hitter boasts a 4-inch screen with LG's new NOVA display technology, which promises "optimal brightness and clarity." and 50 per cent greater energy efficiency. The super-slim Android powered device, which impressed TechRadar at CES back in January, is just 9.8mm thin and weighs only 109g. Unlike the LG Optimus 2X - which boasts a dual-core Tegra 2 processor - the Optimus Black is a little slower with only a 1GHz processor under the bonnet. T-Mobile already in? Back in February we revealed that T-Mobile was already on-board to stock the Android 2.2 handset, which may even be available on a sub-£30-a-month contract. LG is promising the launch in Europe this month, to be followed by a run-out in the US and Asian markets shortly thereafter. White and pink models will launch in June according to the official press release. The White LG Optimus Black? Right you are. 
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| Violence breaks out at China iPad 2 launch Posted: 08 May 2011 10:55 AM PDT The Apple iPad 2 launch in China ended in carnage with witnesses claiming that an Apple store employee lashed-out at customers waiting in line. Numerous accounts have emerged from the launch in Beijing on Saturday, which saw three or four people were injured at the scene and the store's glass door smashed. One version of events claims that a non-Chinese Apple employee emerged from the store to confront people who had cut into the line, before striking those he suspected with a metal club. When security prevented from following him back into the store to confront the employee, reports suggest that is when the glass door was smashed. Wounds Photos that have emerged from the event show numerous people laying on the floor with visible wounds from the fracas. Apple has so far refused to comment on the alleged incidents, but it really doesn't look good at this stage. Source: Apple Insider 
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| Brit Week: British tech: the media eye view Posted: 08 May 2011 06:30 AM PDT Although the UK's technology industry may be suffering from an image problem, a seeming lacklustre approach and a dip in innovation, there's never been a cooler time to be a technology journalist in the UK. It's all because of you, dear reader - you just love technology. And these days, it's not just you but your iPad-toting mum, your BlackBerry obsessed niece, your once-net-phobic uncle and your cat which probably has a little webcam on its collar and its own YouTube channel too. And boy do we love telling you about the newest and greatest tech; although our neighbours across the pond tend to get better access, we have a brilliant tech media community in the UK. This is the side that you don't get to see so much; while we're competitors by day, we're pals by night – well, mostly. So, who better to talk to about British tech than the people who spend their days sifting through the press releases, chatting with manufacturers and bringing you the big news? The UK technology journalists are a varied bunch. Rory Cellan-Jones is a man whose voice you'll recognise from the radio, whose open and trustworthy face you probably know from the news and whose dog you'll almost definitely know from Twitter – he's the BBC's technology correspondent. "There are two sides to British technology today," he says. "There's the traditional side, things like engineering and manufacturing, which has definitely struggled over the past twenty years. "Then there's the new media side; the dotcoms, software makers and start-ups. We don't look great compared with Silicon Valley; but then again, no one does." Valley wannabes Given that the UK is responsible for so many great technological inventions, it's really a shame that the US has swept in and taken over with its domineering Silicon Valley and a can-do, will-do attitude. Stuart Miles, founder and editor of tech site Pocket-Lint.com reckons this is down to the reserved British nature. "Silicon Valley companies are very good at working together to promote themselves; there's a lot of backslapping that goes on over there and it creates what we call a distortion field, subsequently giving some quite mediocre tech instant success. "That promotion can make or break you – but in the UK companies tend to be more reserved and very competitive against each other. There's none of that back-slapping which is why attempts to recreate Silicon Valley in Shoreditch – Silicon Roundabout etc. – aren't working." Cellan-Jones isn't convinced by the Silicon Roundabout phenomenon either: "I'm sceptical about the East London set; despite the buzz about the Silicon Roundabout and what's going on there, it's small-scale. A few guys in a garage, really." Although British companies might not be so quick to reward impressive work from competitors, Kat Hannaford, UK contributing editor for Gizmodo, argues that there's a lot of support for home-grown tech from the UK public. "Call it British eccentricity if you will, but there's a real sense of supporting British companies and rewarding the forward-thinkers here. Likewise, lambasting those who rest on their laurels and simply churn out the same old tired iAccessory year after year," she said. Back to basics After all our years of inventing the television, the telephone, the computer and the internet, Hannaford reckons Britain should be looking to the technology innards for where British innovation is headed now. "After years of the home audio industry stealing headlines for British innovation, we're beginning to see a shift to the technology less tangible -- specifically, apps, software and chips. "Some of the breakaway apps on the various platforms have come from British soil - Shazam being one of them - along with multimillion-selling games from the likes of Rockstar, Criterion and Rare." There's also a burgeoning community of tech companies based in Cambridge that shouldn't be ignored. Cellan-Jones remembers the early days, saying, "It'd be wrong to overlook the Cambridge cluster, which is only now really reaching critical mass. "Twenty years ago people were talking about the Cambridge phenomenon and saying that it just needs a company worth at least £3 billion to make it; well, now it has several companies worth that and more – ARM, Cambridge Radio… so it's beginning to happen there." Indeed, ARM has come up whenever we've talked to industry insiders about the future of British tech. When asked which British tech company he most admired, Cellan-Jones didn't hesitate: "ARM. I've gotta say it; it's proved its value, not sold out and all the time showing innovation and endurance." In other words, ARM has applied a bit of elbow grease, shown a stiff upper lip and relied on the healing powers of a nice cup of tea when times have been hard, if you like your processors with a healthy does of British cliché. Miles also cites ARM as his top British