Dell’s mad scientists reveal Alienware M11x’s evolutionary process
Jan 30th
I’m still not willing to call the Alienware M11x a netbook, and I’d call you crazy if you were to do so. The bottom line is that no netbook should cost $800 (are you listening, Sony?) and that Core2 CPUs pretty much exclude you from the category.
Now, that doesn’t mean the M11x isn’t sweet. Quite the contrary. It’s a seriously bad-ass little gaming rig, and you’d be hard pressed to find a more portable frag box to take to that mostly-friendly LAN at your buddy’s house. IGN even picked it as one of CES’ best-in-show products.
Over on the Direct2Dell community site, they’ve posted a blog about the M11x’s origins as the “Phantom.” According to the post’s author, Alienware had been planning the tiny beast since around 2005, a bit over a year before the Dell acquisition went down.
It’s an interesting read, and there’s a video embed of the M11x running L4D2 without breaking a sweat. The more I look at that thing, the more I start thinking about where I can scrounge $800 to buy one. It’s not due out for a little while, so I guess we all have time to start saving pennies, amirite?
WTF, Lee, why the long pause?
Jan 30th
Well, I’ll tell you.
Things have been more than a little crazy at Minifrag HQ (translation: my house), because my family and I have been in the process of purchasing a new home. It probably wouldn’t be such a big distraction if it weren’t for our geography.
See, yours truly lives and works way, way up north in Canada — six hours north of Winnipeg, to be more clear. The dilemma we faced was deciding whether to commit to a long-term stay where we are now, or relocate somewhere a bit closer to “civilization.”
Ultimately, bush living won out, and we’re set to move — in a little over two weeks. So further craziness is about to commence…
On the plus side, the new place has an actual office where I’ll be writing from. No more kitchen-table blogging from me. And that also means I’ll be able to frag my heart out in private without disturbing anyone in my home who has practical things like homework or bill-paying to do.
Thanks for giving a hoot, and stay tuned!!
Futuremark’s Game-o-meter shows what games your netbook can play
Jan 19th
One big issue I have when it comes to paying for boxed (or downloadable) games is wanting some assurances they’re going to run on my hardware. I currently don’t own a tower with “real” graphics capabilities – just a netbook and a laptop, both with Intel integrated video.
Fortunately, the crew from Futuremark has a useful little web app called Game-o-meter. It uses a Java-powered system profiler to collect data from your rig and compare it to minimum requirements for tons of different games. Just about every popular title is listed, from WoW to CIV3 and 4, to Rome: Total War.
The results Game-o-meter produces aren’t fool-proof, of course, but they at least give you a little more insight than what’s printed on the box.
One caveat: new hardware might take a little while to show up in their database. As you can see from the test run on my Gateway LT210H, the Pine View graphics are as yet unknown to Futuremark.
To check your system, make sure you have Java installed and then head over to Yougamers.com – just click any game to start testing!
NVidia Ion 2 (nearly) outed as G310 GPU on mini-PCIe
Jan 17th
When Zotac’s new models were photographed at CES, there was a non-working unit which looked like it could be hiding the fabled NVidia Ion2 mini-PCIe expansion card. Unfortunately, there was an HSF obstructing our view.
Now it appears that Asus has let some information slip in the footnotes of a marketing imagefor their upcoming EeeTop 2010PNT. Spotted by Blogeee [Google Translate link], there’s a bulleted item for NVidia Geforce G310 Ion2 graphics.
Ok, great. We have one more confirmation that Ion2 will be some kind of a G310 GPU. And it’ll likely be on a mini-PCIe card from what we’ve seen before.
What I want to know is this: when will we be able to buy the damn thing!?