For speciality laptops, I’d recommend you stay away from Dell, HP, Compaq and the big dealers because these dealers do not specialize in making gaming or entertainment laptops. They may not give the best selection combinations and prices for such laptops are generally higher from the big manufacturers. For an extreme high-end laptop I’d check out Alienware, Falcon Nrothwest, or Voodoo if your budget is unlimited. For $5,000, you can get a top-of-the-line SLI videocard laptop with all the bells and whistles. However, if your budget is more limited, I suggest you go to a place like cyberpowerpc.com or ibuypower.com and buy a more modest laptop. For most people, I’d suggest a dual-core processor, 1-2GB of Ram and at least a GeForce 7600 Go videocard or ATI X1600 videocard. A laptop like the one I just described may run you around $1,200 and usually there are free goodies that come with it. I’d actually look now for laptops that have the 8600GT in them or the 7700 for videocard as these well outperform the 7600 GO. If you really want gaming power you can always go for the laptops with the 7900GS or 7950 GTX videocard models, but those generally range in the $2000+ range and for laptops, is not worth your money in my opinion.
Posted on October 1st, 2007 by Archbob
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With the world going mobile, you might be thinking of trading your desktop for a laptop. Laptops are small, lightweight, and able to be carried anywhere. However, they are also significantly more expensive than their desktop counterparts, are largely not upgradable, and there is no build-it-yourself option. This leaves you with the hard choice of which laptop to buy, what price to pay, and where to purchase the laptop. If your just wanting to use the laptop for business purposes and do not do much video editing, graphics animation, or gaming, then a regular old Dell Inspiron like the baseline 1510 Model will suit you just fine. If you are planning to use Vista and the aerobrush feature, then I highly recommend upgrading the RAM to 1 GB minimum and possibly 2GB if you can afford the extra $70. If you have special needs for the laptop such as gaming and video editing, stay tuned for the next article and my recommendations for speciality laptops.
Posted on September 29th, 2007 by Archbob
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Vista has been out since early this year and one of the biggest complaints is the massive hardware requirements that it takes just to run this OS. Its so advanced that your average Wal-Mart computer will not run it anywhere near an acceptable speed. This is the first OS that recommended(really requires) you to have an external video card other than the integrated one that comes with most computers.
Lets take a look at the breakdown of what the recommended requirements are:
1 GHZ processor
1 GB DDR Ram
1 Graphics card (128mb memory)
Pixel Shader capabilities
However, I found that those minimum requirements won’t cut it for decent performance. Almost always, you’ll be running other applications while running Vista and if you want to use the new Aerobrush interface, you’ll need much more under the hood of your computer than that. What I recommend:
1. Dual Core processor(Core 2 duo or AMD X2)
2. 2GB DDR RAM(aero-brush eats memory like crazy)
3. 80 GB HD
4. Ge-Force 7600 256mb or better(equal to ATI Radeon X1600)
I suspect you’ll need at least that kind of hardware to run Vista and get your games going at the same time.
That being said, even if you have the computer to run Vista, I don’t recommend upgrading from XP until later. Vista is still a bit unstable and some drivers are just not compatible. Plus the security, while improved, is somewhat too improved and it sometimes doesn’t allow you to do anything. For anyone reading this, I recommend waiting until SP1 for Vista comes out before making the jump from XP.
Posted on September 25th, 2007 by Archbob
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With Intel coming out with the 45nm Penryn this November, it seems that AMD is really on the hopes. They, however, have their own heavyweight fighter on the line. Its name: Phenom. Phenom is set to release in December and will hopefully make its debut in time for the holiday season.
Phenom will come in 3 varieties and will support different sockets, so here’s the breakdown:
Atholon X2: This isn’t really part the Phenom family and have already been out for a while. The X2 family of processors will become the value option once phenom is released and should see a drop in price. They will continue to be Socket AM2. Basically, they are Atholon 64’s with the 64 taken off the name.
Phenom X2, Phenom X4 - These are low-grade or mid grade Phenom Chips that support either dual-core or Quad-core setups(as evidenced by their name X2 or X4). These versions will have lower clock speeds and not as much Cache as the top-of-the-line Phenom processors.
Phenom FX - This is AMD’s 900LB gorilla at launch and probably the one that will be pitted against Penryn’s best. This version is quad-core only and will cost you an arm and a leg. They boast the highest available clock speeds and the most cache of the AMD family.
Phenom will initially be based on the 65 NM core with 45NM shrinks in the pipeline possibly next year. To compete with Penryn, the Phenom must be at least 33% fast than the current Core2Duo’s which is a hard feat.
I’m an AMD fanboy myself but I cannot see the 65nm Phenoms beating out the 45nm Penryns in terms of performance. AMD’s quad-core is a true quad core instead of the 2*dual-core setup that intel has so this may be a large factor. We will have to see in the upcoming battle.