tech company: "I'd say the company that's been most influential during my career is ARM; it's been instrumental in creating the technology we use today." "With ARM rumoured to be supplying the next iPhone with its asskickin' chipset, British silicon is in huge demand," adds Hannaford, pointing out that things look set to get better and better for the chip company. But although ARM is proving the leading light in terms of one quite specific area of the technological ecosystem, others are forging ahead and looking way into the future with their ideas and ideals. "You've got to admire Richard Branson and what he's doing with Virgin Galactic; he's really looking at the next frontier," said Miles. Indeed, Virgin Galactic is looking to the final frontier and after decades of the US and Russia battling it out for our skies, having a Briton spearheading the consumer-space-travel campaign is quite something, despite the fact that much of the actual action will take place in the US. "With Virgin Galactic, Branson isn't doing what most companies do and looking at the next five years; he's investing in the next 50." You love it The one thing that everyone agrees on is that the appetite for technology has grown and grown in Britain over the past few years. Where once it was the realm of nerds and geeks, microserfs and code monkeys, technology is now everywhere you look. "Over the eight years we've been running, Pocket-Lint has grown despite there being more tech players. The only conclusion to draw is that interest in technology is growing – which you can plainly see from the growing attention from the mainstream media. There's definitely an appetite for everything from videogames to smartphones." "There's been a change in the culture towards starting businesses," adds Cellan-Jones. "Particularly post the dotcom bubble in the UK. There's certainly a better climate for entrepreneurship and a lot of excitement around tech." But before you start cracking out the bunting, he concluded: "It's the slightly fluffy side of tech that we're excited about here while engineers struggle to get recognition. "We're great at the fluffy creative marketing; but not so much at the science and engineering business." While we're not going to suggest you buy your nearest tech engineer a drink (although that would be awfully good of you, old sport), it wouldn't hurt to support British tech and the wonderfully clever people behind it where you can; after all, TechRadar's Brit Week has hopefully shown that there's plenty to be excited about. 
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| In Depth: PC water cooling guide: all you need to know Posted: 08 May 2011 05:00 AM PDT Remember the heady days of the Pentium 4, when a single CPU could generate enough heat to keep you warm through winter? They were great for cutting down on household utility bills, but as soon as the weather started to improve, systems would fall over as the mercury rose. They were also slow, and their performance aged quickly. As a result, many of us looked to watercooling to bring down core temperatures. This in turn reduced noise and increased the useful lifespan of our components by just a few months through overclocking. To meet demand, early online component stores were stocked full of arcane heatsinks, boasting hand-milled plates and liquid cooling that looked like something ripped off the back of a refrigerator. The weirder, the better. A quick flick through the catalogue of any online retailer now, though, suggests that the golden age of cooling is over. It's almost impossible to find a TEC-based chiller, and there's clearly no demand for funky accoutrements, such as UV lighting and external tanks. It's not surprising. The most recent, fastest quad-core processors won't even make an Eskimo sweat. This is due to the move to ever-more ludicrous efficiency and 32nm manufacturing techniques. Air coolers are far more effective and quieter than they ever used to be, and overclocking is hardly a necessity when a three-year-old CPU can cope with the latest games. Or so received wisdom goes. The joy of watercooling has never been about its practical value. It's about taking a PC system and personalising it in ways that lesser mortals can't even imagine. It's about mixing electronics and liquids with panache and bravado and creating something that isn't a slowly sparking mess. It's also - as it always has been - about beating The Man. Sure, you can buy a shiny new four or six core processor for £150 and get top performance with just a bit of heat paste, but where's the satisfaction in that? How much more impressive is it to hit the same benchmark score for half the price? It's possible, and we're going to show you how to do it.
One of the historical drawbacks of watercooling is that it's tended to be quite expensive. Saving £70 on a CPU by spending £300 on a radiator and pump might earn you a certain caché in some circles, but it won't earn you the Nobel Prize for Economics. To make matters worse, while watercooling was essential for overclocking, many people dabbled in it to silence noisy PCs for media centre work. Unfortunately, many self-built systems tended to be as loud, if not louder, than a decent fan. Cool trends If you've been watching closely, though, you might have noticed one of the more intriguing trends in component sales that's been going on recently. There's been a dramatic drop in the cost of self-contained CPU water cooling kits. These units are relatively new, and are designed to make watercooling simple, cheap and risk-free.
If you've not seen one before, these boxey devices combine everything you need for watercooling in a single unit. The bulky part will contain a pump, reservoir, radiator and a fan which bolts onto the rear exhaust ports of your case. The other end is attached to a CPU block. Everything is filled with fluid and sealed in the factory, so you don't need to risk getting your PC wet or worry about checking the levels and refilling at a later date. Pioneered by Canadian outfit CoolIT Systems, the first self-contained coolers appeared four years ago based on designs used in server farms. These original models came with a clever control panel, but overall it had two significant flaws: it was expensive and arguably less effective than a run of the mill £20 air cooler at keeping temperatures down. That was then, however. Now, several new revisions have vastly improved on the original design, which has been further pushed on by competition from the likes of Asetek. Modern all-in-ones are everything they promised they'd be. Starting at around the same price as a high-end heatsink of the traditional variety, the self-contained watercoolers of today are whisper quiet and can chill a chip at one thousand paces. Cooler Master has even gone one further, building a self-contained Peltier-powered CPU cooler, the V10.
