In depth: Following the Bay Trail: 5 Intel tablets to make you drool

If you've been keeping one eye on the current spate of smaller Windows tablets cropping up on the market, you'll know that many of them house Intel's latest Atom Bay Trail CPU.

Though you could say that the chipmaker was a little late to the mobile party, it appears to be making up for lost ground now with the diminutive processor, allowing for more portable, powerful and affordable devices that consume less power.

And they've arrived at the right time too, funnily enough. Now that Windows 8.1 has landed, Bay Trail-toting tablets will ship with a host of new features out of the box. Here are some of the ones to have caught our eye.

Pricing: $329.99, around £204 exc VAT, or AU$432

Acer's Iconia W3 attracted criticism for its appallingly bad capacitive display, but it's an entirely usable device that's also super portable when combined with its Bluetooth keyboard dock.

Love it or hate it, the W3's white bezel has returned on its successor, the Iconia W4, which has been equipped with an IPS display (1280 x 800 pixels) to widen the viewing angles to 170 degrees.

The W4's 1.8GHz Bay Trail CPU should make it nippier than its predecessor and its touted 10 hours' battery life gives it the legs to go the distance and then some.

We've not had the chance to use the W4's new Crunch Keyboard and Cover accessories, but it'll be interesting to see if they make us hungry for some marathon typing sessions.

Pricing: 32GB - $299, around £185, or AU$310. 64GB - £349, around £215, or AU$362

Lenovo is aiming to do things a little differently with its Miix2 slate, which bolts a hinge to the left-hand side of the device to give it iPad mini-style protection in a snap. The cover even folds over itself to form a small triangle to prop the tablet up.

It's promising to be one of the most diminutive 8-inch outings yet, measuring just 8.1mm thick, meaning you won't have to be a clown to carry full-fat Windows 8.1 around in your pocket. It weighs just 0.77lb too, which only adds to its portability.

Again, it gets a 1200 x 800 pixel-resolution display that's powered by an Intel Bay Trail-T Quad Core processor. On the negative side, we're a little cautious about a stylus pen being bundled with a device this affordable, and Lenovo's claim of seven hours of battery life falls short of the competition.

Pricing: $299.99, £349 exc VAT or around AU$310

Dell has entered the Bay Trail fray with its 8-inch Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet, a no-nonsense device the company is offering to business users with full enterprise support and an optional Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for rock solid security.

That's not to say that its appeal is limited to tablet-toting executives rocking up at meetings with slates up their sleeves. With an IPS display, optional HSPA+, Wi-Fi connectivity, a folding keyboard accessory and free Microsoft Office, there's a lot for anyone to like.

The tablet, which measures 8.9mm thick, also gets a 5-megapixel camera on the back, a front-facing sensor and a stylus pen, meaning you can take a photograph of yourself and draw on a big moustache afterwards. And who wouldn't want to do that? OK - just us then.

Pricing: $399.99, UK/AU pricing TBC

Whereas other entries on our list seem to offer keyboards because they have to, Asus' Transformer Book T100, as with previous devices bearing the Transformer name, makes its an integral part of the package.

The tablet itself snaps onto the keyboard, which dons a small trackpad roughly the same size as those on Microsoft's Surface Touch and Type covers, alongside a powered USB 3.0 port for charging other devices.

Its 10-inch IPS display differs slightly by offering a 1366 x 768 pixel resolution but, on the plus side, Asus is claiming 11 hours of battery life thanks to extra juice provided by the dock, making it suitable for marathon sessions on the road.

Better yet, i ts maximum 64GB of internal storage can be doubled thanks to a microSD card slot, giving you a spacious 128GB to play with.

Pricing: $329, £249 or AU$361

Toshiba's Encore isn't really a looker - it features a similar design to the company's Excite range of devices styled with black bezels and silver plastic back panels.

It does, however, offer a range of pluses including an "instant on" feature that Toshiba claims allows it to come to life in under 300ms.

