Alienware laptop gets an autopsy

LITTLE GRAY MEN have spawned another gaming laptop and used Joe at Bit-Tech as their pod. The Area-51 m15x aka “an incredibly stupid name” was submitted to an autopsy (although it was hardly dead afterwards), and the wide-screen laptop revealed some alien technologies like the X9000 Intel CPU and 8800M GTX graphics. All very interesting and game-worthy, if you ask us – and not at all expensive compared to other gaming lappies. Now if only we could come up with a good alien joke… or you can read Joe’s.

You’re likely to have never heard of Force 3D. No worry. It’s a new brand of graphics cards operating out of Hong Kong, a sister company to Inno 3D that caters exclusively to the DAAMIT machine (more and more common these days). They’re sampling their HD 4850 and HD 4870 to Hilbert at Guru3D, who was right impressed at the chippery the other day, and is more than pleased to oblige. Find out how they fared in this Guru3D debut.

As a prophylactic for Iphone users, Tech Radar has compiled a list of its choice software and hardware accessories for the new handset, all ten of them. From condoms to headphone de-tanglers and video conversion utilities. It’ll change the way you make phone calls. No. Honest. Check them out here.

Driverheaven picked two top performing GTX 280s and faced them off, the Asus GTX 280 TOP and the XFX GTX 280 XXX. These are both overclocked versions of Nvidia’s big gun, both clocked at 670MHz core, and the memory clock on the XXX version being ever so slightly higher. Both use reference dust busters to cool the GPU, but neither sport an HDMI dongle, which sounds cheap for a card of this magnitude. This is really very high-end performance, and the numbers are showing that the GTX 280 is a smooth ride all the way, even against Crossfired HD4870s. Gawk at the numbers here.

Legion Hardware is looking into the value of an HD4870. Yes, because just how much performance can you squeeze out of a $300 card? Plenty, thinks Steven – DAAMIT really blindsided the consumer with a decent bit of GPU. The operating temperatures are far from ideal, tho’, and as he puts it “the cooling solution desperately needs to be upgraded”. Still, this is just the first batch of 4870s, the second should come with each AIBs custom cooler. Read the article, here.

We’ve all read how power efficient and powerful is AMD’s 780G chipset, but what you haven’t likely heard is that there’s a little brother chipset out there – the 740G. iXBT/Digit-Life is looking at it as the 55nm shrink of the 690G, targeting the very cheap $50-$60 mobo segment. ECS handed them a A740GM-A motherboard, a comfy micro-ATX workhorse mobo that won’t run your high-end Phenoms, but will do just about everything else. The IGP is DX9.0c, but it offers performance similar to an Intel G35. Cheap as the proverbial chip. Read it here.

Xbit Labs has focused their attention on a 1TB HDD roundup – with a total of six HDDs in this category. These drives offer pretty extreme storage capacity at a premium, enough to dump your entire collection of pr0n, we’re sure. Samsung’s F1 unit was the biggest surprise, we guess, as they’ve been very discrete in the HDD market, up until now. Read the whole 24 pages, here. µ