CoolIT, meanwhile, has just gone into partnership with Corsair to increase the market for its all-in-ones, and the first product of the union is the H60. Staying breezy While the watercooling purist may look upon these all-in-ones with scorn, they do work and, cost-wise, are a bargain. There's only a £10 difference between a midrange air cooler and the H60, for example, and you'll not only get better performance from the latter it looks a lot better too. As far as designing a complete system goes, though, the only thing you need to consider is that the unit which replaces a rear case fan does contain the radiator from the CPU, which is cooled by drawing air across it towards the vent. So if you have a lot of other hot components, you'll need to make sure they aren't heating up the inside of your case to the point of rendering the CPU cooler useless. In other words, remember that just because you have one of these, don't think you can skimp on fans elsewhere. When it all goes Pete Tong So you've sprung a leak, and your PC has begun gently sparking away to itself. That's not good is it? First things first, don't panic. Although water and electricity aren't known as the best of bedfellows, the damage is probably not as bad as you think. The first thing you should do is pull the plug. Hit the main trip switch on your fuse box. Even turning a PSU off using the power switch around the back may not stop it drawing current, so removing the cable is the only safe option. Pull the ATX connector from the motherboard too, just to be sure. Your next job is to dry everything thoroughly. Mop up any obvious spillages with an old cloth, and then leave your machine in a warm place. Ideally, you should take components such as the motherboard out and dry them separately, but 24 hours next to a radiator should do the job. With a bit of luck, that should be all you need to do, and your PC will work when you boot up, but do remember two things. First, the obvious: fix the leak and make sure the cooling system is working properly before you plug everything back in. Second, remember that the power supply is where the big voltages are, and that underneath the cover there are a lot of capacitors, which store up electricity for various reasons. If the PSU is wet, then, take extra care. In the old days, when PSUs were sited at the top of the case, this wasn't so much of a problem. New cases, though, tend to put the power supply at the bottom, exactly where water will gather. How easy is water cooling? Fitting a self-contained watercooler is only marginally more complicated than attaching a standard heatsink. The main complication is that the CPU block is always attached to the radiator and fan assembly, so manoeuvring the two into position can be quite a tricky process. A PC case with access to the back of the motherboard is essential, but even then it's easy to pull a bit too hard and unhook a pipe - which means writing the whole kit off. Building your own system isn't hard, per se, but you do need a lot of patience to assemble carefully, tie up pipes safely and check all the seals as you go. The biggest danger to any watercooling set-up is rushing it and botching the job.
A minor point before we begin, but the term watercooling is a slight misnomer. The fluid that's pumped around a liquid chilled PC is rarely just a couple of Hs with a bit of O. Usually it's mixed with some sort of additive in order to improve efficiency and prevent limescale build up or corrosion of the plastic parts inside your system. You could use distilled water - if you were sure that there's absolutely no mineral content that might get left behind in the radiator - but it's really not worth the long term risk. Especially when coolants come in a range of funky colours. That minor quibble aside, all water systems are based around a similar set of components - a pump, reservoir, heat transfer block, piping, a radiator and fan. They vary in size from giant external towers like the Zalman Reserator V2 series to compact all-in-ones like the CoolIT Eco ALC, but the general principle is always the same.
The coolant (let's just call it water for simplicity) is poured into a reservoir or tank, which in turn is connected to a pump unit. The reservoir level will need checking and topping up every once in a while, as water will evaporate thanks to the heat, and it's a good idea to drain the whole thing and clean it every six months or so too. The pump pushes the fluid out through a network of pipes to a block of highly conductive metal, usually made from copper or aluminium. This block has one finely milled side, which is clamped on top of the CPU - or GPU or Northbridge controller chip on older motherboards - and has narrow channels running through its core. The water flows through these channels, absorbing heat from the rest of the material, and then exits the CPU block on its way to a radiator. At the radiator, the water is pushed through a network of even narrower channels, which are cooled by having air blown over them by a fan. It is possible to build a passive watercooling system, like the Reserator V2 mentioned above, but they tend to be larger in order to give the water enough time to cool down to match room temperature, and are less efficient. The water then flows back to the reservoir and begins its journey again. Efficiency is king
The obvious flaw with watercooling is that even with a fan assisted radiator, you can't cool the fluid below air temperature. It's possible to find a radiator that's connected to a more sophisticated heat exchanger, like a TEC unit or a compressor of the type more commonly seen in refrigerators. These are relatively expensive, though, and increasingly hard to get hold of as they fall out of fashion. Just because a normal watercooling system can't drop the core temperatures below zero though, doesn't mean that you might as well stick with an air cooler - the important point is that they're very efficient, keeping chips colder for longer while they're working under load, and getting them back down to room temperature faster once they start to idle. For most systems, there are two ways of improving the cooling capacity: you can either increase the fan speed by the radiator or turn up the water pressure on the pump control. Either option will increase the noise levels, and it's important to read reviews and get recommendations before you invest in a potentially pricey system. I've tested pump units that are not only noisier than any standard system fan, they have a similar effect on the bladder to standing beside a large fountain too. You don't really want that if you find yourself stuck for eight hours with a particularly intransigent raid leader, do you? Designed for life With those parameters, of course, there are lots of permutations when it comes to the kit you can buy, although the choice is a lot more limited than it used to be in the past. Even quietpc.com, which pioneered sales of watercooling components no more than a few years ago, has a relatively small selection of Zalman kit on its site now. Only really niche specialists, such as watercoolinguk.co.uk, carry much in the way of choice of components if you want to build a system yourself these days. It's not essential to get parts for an entire system from the same manufacturer, but several websites carry a lot of XSPC gear either as separates or complete kits, which makes it one of the best brands to watch out for. In terms of design, the most popular variants that have been settled on are self-contained CPU coolers or reservoirs that sit inside two or three drive bays at the front of the PC, which have a built in pump and controls that become part of the front panel. Apart from adding a certain je n'ai sais quoi to your machine, it means the whole thing is contained within the case. Otherwise, you'll need to pipe water out of the back of the case to cool it. Pumping action
Drive bay pumps tend to be noisier than external units, because they use smaller motors and vibrations will be magnified by the case itself, but they do have the advantage of taking up less room and leaving your PC relatively portable still, if somewhat heavier than before. There's also less chance of tripping over external units and spraying coolant on the cat (there's a joke right there - Ed). Connecting the various parts of a watercooling system up is generally straightforward. Most are designed for the hoses to sit over rubber seals and be locked into place with jubilee clips. What's important to remember when designing your system is that if you're planning on using a watercooler for overclocking your CPU, you may need to consider heat at other points on the motherboard too. Processors from AMD's Black Edition series or Intel's Extreme Editions have unlocked multipliers which means they can be tweaked independently of other components, but for anything else you're going to be raising bus speeds across the board. That means you might want to add in watercooled heatsinks for your RAM and graphics card, which is considerably trickier than just chilling a processor.
