Hasta La Gadget!

It’s no Shift, but Maingear‘s new line of F1X gaming rigs are still delightfully potent in their own right. Starting at $2,249 (F1X 200) and sailing well north of $5,149 for the top-end F1X 500, this trio of desktops runs on a 64-bit copy of Windows 7 and packs an 80GB SSD boot drive, an overclocked Intel Core i7 CPU and an optional Blu-ray burner. The big fellow touts a 3.6GHz OC’d Core i7-975, 12GB of DDR3 memory, a 1.5TB Western Digital storage drive, 6x Blu-ray writer, a closed-loop watercooling system, 1,000 watt power supply and twin ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPUs (1GB). The other guys step things down just a wee bit, but you can rest assured that today’s latest games will be handled with ease should you snag any of ’em. Speaking of which — they’re only available from Tiger Direct, Circuit City (the website) and CompUSA, so don’t waste your time looking elsewhere for a better deal.

Maingear introduces F1X gaming desktops with overclocked Core i7 CPUs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Since the royal unveiling of HP’s six new Elitebooks and ProBooks last week, the Elitebook 8440w (w standing for workstation) has been making the review rounds, and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from the chaps at Notebook Review, LAPTOP and Computer Shopper. All were impressed by the Core i7-620M and NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M power that’s been crammed into the 14-inch chassis, but unsurprisingly that causes some warm underside temperatures. Other than that, the 8440w received high praise for its durable gunmetal-build and “exceedingly” comfortable keyboard, but the touchpad was noted as being too small. Actually, the guys over at Notebook Review even go as far to say that the laptop would be “absolutely perfect” if that pad and its buttons weren’t so squished. Now that’s quite a bold statement. All in all, the 8440w seems like a solid and very mobile workstation, but hit up the sources if you’re dying to know more about the $1,650 rig.

Filed under: Laptops

HP EliteBook 8440w lives up to its “workstation” title, says the reviewing masses originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Should you be lusting after some of that Core i7 oomph but have a distaste for the large thermal and physical footprint of desktops, you’ll want to hear more from Congatec. A relative unknown hailing from Germany, the outfit has just announced its BM57 small form factor setup, which looks to be ideal for homebrew HTPC enthusiasts — primarily because its i7-620M CPU is both powerful (up to 3.33GHz with Turbo Boost) and relatively easy to cool (35W TDP, including chip-integrated graphics). The kit is able to support up to 8GB of dual-channel DDR3, as well as drive two video outputs concurrently. Choices include HDMI, DisplayPort and VGA, leading to some tantalizingly versatile possibilities for the creative self-builder. Prices are not yet available, but the BM57 will be demonstrated at the International Gaming Expo in London at the end of this month.

Congatec BM57 fits mobile Core i7 onto tiny mobo originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How we missed this at the ASUS booth is beyond us, but leave it to the eagle-eyes at Ars to hone in on the ASUS UL80JT with an overclockable Core i7 processor and NVIDIA GeForce 310 graphics. So it’s just a run-of-the-mill gaming rig, right? Wrong. The 14-inch laptop has switchable graphics like we have never seen before; the laptop automatically switches, “second-by-second” between the NVIDIA card and the integrated Intel one, instead of the “standard” switchable graphics we’ve seen on laptops like the MacBook Pro 15 or ASUS UL80Vt which require users to switch manually. The major foreseeable benefit of this is longer battery life even when the system is using the discrete card, and ASUS touts 12 hours with the automatic solution turned on. No word on price or availability, but we’re guessing ASUS will have more details soon and that we’ll start seeing this this in more and more laptops as NVIDIA spreads the love around to the rest of the industry.

Update: We jumped the gun here, we’ve actually seen this new automatic switching technology in the recently announced Sony Vaio Z.

ASUS UL80JT spotted with automatic switchable graphics, brags 12 hour battery life originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We hate to dampen your excitement right from the get-go, but Intel confessed that it has absolutely no plans of commercializing something like this itself — but that’s not to say someone else couldn’t grab a Core i7 and run with the idea themselves. The Infoscape was generating quite a bit of attention at the chip giant’s CES booth, boasting twin 7-foot touch panels (each with a 1,920 x 1,920 resolution). The entire installation was powered by a single Core i7-based machine with Intel’s own graphics, and it was seen rendering 576 links of live information. Users could touch any individual panel in order to dig deeper and bring up more information on each link, and it had absolutely no trouble pulling up dozens of boxes at once when legions of onlookers decided to touch boxes simultaneously. Hop on past the break to check out a video, and feel free to drop your wildest ideas of where this could be used (like, your den) in comments below.

Continue reading Intel Infoscape HD wall brings real-time web visualization (hands-on)

Intel Infoscape HD wall brings real-time web visualization (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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