Small Form Factor (SFF) PCs are becoming quite popular as processors become more and more power efficient. Over the last few years, we have had a slew of budget SFF PCs. We have a number of powerful units targeting the mid-range and high-end markets such as the CoreHT and the Vision 3D series from ASRock. However, the sales volume lies in the budget lineups. Companies like Asus, ASRock, Sapphire and Zotac have been playing in this segment of the market. The trend started with pure Atom based nettops. The ION-based nettops brought HD video decoding and limited gaming capabilities to the budget lineups. AMD joined the game late with their AMD Fusion-based Brazos offerings early last year. Almost all of these offerings come to the consumer in the form of mini-ITX boards.

Is there anything smaller than a mini-ITX system? The nano-ITX and pico-ITX form factors pioneered by VIA are much smaller, but haven't gained much popularity. Today, Zotac is introducing their AMD E-450 based ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus. With a motherboard measuring 10 cm x 10 cm (smaller than the nano-ITX and just slightly bigger than a pico-ITX), it is definitely one of the smallest machines we have seen in our labs.The ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus comes with loads of exciting features, and Zotac gave us the chance to check out the unit prior to launch. Read on for our review.

Over the past year we've tested more than twenty different enclosures using our existing testbed and produced a mountain of comparative data. The goal of the undertaking is produce actual case reviews rather than testing enclosures in a vaccuum. Our approach has allowed us to compare both cooling performance and acoustics between the cases we've tested.

That said, it was really our first effort at such an endeavor in some time, and since we started some minor inconsistencies began to creep up in our reviews and between test cases. Now that we have data under our belts, we're now taking measures to correct those inconsistencies for future tests, improve the quality of our results, and allow for more reliable comparisons. In other words, we're about to revamp our case testbed and methodology, and hopefully this setup can last us through the next year.

A little more than a year ago NVIDIA introduced the GF110 GPU, the power-optimized version of their Fermi patriarch, GF100. The first product was their flagship GTX 580, followed by the eventual GTX 570. Traditionally NVIDIA would follow this up with a 3^rd product. The GTX 200 series had 285/275/260, and the GTX 400 series had GTX 480/470/465. However in the past year we have never seen the 3^rd tier GF110 card… until now.

Today NVIDIA will be launching the GeForce GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores (and yes, that’s the complete name), a limited edition product that will serve as the 3^rd tier product, at least for a time. And while NVIDIA won't win any fans with the name, the performance is another matter entirely. If you've ever wanted a GTX 570 but didn't want to pay the $300+ price tag, as we'll see NVIDIA has made a very convincing argument that this is the card for you.

With every chipset, there's a call to arms in providing the package that everyone needs. Unfortunately there's never one motherboard which can cater for every possibility, but there are some that come quite close. Our review today is on the Zotac Z68ITX-A-E Wifi - a mini-ITX take on the Z68 chipset, which promises to be a winner right from the start, with dual gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, onboard wifi, onboard power/reset buttons, a debug LED, a lot of extras with your motherboard, and all the extras that Z68 offers. For $170, we're looking at a good contender for an award here, as long as the performance and additions compare well to its rivals. Read on for the full review!

Despite what you could buy many years ago for more than a thousand dollars, you can now get the same performance in a motherboard/CPU combo for under $200.  But at present, with your dual core 1.6 GHz chip, there's WiFi, SATA 6 Gbps, somewhat capable onboard graphics, DDR3 support and potentially USB 3.0.  Today, we're entering the realm of Hudson-M1: the Fusion E-350 domain.  For this review we look at three very different mini-ITX Fusion E-350 boards on the market, from the expensive but completely passive ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe, the cheaper but still jam packed ECS HDC-I, and the SO-DIMM equipped Zotac FUSION350-A-E.

The ultimate goal of any HTPC is to handle any media content you might desire, all while consuming very little power and generating no noise. Package all of that in an attractive case that can fit in with your other home theater equipment and you’ve got a winning HTPC solution. Previous attempts have used NVIDIA’s ION platform (Atom + GeForce GPU), which met the low-power requirement but often failed at decoding certain video streams, and the Atom CPU was so slow that the UI interactions frequently felt sluggish. Other solutions have used higher performance CPUs, but such designs use more power, creating unwanted noise from the cooling fans, and there’s still the issue of media support.

