Here's a prickly subject if ever there was one: while with keyboards you could reasonably argue for the superiority of using mechanical switches over traditional rubber-dome membrane keys, mice are much, much more a matter of preference. A mouse could have all the features you're looking for, but if the grip isn't right or the texture makes you hand clammy the whole enterprise can be a bust. Understanding how delicate the balancing act of a good mouse can be, Corsair has come up with matching mice for their new gaming keyboards.

The new Vengeance M60 is geared for FPS players with an innovative "Sniper" button while the M90 targets MMO players who'll use as many configurable buttons as they can find. Do they work out in practice, though? Read on for our thoughts on these two new mice.

We don't get a lot of projectors for review, but ASUS sent us their P1 Portable LED Projector and so we wanted to do a short write up of the device. It's a small projector primarily intended for portability and business use--something that you could easily carry with you as you travel to meetings so that you know you'll have a viable projector for your presentation. Tipping the scales at less than a pound, there are many projectors where the lens alone is larger than the P1.

So how does the ASUS P1 fare in our short look? While we don't have the necessary equipment to test many aspects of the projector, for the intended purpose it delivers what ASUS has promised. Read on for our thoughts on the device.

If you've been following our SoC and smartphone related coverage over the past couple of years, you'll probably remember how Qualcomm let us take home an MDP8660 from MWC 2011 and thoroughly benchmark it. Qualcomm has done essentially the same thing this year, this time sending their latest and greatest MSM8960 SoC inside the aptly named MSM8960 Mobile Development Platform (MDP) just before MWC 2012. 

The timing is impeccable as we're fully expecting to start seeing MSM8960 based phones next week at MWC, and we've been telling you to hold off on any smartphone purchases until the 8960's arrival. Today we're finally able to give you an indication of just how fast Qualcomm's next-generation Snapdragon S4 will be. Read on!

The majority of the enclosures from Lian Li that we've tested so far have been designed for mini-ITX and micro-ATX builds, but today we have on offer one of their premium full ATX cases, and it's a promising one indeed. Lian Li's PC-90, which they dub "The Hammer," is designed to support HPTX and XL-ATX motherboards while being smaller and lighter than most other enthusiast cases in its class. And while we'd hesitate to call it diminutive, it's definitely smaller than you'd expect.

Lian Li aims to offer a lighter, more austere shell for high performance systems in the PC-90, and we can tell you they've been very successful. The PC-90 is also better than our prior experiences with Lian Li in that it performs right about where you'd expect. Read on for the full details.

Mountain Lion's first developer preview has been around for a couple of days now, and most of the banner features - largely composed of new imports from iOS - have been covered and discussed not just by us, but also by the majority of the tech press. While we wanted to provide you with some coverage of Mountain Lion, note that it comes with caveats - first, this is a look at the first developer preview of an operating system that isn't due out for at least six months, so everything you see here is very much subject to change. We've done our best (using both gut instincts and precedents set by previous OS X versions) to identify and discuss only features that we're pretty sure will make it into the shipping version of the OS, but nothing's final yet. Second, with just a few days of usage under our belts, this is by no means a comprehensive list of the changes so far, but rather an account of what we found most interesting as a current OS X user and administrator. With all of this in mind, let's get started!

We recently re-entered the world of peripheral reviews, specifically mechanical keyboards with our brief rundown of Rosewill's RK-9000 mechanical keyboard (complete with Cherry MX Blue switches). Rosewill's design was as basic as it gets, but the keyboard felt solid and for many of us there's just no substitute for a mechanical switch when it comes to having a comfortable typing experience. But our visit with Rosewill was just a warm up.

Today we have Corsair's Vengeance K60 and K90 gaming keyboards in house. Corsair opts to use Cherry MX Red switches in an effort to find a more suitable balance between typing and gaming needs, and they bring a little more style and class than we're used to seeing in gaming peripherals. Read on for our impressions of the K60 and K90 keyboards.

While Alienware isn't openly inviting comparisons to Microsoft's Xbox 360 with their brand new X51 gaming desktop, it's hard not to see the resemblance, at least in form factor. But where Microsoft's aging console continues trudging away with generations old hardware, Alienware has produced an authentic Windows 7 gaming PC in a shell roughly the same size. Not only that, but they're introducing it at one of the lowest prices we've ever seen for what's ordinarily a very premium brand.

