CES 2021: Western Digital's Portable SSDs Get Capacity Upgrades: 4TB of TLC for $680
Western Digital markets portable SSDs under different brands, catering to different market segments. The flagships in each brand make use of of very similar platforms - a M.2 NVMe SSD behind an appropriate bridge chip. The industrial design varies from brand to brand to appeal better to the target market. The WD My Passport and SanDisk Extreme Portable SSDs are USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) SSDs using an ASMedia ASM2362 bridge chip and a WD SN550E PCIe 3.0
CES 2021: Ambarella Announces CV5 5nm 8K AI Vision Processor
At this year’s virtual CES 2021, Ambarella is launching its new flagship vision SoC – the CV5. Dubbed as a 8K AI vision processor, the new SoC addresses Ambarella’s more traditional core market which includes sports cameras, drones, and the increasing important automotive business of the company. If you’ve had a GoPro or a DJI drone in the past decade, the changes are high these devices were powered by an Ambarella SoC – although many of these companies nowadays also rely on
CES 2021: HP Elite Dragonfly Lightweight Laptops
Today at CES, HP is announcing some updates to their Elite Dragonfly series, which are targeted at business users who need portability. Improving on the original Whiskey Lake based model is the new convertible HP Elite Dragonfly G2, powered by the latest Intel Tiger Lake platform with vPro, and the HP Elite Dragonfly MAX, built to be the ultimate for collaboration and conferencing.
| HP Elite Dragonfly | ||
| G2 | MAX | |
| CPU | Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake Core i3/i5/i7 (i3 only on G |
CES 2021: HP ENVY 14 Refreshed
One of the best value laptops in HP’s lineup is their ENVY series. Featuring premium materials, the ENVY lineup brings a lot of the best of HP, without the higher price tag of some of their higher end lineups such as the Spectre series. For 2021, HP has refreshed the ENVY 14 with the latest internals, but also added a 16:10 display.
| HP ENVY Laptop | |
| ENVY 14 | |
| CPU | Core i5-1135G7 Quad-Core Up |
CES 2021: Thermaltake Unveils Tower 100 Mini ITX Chassis
Thermaltake has announced a new compact chassis based on its monolithic sized Tower 900 chassis. The new Tower 100 includes support for mini-ITX form factor motherboards, with ample cooling capabilities and support for larger graphics cards such as the NVIDIA RTX 3080.
The Thermaltake Tower 100 includes filtered ventilation from top to bottom, with 4 mm thick temperated glass side panels which amalgamated the need for style and performance. It includes an angled top-mounted I/O panel which includes support for
CES 2021: XPG MANA Gaming Gum, Chewable Caffeine For Gamers
It's not April Fools Day, but ADATA XPG has lifted the lid on one of its latest gaming products for CES 2021. XPG Gaming Gum is designed to give gamers a boost with chewable caffeine. XPG first teased this on its official Twitter page back in March 2020 .
The new XPG MANA Gaming gum includes caffeine and a vitamin called Lutein, which is reportedly beneficial for eye health. It remains to be seen if chewing gaming gum can be a proper substitute for proper eye health
CES 2021: Thermaltake Launches TOUGHAIR Series Air Coolers
This year at CES, Thermaltake is unveiling three new air coolers, the Toughair 110, 310, and 510. Each model is aimed at a different CPU segment and looks to offer an affordable and supports most of the popular desktop chipsets, including Intel's LGA1150 and AMD's AM4 socket.
The Thermaltake Toughair series includes three different models, each with different levels of cooling capability. The smallest of the trio is the Toughair 110, which includes
CES 2021: Acer Touts Trio of 4K and 1440p High Refresh Rate Gaming Monitors
Gaming monitors have tended to prefer lower resolutions and higher refresh rates, but catering to the wide variety of users in the market, Acer has also been developing monitors for gamers who want higher resolutions with those same high refresh rates. Set to be released under their Nitro and Predator families, for CES 2021 the company is promoting a mix of new and previously-announced (i.e. delayed) monitors, which will provide both high resolutions and the faster refresh rates that make gaming monitors so smooth.
Lenovo Announces New IdeaPad 5 Laptops at CES: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and 5G
Always one of the biggest set of announcements for CES is from Lenovo, with updates to a lot of their lineup being announced every January, as well as some very interesting new products being shown off most years. As we head into CES week, Lenovo is teasing us with some updates to their IdeaPad lineup, including a new 5G model. As tends to be the case, we don’t always have the full spec sheets for these announcements yet, but let’s dig in and see what Lenovo is
GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master Motherboard Review: Clawing at the Competition
Throughout the majority of 2020, we saw an escalating war between AMD and Intel battling for supremacy in the desktop CPU market, which is an obvious win for the consumers. One of the side battles thus appeared in the motherboard market, with the Z490 chipset paving the way for Intel's 14 nm Comet Lake processors. One such model is the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master, which is poisitioned in the mid-range segment's upper end with a premium feature set