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Antec offers poor man's HTPC kits

Home theater PCs are all the rage. OK, well maybe not all the rage, but there are people who have them and I'm sure there are people who want to have them. These kits from Antec are for the have-nots. Called Multimedia Stations, the adapters allow even technically inept people to add a little or a lot of HTPC functionality to a standard desktop (though they require a couple of open 5.25-inch drive bays or at least a free USB port for the most basic adapter).

Pictured from top to bottom are the Multimedia Station Premier ($119.95), … Read more

How to build a green PC

If you build it, it can be green. That is, if you're savvy in the components you choose and in how you use your PC, you can cut your electric bill and get a good, warm eco-friendly glow. But will you get all the computing power you desire? Such are the potential trade-offs.

Read all about green gaming PCs, extreme green machines, and more at Ars Technica: "Ars System Guide special: it's easy being green"

Integrated or Dedicated Graphics?

Humans are a visually-oriented species. The most important form of output a computer has is the monitor you're reading this on. But, just as important is the hardware which controls the images that display on that screen.

In the world of laptops, there are always a number of compromises that must be made to try and make it as useful and as portable as possible.

There are two general approaches to handling graphics hardware in computers today. You can have separate, or 'dedicated', hardware that does all the graphics processing for the system, or it can be built (or '… Read more

Episode 604: School daze

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Start-up wants starring role in camera mechanics

MONTEREY, Calif.--A start-up called Artificial Muscle hopes its actuator technology will provide a cheaper, quieter, and lower-power alternative to the host of motors and other devices that control mechanical movements inside cameras.

The company's technology employs a particular variety of resilient substances called elastomers. This variety changes properties when a voltage is applied across them, growing softer or firmer. Artificial Muscle mounts a ring of the material to a central disk that's pushed by a spring; when the material relaxes, the spring pushes the central disk outward.

The distance the disk travels, or "throw," is … Read more

This week in laptops

Crave presents the week's laptop news, in digest form.

It was a big week for laptop components. Intel officially announced its second mobile Core 2 Extreme processor, the 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme X7900. Rumors flew about new Intel processors for both the Santa Rosa and yet-to-be-released Montevina platforms, and our News.com team posted additional processor-related stories from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. News broke that both Toshiba and Samsung are pushing for massive laptop storage, with Toshiba's hard drives reaching 320GB in size. And Seagate announced that it, like, totally wants to release a … Read more

iPhone audio codec

Hardware geeks are gleefully prying their new iPhones apart to see what's inside them. Given the topic of this blog, I'm naturally most interested in the audio components--how does thing sound?

According to this breakdown by Semiconductor Insight, reported by EE Times, the iPhone uses the same hardware audio codec from Wolfson as the last generation of iPods, meaning it should sound similar. However, Wired's review suggests that the audio doesn't go as loud as most iPods, particularly the Shuffle, which could be a real problem if you listened to a lot of Rushover headphones … Read more

AMD launches new mobile chipset

Today AMD announced the M690 chipset, a mobile version of the 690 chipset announced a month ago. Like its desktop counterpart, the M690 seems aimed at the entertainment sector: both the high-end M690T and the budget M690V offer DVI video output, with the M690T adding support for HDMI output so you can connect your laptop to an HDTV. The M690 also is AMD's first mobile platform to support ATI Avivo technology, which the company claims enhances high-definition video playback. Both the M690T and M690V incorporate ATI Radeon X1200 series graphics and Turion 64 X2 series processors; you can find … Read more