Was Alienware able to cram a fully-powered machine in this tiny chassis, or were too many sacrifices made? Just what exactly can you fit into this console-esque chassis? Read on for our full analysis!

Late last year, we took a look at the ASRock CoreHT 252B, a Sandy Bridge-based midrange HTPC. We liked the CoreHT quite a bit, noting that the small form factor HTPC was a solid choice for most users in this segment. It hit all the key points, though it didn’t do anything in particular to set itself apart from the rest of the SFF crowd. Our main complaints centered around the hard drive performance, and to that end comes the ASRock CoreHT Server.

It’s very similar to the CoreHT we reviewed before, even sharing nearly the same specs. The one major difference: there’s two 500GB HDDs in the place of one, configured in RAID 0. Other than that, there’s the same mobile Sandy Bridge internals, headlined by the HM67 chipset and Core i5-2410M processor. Read on to find out if this update addresses our earlier concerns of if we're still left wanting more.

With the launch of Tahiti behind them, AMD is now firing on all cylinders to get the rest of their Southern Islands lineup out the door. Typically we’d see AMD launch their GPUs in descending order of performance, but this time AMD is taking a slight detour. Rather than following up the Tahiti based 7900 series with the Pitcairn based 7800 series, AMD is instead going straight to the bottom and launching the Cape Verde based 7700 series first.

Today AMD will be launching two cards based on the Cape Verde GPU: the Radeon HD 7750, and the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition. As the Juniper based 5700 series never got a proper Northern Islands successor, this is the first real update for the x700 series since the launch of the 5700 series in October of 2009. Given the success of the 5700 expectations are going to be high, and to fulfill those expectations AMD will be bringing to bear their new GCN architecture along with a full node jump with TSMC’s 28nm process. But will this be enough to enable the 7700 series to replicate the success of the 5700 series? Let’s find out.

For a while now, our chief complaint when talking about 4G LTE handsets has been battery life. The combination of 45nm cellular basebands, ever increasing screen size, and 4x nm SoCs has been unforgiving in the power department. Handset manufacturers are always engaged in a difficult balancing act between device size, price, and the resulting battery life. Too big of a battery and you’ve created a brick that looks unattractive next to other svelte phones, too small and you’ve created something that looks great but needs to be tethered to the wall all day.

Droid RAZR MAXX (left), Droid RAZR (right)

The Droid RAZR MAXX is quite simply a Droid RAZR with a larger internal battery, 1.8 times the size of the original, to be exact. The result is a device that does internal batteries the right way - if it's going to be sealed inside, it should at least be huge. Read on for our full RAZR MAXX review.

Users who want everything out of their notebook, no matter how ridiculous the demands, are probably more than at least a little curious about Sony's VAIO Z2. There's good reason to be: this 13.1" ultrabook features a stunning 1080p screen, a secondary battery slice that nearly doubles running time off the mains, and an external dock box that features an optical drive, additional connectivity, and a dedicated GPU that can actually be used to power the notebook's internal screen.

The VAIO Z2 has a lot going for it, but is it worth the heavy price tag? Outside of the specs on paper—which admittedly look quite good—what's the build quality like on the Z2, how does it fare in day to day use, and are there any concerns or benefits that might not immediately stand out? We'll cover that and more as we put this laptop to the test.

Since the introduction of the 80 Plus certifications, we've seen a slow but steady trickle down effect where labels that were once reserved for the highest of the high-end (e.g. 80 Plus Gold) have eventually reached mainstream price points. Manufacturers including FSP, Rosewill, Sparkle, and SuperFlower now sell affordable 80 Plus Gold power supplies for less than $100. But if mainstream users are now able to get 80 Plus Gold, what should the high-end market offer? Enter 80 Plus Platinum:

Those looking for maximum efficiency can now set their sights on 80 Plus Platinum PSUs, which will be new halo market for high-end—and high cost—power supplies. To reach the necessary efficiency levels, some improvements are necessary that can change some of the core characteristics of a power. Improved resonant topologies, new MOSFETs for synchronous rectifying, higher switching frequencies, better drivers, and low-resistance conduction paths are just some of the things we'll see with 80 Plus Platinum. We're naturally eager to see what the new models can bring to the table, and Enermax sent us their Platimax 750W model, which uses an optimized Modu87+ design. Read on to find out if Enermax is the new efficiency king, and how it performs in other metrics.

