It’s time to boot up the highest-definition Samsung Ultrabook you’ve ever laid eyes on – unless you’ve been to IFA 2012, of course. While this beast works with a fabulous 13.3-inch Full HD display and Intel Core i7 processor under the hood, you’ll be kicking out Samsung SuperBright technology with a massive 300 nit of eye-piercing power. This notebook is available now at a retailer near you – especially if that retailer is web-based – with features that’ll make your pocketbook explode.
With the Samsung Series 9 Premium Ultrabook that’s become available today, you’ll be working with a cool 128GB SSD and a 3rd Gen (Ivy Bridge) Intel Core i7 processor busting out with Samsung’s Fast Solutions technology. With this tech onboard, you’ll be booting up in less than 10 seconds with a resume time from sleep at nearly zilch.
The Series 9 Premium Ultrabook will be available starting this week (and today) everywhere fine Samsung devices are sold – notebooks and desktops, that is, for a cool MSRP of $1399.99 USD. This machine has also been sand-blasted for full fingerprint resistance, so you know it’s a high-quality build inside and out. From what we’ve seen of this device thus far – before this update – we’re all about it.
Have a peek at the looks we’ve had at the Samsung Series 9 family in the timeline below – pay special attention to the post in the “IFA 2012″ hotlink in the first paragraph of this post. There you’ll find the next generation as well!
The Falcon Northwest Tiki is a custom-built pre-constructed gaming PC that emphasizes both a radically small form factor and high performance processing power. We had the opportunity to take a peek at this system thanks to NVIDIA – inside this tiny tower is the newest most fantastic consumer-aimed graphics card on the market: the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN, the consumer product riding the wave of the impact the TITAN supercomputer. We’ll be continuing to explore the ins and outs of the TITAN over the coming year as products such as Project SHIELD become available – for now, this review of the Tiki should serve as a primer for those of you considering a TITAN of your own – and/or a full Falcon Northwest build, of course.
Hardware
The Tiki case is one that those unfamiliar with the intricacies of custom-made computers will easily overlook. It’s certainly not the flashy rainbow LED light show that some gaming PCs opt for – it’s almost as if the Tiki dares those that look at it to ask what the big deal is. Up close and personal, you’ll find that the Tiki boasts a fabulously simple set of aesthetics, a subtly lit Falcon Northwest logo up front, and a granite base.
The granite base we’ve got here is what the company calls “Absolute Black”. While you’ve got more than one color choice if you’d like to explore several shades, we’d certainly recommend the black if you’re working with the straight-up black case – together they’re quite classy. The whole unit is light enough that you’ll be able to transport it to and from LAN parties with ease (if that’s your sort of thing) and is perfectly well balanced due in a large part to the granite – it does its job well.
Getting inside the Tiki is just about as simple as it gets without working with magnets – here you’ll be undoing two thumbscrews and pushing one side off – you’ll want to be careful doing so only because the 120MM Asetek liquid cooler (550LC) is attached to it, tubes running from the casing to the main hunk of the unit. This setup works awesome for getting down into the guts of the machine as quick as possible – the fewer screws we’ve got to deal with for customization, the better.
Inside this setup you’ll find an ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe mini ITX motherboard shining out in all its bluey glory amid the massive monsters that are the high-end components that this amalgamation is made of. We’re working with a 256GB SSD SATA3 (Crucial M4 with M500 available soon from Falcon Northwest – check on that when you’re picking up your own) as well as a 3TB WD “Caviar Green” SATA3 hard drive for all the data storage you could ask for.
Getting inside to remove / replace / give big kisses to your favorite components is only a few screw turns away. While there are wires here or there glued down for the trip between Falcon Northwest’s test shop and your home, they’re easily popped off and apart when you decide you want to move forward with any new components.
The two big monsters inside this build are the 3rd Generation Intel Core i7 processor (overclocked to 3.5GHz), and the 6GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN graphics card. When you’re picking up the TITAN, you’re not looking for a budget setup. You’ve got a beast right out of the box. Again, this isn’t the last time we’ll be working with NVIDIA’s TITAN GPU for video game reviews and cloud gaming action – stick around our NVIDIA tag portal as well as our NVIDIA Tegra hub for the full fireworks through the future.
Once you’re done rummaging around the insides, you’ll find more inputs and outputs than you’ll ever have a need for. The build we’ve got here works with a Sony Optiarc slot load DVD+-RW on top near a a headphone jack, microphone jack, and set of two USB 3.0 ports. You’ll also see a symmetrical set of vents that, when you peek through, you’ll be able to see the side of the TITAN: “GEFORCE GTX” in bright NVIDIA green lights just below the surface – only visible up close.
