Hasta La Gadget!

The MacBook Air’s integrated graphics all but rule it out as a serious gaming machine. However, Larry Gadea at the Tech Inferno forums has found a way to make the Air a powerhouse through an ad hoc external GPU. His design mates a PCI Express video card to the Mac’s Thunderbolt port through a combination of two adapters, a Boot Camp installation of Windows 7 and third-party software. The performance improvement is appropriately dramatic, leading to frame rates up to seven times faster than what Intel’s HD 5000 can manage. Just don’t expect to buy a pre-assembled version anytime soon — the peripheral needs a desktop-class power supply just to run, and Intel won’t issue the licenses needed to commercialize Thunderbolt GPUs. If you’re absolutely determined to get a Crysis-worthy ultraportable, though, you’ll find Gadea’s instructions at the source link.

Filed under: Gaming, Laptops, Peripherals, Apple, NVIDIA

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Via: MacRumors

Source: Tech Inferno

We usually associate Boston University with brain studies and bat-chasing UAVs; we’ll have to add technology patent lawsuits to the list. Following similar claims versus the likes of Amazon and Samsung, the university has sued Apple for allegedly infringing on a 1997 patent for making gallium nitride thin films used in semiconductors. The university wants both financial compensation (likely the real objective) and a ban on US sales of the purportedly offending iPad, iPhone 5 and MacBook Air. Neither side is commenting on the case, although we suspect that it will end with a whimper, not a bang. Like many big tech firms, Apple tends to fight patent lawsuits when it expects to win, and settle out of court when it doesn’t. We’d add that the patent expires in 2015 — a Boston University victory would have relatively little effect on Apple’s future.

Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops, Tablets, Apple

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Via: AppleInsider

Source: Boston Herald

Solid-state drives are so speedy these days that that even a SATA interface might not have the bandwidth to cope. It’s a good thing that Samsung has started mass-producing the first PCI Express-based SSDs for Ultrabooks, then. The new XP941 series uses PCIe’s wider data path to read at nearly 1.4GB/s — that’s 2.5 times faster than the quickest SATA SSDs, and nimble enough to move 500GB in six minutes. It also ships in a tinier M.2 format that makes past card-based SSDs look gargantuan, even when there’s up to 512GB of storage. Samsung hasn’t named laptop makers receiving the XP941, although it doesn’t take strong deductive skills to spot one of the (probable) first customers. When Apple is shipping a new 13-inch MacBook Air that just happens to use a very similar PCIe SSD from Samsung, there’s likely more than coincidence at work.

Filed under: Laptops, Storage, Apple, Samsung

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Source: Samsung

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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iFixit has a tradition of tearing apart Apple gadgets (and many others) as soon as they’re on sale, and it’s maintaining that custom with a fresh peek at the 2013 edition of the 13-inch MacBook Air. This isn’t a repeat of last year’s by-the-book affair, however — there’s a few minor surprises in store. We now know that Apple is bolstering the efficiency of Intel’s Haswell chips with a larger 7,150mAh battery pack, and that Broadcom makes the 802.11ac WiFi chip. The solid-state drive inside also represents a major rethink: while we’ve heard that Apple has switched the drive’s interface from pokey SATA to PCI Express, we can see that the SSD itself has shrunk dramatically since 2012. iFixit is still down on the Air’s repairability and scores it four out of ten, but those who’ve wanted to answer a few of Apple’s more recent riddles will still want to check out the full examination at the source.

Filed under: Laptops, Apple, Samsung

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Via: iFixit (Twitter), 9to5 Mac

Source: iFixit