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THE INQUIRER

Review GA 7TCSV2 with L5640 ultra low power Xeons

After a brief hiatus the giveaways our back and even more streamlined. We've done away with the email entry and now all you need to do is post a comment to enter the giveaway! Our previous giveaway was an OCZ Behemoth Mousepad. The winner? dumpsterj. You've got an email from me, just confirm your address and we'll get your prize shipped out!

For today's giveaway we're back to memory, but this time it's notebook memory. G.Skill sent over a 2GB stick of DDR3-1066 notebook memory. It's the F3-8500CL7S-2GBSQ, you can find the full specs on it here (note that page has multiple products on it, we're giving away the F3-8500CL7S-2GBSQ). You can check out Newegg's listing here.

Read on for rules on how to enter.

The back-to-school season is coming and refreshed product lines are already starting to appear on store shelves. Intel's dual-core Arrandale processors continue to dominate in terms of raw performance, but AMD K10.5-based notebooks are now available from every major vendor. Intel has also refreshed its mobile line and added some low-voltage kit. It's an interesting market full of options, and sifting the wheat from the chaff requires some research. We've decided to do just that and put together a mobile guide with options for everything from multimedia enthusiasts to mobile gaming powerhouses. We're splitting the guide into two installments, with this first part specifically focusing on the larger laptops and desktop replacement (DTR) options. If you're in the market for a new notebook, this article is for you.

THE INQUIRER

Throw your cables into the dustbin of history

I'm not sure how this keeps happening. The first year I waited at a mall for 5 hours to get the original iPhone. The following year my friend Mark Rein convinced me to see a midnight showing of Hellboy II and then wait outside of an AT&T store all night to get the iPhone 3G. You'd think I'd learn by the third year but once more I was in line at the mall hours before the Apple store opened to get the 3GS. This year I thought it would be different. Apple offered free overnight shipping to anyone who wanted to pre-order the iPhone 4. Figuring everyone would go that route I decided to beat the FedEx trucks and just show up at the mall at 6AM. I'd be in and out in a little over an hour, which would give me a head start on battery life testing on Apple's 4th generation iPhone.

I promise that not all of my decisions play out this poorly. Those who pre-ordered the 4 and requested overnight delivery got their phones early and my one hour wait turned into six hours at the mall, for the fourth year in a row.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Steve gets up on stage, proclaims the iPhone 4 to be the biggest introduction since the original iPhone, and the public flocks to Apple stores to fork over 0 on day one and around 00 over the course of two years for the privilege. But this isn't 2007. Apple has real competitors in the smartphone space. Android phones have grown in features, polish and popularity. Even Palm entered the race with a competant offering, and Microsoft isn't far behind. It's easy to start a revolution when everyone else is doing the wrong thing, but what about when more companies actually get it? Was Steve justified in his excitement over the 4? That's what we're here to find out today.

Lawrence Latif THE INQUIRER

3TB ought to be enough for anyone

Nick Farrell THE INQUIRER

Spells it out for the Grauniad

After a bit of ballyhoo and a bit more of a delay, NVIDIA is finally ready to launch their competitor to AMD’s triple-monitor Eyefinity technology: 3D Vision Surround.

As a quick refresher, we first learned about 3D Vision Surround at CES 2010, where NVIDIA was officially announced the technology and was offering both public and private demonstrations of the technology. At the time they had it running on both GTX 200 series cards and what would become the GTX 400 series. 3D Vision Surround was to be NVIDIA’s competition to AMD’s Eyefinity technology and then-some: not only would NVIDIA match AMD’s Eyefinity triple-monitor capabilities in the 2D space, but they would extend the concept by merging it with their 3D Vision technology for 3D Vision Surround.

NVIDIA has previously told us that they’ve been sitting on the concept for some time with no apparent market for it, with the success of Eyefinity and Matrox’s TripleHead2Go finally motivating NVIDIA to move forward with the technology. The result of this delayed plan is an interesting technology that in many ways is NVIDIA’s version of Eyefinity, and in other ways is entirely different. In a nutshell: it’s not just 3D Eyefinity.

NVIDIA announced their foray into mobile DX11 parts last month with the GTX 480M. No longer content to use older desktop designs optimized for lower power draws, the 480M uses the full GF100 chip with 11 of the 16 Streaming Multiprocessors enabled. That makes the 480M a lower clocked version of the desktop GTX 465, but it should still eclipse the mobile single-GPU competition. We will get our test W880CU from AVADirect later this week, but for those that can't wait AVADirect is now shipping product to customers.

To date, the least expensive SSDs worth consideration have come in at around 0 give or take. Our last roundup looked at the Intel X25-V 40GB, the Kingston SSDNow V Series 30GB, and the OCZ Onyx. Intel uses their own controller, Kingston uses a Toshiba controller, and OCZ uses the Indilinx Amigo controller. Crucial's 64GB C300 is the latest addition to the inexpensive SSD category; it costs 50% more but offers twice the storage of the 30GB drives, which makes it large enough for service as the only drive in your laptop.