Archive for the ‘Notebook’ Category
July 29th, 2010 | 
Author: 
Hot on the heels of Nvidia’s announcement that it would soon begin shipping its Fermi-based Quadro workstation cards, HP has come out and said it will cram the new Quadro 5000M into its EliteBook 8740w mobile workstations.
The 8740w is a 17-inch notebook that comes to the mobile party looking sharp and dressed in a gunmetal anodized-aluminum finish. It’s HP’s most powerful laptop to date starting with a range of Intel chips to choose from, including the Core i7 Extreme Edition. The 8740w comes capable of housing up to 16GB of RAM, and according to HP, it’s been “engineered to meet rigid MIL-STD 810G military-standard tests for vibration, dust, humidity, altitude, and high and low temperatures, and is also free of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).”
In other words, the EliteBook 8740w is purportedly one tough cookie, but it’s the Quadro 5000M that’s the real treat here. This mobile Fermi part comes with 320 cores and 2GB of memory, and is a slightly a trimmed down version of the desktop part with 352 cores and 2.5GB of memory.
Pricing will start at $2,676.
Posted in 
Tags: 
New laptops based on Intel’s Core i5 CPUs are rolling in like a swarm of summer grasshoppers. The Acer Aspire 5740G-6979 all-purpose laptop falls squarely in the conservative middle of these units, stuffing a next-generation Core i5-430M processor and ATI Radeon Mobility 5650 graphics hardware into a bulky, last-generation laptop chassis.
Though the case is an attractive cobalt blue, the unit screams “average” when you factor in its 1.5-inch thickness and 6.2-pound weight. It’s a tight fit in my LowePro FastPack 250 backpack–the power brick needed to go into a separate compartment.
The system’s performance is pretty standard for a laptop in this class, as this portable earned WorldBench 6 scores that were slightly better than average. The gaming results, however, seemed quite good for a $750 notebook, even in modern games: It achieved frame rates over 30 frames per second in Far Cry 2 with optimal settings in DirectX 10 mode, while the more-demanding STALKER: Call of Pripyat needed to be set at moderate settings to hit over 30 fps (but that included enabling DX11 tessellation). Read the rest of this entry »
The One Laptop Per Child team is ready to embrace multitouch displays. The not-for-profit outfit has revealed that the upcoming XO-1.75 laptop will come fitted with a 8.9-inch multitouch display. A cheaper, non-touchscreen variant of the next OLPC laptop will also be available for those allergic to touchscreens.The XO-1.75 will sport a processor based on the ARM architecture unlike its predecessor that features an x86 processor from VIA. This shift necessitates software changes as the current version of OLPC’s favorite Linux distribution, Fedora, is still missing an ARM port. Chris Ball, lead software engineer for OLPC, said in an e-mail statement that future OLPC machines will continue to use Fedora as their main Linux distribution.
“We need to rebuild each of the thousands of Fedora packages for Arm from their Fedora 13 versions, so that includes everything from the kernel and drivers up through all of the other packages, including Sugar,” Ball said.
The latest addition to Samsung’s N-Series netbook range — the N230 — is really just another netbook in a what’s long been a crowded market, only this one promises to stay up and running all day long, and then some.
“A long battery life is vital to a reliable mobile computing experience and the N230 has been designed to provide just that: With Samsung’s innovative LED display, optimized processing performance and proprietary Enhanced Battery Life (EBL) solutions, the N230 delivers incredible energy-efficiency. It offers an extensive battery life of up to 7 hours as standard and with an optional long-life battery. This can be extended up to an amazing 13.8 hours (66Wh battery),” Samsung said.
Other features include the usual suspects, including a 10.1-inch screen, Intel Atom N450 (1.66GHz) or N470 (1.8Ghz) processor, 1GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive, and everything else common to most modern netbooks. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s a rare occasion that we see a high profile new laptop release on a Sunday, but you won’t hear any complaining from me. The new HP Envy 14 has officially gone up for sale as of today, and it strikes an interesting balance between style and performance. The all-aluminum chassis design clearly stole a few styling cues from the Macbook Pro family, but HP has added enough additional details to make it stand out from the crowd.
The base model carries a starting price of $1,099.99 and comes loaded with a Core i3-370M, 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB HDD. Given that the machine also includes HDMI, mini-Display Port, and Gigabit Ethernet as standard options, it appears to be a halfway decent price/performance proposition. Read the rest of this entry »
By now, if you’re buying a netbook, you know what you’re getting: All the models of a given generation are the same on the inside. So with the internals out of the decision tree, how do you choose which of dozens of near-identical netbooks is worthy of your purchase? Sure, the old standby differentiator of battery life still applies. But how about aesthetics? Can you actually choose a netbook based on design?
The N210 is pretty on the outside but bloated on the inside. Be prepared to uninstall some nagware.
We think so. The Samsung N210’s internals could be those of any current-gen non-Ion netbook—a 1.66GHz Atom N450 Pine Trail processor, 1GB RAM, a 250GB 5,400rpm hard drive—but it’s what’s on the outside that counts. The device has an embossed cream-color lid covered with a clear plastic coating. The interior is all matte white; and with its chrome edge trim and crisp gray lettering, it’s almost retro-futuristic. The keyboard puts every other netbook keyboard to shame—the chiclet-style keys aren’t cramped at all and the keyboard doesn’t feel mushy. Read the rest of this entry »
Tired of hearing about 3D? Get used to it folks, this is one fad that shows no sign of going away, and instead continues to pick up steam. It’s infectious, and the latest to catch the 3D bug is Lenovo, which just announced its first 3D laptop, the IdeaPad Y560d.
“Fun is a notebook that brings multimedia to life—and the IdeaPad Y560d does this in a dramatic fashion with a truly unique 3D viewing experience,” said Dion Weisler, vice president, business operations, Lenovo. “While 3D technology has been around for ages, it has not been readily accessible to consumers within the home. Lenovo is helping bridge this gap by delivering consumers a 3D experience on a familiar PC platform that can be viewed and enjoyed when and where they want.”
The IdeaPad Y560d measures 15.6 inches and, like just about every other 3D product on the market, requires special glasses to see objects in three dimensions. In addition, Lenovo says its TriDef technology will allow users to view standard 2D videos and photos in 3D. Read the rest of this entry »