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Posts Tagged ‘Intel’

Panasonic has updated its Toughbook C1 convertible tablet PC with a second-generation Intel chip. The upgraded C1, which lays claim to being the lightest 12.1-inch convertible tablet, features a Core i5-2520M vPro 2.50GHz processor as opposed to the 2.4GHz Core i5-520M found inside its predecessor. Hit the jump for detailed specs.

The Sandy Bridge processor is not the only thing that gives the latest model an edge over its predecessor. Here is a list of some of the other upgraded features:

• 320GB 7200rpm shock-mounted flex-connect hard drive with quick-release
• RAM:  2GB DDR3 (1333MHz) RAM (expandable to 8GB)
• Battery Life: Up

… [Read More...]

Beautiful 3D laptop with mediocre graphics performance

What you do alone in your man cave is your business. If you want to put on a pair of 3D glasses and practice the Na’vi language, more power to you. Sony’s F Series Vaio 3D can make that dream a reality in style, but it lacks the graphics power to deliver first-class stereoscopic 3D gaming.

If you’re not piloting the Mars Rover or doing endoscopic telesurgery, you probably want stereoscopic 3D technology for two main purposes: watching movies and playing games. Now that 3D TVs are becoming widespread, there are lots of … [Read More...]

A bronze statue of power

How far can you take a Sandy Bridge processor? We’ve heard that even extreme overclockers seem to hit a wall just beyond 5GHz with Intel’s darling new chip.

Whatever the limitations, Maingear seems content to take its Shift Super Stock to the brink of madness by clocking the 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K to 5GHz.

The company credits some of that high overclock to its new partnership with CoolIT and the use of a massive and exclusive 18cm EPIC cooler. EPIC, in this case, stands for Enhanced Performance InterCooler. Perhaps even more impressive, you can’t even find … [Read More...]

When all of the walls of a system are transparent, where do you hide the cables? Answer: behind all the awesome insides

Were there a Mount Everest of PC builds, the see-through PC would likely be it. The difficulties are great, and the possibilities for failure high, but there’s nothing that gets me more excited than the opportunity to crack my knuckles and customize the lighting and electrical setup of a transparent desktop system.

The most fearsome part of this build is the acrylic case I’m using: There’s nowhere to hide any mistakes. Nor can I just stuff a mass … [Read More...]

With one market research study after the other pointing towards the cannibalization of netbooks and other PCs by the iPad and other media tablets, Intel has a reason to be alarmed. After all, it has yet to gain any traction in the tablet market.

But Intel is trying to turn things around. Even as it makes a play for a foothold in the tablet market with its Oak Trail chips, the company has decided to do something on the PC front too. The chip maker is now counting on a new class of laptops called “Ultrabooks” to turn things around for … [Read More...]

We love it when the trade shows roll around because that’s when companies show off their upcoming products. Not all of them turn out to be winners, of course, but Asus’s UX21 ultrathin notebook being shown off at Computex holds a lot of promise. From the pictures we’ve seen, it’s sleek and sexy, and the Core i7 foundation is just icing on the cake.

The UX21 measures 17mm at its thickest point and weighs just 2.4 pounds. It’s what you can expect from Asus’s UX Series of ultraportables, which Asus said “are made possible through the use of a strong … [Read More...]

Polywell’s latest packs a surprise GPU

Here at Maximum PC, we adhere to the cable news statistics rule that two data points is all you need to create a trend. So being presented with the second white system we’ve seen in the last three months, we can now declare that white is the new black (which was the new beige).

And, (Kent Brockman voice-over) it’s a trend we like. Far from gaudy, Polywell’s Ignition X5800 manages to look powerful, stately, and professional. It’s an appropriate aesthetic coming from a company with a long history of making computers for work. For … [Read More...]

A bold move into Apple territory

Samsung has only been selling its laptops in North America for the last few years, and while those machines haven’t been bad, they haven’t been remarkable either. But with the Series 9, the company is putting forth a laptop that demands notice. From its sub–three pound, super-slim, and sexy chassis to its spare, sophisticated style, it looks like nothing so much as a MacBook Air. It’s a bold, high-profile move by a company that’s been firmly rooted in the mainstream.

