Hasta La Gadget!

They’re a far cry from being beautiful, but they’re also tremendously more powerful than that joke-of-a-machine you’re using now. In an effort to help those who live and breathe within Excel experience a life filled with fewer frustrations, Lenovo is cranking out a pair of new desktops for the working world. Both the ThinkStation E30 and ThinkCentre M81 can be outfitted with Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs, and the E30 can be equipped with an 80GB or 160GB SSD, NVIDIA’s Quadro / NVS graphics, up to 16GB of memory, USB 3.0 and a SATA III interface. The M81 steps down a bit with integrated Intel graphics (or a discrete ATI option), but both rigs are optimized for fast start up and shut down time under Lenovo’s Enhanced Experience (EE) 2.0 for Windows 7 program. The bad news? $629 and $599 starting points in order of mention, and you’ll have to wait until late April / early May to get your grubby paws around one. Full release is after the break, per usual.

Continue reading Lenovo gets serious with cubicle-approved ThinkStation E30 and ThinkCentre M81 desktops

Lenovo gets serious with cubicle-approved ThinkStation E30 and ThinkCentre M81 desktops originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Does this badass gaming rig look familiar? It should — it’s basically a DARWINmachine Hammerhead HMR989 with some sweet, sweet cherries on top. In an attempt to live up to its name, Pure Luxury’s pimped it out with an Intel Core i7-990X processor, 12GB of pricey Kingston RAM, two NVIDIA GTX 580 graphics cards, two 128GB SSDs, 2TB of magnetic storage, and a Blu-ray drive for good measure. The company claims the killer combo can boot in four seconds, and run Call of Duty: Black Ops at 1920 x 1200 resolution with 8xMSAA at 285fps. All of those components plug into an ASUS Rampage III Gene motherboard and a 1.2 kilowatt modular power supply to juice the blood-red monster machine, and there’s a lifetime warranty with 24/7 phone support. Should any of those expensive parts fail, Pure Luxury says it’ll replace them with equal or better performing components and foot the shipping bill too. Of course, all this luxury doesn’t come cheap — you’ll drop $9,500 before you see one of these puppies shipped to your house. Makes the original $2,900 Hammerhead look downright affordable, no?

Continue reading Pure Luxury takes DARWINmachine’s Hammerhead PC, adds primo parts and lifetime warranty

Pure Luxury takes DARWINmachine’s Hammerhead PC, adds primo parts and lifetime warranty originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re scoring at home, NVIDIA currently holds the lead in single-GPU graphics cards with its GeForce GTX 580, but ATI’s dual-chip Radeon HD 5970 has been holding down the absolute speed crown for a good long while. Now, bearing the name of AMD Radeon HD 6990, its successor sidles up to the throne and demands attention as the fastest single expansion board you can plug into your shiny new motherboard. The 6990 boasts a massive 4GB of GDDR5, 3,072 Stream Processors, 64 ROPs, and an 830MHz core clock speed. A dual-BIOS switch will let you crank that clock up to 880MHz with a corresponding increase in voltage, but don’t expect to see much overclocking headroom above that.

Reviewers note, alongside their fawning assessment of the world’s best performance, that the HD 6990 is a massively power-hungry card (375W TDP) and one that makes quite a bit of noise while going through its herculean tasks. That’s in spite of a new vapor chamber cooling system that allegedly supports up to 450W of thermal output. If all this strikes you as a somewhat flawed execution, maybe you’ll join us in hoping NVIDIA’s imminently upcoming response, dubbed the GTX 590, will be able to offer a neater, more efficient assault on the extreme peaks of graphical performance.

Read – HardOCP
Read – AnandTech
Read – Tech Report
Read – PC Perspective
Read – techPowerUp!
Read – Hot Hardware
Read – Hexus

AMD launches Radeon HD 6990 powerhouse for $699, maintains ‘world’s fastest’ title originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every time we write about Intel’s flawed Sandy Bridge chipset and the need for it to be physically replaced, the financial costs go up. First Intel projected a $300 million hit to its bottom line, then it set aside $700 million to cover repairs and replacements, and now it’s estimating a round $1 billion loss in “missed sales and higher costs.” Those missed sales will be coming directly from guys like MSI and Gigabyte, two of the major motherboard makers, who have stopped selling their Sandy Bridge-compatible models until Intel delivers untainted stock, and also Dell, who has nixed availability of its Alienware M17x R.3 gaming laptop. CNET did spot that HP and Dell were still selling laptops with the offending chipset in them yesterday, but we imagine both will get their online stores straightened out in due course. For its part, HP says it’s pushing back a business notebook announcement due to this news, much like NEC has had to do. Moral of the story? Don’t let faulty chips out of the oven.

[Thanks, geller]

Dell, Gigabyte and MSI pull products in wake of Sandy Bridge chipset flaw, HP faces delays originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 04:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh, come on, Google! If you’re going to give us desktop notifiers for our favorite email and chat clients, you’ve got to play nice and let us have them on more than your own browser, right? To be fair to the Chrome maker, it’s standardizing the code it’s used in its new HTML5 alerts so that other browsers can soon use it too, but as of today, you’ll need to use the Google-sanctioned webscape navigator if you want its sweet new pop-ups on your desktop. We gave them a quick try and they’re delightfully quick, with Gtalk message alerts updating themselves to the latest one received instead of stacking up and threatening your sanity. Hit the source link to learn how to enable the new notifications.

Google adds HTML5 Gmail and Gtalk notifications for the desktop, makes you envy Chrome users originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 05:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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