The back of this machine has its IO panel labels set in upside-down for easy reading whilst looking down over the top – as you’re prone to do with such a desktop. That massive set of connections includes two eSATA ports, four USB 3.0 ports, and four USB 2.0 ports. You’ll also find GigE, ASUS Wifi connections (you’ll get two external antenna in your package from Falcon Northwest), and standard optical and analog audio jacks. Ethernet and processor-powered display outputs DVI, HDMI, and Display Port are also down there if you want to make use of them.
Nearer the top you’ve got two DL-DVI ports as well as HDMI and DisplayPort outputs bringing the heat via your GeForce TITAN GPU. Your power supply (Silverstone ST-45B 450W) sits nearest the bottom on the back. On either side of the case you’ll more airflow action allowing this Tiki setup to remain impressively cool no matter what we throw at it. With that you’ll still be hearing next no noise – you’ll certainly not be having to dismiss a “hum” while you’re enjoying the greatness of the highest powered games on the market – those being the games you’re essentially obligated to test out and work with when you’re rolling with Tiki.
Software and Performance
Under the hood out of the box we’re working with 64bit Windows 8 Professional, and though it’s still a little odd working with this operating system without a touchscreen interface, it’s certainly starting to feel more natural than it did when Microsoft first pushed the system to consumers. That said, the real power here comes from the software we’re using outside the standard Microsoft experience: games, games, and more games. And with a system this size, big-time possibilities!
Steam Big Picture Mode
The size of this system suggests some rather unique use-cases, even before we consider the fact that NVIDIA has some big plans for GeForce and cloud computing in the home this year. The Tiki case isn’t much larger than the average major-label gaming console today, and even compared to what’s coming out later this year (more than likely), you can be confident you’ll have a size-to-power ratio that blows any gaming console out of the water. And unless the Xbox 720 or PlayStation 4 pull some real magic out of their sleeves with regards to digital game distribution soon, Valve’s Steam will continue to be the premiere destination for the universe’s greatest downloadable games.
NVIDIA GeForce Experience
NVIDIA has made some rather interesting strides recently in making sure the average citizen is able to have a top-notch gaming experience. Just this year the GeForce Experience was released – an NVIDIA-powered app interface where a collection of the world’s most fabulous games can have their settings optimized for your unique gaming hardware setup instantly and automatically. NVIDIA has released a new GeForce driver software update for esentially every major game delivered in the first quarter of 2013, each of them able to be accessed via this GeForce Experience with a single button click, a unique game settings interface appearing for you then if you’ve got said game on your computer.
System – System manufacturer System Product Name
Manufacturer
Falcon Northwest
Product Type
Desktop
Operating System
Microsoft Windows 8 Pro (64-bit)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P8Z77-I DELUXE
Processor
Intel Core i7-3770K
Processor ID
GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 58 Stepping 9
Processor Frequency
3.50 GHz
Processors
1
Threads
8
Cores
4
L1 Instruction Cache
32.0 KB
L1 Data Cache
32.0 KB
L2 Cache
256 KB
L3 Cache
8.00 MB
Memory
8.00 GB DDR3 SDRAM 934MHz
FSB
100.0 MHz
BIOS
American Megatrends Inc. 0607
With the automatic settings optimization feature, your games will become as excellent as they possibly can be – both aesthetically and performance-wise. With the Tiki rolling with a GeForce GTX TITAN under the hood and NVIDIA optimizing settings game-to-game, we’ve had nothing but the best gaming experiences we’ve ever seen on a gaming computer.
Benchmark Score – System manufacturer System Product Name
Section
Description
Score
Total Score
Windows x86 (64-bit) – Microsoft Windows 8 Pro (64-bit)
Integer
Processor integer performance
16175
18728
Floating Point
Processor floating point performance
28310
Memory
Memory performance
10590
Stream
Memory bandwidth performance
10411
Right this minute we’ve done just our standard fare as far as benchmarks go, Geekbench showing this build to be amongst the most powerful gaming PCs we’ve reviewed. Also be sure to check out similar results on much larger machines, too: AVADirect Quiet Gaming PC and NEEDLETAIL SX – and have a peek at a couple relatively small machines so you know what the Tiki is up against physical size-wise: MainGear Potenza and iBuyPower Revolt.
Whilst playing Batman: Arkham City, we’ve experienced a been a bit of a re-birth of interest with the much higher-definition display than we used when originally reviewing the game, not to mention a system that’s on a whole different level than the Alienware notebook (pre 3rd-gen Intel Core processors and so-forth). While it’s not that working with a beast like the MX-17 from a couple years ago is a bad thing (it’s actually still quite amazing), there’s just no comparing to the smoothness and detail we’re getting here.
