Lexmark - X4550 review

A light all-in-one device, albeit one that still demands a reasonable desk footprint, Lexmark's X4550 is heavily targeting those with a wireless network in their home. That's down to one of its box-stated features being the ability to connect wirelessly over wi-fi to your machine.

It's an easy device to get going, with special thanks to Lexmark's continued inclusion of clear and well-explained instructions. It can connect over USB to a PC, but we found that the wi-fi option worked well and we appreciated the convenience of being able to take another wire out of our lives.

Yet for a feature-rich box, the Lexmark is not without its problems, as we'll come to see. Still, from the outside, it hints at an irresistible package: colour inkjet printing, scanning, copying, front-mounted photo card support and a sleek design that's not likely to trouble the aesthetic sensitivities of those who add it to their home.

But if the old cliché is that all-in-one devices are jack of all and master of none, Lexmark is a key witness for the prosecution. While the black printing, for instance, varied between seven and eight good pages a minute, the output - while perfectly acceptable - still left some obvious room for improvement. In colour, the speed drops a lot - we couldn't manage our test page in under a minute - and again, the X4550 offers little substitute for a good, targeted colour inkjet printer. It should also be pointed out that printing over wireless slowed those speeds down further.

The scanner is bog standard, lacking flashy features or much to lift it out of its routine and passable performance. For the home user who just wants to scan in the odd document from time to time, it'll probably suffice, but if a good scanner is on your shopping list, the X4550 is unlikely to satisfy your need.

Where the device does score, though, aside from its general ease of use and convenience, is in its price. Weighing in at £90, you do get standard enough performance from the device, and in an undemanding home environment it's likely to serve you well.

We did have concerns over the duration of the ink cartridges, not least because it's a widely-known fact that printer manufacturers make their real money out of the replacement cartridges. But even so, the Lexmark unit isn't without merits.

However, if your printing and scanning use goes beyond the occasional bit of output, it's probably worth compromising on the wireless support for now - at least until a wider range of alternatives come round the mountain - and spending a bit more.

Gigabyte - GA-X38T-DQ6 review

Let's talk chipsets. Intel introduced its P31/P33/P35 family of Core 2 Duo chipsets six months ago, but it left a gap at the top of the range for an Extreme performance chipset that would replace the venerable 975X Express.

The problem is that 975X supports dual ATi graphics cards in CrossFire but you only have two options for PCI Express. You can assign all 16 lanes to a single graphics card or divide them in two and give eight lanes to each card in CrossFire. That sounds rotten but it doesn't present a bottleneck in the real world as PCI-E has so much bandwidth, however 975X doesn't support the latest 1,333MHz FSB and certainly won't be compatible with Intel's next generation of 45nm CPU. Added to that 975X is twinned with the ICH7 Southbridge, which is looking a bit long in the tooth when it comes to the quantity of USB 2.0 and SATA ports supported.

You might think that P35 is the answer to this particular problem, as it uses the latest ICH9 Southbridge and supports the 1,333MHz FSB, but there's a significant problem here. Although you'll have seen P35 motherboards with dual graphics slots, the 20 lanes of PCI Express are assigned in a fixed pattern with a full 16 lanes going to the primary graphics slot and the remaining four lanes for the PCI-E x1 expansion slots.

If you plug in a second graphics card it shuts down those PCI-E expansion slots, which is unfortunate if you're actually using them, and means that the second graphics card only gets four lanes of PCI-E. That's fine if you're running dual Radeon X1600s but a problem if you have X1900s in CrossFire and a serious headache if you have gone the whole hog and use Radeon HD 2900XT cards.

It's taken a long time, but enter stage left the X38. This new chipset answers all of those problems in one fell swoop as it supports dual graphics slots and each slots gets a full 16 lanes of PCI-E. In addition we're talking about PCI-E 2.0, which has double the bandwidth of the original PCI-E, which will be handy when PCI-E 2.0 graphics cards go on sale. In addition it supports Penryn 45nm processors and a 1,600MHz FSB and of course it has the ICH9 Southbridge.

This Gigabyte GA-X38T-DQ6 makes the most of the new chipset and has four DDR3 memory slots which can accommodate up to 8GB of 1,600MHz DDR3, provided you are running a 1,600MHz FSB, which currently means that you'll have to overclock or the memory speed will be capped at the 1,066MHz or 1,333MHz of your CPU.

We overclocked a QX6850 CPU from a 1,333MHz FSB to 1,520MHz very easily and raised the FSB of a Core 2 Duo E6700 from 1,066MHz to 1,280MHz, so you have plenty of scope to overclock, however we have seen higher performance from P35 and P965 motherboards.