While the comparison to a MacBook Air is inevitable, the Series 9 features some … [Read More...]

You know what Sony does well? Make a premium PC. They proved that again with today’s refresh of the VAIO S ultraportable line and the high-end entertainment powerhouse F series.

The new S is an upgrade to what is already a great PC. I have current generation VAIO SB (that you can read about in this post) that I’ve been using as my daily carry for the last few weeks, and I really like it. It’s fast, light, and with the optional sheet battery, gets about 15 hours of battery life. It has a premium look and feel – even … [Read More...]

We’re fine with companies offering thinner, lighter designs, all we ask is that they figure out a way to nip and tuck without removing vital organs and replacing them with less powerful parts. After all, this is Maximum PC, not Compromise PC. Well, Sony claims that its new S Series Vaio laptop “combines for the first time portability, performance, and power” in said thinner and lighter design. Did they really do it?

Judging by the spec sheets, it doesn’t look like Sony’s blowing smoke. Pricing starts at $1,000 and gets you:

• 13.3-inch LED backlit display (1366 x 768)
• Intel Core

… [Read More...]

Dell just announced the brand-new XPS 15z.  It’s the thinnest 15” PC in the world.  Ever. 

Even though its crazy thin (under 25mm), the XPS 15z is a powerhouse; you can get one with up to a second-gen Core i7 processor, a backlit keyboard, high-end NVIDIA GPUs, Intel WiDi 2.0 and a new full HD display that Dell says is up to 50% brighter than standard displays.  And it gets up to 8 hours of battery life.

Dell hooked me up with a preview of the XPS 15z a few days ago, and while I didn’t get a chance to … [Read More...]

Remember the totally kick-ass, Light Cycle-inspired scratch PC mod by veteran modder Boddaker (aka Brian Carter) that was featured on our site recently? Called TRON Lightcycle PC, Boddaker’s entry for Cooler Master’s annual case mod competition (scratch build category) is currently the third most voted case mod in contention. 

As of now, the top spot belongs to the L3p D3sk by a 30-year-old Dutch guy named Peter. The rig is housed inside a desk, effectively making it an “all-in-one desk”, as Peter likes to call it.

Completely made of aluminium and glass, the water-cooled L3p D3sk boasts the following specs:… [Read More...]

A few years back during the Vista era, Lenovo introduced the ThinkPad X301. That PC was absolutely awesome – one of the best that Lenovo ever made. It was a 13” ultrathin with a Core 2 Duo processor, a 128GB SSD (very rare for that time), and killer battery life. I used it as my daily carry for nearly 2 years.

Since then, Lenovo has made a number of great ThinkPads – the X200 comes to mind, as do the new X120e and X220 – but they haven’t made a direct replacement for the 13” X301. Until today.

That’s … [Read More...]

From Windows 95 right on through to Windows 7, the Start Menu has always been just a wee bit short of perfection when it comes to increasing your productivity. Requiring users to seek out content through an seemingly endless series of nested drop down menus, and folders with company names you can’t remember having ever seen before, it’s a user interface element that was designed to make our lives easier, but in actuality slows our workflows down to a crawl. Fortunately, Launchy has been helping Windows users get back up to speed since 2007.

For those of you not familiar … [Read More...]

Toshiba has finally updated their high-end gaming laptop line with the new X770 model. This is a hefty desktop replacement unit, but it has slimmed down compared to the last generation. Still, it doesn’t compromise on the specs. The X770 can blow a lot of desktops out of the water.

The X770 has a 17-3-inch 1920×1080 screen (the old X505 had a 18.4-inch display). At its heart lay the Intel Core i7-2630QM processor, 8GB of RAM, and 1.25TB of storage space in the form of two hard drives. Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a gaming laptop without a … [Read More...]

From the caliber of their parts to the breadth of their abilities to their unconventional shapes and sizes, today’s small form factor PCs are a tasty treat for power users

It has long been considered common wisdom that the smaller the size of a PC, the greater its compromises. Notebooks, no matter how fat, for example, will never touch the power of a desktop machine.

The same held true for small form factor rigs. But is that still the case? To find out how today’s SFF rigs compare with their full-size desktop brethren, we tasked five top PC makers with … [Read More...]