In Hawken the only thing that stops one from having the miraculous non-stop smoothness we’re seeing in Arkham City is the fact that part of our experience is based online. If we’d be working with the connections our friends in Japan have with wires so thick you could drive a truck through them, we’d be golden – here we’ll have to settle for just “destroys all gaming experiences we’ve had before this year.” Have a peek at our first look at Hawken while you’re at it.
Even Star Wars: The Old Republic looks great. As it’s included in NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience list of games that can be optimized for greatness automatically, we certainly had to give it a go. As it turns out, the difference between what you get in this game on a basic level and what NVIDIA can give you is immense. While the gameplay remains the same – you’re still firing blasters at your opponents and rolling in the Force like mad – you can take part in the deepest visual details the developers intended you to see. Just look at that water ripple!
We’ll be continuing to benchmark the build we’ve got here through the future, so be sure to ask if you’ve got any tests you’d like us to run. We’ll be putting this setup through the punches in any and all ways you desire!
Wrap-Up
The Falcon Northwest Tiki is not a machine made for penny-pinchers. If you’re planning on working with any gaming PC packing an NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN GPU, you’re going to be paying quite a chunk of change – this isn’t the sort of situation where you’re paying just a little bit of cash for a just-good-enough helping of performance. Instead you’re going to want to save up for a couple months – the build we’ve gotten from Falcon Northwest here will cost you more than $3k.
You can make your Tiki cost quite a bit less if you don’t want to pack it full of the top-of-the-line components we’ve got here – and you’ll still have an amazing build – but that’s not what NVIDIA’s TITAN brand is about. With the Falcon Northwest Tiki packing NVIDIA’s TITAN, you’ve got a gaming masterpiece, plain and simple.
Sony just revealed its new models for spring for VAIO’s 5 series with a total of 18 models. All are due to be released in Japan on February 9th. Laptop and desktop computers include 3 touch panel compatible models. All of these new models have Windows 8 “Office Home and Business 2013″ pre-installed. I previously wrote about the convertible laptop/tablet “VAIO Duo11″ with Windows 8 64 bit on Intel Core i5, 11.6 inch display, 4GB RAM and SSD 128GB hard drive, but …
Samsung today announced two additions to its high performance Series 7 PC lineup: the enhanced Series 7 Chronos, which delivers professional performance in a thin and light form factor, and the Series 7 Ultra, which takes Ultrabooks to the next level with enriched computing power, graphics and touch capability. New Series 7 Chronos – Professional, Powerful Performer Delivering professional performance in a thinner and lighter form factor, the new Series 7 Chronos provides enhanced processing …
Attempts to create truly small gaming desktops usually involve at least some kind of performance hit. Even HP’s category-bending Firebird, one of the few stand-out examples, had to use toned-down graphics to succeed in a tiny enclosure. Digital Storm might have broken the trend towards sacrifice with its new Bolt desktop: although it’s just 3.6 inches wide and 14 inches tall, the Bolt can cram in as much as a GeForce GTX 680 and will even let gamers upgrade the graphics like they would in a full-size PC. The seemingly logic-defying (if also finger-defying) case still allows room for as much as an overclocked 4.6GHz Core i7, 16GB of RAM and storage options that meld a spinning hard drive with up to two SSDs and a DVD burner. Digital Storm isn’t even setting an absurd base price, but it’s in the cost that we finally see the catch to the miniaturization tricks. The $999 entry-level Bolt carries a modest 3.1GHz Core i3, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive and GeForce GTX 650 Ti, while it takes a staggering $1,949 to get a fully decked-out Core i7 system with a GTX 680. Those prices might be worthwhile for anyone who has ever strained while lugging a traditional tower to a game tourney.
Who said Apple’s event was all about the little things? Apple just unveiled its first redesign to its iMac desktop in three years. The new all-in-one makes the widely expected leap to Intel’s Ivy Bridge Core i5 and Core i7 processors, but also represents a much leaner and meaner replacement for the 2009-era template — its edges are just 5mm thick, and it’s constructed with “friction stir welding” as well as a gapless, less reflective display that’s laminated together with the glass. Screen sizes remain the same and include both a 21.5-inch, 1080p model and a 27-inch, 2,560 x 1,400 model — sorry, no Retina displays this year. They share 720p-capable front cameras with dual mics as well as NVIDIA’s GeForce 600-era graphics, up to 32GB of RAM and a panoply of storage options that peak at 3TB of spinning storage, a 768GB SSD or what Apple calls a Fusion Drive that mixes both 128GB of flash with 1TB or 3TB of conventional storage (a hybrid drive, for those of us who’ve seen it before). There’s no optical drive unless you plug in a USB option.