Intel has taken the bold step of introducing some overclocking features with X38. There's support for XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) which works with compatible DDR3 memory that contains SPD settings that boost performance. The other tool is a piece of Intel software called Extreme Tuning Utility, however our review sample didn't come with this software.

In the main the layout of the GA-X38T-DQ6 is very tidy, which is what we've come to expect from P35 boards. Like so many manufacturers, Gigabyte has specified Ferrite Cored Chokes, solid aluminium capacitors and small MOSFETs as well as an extensive passive cooling system that links the Southbridge to the Northbridge and power regulation hardware.

Unfortunately the latches for the memory slots are too close to the top graphics card slot and the graphics retention devices are very awkward to release when you have dual-slot graphics cards. Added to that the primary SATA connectors require you to feed the cables in very close to your graphics card and the eight-pin ATX-12V power connector is tucked in very tightly behind the I/O panel.

We were also unhappy that there isn't a power LED on the board, so you can't be sure whether it's safe to work inside your PC.

There's a long line of ports and connectors on the I/O panel, which is just as well as there are no brackets in the package, apart from some eSATA adapters which connect to up to four of the eight internal SATA connectors.

In addition to the two legacy PS/2 ports there are coaxial and optical audio connectors, eight USB 2.0 ports, a mini Firewire, six-pin Firewire, dual Gigabit LAN and six audio mini jacks. If that's not enough, and you have appropriate connections on your case, there are headers for four more USB ports and one more Firewire.

Toshiba - Satellite U300-134 review

Having seen the popularity of Apple's very stylish but none-too-light MacBook, other manufacturers have got on the 13.3-inch laptop bandwagon; with, it has to be said, varying degrees of success. Toshiba's foot-hold in this market sector is the Satellite U300 series. Currently there are six models in the U300 family line-up, with our review model, the U300-134, sitting at the mid-way point.

The U300-134 certainly looks the part, with the familiar Satellite glossy blue finish to the lid and the traditional large Toshiba logo in bold, silver lettering. Opening the lid reveals the silver finished keyboard and surround, which is neatly set off by gloss black panels above and below. A blue, LED-backlit Satellite logo sits in the left-hand corner of the bottom panel, matching the backlit system indicators on the other side. Sitting directly above the keyboard are the power button, quick-launch Internet and CD/DVD buttons, and four controls for playing CD/DVDs.

Overall the build quality of the U300-134 is up to the usual high standard we have come to expect from Toshiba, and weighing in at around two kilos it's certainly easy to carry around.

At the heart of the Satellite U300-134 lurks an Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 processor which, clocked at 2.0GHz, has an 800MHz FSB and 2MB of L2 cache. If you want more or indeed less power, you can simply choose a different model in the U300 range: they are available with 1.50GHz (U300-13U), 1.66GHz (U300-14B, U300-133), 1.8GHz (U300-11V) and 2.4GHz (U300-13V) processors.

Our Satellite U300-134 came with what appears to be the standard amount of memory for a notebook these days, namely 2GB of PC2-5300, 667MHz, DDR2 memory. If you want to upgrade then the U300-134 motherboard will support a maximum of 4GB through two SO-SIMM slots.

Performance-wise the U300-134 provides few shocks. PCMark05 produces a score of 4,032, which is about average for this combination of processor and memory, although holding the score down is the graphics performance of the integrated Intel X3100 chipset.

The 13.3-inch widescreen display comes with Toshiba's TruBrite coating to improve the screen's brightness and has a native resolution of 1,280 x 800; perfectly set up for office work and watching films on, but beware of the viewing angles as they aren't the best.

Storage comes in the shape of a 160GB, 5,400rpm hard drive with a SATA interface and there's an 8x Super Multi DVD burner so you can back-up data easily. You also get an Express Card slot and a 6-in-1 card reader supporting SD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, MMC and xD cards.

The keyboard is a bit of a mixed bag: while it's a decent size and well laid out, the keypad bed has a fair degree of flex to it and the keys themselves feel a little spongy with little feedback to the user. On the other hand the trackpad is good and responsive, as are the two mouse buttons in front of it.

To connect to the outside world there is 802.11a/b/g WiFi, Bluetooth, 10/100Mbps Ethernet and, if all else fails, a 56Kbps modem. The ports for the wired LAN and modem are built into the right-hand side of the chassis along with a single USB port, the optical drive and the Express Card slot.

The other side of the chassis is dominated by a large cooling grill, which leaves just enough room for two more USB slots, two audio ports (with a volume control dial) and a VGA port. Unfortunately this leaves no room for either DVI or S-Video ports, or an HDMI port for that matter.

Battery life for the Satellite U300-134 is pretty good: using it for normal office work with the power setting in the power safe mode, the battery lasted for three hours and forty five minutes. It lasted for a shade under three hours while watching a DVD.