For a start, you'll need to get the flow of water around the inside of your case right, running it over cooler components first and possibly adding a second radiator to drop the temperatures between - say - the GPU and CPU. It's a bad idea to take fluid that's already warmed up and run it over a cooler component if you're trying to reduce its temperature. At the very least, you'll need a double width radiator to disperse the heat. These usually bolt over two fan slots at the top of the case and are slightly noisier than a single unit. In principle, that's all there is to watercooling. Every system is unique, and it's a good idea to clip back errant hoses with cable tidies to stop them snagging if you need to pull out a part, but it's really not as complex as you might think, and modern systems are usually well-designed when it comes to preventing leaks. Worth the pain? Is it actually worth it, though? After all, a full kit can cost over £200, and you'll need a decent motherboard to push the CPU to any great extent too. Some people seem to think so. All Cyberpower PCs, for example, are sold with watercoolers as standard. We asked production manager David Scott why that is: "Any water cooling cooler we have used will allow you to overclock a PC," he said. "And the price of self-contained units are practically the same price as a decent air cooler anyway. The risk of water damage on a self-contained unit is very low, and because of this most manufacturers will guarantee the warranty on the parts affected by a leak. Custom built kits look amazing and you can get top end performance that only cryogenics (LN2 or Phase-Change) will beat." How good is it? Well, it can certainly help to close the gap between AMD and Intel, for example. Using a watercooled rig to overclock a six core Phenom II 1100T (£200) to 4GHz, we brought it within 16 per cent of a top-end Core i7 2600K (£260) in gaming and video encode tests. More impressive, however, was taking a £50 Athlon II 255 chip and giving it the water treatment and a few BIOS tweaks, had it running at 3.9GHz and easily matching any dual core Phenom II in the benchmarks. That's performance enough to justify the cost of a self-contained unit, and potentially a great way to revive an ageing PC. Ultimately, though, watercooling isn't about cost. It's about the joy of building and tweaking a PC and knowing that, in these days of superfast stock CPUs and tablets, there's still space to create something unique. Something slicker? If the main reason you're interested in watercooling is to reduce the sound of noisy fans, why not make your PC completely silent by submerging it in oil? Stripping your system components of all moving parts and then sinking them to the bottom of a tank of mineral oil is a well-known way to achieve the most consistently low temperatures possible. The oil itself is non-conductive and doesn't harm components, and so long as the tank is large enough that heat is shifted away to the surface by natural convection currents, you won't need any pumps. That does mean that oil is no use for extreme overclocking, because you can't chill components below ambient room temperature. But for a media centre, say, it's near perfect - except for the fact that any peripherals that plug directly into the motherboard are likely to make a bit of a mess on your living room carpet. Oil cooling has been around for ages. The early Cray 2 supercomputers, for example, were kept at stable temperatures using this technique and US start-up Green Revolution Computing is pushing the technology for data centres, where it can be considerably cheaper than CPU fans coolers and banks of air conditioning. While mineral oil is preferred for this type of heat management because of its non-corrosive nature, it can be hard to get hold of in the UK in large enough quantities to be practical. Emptying individual bottles of baby oil into a 30 litre tank, for example, would soon get quite expensive. Other oils can be used, but the drawback is usually that they smell. Vegetable oil, for example, makes a fine coolant - so long as you don't mind your PC smelling like chips. Something a little colder?
The big daddy of component cooling remains, of course, liquid nitrogen, or LN2 to its friends. Contrary to popular belief, liquid nitrogen is not the coldest fluid known to man, that honour goes to helium which has a boiling point 100 degrees lower than that of LN2, but nitrogen is the PC enthusiast's coolant of choice because it turns into a gas at -196 °C and is relatively cheap and easy to purchase - providing you have a cryogenically safe Dewar flask and convince your local industrial chemical supplier that you're capable of handling it safely, that is. Using LN2 to sub-zero temperatures, hardcore overclockers are able to hit clockspeeds of over 8GHz on a Cedar Mill Intel Celeron chip. The cooling effect is achieved by attaching a flat bottomed tube, or 'pot', in the heatsink position which can be filled with LN2 just before the CPU is switched on. It's not much use for day-to-day cooling, as even a full pot will evaporate in minutes. While it sounds simple, there's a lot more to it than that. For a start, the engineering of the pot has to be immaculate. Any minute ridges on the surface of the CPU or base of the pot could cause the chip to crack when the LN2 is poured in. Then there's the problem of condensation: as water forms on the surface of the components, it can create short circuits and damage the system. In fact, it often takes months of preparation to get a board and CPU working stably with LN2. Practice runs with mechanical phase change machines at slightly higher temperatures will be needed to test the thresholds of the equipment, and motherboards have to be customised with soldered in resisters to get the kinds of voltages that BIOSes just don't allow, but are needed to go several gigahertz above the operating limits. As far as we know, there are no recorded episodes of overclockers injuring themselves by using LN2, and when handled correctly the liquid itself can be quite safe. Arguably, the best way to indulge in LN2 overclocking would be completely naked, since the liquid itself boils off of skin before it can do any harm - thankfully though, there are no public records of naked overclockers, although a YouTube video is bound to turn up now. That said, it's not something we'd advise you to try without a lot of experience in both handling dangerous chemicals and overclocking PCs. Even the experts are shaken by LN2's reputation and terrifying characteristics, and many of the best stick to slightly less challenging techniques like using dry ice for equally impressive results. 