The 21.5-inch model ships in November, and will set you back $1,299 for a 2.7GHz Core i5, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive; pony up for the 27-inch model at $1,799 and you’ll get a 2.9GHz Core i5 as well as the same memory and storage. Apple’s larger iMac doesn’t ship until December, however, which will give some impulse buyers at least a brief respite.
Keep lurking long enough and you’ll find the unexpected. Even at MobileCon 2012. Exhibit A: the Kupa UltraNote modular tablet running Windows 8. This 0.6-inch (15mm) thick slate is powered by an Intel Core i7 processor (Ivy Bridge) with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 64GB SSD. It features a 10.1-inch 1920 x 1200-pixel IPS display with a ten-point capacitive multitouch layer and a Wacom-like digitizer for pen input. Other amenities include WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 and 3G/4G (LTE) radios along with dual cameras (2MP in front, 5MP in back), NFC and a fingerprint reader. There’s a SIM slot, headphone jack, mini HDMI output and two USB 3.0 ports on the right side of the device, plus a proprietary power / docking connector on the bottom edge. A 45Wh slide-out Li-Ion battery is located on the left side.
While the specs are pretty much what you’d expect from a decent Windows 8 tablet, it’s the modular design that makes Kupa UltraNote unique. There’s an Asus Transformer-like keyboard dock which boasts an additional battery, power jack, SD card slot, Ethernet connector, VGA output and two USB 3.0 ports. Accessories such as credit card reader can be attached the left or right edge of the slate thanks to a built-in latch mechanism. It’s clear that the company is targeting the enterprise and vertical markets and even positioning itself as an ODM. We spent a few minutes with the device and were impressed with how lightweight it was (760g / 1.67 lbs). Build quality, however, left a lot to be desired, even for a prototype. Still, overall performance was solid, both in terms of speed and responsiveness.
Maingear certainly loves to turn out solidly specificated hardware, and today is no exception. Its latest offering? The Nomad 17. As the name suggests this is a 17-inch notebook for gamers on the go. (Nomad, get it?) The new addition will support third-gen Intel Core i7 chips (up to 3.8GHz) and a maximum 32GB of RAM, with a choice of hard drive configurations. It’s not all about the under-the-hood grunt, though, with Maingear offering a choice of six colors for what it’s calling “hand-painted premium automotive paint jobs.” As for the other spec options? You can expect NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675M or 680M graphics, a 1,920 x 1080 display, combo Blue-ray optical drive, b / g / n wireless along with USB 2 / 3, DVI-I, HDMI and Fire Wire ports. So, this definitely sounds like a ride you can make your own. Assuming you’re good with the $1,599 starting sticker price that is.
Nettops and media-center PCs in many ways hang on opposite sides of the same saddle. MediawavePC’s new MW6110 “Ultra Small Media Player” tightens the straps between these two types of machines, and adds an extra satchel with it. The 7.87 x 7.28 x 1.57-inch form gives it a discreet footprint, and supports Intel’s Core i3- i5- and i7 chips. You can also add-in up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM, along with 1TB of storage. Connection-wise, you’re well looked after with 6 USB ports, HDMI, LAN, plus Audio in / out and WiFi. So, plenty of scope to configure to suit your needs — you’ll just need the $499 base price to get started.
This week the folks at Lenovo have revealed an all-in-one computer by the name of IdeaCentre A520 – a smaller version of the A720 we reviewed quite recently – with Windows 8 and 10-point multi-touch greatness. This machine is still able to adjust its display from -5 to 90 degrees flat, works with Ivy Bridge – 3rd Gen Intel Core processors of all kinds (i3 up to i7) and comes with Windows 8 (64 bit) right out of the box. You’ll be working with unique touch-optimized applications and user interface updates with your basic build and will have the same great casing aesthetics as the A720 too.
In other words, we’ve got no reason to believe that this unit wont be a winner. The original was (and is) massive beyond comprehension, this one has been made for people that like the design of the A720 but want to keep it a bit smaller for more realistic human-sized rooms. You’ve got a 23-inch full HD (1920 x 1080 pixel resolution) IPS LCD display working with Intel® HD Graphics 4000 / optional NVIDIA GeForce 615 2G/1G – and there’s two parts to this equation.
First you’ve got the monitor which measured in at 561×345.9×21.5 mm (22.08×13.61×0.84 inches). Then you’ve got the base which is 337x32x210.8 mm (13.26×1.25 x8.29 inches). The whole thing is still going to be relatively heavy at 9.8 kg (21.60lb), but the size is what matters here the most – instead of the massive A720′s beastly proportions you’ve got, again, a human sized monster on your hands.
The Lenovo IdeaCentre A520 will be popping up in October 2012 starting at $999 USD – also a very human-sized price. Have a peek at the rest of our Lenovo coverage of IFA 2012 and stick around for future reviews as well!
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
