3-in-1 Mini DisplayPort to HDMI / DisplayPort / DVI Adapter Review and more

In the past year or so we’ve seen many laptops and video cards that are coming equipped with mini DisplayPort connections but those laptops and video cards don’t come with adapters so you can actually make use of those ports. Today I’ve got a short review for you of a product that many of you might find very useful, it’s a 3-in-1 adapter that goes from mini DisplayPort output to DVI, HDMI or stand DisplayPort video inputs. The product is just a small white box really, not much special or exciting about it but it is inexpensive and it does the job it needs to do.

The 3-in-1 mini DisplayPort adapter came shipped with other things so there is no shipping package pictures, but the actual packaging is just a bag basically.

It seems like Creative is following the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra for their latest Tactic 3D lineup of gaming headsets. For a company with a name that literally implies innovation, this comes across as a little strange for me. In fact, the headsets in the Tactic 3D lineup look so similar that when Creative sent me the Tactic 3D Rage to review I had to double check the box to make sure that they didn’t ship a Tactic 3D Wrath by mistake – they didn’t.

I thought that since the Tactic 3D Rage doesn’t seem to substantially deviate from the Wrath aside from having an angrier name, it’s probably packing something special on the inside, right? Well, not really. After reading the specifications sheet, the Tactic 3D Rage is fairly identical to the Tactic 3D Wrath. Everything from the 50mm neodymium drivers, microphone type, and frequency response are all pretty much identical with the exception that the model we have here is the wired edition, with Creative also offering a wireless edition of the Tactic 3D Rage as well. The only noticeable difference between the two is that the Tactic 3D Rage has programmable earcup lighting and has a newer SBX pro software. Nice.

It's a brand better known for producing budget alternatives to original E-Ink-based Kindle et al, but can the all-new Arc tablet take the fight higher to the Kindle Fire HD and even the Nexus 7 and iPad Mini? If you've seen Kobo's previous tablets, it's likely you were in WHSmiths, which actively promotes and sells all Kobo tablets and eReader in its high street shops ? including the Arc. The headline feature on this 7-inch, 1280x800 pixel tablet is a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, though just a standout when compared to eReader-style tablets (principally the Nook HD and the Kindle Fire HD) is the Arc's open Android experience.

The enthusiast audience waited throughout 2012 for AMD to come up with a dual GPU HD7970 solution. In the end they failed to deliver, so it fell onto partners to create a solution. Powercolor, VTX3D and Club3d all released the HD7990 last year a monster dual GPU designed to battle head to head with the Nvidia GTX690.

Sony has recently released their latest upgrade to their Vegas video editing application in Vegas Pro 12. This version of Vegas adds tons of feature enhancements and performance improvements. Since this is one of the main tools we use in our arsenal, we wanted to see just how well this new software worked and took it on a test drive to compare it directly with its predecessor.

Our render speed tests highlighted the real-world improvements that you can expect from a complicated project, but you will see the most improvements to Sony Vegas Pro 12 as you use it during your projects. One thing we did see was the power of GPU acceleration and how it produces better quality renderings and saves you quite a bit of time. The functionality and controls are improved in Vegas Pro 12 allowing you to make your keystrokes more efficient speeding up your editing times as well...

It is always good to have a backup of important data. If you regularly change the data on your phones SD card, or switch between cards regularly, you may be interested in DropSpace, an application for Android that syncs the data on the card automatically with the Dropbox file hosting and syncing service.

Browsing through a manufacturers website can offer a startling view of the product line up. Such was the case when I sprawled through Gigabytes range, only to find that they offer server line products, including dual processor motherboards. These are typically sold in a B2B environment (to system builders and integrators) rather than to the public, but after a couple of emails they were happy to send over their GA-7PESH1 model and a couple of Xeon CPUs for testing. Coming from a background where we used dual processor systems for some PhD CPU workstation throughput, it was interesting to see how the Sandy Bridge-E Xeons compared to consumer grade hardware for getting the job done. Read on for the full review.

Here's a long, thorough review of Netrunner 12.12 64-bit edition, a Kubuntu-based distribution, covering live session, installation in a quadruple-boot configuration on a laptop with Intel graphics and SSD, plus post-install testing and usage, including look & feel, new Dolphin options, Wireless, Samba sharing, Web Accounts and desktop integration, Runners-ID cloud storage, multimedia playback - Flash and MP3, applications stack, web camera, desktop effects, updates, system stability, system resources, suspend & resume, multiple problems with various services in the live session, installer crashes, a few other glitches, and more.

While benchmarks this week have shown the Nouveau driver can be faster with the Linux 3.8 kernel, further benchmarks have shown that this reverse-engineered open-source driver for supporting the spectrum of NVIDIA GPUs is still at a significant loss compared to NVIDIA's official but proprietary Linux graphics driver.

When using the Linux 3.8 Git kernel plus the Mesa 9.1-devel Git master code for Nouveau Gallium3D, both of which were fetched as the "Nouveau Latest" code from just days ago, the performance was compared to NVIDIA's latest 313.09 Beta proprietary Linux driver. The GeForce 9800GT, 9800GTX, and GT 220 were used as the cards for this round of comparison, similar to the benchmarks published earlier this week.