The Tech Report

This week, Scott joins us to talk about netbooks, new triple-core Phenoms, and his recent trip to AMD Austin, where he got a chance to see six-core Opterons and HP's new Athlon Neo-powered laptop. Scott signs off for the second half of the show, and Matt Butrovich returns by popular demand for a round-table discussion about lawsuits, future Microsoft retail outlets, his new MacBook, and Newegg's shipping policies.

Scott starts off this week's tech discussion with tales of his recent trip to Oregon, where he talked with Intel executives about the newly announced 32nm Westmere processors. Our editors are skeptical about Intel's motives for making Westmere into a CPU/GPU chimera, especially since—as Geoff points out—current Intel integrated graphics are still considerably slower than competition.

Scott then leaves our show early to continue his work in Damage Labs, and TR blogger and reviewer Matt Butrovich fills in to talk about everything from Mirror's Edge PhysX performance to a possible $99 iPhone. We also hear Geoff's thoughts on the 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive and his favorite musical rhythm game.

Our longest episode ever brings the thunder with a combination of great news and reviews and one of our most interesting interviews to date. Before our foray into the tech world begins, Jordan informs us that this episode marks the TR Podcast's one year anniversary, we pause for a quick celebration and then start into our discussion. Geoff begins with review of Nvidia's ION platform, followed by our concern over bandwidth caps and a look into the future for the curious NIC card maker Bigfoot. Our editors also debate the wisdom of another extensive sku list for Windows 7, Scott gives us an interesting perspective on the recent purchase of Shacknews, and Cyril thinks Mirrors Edge for the PC is worth a second look. Finally, Scott evaluates Nvidia's new 3D vision scheme and is only able to conclude that 3D zombies are cool, 3D women are hot.... and the rest kinda goes down hill from there.

The second half of our episode contains an interview with Intel engineer Matthew Hiltner. Scott and Geoff ask him a mix of editor and user submitted questions and Matthew talks about everything from silicon testing and bios emulation, to what happens when someone in the workplace fries an expensive testing motherboard.... don't miss this interview.

This week really has it all. We start with listener mail, as Scott and Geoff answer questions about solid-state storage and the future of AMD. Our recent escapade into the wacky world of Facebook generates buzz both in the comments and among our panelists, Josh Buss joins us to talk about a very unusual ATX case design, and we talk about Gmail getting better for the corporate world. Lastly, the Kansas City original "Bacon Explosion" has our editors drooling on mic... and Damage promises to benchmark the BBQ beauty this weekend.

Listen to this week's episode as we dive into the tech economy, the Seagate debacle, disappointing Oscar nominations, and more.

Our first regular podcast of the year covers everything from CES and Macworld news to the latest processors and graphics cards, the Windows 7 beta, and clicky keyboards.

In this special edition of the TR Podcast, Jordan and Scott summarize TR's coverage of CES 2009. Scott (on the phone with us from the airport in Las Vegas) talks about the markedly different mood for the new year, the unusual bevy of product releases for the event, highlights from the show floor, and more.

After almost of year of vocal tech reporting, our panelists sit down with hindsight 20/20 to dissect this past year of tech. Scott starts us off with an overview of the three tech trends he believes have outlined the industry in 2008. In brief, these are the solidification of the "productivity" usage model, the stagnation of graphical requirements for games, and the inevitable collision of CPUs and GPUs.

With these three tech themes serving as an outline, our editors dive into the top news and reviews from their areas of expertise. Geoff discusses the rise of netbooks, 780G and P45 chipsets, Xonar sound cards, and the advancement of solid-state storage technology. Cyril and Scott discuss some of 2008's biggest corporate news, including AMD's early CEO swap and Nvidia's acquisition of Ageia. Finally, Scott does a roundup of the CPU and GPU designs that made this year one of the busiest we've seen in TR's 9 year history.

Before signing off on our last episode of 2008, Jordan asks each of the editors what they're most looking forward to in 2009, and we all pick our favorite 2008 game.

Scott starts off the discussion this week with a scathing technical review of the recently released EA survival-horror game, Dead Space. After a brief cool down period, we deliver the news that TR's marketing maestro Adam Eiberger is the proud father of a newborn baby boy. (Daniel Micah Eiberger weighs in at 8 lbs, is in good health, and is consistently scoring 240 in WorldBench.)

Before taking time off to prepare for the new baby gerbil, Adam and Scott worked to put together TR's 2008 Christmas Giveaway. Scott fills us in on the impressive specs of the giveaway PC, and he says he expects to post an article very soon with details on how to enter. The rest of our episode covers this past week's helping of TR news and articles. Our editors discuss SSD speeds in Windows 2000, the advancement of physics technology in games, the recent release of OpenCL 1.0, Gigabyte's new 'nettablet,' Intel's Core i7-940 and more.

After a brief Thanksgiving hiatus, the TR Podcast is back in action with one of our best sounding episodes yet (no really, it is). The holidays are fresh on our minds as we start the show, and Scott jokes about the geekiness himself and others display by using LED Christmas lights. We go on to talk about our latest TR poll, a sneak preview of Scott's super-high-end GPU benchmarks, this season's new games, and the Christmas TR system guide (which includes the infamous Crushinator configuration, inspired by the namesake robot in Futurama).

Moving on to the latest TR review articles, Scott and Geoff dive into our Core i7 memory speed analysis, and they discuss Intel's blazing fast X25-E Extreme solid-state drive. Finally, Cyril talks fondly of his new 24" LCD monitor, and the intriguing tale of AMD's RV770 GPU unfolds with colorful insight from Scott.