The overwhelming majority of cases from SilverStone we've reviewed so far have been based on some very unorthodox designs, featuring layouts that feel ATX in name only. Yet when we visited with them at CES and they showed off the Temjin TJ04-E, we were surprised: at least superficially, the TJ04-E looked like a garden variety ATX case. It had SilverStone's usual clean lines and style, but everything seemed almost too normal. Thankfully we have the Temjin TJ04-E in house today, and while it may indeed look fairly by-the-book at first glance, SilverStone's mad scientists have tweaked quite a few things beneath the surface.

The one thing that OCZ has been missing for so many years is finally one of its staples: focus. The same company that dabbled in everything from brain mice to DIY notebooks is now almost exclusively an SSD company that peddles power supplies on the side. OCZ's penchant for aggressively trying new things hasn't faded away however. As an SSD maker, OCZ is currently or will in the near future, be shipping drives based on controllers from three different vendors - each with their own strengths. OCZ's relationship with SandForce continues and the Vertex 3 remains OCZ's highest performing offering. A recent partnership with Marvell gives OCZ early experience with native PCIe based SSDs, experience that is extremely important as the industry marches towards a new PCIe based interface standard for SSDs (SATA Express). Finally there's OCZ's own controller, the Indilinx Everest, which it is quickly building momentum behind. It's obviously in OCZ's best interests to have its own controllers in the bulk of the drives it makes, but one doesn't simply build a better controller than everyone else on the first try.

A few weeks ago OCZ released a firmware update for its Octane drives that promised a significant increase in 4KB random write performance. Read on for our analysis of the firmware update!

When we first looked at the Opteron 6276, our time was limited and we were only able to run our virtualization, compression, encryption, and rendering benchmarks. Most servers capable of running 20 or more cores/threads target the virtualization market, so that's a logical area to benchmark. The other benchmarks either test a small part of the server workload (compression and encryption) or represent a niche (e.g. rendering), but we included those benchmarks for a simple reason: they gave us additional insight into the performance profile of the Interlagos Opteron, they were easy to run, and last but not least those users/readers that use such applications still benefit.

Back in 2008, however, we discussed the elements of a thorough server review. Our list of important areas to test included ERP, OLTP, OLAP, Web, and Collaborative/E-mail applications. Looking at our initial Interlagos review, several of these are missing in action, but much has changed since 2008. The exploding core counts have made other bottlenecks (memory, I/O) much harder to overcome, the web application that we used back in 2009 stopped scaling beyond 12 cores due to lock contention problems, the Exchange benchmark turned out to be an absolute nightmare to scale beyond 8 threads, and the only manageable OLTP test—Swingbench Calling Circle—needed an increasing number of SSDs to scale.

The ballooning core counts have steadily made it harder and even next to impossible to benchmark applications on native Linux or Windows. Thus, we reacted the same way most companies have reacted: we virtualized our benchmark applications. It's only with a hypervisor that these multi-core monsters make sense in most enterprises, but there are always exceptions. Since quite a few of our readers still like seeing "native" Linux and Windows benchmarks, not to mention quite a few ERP, OLTP, and OLAP servers are still running without any form of virtualization, we took the time to complete our previous review and give the Opteron Interlagos another chance.

For the majority of the history of AnandTech we've hosted our own server infrastructure. A benefit of running our own infrastructure is that we're able to gain a lot of hands on experience with enterprise environments that we'd otherwise have to report on from a distance.

When I first started covering SSDs four years ago I became obsessed with the idea of migrating nearly every system over to something SSD based. The first to make the switch were our CPU testbeds. Moving away from mechanical drives ensured better benchmark consistency between runs as any variation in IO load was easily absorbed by the tremendous amount of headroom that an SSD offered. The holy grail of course was migrating all of the AnandTech servers over to SSDs. Over the years our servers seem to die in the following order: hard drives, power supplies, motherboards. We tend to stay on a hardware platform until the systems start showing the signs of their age (e.g. motherboards start dying), but that's usually long enough that we encounter an annoying number of hard drive failures. A well validated SSD should have a predictable failure rate, making it an ideal candidate for an enterprise environment where downtime is quite costly and in the case of a small business, very annoying.

