We just hit up HP's booth to check out the new Firebird gaming rig, and it's pretty slick looking, although it's a lot bigger than we expected / hoped. The side panels are actually a cool translucent smoke finish, and the blue LED lighting might be the first classy gaming PC light kit we've ever seen. HP was demoing the Firebird with Left 4 Dead and Crysis, and the gamers on hand seemed pretty pleased -- we'll have see how the $1,799 machine's 2.83GHz Core 2 Quad and dual NVIDIA GeForce 9800S graphics cards benchmark out when it's released...
I'm usually not into that liquid cooling glowy PC mod stuff, but the HP Firebird 803 really is a nice looking machine...in a clinical circuitry kind of way. As we've mentioned before, slight modifications to the traditional gaming PC rubric allow the machine to run a 2.83 GHz Core 2 Quad processor, 640 GB of 2.5-inch drive storage, Blu-ray, 4 GB RAM, dual SLI graphics cards and liquid cooling for a scant 350W. It's surprisingly small when you take all of those features into account, even if it's not quite a Shuttle PC....
It’s that time of year again – time to sally forth in search of the perfect gift for the special and not-so-special-but-they’re-family people in your life. Given the economic situation this year, I made up a list with a few criteria in mind: Nothing crazy expensive. Everything on this list is under $400, and most is way under. Sure, a 48-foot LCD TV would be nice, or a 64 gigapixel DSLR, or that 128-core gaming PC you’ve been looking at for your teen, but in these uncertain times, I felt it would be best to keep things a bit...
So far about every major and niche computer maker has announced a Core i7 desktop platform this week and ASUS is not to be outdone. The ROG CG6190 pairs up the powerful Core i7 Extreme Edition with the Intel X58 chipset. The press release isn’t exactly clear but it seems that the box can support up to 12 GB of triple channel DDR 1333 memory and 4TB of hard drives with the graphics being provided by a 3-way SLI and ATI CrossFireX graphics. All this computing power has to come at a price but ASUS didn’t announce how much it will...
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming Tweak Town has given the new LAN Shark gaming PC by Smooth Creations a thorough once-over and they really seem to like what they see. The review machine (priced at $1,343.75) arrived kitted out with a 3.0 GHz Core 2 Quad processor, 4GB RAM, Diamond HD 4870 1GB graphics and Western Digital Raptor 150GB storage. The whole shebang is housed in an elegant acrylic case with a subtle, yet understated "flame" motif (as pictured above) and gently illuminated by a full compliment of LEDs and cold cathodes. In fact, the only real complaint they lodged about...
The economy is in pretty rough shape, and it would appear that Alienware has taken notice. Their latest machine is a clear attempt to tap into the market of people that don’t have several grand to drop on frivolous pursuits, or simply put, everyone but Eliot Spitzer.The Area-51 750i will be built off of an Nvidia nForce 750i SLI motherboard, a Core 2 Duo E8400 and an Nvidia GeForce 9800GT. To compliment the mothership, there’s also 2GB of DDR2 RAM to keep the random accesses as random as possible, and it’ll all come to you on Windows Vista 64-bit.While...
Filed under: Desktops Remember when the average Alienware was like four large? Ah, those were the days. As the used-to-be-boutique gaming PC company looks to attract a wider range of customers and fight off the effects of this economic quandary we're involved in, it has introduced the (relatively) affordable Area-51 750i. Predictably based on the NVIDIA nForce 750i SLI motherboard, this rig can be outfitted with a Core 2 Extreme QX9650, twin ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards (or dueling GeForce GTX 280s, if you prefer), 8GB of DDR2 RAM, Windows Vista 64-bit, more hard drive space than you'll...
Nope, it’s not a joke or some cleverly worded piece of subterfuge, I’m selling my Vaio. For those of you who have followed, I’ve had some great times, followed by some terrible times, followed by some great times again with Vaios. But we’re going to move to a desktop at home (read: gaming PC), and we don’t have any family members who need any laptops, and I certainly don’t want to try to “recycle” it. So I’m turning to the community (since it’s impossible to sell a laptop on eBay anymore). It’s the Sony Vaio VGN-SZ460N (full specs here). I...
The VooDoo Envy 133 is a notebook to lust after and that just got easier to do. HP has integrated the VooDoo operation into the main notebook unit and as a result the Envy 133 just got $200 cheaper. Starting today the Envy 133 price is $1899 instead of the normal $2099 and those who order will get a free second battery thrown in. HP is no doubt listening to those who have complained about the poor battery life of the 133 so this is a good move. HP has also dropped the price of the VooDoo Blackbird 02 gaming...
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Apple, Macbook Pro, MacBookIs it just me or is it pretty mindblowing what Moore's Law is doing to our computers these days? I remember when 64mb of RAM was great, and even a few years ago, I wondered why anyone would ever use 1GB of RAM (I've got 2GB in my gaming PC, and I still almost think it's too much). But apparently TidBITS has been doing some testing, and they've discovered that not only can the new MacBooks hold 4GB of RAM as Apple recommends for a limit, but stuffing a whopping 6GB...
For most of the last decade, improving 3D performance has been the primary goal of operating system, application (read gaming) developers, and hardware developers. However, when you're at work, trying hard to make the money you need to buy a new HDTV and über-gaming PC, you're probably working in a 2D world that's being managed by the creaky GDI/GDI+ APIs which were first developed back to the 1990s.This week, Microsoft introduced a replacement for GDI/GDI+ called Direct2D. Microsoft's Thomas Olsen, a Dev Lead in the Windows Desktop Graphics organization, uses his new blog to bring us up to speed on...
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been going through all the netbooks in the office, looking to see which I like best. I have to agree with Joanna that the Samsung NC10 is mighty fine, but I still love the Acer Aspire One — perhaps because I just love Acers. My first love was the Eee PC, of course, and the S101 did impress me. But I haven’t yet come across the perfect netbook yet. There probably is no perfect netbook, but ASUS wants to see if they can come close. They’ve set up a Web site in conjunction...
