Let's think the first words coming to our minds when reading: Adobe Flash Player. Youtube, Hulu, vimeo, HD videos might be some of them. If you don´t understand or relate this words you probably live under a rock or have been out of the game, and by game I mean technology world, for a long time. In our AVIVO Purevideo DXVA HD Acceleration Guide we show you how to use your GPU to playback and enhance many kinds of video formats, normally used on DVDs and Blu-Rays, but not limited to them. The benefit is clear. As long as you can use your graphics card to playback your videos instead of using the CPU, you are doing things easier for your machine, thus consuming less energy and freeing your CPU to do other stuff at the same time.

This was the original idea of the DXVA technology. But what happens to the rest of the content we normally watch at the web? Flash is one of the biggest and more used formats today. Youtube being ranked 4th (by traffic stats) is knocking hard at our doors asking for some attention. Some other sites like Hulu (USA) or vimeo have enormous quantities of traffic also, and it wouldn´t be a problem if they weren´t constantly evolving and offering better quality services. For example, Youtube just went up to 1080p support the last month. But I fear 1080p isn´t an easy task for a mid-low CPU, it is? The answer to all this is very simple: DXVA for Adobe Flash Player, and that's what we are testing today in our Adobe Flash GPU Acceleration Guide at Benchmark Reviews.

Benchmark Reviews offers our finest choices for the 2009 Editor's Choice Award in this article, and the selection process has not been easy. To choose one consumer electronics product as the best-of-the-best when the vast majority of products tested at Benchmark Reviews are already at the top of their game demands the highest quality. Even though this past year has been filled with global crisis and economic meltdown, 2009 has still brought consumers some of the best products ever made. The consumer electronics and performance computer hardware markets have introduced excellent products throughout 2009, and only the best deserve our Editor's Choice Award recognition.

When the Seagate Barracuda XT was revealed as the World's first-ever third generation SATA 6GBps hard drive, expectations for performance were raised to match the new bandwidth limit. While this drive offered tremendous storage capacity paired to good performance, the transfer speeds were nowhere near the second generation SATA-3 Gb/s limit. This is where Benchmark Reviews turns to our vast collection of Solid State Drive storage products, some of which eclipse the SATA-II range. However, our history of SSD performance tests on the Intel ICH10 Southbridge would prove to be very different than our results on the new Marvell 88SE9123 or 88SE9128 SATA-III chips. In this article, Benchmark Reviews compares Marvell SATA-6G SSD performance against tests on the Intel ICH10 chipset.

HTPCs and HD content are growing more and more around the GPU industry. ATI and NVIDIA have been working on technologies to playback and enhance this video content for many years. NVIDIA started working on their Purevideo technology and added the Purevideo HD some time ago. ATI on the other hand, has their own AVIVO technology and as it was obvious, they name their latest technology AVIVO HD. Now, while these technologies have been marketed too much, I´ve noticed that the big consumers majority doesn´t even know how to use them. The real problem is that neither NVIDIA nor ATI have done enough to help people use their technology. They can bombard you with so many pictures, images and text but neither of these things will offer a simple guide on how to use the software tools in the real world. Here at Benchmark Reviews, we will teach you how to use your GPU to playback and enhance HD video content, and we´re not limited to DVD or Blu-ray content, because we´ll also address *.mkv files so that you can enjoy your stored multimedia. There is so much content available for download from Internet which can be reproduced without using your CPU, that it makes good sense to enhance the image quality whenever possible. Please, have a read at our AVIVO-HD PureVideo-HD DXVA GPU Acceleration Guide and enjoy the Full High Definition experience as it was meant to be!

Many gamers swear by the proven stability that is Windows XP, but there's a new player on the market: Windows 7. While Windows XP is heralded by some as the best OS to ever come from Microsoft, Vista is the Windows ME of the 21st Century. Enter Windows 7. Built on the proven NT platform and in many ways appearing much like Vista, that's where the similarities end. Today, Benchmark Reviews will take a look at some of the different methods of installation, and hopefully clear up some of the confusion many of you may be having. I think some people will be surprised by how easy it can be, plus we will show you how to possibly bypass having to reinstall Windows XP or Vista during an upgrade.

The proliferation of multimedia audio and video formats, including Blu-Ray, and an increasing array of TV and web based services have made the home theatre personal computer (HTPC) a powerful convergence device. With the imminent release of Microsoft's Windows 7 Operating System, Benchmark Reviews explores the evolution of the Windows HTPC Platform. We will also examine the efforts of a global community of users and premium developers, who have used Microsoft's product to showcase their skills and highlight their passion to make the PC a core component of the home entertainment setup.

Historically most people couldn't justify the expense of a dual-monitor setup in spite of the productivity gains multiple screens afford. So most people were relegated to drooling over the possibility while watching movies like "Swordfish" (possibly the most eye popping multi-monitor setup ever) or the 2008 remake of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" which reflects not only the broad adoption of multi-display configurations, but also demonstrates currently available "next generation" display technologies like Microsoft's "Surface". Today, even entry level PC's as well as nearly all laptops have graphics cards capable of multi-monitor support - so at Benchmark Reviews we decided to address the most important questions: "Will you really be more Productive?", "What do you need to know?", and "What will it cost?". Benchmark Reviews will answer all of these questions in-depth in this article on Using Dual-Monitors to Optimize Productivity.

Frequently, we find that new technological breakthroughs make old hardware that was just fine seem quaint. Be it a race toward higher clock speeds, faster front side buses, multiple cores, etc, computers become disused and replaced. Green attitudes have dissuaded people from tossing out components that are, for all intents and purposes, quite harmful to the environment. Moreover, current operating systems are becoming more power hungry let alone the software that runs on them. What's interesting about these computers is that in many cases they're perfectly useable. Here at Benchmark Reviews, we'll provide our list of uses for recycled computers.