Looking to beef up your desktop with super-fast storage? Corsair has a new solid state disk that takes advantage of your PC’s speedy PCI Express lanes by plugging directly into an add-in card slot. It’s called the Neutron NX500 NVMe PCIe SSD AIC, and it’s available in two capacities now, to be followed by a third capacity at the end of the month.
Traditionally, mechanical hard drives and cartridge-like solid state disks connect to the Serial ATA (SATA) bus (freeway) on a motherboard via ports and cables. The third revision of the specification powering this bus caps read and write speeds at 600MB per second, which is fine for general applications like browsing the internet, checking email, writing documents, and performing other mainstream tasks.
Meanwhile, the PCI Express bus is extremely fast. It’s built for handling add-in cards shoved into slots that are essentially an extension of the motherboard. Short for Peripheral Component Interconnect, this bus relies on “lanes” for sending and receiving data from multiple card-focused slots. Because SATA was created with slow hard drives and optical drives in mind, it bottlenecks the full capabilities of the newer, super-fast NAND Flash technology that drives today’s solid state drives.
Thus, moving SSD storage to PCI Express makes sense. As of late, stick-shaped SSDs have become a popular form factor, connecting to special “M.2” card-style slots on a motherboard. These slots can be based on the PCI Express or SATA 3 bus, depending on the manufacturer. These slots also rely on the NVM Express or the SATA Express storage access interface, the latter of which uses a PCI Express bus to provide transfer speeds of up to 1,969MB per second.
But what if you don’t have an M.2 slot on your motherboard supporting PCI Express? That’s where Corsair’s Neutron NX500 add-in card comes into play. Just shove it into an open slot, and you immediately have a crazy-fast SSD without disrupting the other storage devices installed in the PC. It’s based on the NVM Express interface, which was originally designed for the high-speed needs of the enterprise market. Corsair’s SSD requires a slot that supports the PCI Express 3.0 specification, and at least four lanes.
Outside the speed factor, the Neutron NX500 add-in SSD comes packed with a high-surface-area heatsink to keep the card cool and fanless, enhanced error correction, dedicated DDR3 cache, and a five-year warranty. It’s compatible with Corsair’s free SSD Toolbox software, too.
The 400GB ($320) and 800GB ($660) models are available now. The 1.6TB version won’t be made available until the end of August.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.