LG - Super Multi Blue review

LG may just have arrived at the party a little too late with its Super Multi Blue combo optical drive. Stepping foot on neither side of the high definition format war, LG adopts the kind of thinking that resolved the petty squabble over competing DVD writing standards once upon a time, and has released drives such as this, that support both Blu-ray and HD DVD.

This particular unit is mostly a ROM drive as opposed to a writer, although for a premium it is possible to get a unit that writes to high definition discs too. But very much in the favour of this device is that it can pretty much read anything. Blu-rays are read at up to 6x, HD DVDs up to 3x, DVDs up to 16x and CDs up to 40x. It can also write to DVDs and CDs.

It comes in a smart retail box with instructions, cables, screws and some Cyberlink software that we'll come to shortly. The drive itself is black and crowded with logos over its front fascia. It's SATA-only, and to install it was simplicity itself; our test PC picked it up immediately.

To get the high definition playback moving, we installed Cyberlink's Hi-Def Suite that also comes with the device. This features PowerProducer for authoring, PowerBackup (self explanatory), Power2Go (an instant burning application) and PowerDVD, the latter of which is primed and ready with high definition support.

It should be noted that, as with DVD drives, by default you can alter the regional coding for Blu-ray discs five times before it permanently becomes locked to one region. Again, we're coming to that shortly.

Firstly then, we tested the drive with a few HD DVDs, and these gave us few problems. Start up times weren't quite at DVD levels, but soon enough we were admiring the crispness of the output. Blu-ray wasn't as straightforward, as the software insisted on running a nigh-on 70MB update - which it uses your Internet connection to download - before our test discs would even work.

Even then, the drive defaulted to the American region A, meaning our British disc wouldn't play and we simply had a warning screen telling us to get the right playback device. A bit of fiddling around PowerDVD activated one of the region changes, but it wasn't clear what you were supposed to do.

Still, once over those hurdles, the performance of the drive was pleasing and worthwhile. It works best, we suspect, in a system with a more specialised DVD burner as well, but LG's solution is a versatile and well put together package. The problem is that with the demise of HD DVD as a format, it may not be the most logical upgrade to opt for, with a specialised Blu-ray drive likely to prove the more satisfactory long-term investment.

Sapphire - HD3870 review

Nvidia has had an easy time of it lately, with the 8800 series (Ultra, GTX and both versions of the GTS) holding their own admirably against AMD's very late HD2xxx range of cards. And even when the boys in red were about to trumpet a new range of cards, Nvidia managed to out-trump them with the 8800GT.

Both companies were guilty, last time around, of not producing a serious card for the mainstream market, something Nvidia has rectified with the 8800GT and AMD is now rectifying with the new cards based on the RV670 core, the HD3870 reviewed here and the HD3850.

The RV670 core is basically the R600 with added functionality and less bandwidth, but more importantly for AMD's future graphics developments, it is built on a 55nm process which should lead to higher yields at lower costs, and allow faster clock speeds while reducing power requirements.

Despite the smaller die size, the RV670 still manages to pack 666 million transistors into the core, though that's a significant drop from the R600's 720 million. A large chunk of this reduction is from the internal memory ring bus which has been hacked from 1,024 bits down to 512 bits. But to make up for this, the memory speeds on the RV670 run much higher. It retains the 320 stream processors of the R600 and is also fully PCI-E 2.0 compliant, ready for the next generation of motherboards.

Built into the R670 are some of the latest AMD technologies; UVD, PowerPlay and support for the latest DirectX 10.1. UVD (Unified Video Decoder), previously available on the HD2600 and HD2400, is going to be featured across the HD38xx series. The technology handles the decoding of H.264/AVC and VC-1, freeing up the CPU for other duties, and also can record audio along with video via the PCI-E bus through a sound card or integrated motherboard audio. PowerPlay, more normally found on mobile graphics chips, gives a greater range of power saving features for desktop graphics.

Sapphire's HD3870 is built to the reference design, the only difference being the Sapphire sticker on the dual slot cooler - a new series of cards brings a new female character. The fan is a little noisy when the card is first asked to do anything, but it soon quietens down. It has the standard clock speeds for the HD3870; a 775MHz core and memory zipping along at 1.125GHz (2.25GHz effective). The card comes with 512MB of GDDR4 memory giving it an impressive memory bandwidth of 76.8Gbps.

Performance-wise the HD3870 is excellent, given its price point. Tested with 3DMark06 at the default setting of 1,280 by 1,024 it produced a score of 11,800, not that far behind the 512MB HD2900XT (12,220) and leaving the 320MB 8800GTS trailing behind (10,298).

For games it produced an average frame rate score in Half Life 2 of 128.78fps, dropping to a very reasonable 97.06 with 8x Full Screen Anti-Aliasing and 16x Aniscopic filtering. It even performs very well in two of today's most demanding games, Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, giving average frame rate scores of 106.9fps and 43fps respectively when tested at a 1,280 by 1,024 resolution and 4x FSAA.