Now, Zotac hopes to satisfy the needs of the low-power crowd while providing enough performance and decoding prowess to please A/V aficionados who want 24FPS content to work properly. To do this, they’ve turned to AMD’s Brazos platform, sporting Atom-like power with roughly twice the CPU performance and integrated graphics that are faster than ION and we might just have a winner. Zotac also includes a Blu-ray drive, for those who prefer disc content. Can the new ZBOX AD03BR-PLUS-U finally supplant the higher performance CPUs with discrete GPUs that so many HTPC users end up using in order to handle all of their video decoding needs? Let’s find out.

Throughout the lifetime of the 400 series, NVIDIA launched 4 GPUs: GF100, GF104, GF106, and GF108. Launched in that respective order, they became the GTX 480, GTX 460, GTS 450, and GT 430. One of the interesting things from the resulting products was that with the exception of the GT 430, NVIDIA launched each product with a less than fully populated GPU, shipping with different configurations of disabled shaders, ROPs, and memory controllers. NVIDIA has never fully opened up on why this is – be it for technical or competitive reasons – but ultimately GF100/GF104/GF106 never had the chance to fully spread their wings as 400 series parts.

It’s the 500 series that has corrected this. Starting with the GTX 580 in November of 2010, NVIDIA has been launching GPUs built on a refined transistor design with all functional units enabled. Coupled with a hearty boost in clockspeed, the performance gains have been quite notable given that this is still on the same 40nm process with a die size effectively unchanged. Thus after GTX 560 and the GF114 GPU in January, it’s time for the 3^rd and final of the originally scaled down Fermi GPUs to be set loose: GF106. Reincarnated as GF116, it’s the fully enabled GPU that powers NVIDIA’s latest card, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

CES 2011 has kicked off in a major way and the talk on a lot of vendors lips is Sandy Bridge: what it means, what it brings to the table, and yes, how to capitalize on it. But Sandy Bridge isn't the only big thing going on here; we had a chance to sit down with Corsair, Kingston, Zalman, Zotac, Patriot, A-Data, Thermaltake, and Cooler Master to see what they had on the horizon. These are some of the trends and noteworthy products we came across.

NVIDIA’s ION brought a tremendous appeal to mini-ITX last year, but over the past six months Clarkdale has established itself as the natural and more capable choice for small form factor builds. ZOTAC are today attempting to reinvigorate appeal for ION by teaming up Intel’s CULV processors with NVIDIA’s aging GF9400 chipset.  We take a look at the IONITX-P-E, and aim to find out how it fits into the HTPC landscape.

When we reviewed Zotac's ZBOX HD-ID11 we noted that the upgrade to the Next-Generation ION didn't feel like much of an upgrade. Performance improved in some cases, but power consumption got worse and in 3D games and Flash playback performance actually dropped. The latter was a particular problem because many want to buy these NG-ION nettops for use as streaming content devices.

NVIDIA recently gave us a driver to improve the Flash playback situation on NG-ION platforms and we put it through the paces. While it doesn't fix everything, there's at least light at the end of this tunnel. Read on for the story.

Hot off the heels of launch of the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470, NVIDIA is launching the next card in the Fermi family. Based on the same GF100 GPU that powers the GTX 480 and GTX 470, the GTX 465 is a further reduced product designed to put a Fermi card in the all-important under-$300 price range. With a MSRP of $280, NVIDIA has put the card right under the Radeon HD 5850 with the performance to match. But is cheaper necessarily better? Not always, and today we'll see why.

As NVIDIA is not providing reference samples of the GeForce GTX 465, today we will be looking at a retail card: Zotac's GeForce GTX 465. With a hard launch ruling the day, the Zotac GTX 465 and the rest of the GTX 465 lineup are available today.

The nForce 2 was one of the best chipsets to come out of NVIDIA. It was NVIDIA’s second attempt at a desktop chipset yet it cemented NVIDIA’s position as a leading provider of core logic in the market. Oh how much has changed since then.

Most of what made a chipset worthwhile is now integrated into the CPU. It used to be memory controller optimizations that kept chipsets afloat, but that’s no longer the case as all x86 processors now ship with an integrated memory controller. The performance differences between chipsets disappeared and all that was left was testing, validation and drivers, also known as the boring, expensive and time consuming aspects of chipset development.

NVIDIA has mostly abandoned the chipset business, focusing on opportunistic wins where possible. The most obvious example is with ION, its chipset/GPU for Atom based systems.

Last year we played with a number of ION systems and motherboards and were generally impressed. The platform made for a powerful little HTPC. Today we’re able to bring you a hands on performance preview of the first Next Generation ION box we’ve laid our hands on: the Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11.