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| Review: Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus HD Posted: 08 May 2011 04:00 AM PDT Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus HD claims to be the 'world's first 4D video editing program'. A bold claim, but it goes on to explain that the fourth dimension is 'speed', as this is the quickest and most resource-light version yet. It certainly feels quicker than previous versions and proved faster than both Adobe Premier Elements 9 and CyberLink PowerDirector 9. The main screen has a look in keeping with the majority of other suites, with a nice amount of space for the playback panel, as well as an attractive Timeline display. We like the layout of this package, as there is enough in the basic outline to edit and export videos without it getting too complicated, while experienced users can locate Advanced Tools from the toolbar. We found importing video was quick and editing a movie together is relatively simple. Playback proved satisfactory with no sign of lagging, while rendering and exporting was better than in the past. This is the first video-editing suite we've come across that has full support for 3D video camcorders. You can import 3D footage, as well as make the most of the array of effects that are bundled with the software. It's not the only 3D suite on the market, but it's certainly one of the cheapest. There is even a pair of 3D glasses included in the box. You'll need a laptop with a screen that runs at 120Hz or, as in our case, an external monitor, and even then you'll find it can be tricky to get a perfect image. There are plenty of other new features on offer, such as uploading videos to Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo, in Full HD. If you don't need the full-blown package, there is a Classic version aimed at first-time users which costs £60 (inc. VAT). Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus HD is a well-rounded package, but is better suited to those with editing experience. The 3D features are fun and work really well, opening up options the other packages here simply can't offer. 
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| Posted: 08 May 2011 03:30 AM PDT HP is currently the world's largest laptop manufacturer. The company produces a broad range of laptops, including consumer machines, but here we take a look at one of their business ultraportables, the excellent EliteBook 2540p. While the laptop may lack the gorgeous design of the Apple MacBook Air and Dell Adamo XPS, this machine is all about performance and portability. As a result, it comes up against the Sony VAIO Z Series. Performance is excellent (just beating the Sony), thanks to the very powerful Intel Core i7 640UM processor. The laptop sailed through all our benchmarking tests and proved to be as powerful as a high-end multimedia machine in everyday performance. If your work requires you to run resource-intensive programs concurrently, this is the machine for you. Graphically this isn't the case, however, and the integrated graphics card only allows light photo editing or entry-level gaming. If you need power for high definition (HD) video editing, for example, the MacBook Air or Sony VAIO is the better option. Benchmarks Battery life: 340 minutes The EliteBook can best be described as functional. The lid and chassis are both crafted from metal and feel rock-solid, with the result that this is a tough laptop for the daily commute. Small screen At 12.1-inches, the laptop's screen is quite small at this price, making it more compact and easier to carry than the others, but only just. A matt coating means no reflections in bright light, but colour reproduction isn't nearly as good as the Sony or Apple here, so it's not great for film lovers.
The keyboard is, despite its size, spacious and extremely comfortable to use. Typing for long periods is a pleasure, thanks to its extreme firmness, and the touchpad is also responsive, although very squashy click buttons won't be to everyone's taste. Connectivity is second to none with even a modem port included, but a DisplayPort replaces the more common HDMI. This will suit business users, but not those who wish to hook their laptop up to an HDTV at home. An impressive array of features also includes a fingerprint reader and even the keyboard is spill-resistant. Finally, portability impresses and, even though the EliteBook is marginally heavier than the rest here, the 340-minute battery life is only beaten by the Sony Z Series. The EliteBook 2450p is an excellent business tool with great build quality and excellent usability. But where it really shines is everyday performance. 
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| Posted: 08 May 2011 03:00 AM PDT The Dell Adamo XPS was released to great a fanfare a while back courtesy of its slim, high-end design. A year or so on and the laptop has crashed in price, making it a great option for those out to make a (reasonably) affordable style statement. Unfortunately, however, Dell has cut a few corners in the making of this concept machine. Dell has taken a unique approach in the design. To open the laptop you brush a finger over the edge of the lid which then unlocks it. As you lift the screen the keyboard folds out of a recess (flush to the panel) in which it's been parked. The action works well and feels good to use. When open, the keyboard hinge is located at the bottom of the screen, but actually sits high off your desk, causing a wedge-shaped empty space under the laptop. In theory, this should make it easier for air to cool the laptop from underneath, but the machine still got surprisingly hot.
While the design is unique, it does look awkward, and not exactly aesthetically pleasing. Spacious keyboard Nevertheless, a benefit of this is the comfortable typing angle of the keyboard, which is generally excellent. The keys are nicely spread apart and have a succinct action that's a pleasure to use. The F and J keys don't feature the usual marks to indicate where your index fingers should sit, and occasionally it's easy to get lost on the board. The 13.4-inch screen features a 1366 x 768-pixel resolution. It is bright and detailed, but features a very slight green tinge, making it, like the HP EliteBook 2540p, unsuited to multimedia work. Like the Apple MacBook Air a shiny screen coating makes the display irritating to view in bright light conditions. A CULV Intel Core 2 Duo processor provides limited performance, and your power requirements should be limited to surfing the web and creating office documents. If you're after real power, the HP EliteBook or Sony VAIO VPCZ13M9E/B are the laptops to consider. Benchmarks Battery life: 98 minutes Graphical performance is also poor, and you'll be limited to consuming media rather than creating it. A 128GB hard drive will also mean you'll need to regularly move data to an external hard drive. At 11mm, the laptop is incredibly thin, so carrying it around is no problem at all, but the 98-minute battery life is terrible. It's important not to criticise the Dell for being something that it's not supposed to be. It was designed as a high-end concept ultraportable and, on this level, it succeeds – largely thanks to the incredible design. Unfortunately, performance and battery life have been the casualties, but that may not be a problem for everyone. 
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| Buying Guide: Graphics card upgrade: your options explained Posted: 08 May 2011 03:00 AM PDT The graphics card is the racehorse of your PC components stable. It's a high-value add-in board that's traditionally done one thing and one thing only: let you play games with all the latest graphical wizardry. Increasingly though, the graphics card is becoming far more than just a gamer's luxury. With architecture improving year on year, 3D graphics aren't the only thing your discrete GPU can do. It can now be used to enhance your web browsing experience and enjoyment of high-definition media, let you explore your creative side with enhancements for productivity software and even help cure terminal diseases through projects like Folding@home. So as well as producing some stunning visuals, your graphics card can also help save lives. In the last decade, GPUs have been following in the footsteps of the CPU market, with increased core and thread counts. Speed in MHz or GHz is no longer the only measure of a chip's power, whether it's a GPU or a CPU. What counts now is the number of cores, and how much data the chip can process at any one time. In CPU terms, the maximum on the desktop is six cores and 12 threads, and a full-fat 12 cores in the server space. The top-end Nvidia GPU – the GeForce GTX 580 – has 512 CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) cores. Meanwhile, the AMD Radeon HD 6970 has 1,536 shader processors, all of which are simple processors capable of taking on tasks such as video encoding, where some simple parallel processing is needed to enhance speed. Nvidia was first to take this on with its CUDA cores, which let programmers write code in industry-standard languages such as C++. This code is run using all the shader processors (or CUDA cores) in Nvidia's GTX 8-series onwards. Microsoft's latest update to its graphics API – DirectX 11, has done a similar thing with its Compute feature, which enables general purpose applications to run through a DirectX-capable GPU rather than taxing the processor. If the GPU is becoming ever more powerful, why is there such doom and gloom around the discrete graphics card market? According to Intel and AMD, the future is fusion. Are integrated graphics the next big step in the great graphics war?
There are many reasons to be upbeat about the future of discrete graphics cards. There isn't going to be a new games console release for another couple of years now, and the mid-range cards of today are far superior to anything the Xbox 360 or PS3 contain, so the PC is the platform to go for if you want to see the top releases looking their best. Integrated graphics (the graphics processing power that traditionally comes with your processor chipset combination of CPU and motherboard) are catching up, though. They're changing as well – moving from the motherboard onto the CPU. All the big boys are getting involved. First there was Intel and its Arrandale processors, which packaged a GPU and CPU on the same chip. Then came the company's Sandy Bridge, with its fully integrated processor graphics. AMD has recently released its first Fusion board to the world, housing a tiny CPU and GPU setup – the first new CPU architecture we've seen from the company in years. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas in January, Nvidia announced Project Denver, its own collaboration with ARM to create a powerful desktop CPU with Nvidia's GPU architecture built right in. This may not shake up the high end of the discrete graphics market – after all, the latest 3D games are still going to need a power-hungry graphics card sitting in that PCI Express slot – but the value end of the market is going to change. Processor graphics will be more than capable of coping with high definition video, encoding and casual gaming, so why would you choose to spend £50 on a separate card that will do the same job? That said, times move quickly in the graphics card market, and tomorrow's £50 GPU will make processor graphics weep. AMD and Nvidia will be launching a slew of low-end cards to prop up their latest HD 6xxx and 5xx series respectively. The high end will probably see the biggest battle. Nvidia's GTX 580 is currently top dog, but AMD is due to release its dual-GPU Antilles behemoth in the next few months, possibly at the CeBIT show in Germany. Details are scarce, but if AMD follows the example set by its previous dual-GPU releases, you can expect two Cayman Pro GPUs wired into one slice of AMD-red PCB.