Bundled with the card are the usual cables; HDTV breakout, TV-Out converter and a 4-pin Molex to 6-pin PCI-E power cable. There's also a DVI/VGA converter, a DVI/HDMI converter that outputs the audio signal along with video, and a Crossfire bridge. There are no games bundled with the card but instead you get some useful applications; 3DMark06 and CyberLink's DVD Suite 5 and PowerDVD 7.

Samsung - CLX-2160N review

Samsung has taken its newly-designed colour laser engine, first seen in the CLP-300, and built it into this highly-compact all-in-one machine. The company has managed to incorporate a full A4 flatbed scanner onto the top of its laser engine, with very little increase in the overall dimensions of the combined unit.

The top surface of the CLX-2160N is the flatbed scanner lid and, in front of this, the lip of the device is rounded off with an inset control panel, offering a two-line by 16-character LCD display and a total of 11 control buttons.

Apart from large coloured ones to start and stop a copy job, there are two buttons dedicated to scanning an image to a memory drive plugged into a USB socket at the front, and to printing an image from the same source. There's also a feature called ID Copy, which scans two separate images and combines them on one sheet of paper, so you can produce an ID badge quickly and simply.

Below the control panel is a pull-down front panel, which reveals the four, coloured toner drums, each of which slots into the front of the machine, like fitting fuel rods into some science fiction power plant (if you're that way inclined). At the bottom of the front face of the printer is a rather conservative, 150-sheet paper tray, which projects forward by about 10cm and has a single-sheet feed built into its top cover.

At the back of the device are sockets for USB 2 and Ethernet connections, both of which come as standard. Samsung provides its mysteriously-named SmarThru control panel to handle the various functions of the CLX-2160N and there's ReadIris Pro 10 OCR software for scanning in text documents.

The main problem with the CLX-2160N is its print quality. While its plain black text is reasonable, if a little thicker than it should be, colour graphics are quite fuzzy and text over colour looks smeared. Trying to reproduce colour photos produces a cartoony effect with a limited range of hues.

The only consumables are the four drums of toner - 2,000 pages for black and 1,000 for each colour - and an imaging unit, which is good for 20,000 pages. Running through the maths produces a cost per page for black text of 2.77p and for colour just over 11p. Neither of these costs is particularly good and the colour cost is high compared with the device's immediate competitors.

Canon - SELPHY CP740 review

The digital age has altered forever the way we take and view photos, not least because of the speed at which the final image can be produced and then passed on to other media. Photojournalists can have their pictures on the front page within minutes and holiday snaps can be swapped with friends only seconds after they're grabbed.

Canon's SELPHY CP range has been designed with this 'instant gratification' principle in mind and the latest two models - the CP750 and the entry-level CP740 reviewed here - have just been released as updated versions of the CP730 and CP720. Both are designed to be 'party printers' that are light, compact, chic and easy to use, whilst still managing to produce high quality, economy-size snaps without having to go through a PC.

The basic CP740 unit weighs a mere 940g and its 179.0 x 127.1 x 63.0mm dimensions are smaller than a tiny loaf of bread. Its Apple-like creamy colour is clearly designed to complement your Mac and iPod and the expanded 2.0-inch LCD screen sits squarely in the middle of the top panel. Surrounding it is a range of buttons that control mode, layout, display and date, as well as an innovative and welcome auto-Red-Eye Correction via simple, self-explanatory icons.

The front panel contains four memory card slots that can deal with virtually any of the current versions of CF, SD, MMC, Memory Stick and xD. In addition, a discreet panel on the front-left hides an extendable USB cable that can be attached to PictBridge-enabled cameras or Canon Direct Print devices.

Unfortunately, the downside of this beautiful looking machine is the clunky method by which the photo tray is inserted in the front: a fair amount of huffing and puffing is needed to slot it in correctly. However, once in place you have five sizes to choose from (Postcard, Wide, L, Credit Card and Mini Stickers) and you can view each image full-screen before you print.

What is impressive is the quality of the finished image. Each print takes four passes to complete and it's fascinating to see the sharpness and clarity gradually emerge (postcards take about a minute), with the final pass adding a high-gloss protective layer that protects from splashes, spills and fingerprints. The CP740 uses 300dpi dye-sublimation printing technology that leaves images virtually grain-free, as each printed dot has up to 256 intensity levels per colour.

If you're feeling a little more flush with money, the more expensive CP750 has extra features like 'My Colors' photo effects (which include Black & White and Sepia), an optional battery pack and IrSimple compatibility for infra-red printing from mobile devices. Both models have improved skin tone reproduction for enhanced flesh tones.