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To say that I was very impressed by the Toshiba R700 on paper would be an understatement. Even with very little actual hands-on time with the notebook, I put it in my mobile buyer's guide as my pick for road warriors. I got Toshiba to send me a review unit to see if the R700 was as impressive in day-to-day use as it is on paper and found that while the configuration they sent me was not so great, the rest of the R700 lineup represents a fantastic value for money and is a great choice for mobile use.

Last night LG announced that it would be using NVIDIA's Tegra 2 in its Optimus Series smartphones starting in Q4 2010. The most exciting part of Tegra 2 is its use of two ARM Cortex A9 cores. The Cortex A9 is ARM's first out-of-order architecture and should deliver a performance boost similar, at worst, to what we saw in the ARM11 to Cortex A8 transition. But NVIDIA isn't the only company working on a Cortex A9 SoC.

Samsung was unwilling to talk about its Cortex A9 plans at CES, but today it announced the successor to Hummingbird: Orion. Samsung's 45nm Orion SoC implements two Cortex A9 cores running at 1GHz, each with a 64KB L1 cache (32KB+32KB) and a large 1MB shared L2 cache. At 45nm peak power consumption should be greater than the Cortex A8 based Hummingbird, but average power consumption may be lower thanks to the improvement in IPC that accompanies the Cortex A9. 

The GPU specs are unusual. Samsung lists Orion as having up to 5x the GPU performance of its previous generation SoC (presumably Hummingbird). We just finished talking about how great Hummingbird's PowerVR SGX 540 is, but to outperform it by 5x would require a serious GPU. I'm not sure I believe Samsung's claim. It is interesting that 5x is the same number NVIDIA used in its announcement yesterday.

TI is also working on a Cortex A9 based SoC – the OMAP 4. Due to ship in Q4 2010 with devices available in 2011 the OMAP 4 series sounds a lot like Orion. However OMAP 4 will use the SGX 540, not whatever higher performing option Samsung turned to for Orion.

If you like you keep your smartphones for a while, it seems like now would be the worst time to buy. Within 6 months you should have much faster options at your disposal (Update: it's unclear when Orion will ship, but at least NVIDIA will have dual core A9 based products in the market by then).

The Silent Pro series is one of the best-known series power supplies from Cooler Master, previously covering range from 500 to 700 watts. The range has now extended to 1000W with two models rated at 850W and 1000W, including flat connection cables found in higher power classes. Today we are looking at the latter. The 1000W model comes with a 5-year warranty, promises a maximum efficiency of 86%, and uses a single +12V rail. Excluding the motherboard connectors all cables are fully modular. Cooler Master also makes note of the high quality of selected components. Even though the housing of the PSU seems to be very similar to the smaller Silent Pro, a different ODM is responsible for the manufacture. On the next pages we will explore the design and topology and see if Cooler Master is able to keep their promises.

Our Ask the Experts series continues with another round of questions.

A couple of months ago we ran a webcast with Intel Fellow, Rich Uhlig, VMware Chief Platform Architect, Rich Brunner and myself. The goal was to talk about the past, present and future of virtualization. In preparation for the webcast we solicited questions from all of you, unfortunately we only had an hour during the webcast to address them. Rich Uhlig from Intel, Rich Brunner from VMware and our own Johan de Gelas all agreed to answer some of your questions in a 6 part series we're calling Ask the Experts. Each week we'll showcase three questions you guys asked about virtualization and provide answers from our panel of three experts. These responses haven't been edited and come straight from the experts.

If you'd like to see your question answered here leave it in the comments. While we can't guarantee we'll get to everything, we'll try to pick a few from the comments to answer as the weeks go on.

The pricetag of Lenovo's ThinkPad X100e has come down a couple of hundred dollars from its lofty perch when it entered the market more than six months ago, but it still remains a pricy alternative to CULV and Atom-based ultraportables. The X100e is saddled with AMD's outdated Congo platform, but is there more to a notebook than just the hardware under the hood? We think so, and we took the ThinkPad X100e for a spin to prove that the platform isn't always what counts.

When Fermi first launched on the desktop, we wondered how long it would take to trickle down to the lower end markets—and the mobile team also wondered if we'd ever see Fermi make it into notebooks. NVIDIA managed the latter with the GTX 480M, a lower clocked chip harvested from the full GF100. Now they're ready to launch the rest of their mobile lineup, with product schedule to start shipping later this month. Want to see what NVIDIA's brining to the table? We've got the official specs, though we do have to note that there are a few areas NVIDIA isn't discussing just yet. Regardless, we'll see plenty more Optimus Technology laptops and notebooks, and mobile GPUs may actually get the kick in the shorts we've been longing for!

Our readership is composed largely of people who prefer to roll their own, but recently we've had the opportunity to take a look at some interesting desktop machines from big name manufacturers. Now we tread on much more challenging terrain: can a hardware boutique like iBUYPOWER make a convincing case for buying a custom built machine instead of learning to build one yourself? That's what we aim to find out in our review of iBUYPOWER's new flagship, the Paladin XLC.

This summer has been a busy one for smartphone platforms. We started the summer with an Apple iOS update that remedied a number of the primary concerns with Apple’s iDevice platforms, followed by the launch of the iPhone 4. Meanwhile, the Android flagship crown was passed between no less than 4 devices (HTC Incredible, HTC EVO 4G, Droid X, and now arguably Droid 2 or Galaxy S phones), and Google’s OEM partners have slowly but surely rolled Froyo 2.2 out across their install base. 

Now it’s Research In Motion’s turn to deliver a summer update. Their answer is two pronged – BlackBerry 6 (that’s not a typo, they’ve named the new OS after the platform itself – BlackBerry 6), and a new device for AT&T, the BlackBerry Torch.

Lately, the BlackBerry platform as a whole has been showing its age. Browsing the web and checking email on a mobile device are no longer novelties that wow on their own – they’re old hat. Further, smartphone browsers have established a pretty steady cadence toward parity with the desktop in both speed and rendering, something the BlackBerry’s previous web browser was frequently criticized for failing to deliver – at all.

On carriers like Verizon, where BlackBerry once reigned supreme at the top of the smartphone food chain, it now faces direct competition with Android. The first Storm was a commercial failure, and the Storm 2 – though better – was still not the proverbial home run RIM needed.

One year and one acquisition later, and RIM is ready to play ball with a modern, WebKit based browser, revamped hardware design, and true capacitive multitouch screen (sans SurePress). How does the BlackBerry Torch fare? Read on for the full review.

We kick off our long overdue focus on AMD with an in-depth review of ASRock's 890FX Deluxe 4. Landing with an MSRP of 0, the Deluxe 4 slots in between the very best 890GX motherboards and the enthusiast 890FX based offerings. Have ASRock done enough to draw our attention away from the cheaper 890GX based ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 (circa 0)? It's a close call; the M4A89GTD Pro is the better clocker, while the Deluxe 4 proves to be the more versatile workhorse…

Late last week we pulled back the covers on Intel's next-generation Core architecture update: Sandy Bridge. Due out in Q1 2011, we learned a lot about Sandy Bridge's performance in our preview. Sandy Bridge will be the first high performance monolithic CPU/GPU from Intel. Its performance was generally noticeably better than the present generation of processors, both on the CPU and GPU side. If you haven't read the preview by now, I'd encourage you to do so.

One of the questions we got in response to the article was: what about Sandy Bridge for notebooks? While Sandy Bridge is pretty significant for mainstream quad-core desktops, it's even more tailored to the notebook space. I've put together some spec and roadmap information for those of you who might be looking for a new notebook early next year.