Those are the chips powering the superlative Radeon HD 6950, and will make for one hell of a card. Don't expect Nvidia to be keeping quiet, though. When we spoke with Tom Petersen, the company's Director of Technical Marketing, at the secretive preview of the GTX 580 last year, we asked if he expected to see a dual-GPU Fermi card any time soon. He explained that, now the thermal issues seen in the first high-end Fermi card (the GTX 480) had been solved in the GTX 580 and GTX 570, there really wasn't a barrier any more. So pretend to be surprised when Nvidia announces a GTX 595 just as AMD starts to get excited about its Antilles card. Three top graphics card choices Zotac GTX 580 AMP
On the basis that money is no object in your search for graphics perfection, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more impressive pixel-pusher than Zotac's recently launched, overclocked GTX 580 AMP. This souped-up version of Nvidia's GPU is the fastest thing on two PCIe power cables. Based almost entirely on the first Fermi card, the GTX 480, it's undoubtedly what the brand wanted to release originally. The GTX 480 had a cutdown version of its low-yielding GF 100, with one streaming microprocessor turned off. That meant a lowly 480 CUDA cores instead of the full 512 we were expecting. The GTX 580 came out of nowhere last year with the full complement, plus nifty power and cooling advances. So it's quicker, cooler, quieter and far more power-efficient. In short, it's just better. The AMP version is ever so slightly overclocked, but will also give a little more headroom should you wish to push it further. At these speeds though, you won't need to for a few years at least. Verdict: 4.5/5 Asus GTX 460 Top 768MB
We've already seen the stock GTX 460 768MB, and now it's the turn of the overclocked cards in the shape of Asus' GTX 460 768MB TOP edition. The GTX 460 looks set to be the most successful iteration of the Fermi architecture that Nvidia has released to date. That's mainly thanks to a redesigned chip, still based on the same technology that made the GTX 480 such a blisteringly fast, and hot, card. This new GF104 GPU is a far more streamlined chip compared to the fairly bestial GF100. It still has the same basic premise running through it, but more cores have been squeezed into fewer streaming microprocessors (SMs) and more texture and special funtion units have been jammed in there too. Verdict: 3.5/5 Read the full Asus GTX 460 Top 768MB review Sapphire Radeon HD 6950
AMD's Radeon HD 6950 is the must-have card of the moment, its price tag hitting the sweet spot in terms of cost/performance ratios. The card is based on AMD's latest Cayman GPU, and with its redesigned approach to tessellation, offers some serious competition for the far more expensive GTX 570. It's also the only card under £250 that can take on the tessellation-heavy Metro 2033 at an eye-bleeding 2,560 x 1,600 resolution and still come out smiling. The Cayman GPU's twin tessellation engines make the HD 6950 an excellent DirectX 11 card. On the DX 10 benchmarks it loses ground to the new GTX 560 Ti from Nvidia, but the AMD card has the better scores in the newest titles and comes with an impressive trick up its sleeve. With a simple BIOS flash you can upgrade your HD 6950 and turn it into an HD 6970 – a £270 card – for free. That's not an overclock; it's unlocking dormant parts of the GPU and setting them free. That makes it the card of choice right now. Verdict: 5/5
With any sort of gaming, the biggest performance boost you can get is by making a change to your graphics card. However, that doesn't mean you need to kick your existing card into touch and dip your hand into your wallet to fund a quicker one. Overclocking your graphics card is the quickest, cheapest and (most likely) easiest way to wring a little extra performance out of your current GPU. It was originally seen as a way to make older components competitive for longer, whereas it's now an expected consideration when you're choosing any new graphics card. It's also not as dangerous as it once was; it's fairly difficult to brick a GPU with the simple overclocking you can do in Windows. Generally speaking, you'll be lucky to get a 10 per cent increase in performance, but those precious few extra frames per second can mean the difference between almost unplayable choppiness and smooth, slick action. To get started, all you need is a software tool like MSI's Afterburner, a graphics stress test such as Heaven 2.1 and a bit of patience. With a few cards, including the Radeon HD 6950 we've already talked about, it's possible to make some BIOS tweaks to garner a boost in performance. The HD 6950, for example, runs the same GPU as the HD 6970. All that's different is that the chip was chosen to go in the lower-price card and has some features turned off. Normally, these changes are hard-wired out of the GPU, but AMD decided to implement the castration with software pincers only, making for easy reversal. This is an extremely rare state of affairs though, and we haven't seen similar things happen in the GPU game for years. Another way to improve things is by taking the more heavy-handed approach of adding a second GPU to the equation. Multi-GPU graphics have come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of years. Now we're seeing performance with a second card hit the 2x boost we'd always hoped for – and even more in some cases. The difficulty is with the motherboard. You need one that supports multi-GPU and, unfortunately, that's a tougher, more expensive journey if you want to go down the Nvidia SLI route. However, most boards will support AMD's CrossFire technology as standard on extra PCIe lanes, so that's becoming far more popular. Easy overclocking 1. The setup
MSI's Afterburner has an impressive hardware monitoring display. Detach this from the main console and it will give you a better view. Start up the Heaven 2.1 benchmark in Windowed mode, at a lower resolution than your desktop, but with high settings. This will stress your GPU as you apply the overclock to help you judge stability. If there are no graphical glitches on-screen, the OC is stable. 2. The push
You'll need to approach the memory and GPU overclocking of your card separately to judge the maximum overclock on each. Start with the memory and push the slider up in 5MHz increments. After each step, watch the Heaven benchmark closely for artefacts. Keep doing this until you see problems, then step back the OC until they go. Reset the memory slider. Repeat for the processor clock. 3. The stress
Once you've discovered the top overclock for the GPU and memory clocks, set both sliders to their maximums and watch the benchmark. You'll have to knock back the relevant sliders to create a stable OC. Pixel-sized artefacts mean there's a memory problem, and bright colour blocks represent GPU issues. When there are no artefacts, your OC is stable. Now stress test it in fullscreen mode to make sure. 
