Hardware
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?
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!?
NVidia Ion 2 spotted in the wild at CES?
Jan 13th
TechReport spotted some new models from Zotac during the craziness at CES, including the system above – clearly marked as running Pinetrail + GT218. Yep, that’s the NVidia GPU which has reportedly mutated into the Ion 2 “chipset.”
It’s too bad there are a couple downsides to this picture. One, the socket is totally covered and there’s no view which shows whether or not that’s a mini-PCIe slot under there. Two, the label also clearly says “non-working.”
From what I’ve seen over the years on other laptop designs, it’s entirely possible that there is, in fact, a socket and an expansion card under that HSF. It’s also entirely possible that this particular unit at CES didn’t have anything under it.
Bottom line: Ion 2 is still “coming soon,” but at least OEMs are obviously ready to ship it once it’s ready.
NVidia’s Tegra 2 is 1080p capable, can run Unreal Engine 3 games
Jan 9th
Over at Liliputing, Brad continues churning out news from CES 2010 in Las Vegas. In the last couple days, the thing I’ve been most excited about is the slew of NVidia Tegra 2 tablets and netbooks on display. Why?
Because Tegra 2 is a giant leap ahead of the current Tegra platform. Here are some highlights of Tegra 2, in case you’ve missed them:
- 40nm process Dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor at 1GHz
- 4x faster than current-gen Tegra
- full 1080p HD (including HW accelerated Flash 10.1)
- insane battery life: 140 hours of music and roughly 16 hours of full HD video
- supports Linux (eventually including Chrome OS), Android, Windows CE/WinMo
But there’s one feature that has been somewhat glossed over. The Tegra 2 can also run games built on Unreal Engine 3. Better still, it runs pretty darn well – read on, and check it out in the video after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »