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In an unusual move, NVIDIA took the opportunity earlier this week to announce a new 600 series video card before they would be shipping it. Based on a pair of Kepler GK104 GPUs, the GeForce GTX 690 would be NVIDIA’s new flagship dual-GPU video card. And by all metrics it would be a doozy.

Packing a pair of high clocked, fully enabled GK104 GPUs, NVIDIA was targeting GTX 680 SLI performance in a single card, the kind dual-GPU card we haven’t seen in quite some time. GTX 690 would be a no compromise card – quieter and less power hungry than GTX 680 SLI, as fast as GTX 680 in single-GPU performance, and as fast as GTX 680 SLI in multi-GPU performance. And at 9 it would be the most expensive GeForce card yet.

After the announcement and based on the specs it was clear that GTX 690 had the potential, but could NVIDIA really pull this off? They could, and they did. Now let’s see how they did it.

The last time we reviewed one of SilverStone's Grandia enclosures, it was the GD04, and it was a review that launched the first major revamp of how we test cases. Since then SilverStone has kept the Grandia series relatively staid, but at CES they were showing off the new GD07 and GD08, and today we have the GD07 in house.

SilverStone has turned the GD07 into an enclosure designed to cram as much computer into as small a space as possible within reason, and the horizontal orientation seems to make it ideal for use as a media center enclosure. However, inside it also has a tremendous amount of storage capacity that suggests it could also be used as a media server. The GD04 was a fine case once you tweaked it and added a fan controller; is the GD07 ideal on the first go?

Product: Huawei Mediapad
Specifications: 1.2GHz dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, Android 3.2 Honeycomb, 7in LCD 1280×800 IPS LCD display, 5MP autofocus camera with 720p HD video, 1.3MP front-facing camera, up to 32GB expandable storage, 4,100mAh battery, 190x124x10.5mm, 390g
Price: £275

THE COMPACT Huawei Mediapad is a modest tablet that doesn’t want to compete with “the new Ipad” or the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1in tablet. Instead, the dinky slate hopes to tempt consumers looking for a handbag-friendly alternative, which it manages thanks to its slender frame and 7in screen. However, with its cheap price tag come a number of niggles, including its below-par rear facing camera, disappointing battery life and often over-complicated interface.

Hey, good looking
We were immediately impressed by the look and feel of the Huawei Mediapad, its aluminium casing screaming premium and feeling robust enough to handle scratches and tumbles. The tablet’s size is just as appealing, as at 190x124x10.5mm we even managed to squeeze it into our pocket, although it’s not that light at almost 400g.

In terms of ports and buttons, the Mediapad is fairly streamlined. You’ll find a volume rocker on the right hand side of the tablet, and a power button resting on the top. You’ll also find mini-HDMI and mini-USB ports on the bottom of the device, and a 3.5mm jack sitting on the top. However, despite the inclusion of a USB port, the device doesn’t come with support for USB charging, which means you’ll have to lug a heavy cable around with the slate.

We should mention, although we were given the mooted silver version in for review, the tablet will also be available in shadow black, classic brown and a garish passion pink model.

7in screen is impressive
The screen on the Mediapad is not the best we’ve had the pleasure of testing. However, the 7in 800×120 WXGA display is by no means one of the worst, either, boasting resolution usually found on larger 10in tablets. Its in-plane switching (IPS) LCD means it has impressive viewing angles and manages to look good in direct sunlight too, as long as the brightness is set at 100 per cent. The display also touts a decent 217 pixels per inch (ppi), which means it’s more crisp looking than the 7in 196ppi screen on the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

No taste of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich just yet
The Huawei Mediapad runs Android 3.2 Honeycomb out of the box, with an update to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) said to be coming. However, with no ICS on the tablet at launch some customers will no doubt be put off.

Android 3.2 Honeycomb might not be as old as Android 2.3 Gingerbread, but we can’t help but think it already feels more dated. The three shortcut buttons in the corner of the screen make navigating the tablet often over-complicated, despite the largely vanilla user interface. The lack of ICS also makes for a lack of apps such as the Google Chrome web browser, which, as we mentioned in our HTC One X review, is the best browser available on Android devices.

One nice thing we did come across though is Huawei Office, the company’s own mobile office suite. Ideal for professionals looking to be proactive while on their way into the office, this app enables users to create and edit Word, Excel and Powerpoint projects, and much to our surprise it does so really well.

For Intel, the road to their first real competitive smartphone SoC has been a long one. Shortly after joining AnandTech and beginning this journey writing about both smartphones and the SoC space, I remember hopping on a call with Anand and some Intel folks to talk about Moorestown. While we never did see Moorestown in a smartphone, we did see it in a few tablets, and even looked at performance in an OpenPeak Tablet at IDF 2011. Back then performance was more than competitive against the single core Cortex A8s in a number of other devices, but power profile, lack of ISP, video encode, decode, or PoP LPDDR2 support, and the number of discrete packages required to implement Moorestown, made it impossible to build a smartphone around. While Moorestown was never the success that Intel was hoping for, it paved the way for something that finally brings x86 both down to a place on the power-performance curve that until now has been dominated by ARM-powered SoCs, and includes all the things hanging off the edges that you need (ISP, encode, decode, integrated memory controller, etc), and it’s called Medfield. With Medfield, Intel finally has a real, bona fide SoC that is already in a number of devices shipping before the end of 2012.

In both an attempt to prove that its Medfield platform is competitive enough to ship in actual smartphones, and speed up the process of getting the platform to market, Intel created its own smartphone Form Factor Reference Design (FFRD). While the act of making a reference device is wholly unsurprising since it’s analogous to Qualcomm’s MSM MDPs or even TI’s OMAP Blaze MDP, what is surprising is its polish and aim. We’ve seen and talked about the FFRD a number of times before, including our first glimpse at IDF 2011 and numerous times since then. Led by Mike Bell (of Apple and Palm, formerly), a team at Intel with the mandate of making smartphone around Medfield created a highly polished device as both a demonstration platform for OEM customers and for sale directly to the customer through participating carriers. This FFRD has served as the basis for the first Medfield smartphones that will (and already are) shipping this year, including the Orange Santa Clara, Lenovo K800, and the device we’re looking at today, the Lava Xolo X900. Future Medfield-based devices will deviate from the FFRD design (like the upcoming Motorola device), but will still be based loosely on the whole Medfield platform. For now, in the form of the X900 we’re basically looking at the FFRD with almost no adulteration from carriers or other OEMs.

Read on for our review of the very first Intel x86 based Android smartphone!

The times, they are changing. In fact, the times have already changed, we're just waiting for the results. I remember the first time Intel brought me into a hotel room to show me their answer to AMD's Athlon 64 FX—the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. Back then the desktop race was hotly contested. Pushing the absolute limits of what could be done without a concern for power consumption was the name of the game. In the mid-2000s, the notebook started to take over. Just like the famous day when Apple announced that it was no longer a manufacturer of personal computers but a manufacturer of mobile devices, Intel came to a similar realization years prior when these slides were first shown at an IDF in 2005:

IDF 2005

IDF 2005

Intel is preparing for another major transition, similar to the one it brought to light seven years ago. The move will once again be motivated by mobility, and the transition will be away from the giant CPUs that currently power high-end desktops and notebooks to lower power, more integrated SoCs that find their way into tablets and smartphones. Intel won't leave the high-end market behind, but the trend towards mobility didn't stop with notebooks.

The fact of the matter is that everything Charlie has said on the big H is correct. Haswell will be a significant step forward in graphics performance over Ivy Bridge, and will likely mark Intel's biggest generational leap in GPU technology of all time. Internally Haswell is viewed as the solution to the ARM problem. Build a chip that can deliver extremely low idle power, to the point where you can't tell the difference between an ARM tablet running in standby and one with a Haswell inside. At the same time, give it the performance we've come to expect from Intel. Haswell is the future, and this is the bridge to take us there.

In our Ivy Bridge preview I applauded Intel for executing so well over the past few years. By limiting major architectural shifts to known process technologies, and keeping design simple when transitioning to a new manufacturing process, Intel took what once was a five year design cycle for microprocessor architectures and condensed it into two. Sure the nature of the changes every 2 years was simpler than what we used to see every 5, but like most things in life—smaller but frequent progress often works better than putting big changes off for a long time.

It's Intel's tick-tock philosophy that kept it from having a Bulldozer, and the lack of such structure that left AMD in the situation it is today (on the CPU side at least). Ironically what we saw happen between AMD and Intel over the past ten years is really just a matter of the same mistake being made by both companies, just at different times. Intel's complacency and lack of an aggressive execution model led to AMD's ability to outshine it in the late K7/K8 days. AMD's similar lack of an execution model and executive complacency allowed the tides to turn once more.

Ivy Bridge is a tick+, as we've already established. Intel took a design risk and went for greater performance all while transitioning to the most significant process technology it has ever seen. The end result is a reasonable increase in CPU performance (for a tick), a big step in GPU performance, and a decrease in power consumption.

Today is the day that Ivy Bridge gets official. Its name truly embodies its purpose. While Sandy Bridge was a bridge to a new architecture, Ivy connects a different set of things. It's a bridge to 22nm, warming the seat before Haswell arrives. It's a bridge to a new world of notebooks that are significantly thinner and more power efficient than what we have today. It's a means to the next chapter in the evolution of the PC.

Let's get to it.

Before the 9 iPad 2, before the 9 Kindle Fire, there was the 9 Eee Pad Transformer from ASUS. Like nearly all first attempts in the tablet space, the original Transformer wasn't perfect, but it was quite possibly the best try outside of Apple at the time. And unlike most of the Android competition at the time, it was priced sensibly at launch.

The 9 Eee Pad Transformer Prime showed up several months later, but not as a true successor but rather an upstream member of the family. Combining Tegra 3, an improved display and a much thinner chassis, the Prime once again took the crown as the best Android tablet on the market.

ASUS hasn't lost sight of its focus on cost however. At CES this year it announced a 0 7-inch Tegra 3 tablet, and today we get the first true successor to the original Eee Pad Transformer: the Transformer Pad 300. Priced at 9 for a 16GB WiFi version and 9 for the 32GB model, the Transformer Pad sheds the Eee label but keeps the spirit of the original Transformer. The Eee brand that launched with netbooks back in 2007 is clearly on its way out as the last of the netbooks will ship this year.

Read on for our review of the Transformer Pad 300!

Just three months ago we took GeChic's 13" USB 2.0-powered monitor, the On-Lap 1301, for a test run. What we found was a compelling concept for a product that was marred by some usability issues. Apparently we weren't the only ones who felt like the On-Lap needed a revision; the On-Lap 1301 proved successful, but it wasn't on the market for very long before being replaced by the new On-Lap 1302.

The big question is: just how much can be revised over the course of just a few months? The answer is more than you'd think, but less than you'd hope.

The arrival of affordable, high-performance client SSDs gave us two (closely related) things: 1) a high-speed primary storage option that could work in both a notebook or a desktop, and 2) independence from traditional hard drive form factors.

Unlike traditional hard drives, solid state storage didn't have the same correlation between performance and physical size. The 2.5" form factor was chosen initially because of the rising popularity of notebooks and the fact that desktops could use a 2.5" drive with the aid of a cheap adapter. Since then, many desktop cases now ship with 2.5" drive bays.

It turns out that even the 2.5 wide, 9.5mm tall form factor was a bit overkill for many SSDs. We saw the first examples of this with the arrival of drives from Corsair and Kingston, where the majority of the 2.5" enclosure went unused. Intel and others also launched 1.8" versions of their SSDs with performance levels comparable to their 2.5" counterparts.

Moore's Law ensures that large SSDs can be delivered in small packages. Take the original Intel X25-M for example. The first 80GB and 160GB drives used a 50nm 4GB MLC NAND die (1 or 2 die per package), across twenty packages. Intel's SSD 320, on the other hand, uses 25nm NAND to deliver 300GB or 600GB of storage in the same package configuration. As with all things Moore's Law enables, you can scale in both directions – either increase capacity in a 2.5" form factor, or enable smaller form factors with the same capacity.

The Ultrabook movement has encouraged development of the latter. While Apple and ASUS (among others) have picked custom form factors for their smallest form factor SSDs, there's always a need for standardization. One option is the mSATA form factor:

Take a mini PCIe card, use the same connector, but make it electrically compatible with SATA and you've got mSATA. It's even possible to build an mSATA/mini PCIe connector that can switch between the two interfaces.

We met our first mSATA SSD with Intel's SSD 310, however today Micron is announcing an mSATA version of its popular C400 drive.

Read on for our full review!

Plextor as a brand is probably a new acquaintance for most people and I have to admit that I had not heard of Plextor until a couple of months ago. Plextor is more known for their optical disk drives but roughly two years ago, they entered the SSD market. Plextor is now at its third generation of SSDs and we have finally got the chance of reviewing their latest offering: The M3. Based on Marvell's 88SS9174-BLD2 controller, the M3 is a direct competitor to Crucial's popular m4 series. Both obviously utilize in-house firmwares, which can lead to big differences in performance.

While Plextor is a relatively small and unknown brand, I can already hint that their offering is not minuscule in performance when put against SSD giants' drives. How fast is it then? Read on and find out!

FOLLOWING OUR new Ipad review, we’ve now pitted it against the Ipad 2 to see whether it’s worth splashing out for an upgrade only a year after the previous model was launched.

In our review of the Ipad 2, we gave it a nine beers rating, with our only complaints centring around the lack of ports such as USB and sub-standard cameras. While Apple hasn’t budged on the first issue, keeping the connectors the same with headphone and charger sockets, where Apple has made a real difference is with the Ipad camera.

Camera
Apple has included a 5MP Isight camera in the new Ipad, with a grid feature for lining up shots and auto-focus and face detection, plus the ability to tap the screen to focus. Apple said the new Ipad has an ƒ/2.4 aperture and five-element lens to produce a sharper overall image, while the hybrid infrared filter offers more accurate, uniform colours.

The image on the left was taken with the new Ipad camera. On the right, the photo was taken with the Ipad 2.

Apple doesn’t list the megapixel rating or many other specs for the Ipad 2 camera, but it’s clearly lower quality than the new one. When you zoom into a photo taken with the new Ipad, the level of detail and colour vibrancy becomes apparent, and you can make use of the in-built editing tools, such as red-eye removal and auto-enhance to improve shots.

Photos taken with the Ipad 2 are less vibrant and grainy, and our test shots blurred when we fully zoomed in. On the new Ipad, we could zoom in with no noticeable impact on the clarity and level of detail.