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| Posted: 08 May 2011 02:30 AM PDT The Onkyo BD-SP808 THX-certified Blu-ray player has purpose. Designed from the rivets up to be nothing less than a bad-ass home theatre disc spinner, it's the designated driver for the brand's current line up of THX AV receivers and pre/power PR-SC5508/PA-MC5500 combo. It doesn't hold much truck with 3D or IPTV network portals and that's the point: it's all about movies and music. Think of the Onkyo BD-SP808 as the bastard offspring of Harry Knowles and Katherine Jenkins. Build quality is outstanding, with good old-fashioned attention to detail. The player has a solid machined fascia and rigid cover, ensuring that unwarranted resonances and wobbles just don't get a look in. The drive mechanism has been centre-mounted, for all the right reasons. The front fascia offers up an SD card slot and a fairy-tree assortment of status lights. On the rear is an HDMI v1.3 output, component jacks, phono video out (answers on a postcard if you can think of any possible use for this), digital coax and optical audio ports, and Ethernet. With an eye to the custom install market, there's also an RS232 port, and IR input/output jacks if you want to operate the player to feed a secondary zone, but the unit is out of range of the supplied handset. However, you can use an IR relay from the likes of Xantech to control it. Clearly, the player isn't a Fancy Dan. Once powered up, the welcome screen is bleak and offers only a discreet invite to scour your connected home network. I accepted its terse invitation and seconds later was looking at my server list; all storage devices were found and accounted for, including my dedicated music server. A couple more clicks and I'm rocking to the OST of Wes Craven's Shocker (what can I say? I like it!). It's worth noting that it can take a little time for the SP808 to read the contents of a NAS – it all depends on how much material is on it. MP3 and WMA music playback is fairly rudimentary. There's no provision to display album art, with just a numerical list of tracks being the sum total of presentation on offer. At least you can navigate quickly using the colour keys on the remote. Needless to say, the player doesn't support FLAC, OGG or other esoteric formats. Extraneous video support basically extends to AVCHD played from SD card. Standard bearer
For a Blu-ray player, the SP808 is surprisingly adept with standard definition DVD. The opening sequence to Shakespeare in Love (Superbit Edition), featuring the slow spiral down into the Rose theatre, is rendered beautifully with no stepping or jaggies when upscaled to 1080p. Indeed, the player passes all the deinterlacing tests on Silicon optic's HQV DVD evaluation disc with flying colours. The Onkyo's native HD output is equally sweet, with exquisite fine detail. There's little overt video noise, so textures shine through; skin tones and glinting metal alike are totally convincing. The result is a supremely cinematic image. If your AV receiver is getting a little long in the tooth, it might be worth letting the SP808 do a lossless audio conversion to multichannel PCM. The player employs a 192 kHz/24-bit Audio DAC that is well above average, and its multichannel PCM output is seductively smooth. Similarly, for CD playback, I would advocate using the analogue stereo output rather than the HDMI connection. I laced the deck up so that I could select CD to listen to this feed sans video (keeping the HDMI feeds separate for home theatre use) and was delighted at the result. The output stage is custom-built by Onkyo and it shines. Overall, the BD-SP808 is a class act with a pure AV heart. While it's an undoubted shame that the deck is not compatible with Super Audio CDs or DVD-A discs, and has shonky multimedia file support, its overall performance is accomplished. Perhaps Onkyo should consider a Universal solution with its next Blu-ray outing, rather than just being predictable and throwing its lot in with the 3D crowd? Overall, the BD-SP808 is a 'must audition', especially for owners of related Onkyo THX kit. 
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| Brit Week: British computing: cakes, codes and creativity Posted: 08 May 2011 01:28 AM PDT It's all too easy to think of the computer as a piece of Americana. With the likes of Microsoft, Apple and IBM clouding our collective cultural memory, it's easy to overlook our small isle and its massive influence on modern computing. After all, it was British engineers, British inventors and British manufacturers who were very much responsible for inventing the humble PC, from cracking codes at Bletchley Park to counting cakes for Lyons Tea Rooms, the first company to put computers to business use. So why hasn't Britain stayed at the top of the technological game? "Most of the early research into computing was done in Britain," Tilly Blyth, Curator of Computing at the British Science Museum, tells us. "And not just building the hardware, Britain had a massive influence conceptually, too. Alan Turing's 1946 paper was absolutely fundamental in exploring the potential for computing. "But in the UK, we had lots of different industries all looking at computers and creating different kinds of machines; IBM became so huge and had such a large market internally in America that British companies simply couldn't compete." Still got it "But don't do us down," she warned. "There are still things we're incredibly well known for, that we do very well in Britain – and are internationally renowned for. ARM, for example, is doing incredible things with processors down in Cambridge. "It's just that we don't have those major consumer brands, we don't have any Apples or Microsofts." The American technology companies are very glamorous; they've got all kinds of gadgets and gizmos packaged up into neat and attractive parcels. That glamour is something British tech companies seem to lack; engineering and processors are more likely to conjure up images of elbow grease and grime than to come in a svelte box with an Apple logo. Perhaps British computing has an image problem. "I don't think technology has an image problem in the UK; it's become very cool to be into computing and know your way around a PC. But the problem here is creating the right kind of culture for innovation. "The Government can help to lead that, but it has to start earlier too; it's about education, learning more than just how to use existing programmes, learning how to think creatively with computing, how to free your imagination." Freedom and creativity It's true that computing has become ring-fenced, in a way. Operating systems are easier to use, but the flip side is that more functions are automatically decided for you. Long gone are the days of the Commodore and the Spectrum for which we'd lug about those enormous ring-bound books and write our own programmes as we went. "I think it's hard these days because computers have come so far – previous generations would only need basic knowledge but with the complexity of computing these days – it can be hard to find a way in to that at a young age," agrees Blyth. "Maybe the development of apps and web pages can get people interested in technology. The small things can really show what we can achieve with it; perhaps that's the way in. "And museums, of course. We're there to inspire people and open up ideas and show career paths that might not be immediately obvious. "For example, our Making Modern Communications gallery is focused on creativity and how users, not just manufacturers and engineers, have helped to mould and shape communications technology. It shows you the influence you personally can have." Unfortunately, Making Modern Communications won't be finished until around 2014; but it's never too soon to start thinking creatively about technology. A bit of good old British creativity – and perhaps a nice cup of tea – is just what British tech needs. 
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