Our most recent server move is a long story for a separate article but to summarize the move, we recently switched hosting providers and data centers. Our hardware was formerly on the east coast and the new datacenter is in the middle of the country. At our old host we were trying out a new cloud platform while our new home would be a mixture of a traditional back-end with a virtualized front-end. With a tight timetable for the move and no desire to deploy an easily portable solution at our old home before making the move we were faced with a difficult task: how do we physically move our servers half way across the country with minimal downtime?

Thankfully our new host had temporary hardware very similar in capabilities to our new infrastructure that they were willing to put the site on as we moved our hardware. The only exception was, as you might guess, a relative lack of SSDs. Our new hardware uses a combination of consumer and enterprise SSDs but our new host only had mechanical drives or consumer grade SSDs on tap (Intel SSD 320s).

In preparing for this move I realized we hadn't publicly discussed the performance and endurance issues associated with using consumer SSDs in an enterprise environment. What follows is a discussion of just that. Read on...

Intel was rumored to be working on a SandForce based drive for several months now, but even the rumors couldn't encapsulate just how long Intel and SF has worked on this drive. According to Intel, the relationship began 1.5 years ago. Still lacking a 6Gbps controller of their own and wanting to remain competitive with the rest of the market, Intel approached SandForce about building a drive based on the (at the time) unreleased SF-2281 controller. Roughly six months later, initial testing and validation began on the drive. That's right, around the time that OCZ was previewing the first Vertex 3 Pro, Intel was just beginning its extensive validation process.

Codenamed Cherryville, Intel's SSD 520 would go through a full year of validation before Intel would sign off on the drive for release. In fact, it was some unresolved issues that cropped up during Intel's validation that pushed Cherryville back from the late 2011 release to today.

Intel's strenuous validation will eventually make SandForce's drives better for everyone, but for now the Cherryville firmware remains exclusive. Intel wouldn't go on record with details of its arrangement with SandForce, but from what I've managed to piece together the Intel Cherryville firmware is exclusive for a limited period of time. That exclusivity agreement likely expires sometime after the SF-2281 is replaced by a 3rd generation controller. There are some loopholes that allow SandForce to port bug fixes to general partner firmware but the specific terms aren't public information. The important takeaway is anything fixed in Intel's firmware isn't necessarily going to be fixed in other SF-2281 based drives in the near term. This is an important distinction because although Cherryville performs very similarly to other SF-2281 drives, it should be more reliable.

Read on for our full review of Intel's SSD 520.

We've been providing live coverage of AMD's 2012 Financial Analyst Day from Santa Clara today, but if you want a summary of the company's strategy under new CEO Rory Read you've come to the right place. Below you'll find links to everything we've published from AMD's FAD 2012:

AMD's Rory Read Outlines AMD's Future Strategy
AMD Outlines HSA Roadmap: Unified Memory for CPU/GPU in 2013, HSA GPUs in 2014 
AMD is Open to Integrating 3rd Party IP in Future SoCs
AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2012 - Mark Papermaster, SVP & CTO Presentation 
AMD: Flexible Around ISA
AMD Nods at Shorter Design Cycles, More Synthesized Designs
What AMD Views as Important: Tablets, Servers, Notebooks & GPUs
AMD & Compal Show Off 18mm Trinity Notebook 
AMD's 2012 - 2013 Client CPU/GPU/APU Roadmap Revealed 
AMD's 2012 - 2013 Server Roadmap: Abu Dhabi, Seoul & Delhi CPUs
AMD is Ambidextrous, Not Married to Any One Architecture, ARM in the Datacenter? 
AMD's Tablet Architectures: Hondo at 4.5W, Future Sub-2W SoC

Read on for our summary and analysis of AMD's new strategy.

NZXT recently released the Switch 810, a new high-end full tower model they proudly had on display at CES at the same time they were seeding samples to reviewers. It's a looker to be sure, but NZXT's engineers also played a lot with the insides of the enclosure, and what they've put together is a chassis with a remarkable number of uncommon features designed to appeal to enthusiasts who want to maximize both the utility of their machines along with the control they have over that utility. It looks great on paper and great on display, but how does it work in practice?