But that's not all - like the Transformer Book T100 - it features a microSD card reader that lets you bump up storage, along with dual mics, an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front camera that's "Skype certified" for tip top video calling.

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Review: Intel DZ87KLT-75K

Give it up for the end of an era, because Intel is getting out of the motherboard game. The 8 Series boards it makes to accompany its new Haswell CPUs are the last full-sized desktop boards it'll produce. So is it goodbye and good riddance, or will we miss them when they're gone?
                                             
Intel Desktop Board DZ87KLT-75K Extreme Amzon price

Credit where it's due, Intel has turned things around a little when it comes to listening to what PC enthusiasts want. It used to take the attitude that it knew best and anyone who didn't agree could sod off.
A delightful example of this was the relatively piffling issue of legacy ports on the back panel. Intel didn't go in for them, so you didn't get any PS/2 ports for mice and keyboards, even on its priciest board. To be fair to Intel, it wasn't a cost issue - it just didn't think they were necessary.

Except, just occasionally, they are. For instance, when you have a USB keyboard that just won't wake up until after the board has past POST and is well in its way to booting the OS, leaving you a bit stuffed if you want to plunge into the BIOS options.


Anyway, Intel has stuck a PS2 port onto the DZ87KLT-75K, so that's progress. Unfortunately, it's not uniform. In its wisdom, Intel has only provided a single HDMI-out port for hooking up integrated graphics. There's no DVI or DisplayPort, which is irritating.

Where things get actually problematic is the BIOS itself. For starters, the look and layout of the overclocking screens are beyond baffling. There are trace lines of sorts that are meant - we assume - to guide you through the process, but leave you scratching your head and at a total loss as to what it all means. Presumably, the aim was techy and slick. The result is borderline laughable.

Making matters worse, Intel eschews convention in some areas when it comes to naming the various options, only adding to the befuddlement. It's a shame, because superficially, it's a pretty sexy looking BIOS menu.
Funnily enough, in actual performance terms, overclocking is where this board falls flat. At stock clocks, it's very nippy indeed. Has Intel done a better job of optimising the DZ87KLT-75K for its new Haswell chips than the competition, or does it know something nobody else does? We'll never know, but it's the quickest Z87 board we've seen at standard operating frequencies.

Problem is, the gap is pretty small at stock clocks and doesn't make up for a disappointing overclocking result of 4.5GHz compared to 4.7GHz for the competition.

Single threaded performance
Cinebench R11.5: Index score: Higher is better
ASUS Z87-PRO: 1.76
GIGABYTE G1.SNIPER M5: 1.72
INTEL DZ87KLT-75K: 1.77
ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77: 1.64

Memory bandwidth performance
SiSoft Sandra: GB/S: Higher is better
ASUS Z87-PRO: 17.47
GIGABYTE G1.SNIPER M5: 17.45
INTEL DZ87KLT-75K: 17.56
ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77: 16.41
Gaming performance
Shogun 2
: FPS: Higher is better
ASUS Z87-PRO: 38.1
GIGABYTE G1.SNIPER M5: 37.1
INTEL DZ87KLT-75K: 37.9
ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77: 35.6

Elsewhere, there's actually quite a lot to like. The chipset cooling is distinctive, stylish and sturdy, for instance. There's a ton of USB ports on the back panel, including six 3.0 items and a pair of 2.0s, not to mention two Gigabit Ethernet adapters.

Expansion wise, we're talking two x16 PCI Express slots and a third physical x16 slot that actually delivers four lanes. There's even an old school PCI slot.

Throw in both Bluetooth and N-spec WLAN, and you've got yourself a nice package and one of the better Intel boards in recent memory, but not one we'd want to buy. We won't exactly be dancing on Intel's grave, but nor will we be shedding too many tears.

Intel Desktop Board DZ87KLT-75K Extreme Amzon price View the original article here