Intel DZ77GA-70K. Hmm. Sounds more of a title for military hardware rather than a motherboard! This ladies and gentlemen is the first Intel board that has a full GUI based EFI interface. Intel has come rather late to the party, but it has made a rather bold entrance. The 7 series boards are old news; released before its companion the 22nm refresh of Intel’ 2^nd generation core architecture. Thus rather than boring you with a preamble into the qualities and goodness of either we will jump to the review proper!

Avantalk has always made some superb Bluetooth devices for various purposes but this time they have catered to the needs of music fans and headphone users with their latest product aimed at delivering wireless communication using Bluetooth so that audio communicated from one device can be transmitted to an audio output device such as speakers and the device only needs to be connected via a 3.5mm audio jack and a commonly compatible speaker for it to be ready to deliver output.

ASRock, a company that was spun-off from Asustek Group to act as a ‘second’ fiddle to the Godzilla of motherboard manufacturers, (ASUS) now occasionally bites the hand that once fed it.  Famous for, among others, for its fatal1ty line of boards, ASRock provides top of the line features for a very reasonable price. Today we have for review one of its latest offering based on the new Z77 PCH, the Extreme 6.

The Avantree Handisync is a peripheral that aims to target addicted smart phone users who tend to forget their USB charging cable elsewhere just when they need to charge their phones. the beauty of this peripheral is that it’s small enough and can even be attached to a key chain / ring so you’d not misplace it by chance. At the start it sticks out like a soar thumb but eventually you won’t even notice it.

With every tick or tock CPU launch Intel also customarily introduces a new chipset (or more aptly the ‘Platform Controller Hub’; PCH). This time, however, Intel did things a little differently (most likely as things were out of its hand). Intel launched a PCH before starting to ship a new processor. The 7 series PCH was married to the Ivy-bridge series of processors. However the groom (or the bride; take your pick) arrived earlier on the scene. Though it was possible to use boards based on the new PCH with older Sandy-bridge processor, one of its most touted features; support for PCI-e 3.0 devices was only possible if it were paired with the new processor.

The Walking Dead is one of televisions most watched TV shows and TellTale games worked with the creators of the show to help make the walking dead into an episodic adventure, normally these kinds of ventures don’t work out well and lead to a disappointing set of characters and an even poorer story. But the walking dead video game goes past all of this and actually delivers a rich and memorable experience for fans of the series and its especially recommended to fans of the series as the story tells itself pretty well, if you can’t have enough of the undead when the show is on break then the game and the upcoming monthly episodes will definitely help quench your thirst for a group of survivors taking on walkers.

HTC One V is part of the ‘One’ lineup from HTC which includes HTC One S and One X, which is their top end offering. We reviewed the One X a few days ago and were quite impressed by its striking design and performance. One V lies on the other extreme of the spectrum offering only the bare essentials. It’s not the lowest end Android smartphone in HTC’s line up but it’s still one of their cheapest offerings. With One V HTC is going head to head with a lot of other phones from competing manufacturers. Does this phone have what it takes to be crowned as the best value for money smartphone? Let’s find out.

2011 was an interesting year for HTC, full of ups and lows. With the launch of high end devices like Desire HD and the Sensation line up things were looking pretty great. However with much fan following HTC lost its way a little by the end of the year. There were simply too many devices and too little innovation. In the space of only a few months we saw three different Sensation models and none improving on its predecessor. The acquisition of Beats Audio didn’t help matters either with the technology receiving mixed reviews. Similarly the once loved Sense UI was also becoming a little long in the tooth.

But you know what they say, you cannot hope to improve if you don’t accept and recognize your mistakes. And although it look a bad quarter financially for HTC to do so, I’m glad they finally did. Less phones and more focus on quality is the new motto for the company and the result of it is the new line up of smartphones dubbed the One series. This includes One V, S and X the latter being the top dog and the phone we will be reviewing today.

According to HTC One X is the phone we’ve been looking for. Let’s find out if that is indeed the case or not.

Intel, Chipzilla, the company that basically paid its corporate clients to stay away from AMD; no matter how you describe Intel, you must admit that of late the company has not put a foot wrong. In fact I would have to go back to the days of the Pentium 4 to find a product that was embarrassing for the chip giant. The ‘disaster’ that the Netburst architecture was, with its mile long pipeline design, must have shaken Intel from the core. If anything that was good for the company as well as consumer. Now before you decide to stop reading and jump to the comment section to scream heretic! Take a moment to read the next few lines.

INTEL, SANDFORCE AND SSD’s

Intel first entered into the 2.5”consumer SSD market in 2008 with the X25-M SATA interface SSDs for personal computers. Based on Intel’s own controller, that did not support the TRIM command at that time, Intel jumped into the mainstream performance enthusiasts market. But the lack or TRIM command coupled with performance bottlenecks in comparison to SSD’s from Kingston, GSkill, OCz etc, it quickly became apparent that Intel lacked proper knowledge with respect to SSD performance.

In Feb 2011, Intel officially released news of the much anticipated 510 series SSD.  With the new Marvell 9174 controller inside and equipped with TRIM, Intel tried to come back in the game, but was still unmatched with the performance SSDs driven by the SandForce controllers. However, SandForce, unlike Intel has had a bad history when it comes to reliability, with drives crashing and loss of data woes spread over the internet and enthusiast forums. Intel on the other hand, enjoyed the laurels of being one of the most reliable in the SSD market, primarily due to the availability or state of the art testing and validation facilities.

Around March 2011, rumors of a SandForce and Intel joint venture in the SSD market surfaced, which were greeted with good and bad reviews, with reliability being the main concern. However, the ideal scenario of performance of SandForce controllers, and Reliability of Intel SSDs was also very tempting.

In early 2012, Intel announced the Intel SSD 520 Series – its fastest, most robust consumer SSD to date. Codenamed Cherryville, it was based on the SandForceSF-2281 controller and usedIntel’s 25nm MLC NAND memory technology on SATA 6Gbps. The SSD boasts fast throughput performance and new security features, made possible by a custom firmware and custom PCB designed by Intel.

Today, we have the SSD 520 Series 240GB drive with us to see if it lives up to their claim. We are especially thankful to XenithPR, who provided us the SSD for review. So let’s get the show on the road!