Behemoth laptops bound into view

16 May 2008 | 22:15 BST

By Paul Taylor

ASUS RECENTLY ANNOUNCED a laptop with a gargantuan 1TB storage capacity, the M70S. Naturally these things come in DTR format, and storage is split between 2x500MB drives. They’re not supposed to be carried around, nor are they in the least bit cheap. Notebook Review tested it to exhaustion and came out with a warm and fuzzy feeling from the experience. It’s got just under the “best-of-everything” you can stick under the hood of a laptop – except maybe SLI graphics, as this comes with a HD 3650 1GB part. The laptop also comes with 4GB of RAM *AND* Windows Vista 32-bit. “Why?” you ask... good question. Unless, of course, the graphics card somehow draws the “unusable” 1GB from main memory for itself. It’s a pretty brutal entertainment system. Read the review.

We’ve been reading a lot of stuff on Acer’s new-born laptop, the Aspire 8920G. It’s part of the new Gemstone Blue line, and this particular model competes in the super heavy-weight DTR 18.4-inch class. Yes. That’s 1920x1080 pixels of screen real-estate on a laptop. With a keen focus on entertainment, it also sports a serious 5.1 sound setup (well, as serious as you can get on a laptop), a really powerful CPU, 4GB o’RAM, BD player and a GeForce 9650M GS (2307 marks in 3Dmark 06) – just about everything you need for entertainment. But what’s really shining through are the new aesthetics in this gemstone line-up. Looks good.

CPU3D has an Atomic HD3870X2 H20 on the bench today. Sapphire’s Atomic series graphics cards come with factory watercooling shipped in a nice metal case. However, we hadn’t seen this particular variety. So what do you get when you watercool a X2? Well, CPU3D was blown away by the performance (no, really), and it’s quite easy to install it seems. The only thing it doesn’t have going for it is the (guestimated) price tag of around £350/$680... Expensive. If you like Crysis very much, you can get a better deal out of a 9800GTX or 9600GT SLI. Catch it here.

Expreview has a ... review... of XFX’s nForce 790i Ultra mobo. This is the ultra-high end of Nvidia’s chipsets and is really only for the extremely insane/wealthy who have nothing better to do with their money. This chipset will allow you to run triple-SLI with Intel’s own Extremely Expensive CPUs. If you consider that Nvidia put what is basically 2 chipsets on one motherboard then what you have is a muscle car with very little finesse. It retails for around $350, making it expensive by any standard, but it will give X48 a run for its money. Read on.

Bit Tech is covering BFG’s GeForce 9800GTX OCX card. This particular model ships with a 755MHz clock on the GPU, not the highest we’ve seen, but still noteworthy. Technically Tim thinks they’ve gone above and beyond, but when you weigh in the price, you start having second thoughts. £250 will buy you this card or an HD3870X2, which means that although you still have a shockingly fast single-GPU card, games that make good use of the X2’s second GPU accordingly, will overtake the BFG. Read about the card, here.

George at HillBillyHardware has received his KDS 26-inch panel in the mail, and he’s really really pleased with it. Sporting a 1920x1200 resolution, similar to some 24-inch panels, the KDS model offers a bigger screen with above-average specs for the price of a 24-incher. Like he says, there isn’t much sense to buying a 24-incher if you can get 26 inches for the same price, even though spec-wise they are similar. It’s also HDCP infected so its “good” all the way. Check it out here.

Extremetech is proving that the old truth about SSD write speeds may coming to an end. Using 2 RAIDed Imation SSDs and another 2 from Mtron (Mobis) 64GB units, they’ve put an end to the matter. Still, dropping $4000 to kit out your PC with 2 drives is still insane by any standard... The drives’ write performance are undoubtedly higher, but still left in the smoking trail of WD’s lightning-fast Velociraptor... *whoosh*. Read it here.

With power consumption being the hottest sales feature on the menu these days – it’s only natural that committees get formed, ponder, scratch chins and type out common frameworks for benchmarking power consumption. Real World Tech delves into the current and future SPECpower benchmarks (including the 2008 incarnation) right here. Who knows, once virtualization enters server mainstream, maybe we can benchmark what web apps consume and “virtualize” our power bills the way of our customers... µ

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