Posted on September 24th, 2007 by Archbob
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In the battle of desktop processors, the lead has shifted back and forth for many years. AMD first burst onto the scene with the K6-2 followed closely by the K6-3, the first real challenge to Intel Pentium II. The K7 completely blew intel away until Intel retailated with its own Coppermine processor. AMD, however, beat intel to the GHZ mark and the two have traded punches back and forth for some time.
Lately Intel’s Core2 Duo has taken a clear lead over AMD’s X2 series. The Core2Duo takes up less power and has better performance. Now Intel seeks to up the ante once again with its new weapon: Penryn.
Penryn is not just another upgrade to Core2Duo, its a shrink from 65nm transistors to 45 nm transistors. What this means is that you can cram more of these transistors on a processor which results in faster clock speeds. However, according to Intel, this is not only an optical shrink. Penryn claims to have architecture improvements over the current Core 2 Duo. Unofficial benchmarks from sources that have been allowed to test samples of Penryn have said the performance of this chip is 25%-33% better than the curent generation of Core 2’s. That is a huge jump if the claims are true. Intel also claims to have a new insulation technology that will help push Penryn to even higher speeds.
This chip is slated to come out in November this year, slightly before AMD’s Phenom series, which it will engage in Mortal Kombat with. Who will be the victor? No one knows.
Posted on September 23rd, 2007 by Archbob
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This article is about ATI/AMD and their soon-to-be-out-hopefully 2900XTX. Originally this card was slated to come out in June as their flagship product to compete against Ndivia’s then flagship product the Geforce 8800 GTX. On the release date, however, it was announced that only the XT would be released to compete against Nvidia’s 8800 GTS 640mb. ATI/AMD’s explanation was that they were more focused on the mainstream card and not the ultra high-end card since it would garner very few sales. A good excuse, but my guess is that the XTX at that time simply did not have the juice to compete against Nvidia’s 8800 GTX. Soon after the XT launched and drivers were optimized, it was found to have about 10-15% more power than the 8800 GTS but lower image quality. It also cost around $50 more at the time. But preformance wise, it still got spanked by the GTX.
Three months later, the XTX is still only about to be released. It looks identical to the XT but with twice the on-board memory. Many hardware hobbyists are skeptical about this change because the XT’s bottleneck was not memory, it was the clock speed, which seems only tuned up slightly in the XTX version of the card. Reviews of the XTX have already leacked out on the web on a variety of sites. These “unofficial” reviews give the XTX a rating anywhere from Ultra-Crappy to Ultra-awesome. My guess is that when it officially launches, it will at first lag behind the GTX in performance because of driver issues. As drivers get more stabilized, the performance will rise to be on par with the GTX and even possibly equal that of the 8800 Ultra.
Of course, ATI is 9 months late to the race and the people who really want the card have already paid for a GTX. But despite ambigious benchmark numbers and a late release date, it will probably sell out just like its XT cousin. Why? My guess is probably because its pink-colored with white flames.
Posted on September 22nd, 2007 by Archbob
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Currently, in the realm of video cards, the top end performer is by far the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra. This puppy supports DX10 and spits out insanely high frame rates on even cutting-edge games at high resolutions. The pitfall? These cards cost over $700 retail. So if you are wondering would people, even gaming enthusiasts, actually pay this much for a video card.
Well, I happen to have won a BFG Nvidia 8800 ULTRA deluxe package from a raffle a few weeks ago and since I couldn’t afford to pair it with a quad-core intel extreme as well as a giant monitor and killer RAM, I decided to see how much I could fetch for this thing on E-bay. BFG retails this product for $750. So are people really willing to pay that much for this card and its accessories? Not even close. Most of the 8800 Ultras on E-bay have Buy It Now prices of $650 and usually go for considerably less. For my own card, I eventually sold it for $600 including the shipping, which brought the price down to around $570 in reality. I hawked it around for a while but that was the best offer I could get.
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Posted on September 21st, 2007 by Archbob
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According to dictionary.com a computer is “an electronic device designed to accept data, perform prescribed mathematical and logical operations at high speed, and display the results of these operations.” Some 10 years earlier a layman definition of computer was a device which had a monitor and a CPU for processing. Earlier in 1980s and 70s which used to require a full size room to contain them, were available in small sized boxed a few years earlier. Now considering todays scenario, when almost all cellphones and mobile devices have the deatures and components of a computer, the definition of computer has alltogether changed. Which used to be a bulky device and had a lot of microships and transistors inside it has now been made on a single chip and that chip is almost smaller than the size of thumb of hand. All features like main memory, processor and storage media are available for small mobile devices. Mobile devices hav OSes, they have network connections like wifi, bluetooth etc. The Iphone which we use today has complexity far greater than the pentium 1 which was being used just 12 years back and the symbian OSes have features which are far more than those present in windows 95 operating system.
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Posted on August 18th, 2007 by gadget
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Posted on August 17th, 2007 by Admin
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