Macbook heresy committed

XBIT HAS A DIFFERENT twist on the Airbook affair. Instead of testing Mac OS X, they’ve done the review with Vista all the way (Apple fanboys stroke out... 3 ... 2... 1... now!). Ilya was quite candid about his assessment: the MacBook isn’t a laptop, it’s a gadget with laptop features. However, the Vista experience was an apparent success, although there’s room for improvement... if Apple wants. So if you’re hooked on Windows and you can afford the price of design, you can go for the Air. Read the review here.

Techgage has an external HDD enclosure on test – the VOX V1 750GB. It comes with eSATA and USB 2.0 connections (although we’re passed the point of no return with the USB 2.0 crappiness). The innards are populated by a WD7500AAKS which will back up all your stuff at the touch of the front button. The software and build quality aren’t all that good, thinks Greg, especially considering the competition sells the same for less. Some pitfalls for the unwary.

Ye Olde PC Worlde has a nice one on the Samsung 2263DX LCD monitor. It’s an odd beast, a bit of master+blaster with a main 22-inch panel and a secondary 7-inch panel mounted on its shoulders (but not necessarily in that format). The idea is to have a companion “desktop” where you can drop your crap, however, wethinks that at the price of $550 you could probably pickup TWO 22-inch panels and have some true real-estate. Read about the monstrosity, here.

Neoseeker has rounded-up the herd of sub-$200 cards and subjected them to the branding iron. Things are pretty competitive right now in the VGA business, and this article will help you make up your mind about what to buy – in case you’re on the market for a mainstream graphics card. These sub-$200’s include anything from 8800GT’s and original 8800GTS’ and the new 9600GT’s, with OC’d HD3870s in the mix. It’s, in a word, enlightening.

OCZ continues its march of the enthusiasts. They’ve equipped OCC with some high performance Reaper HPC DDR2-1066 2x2GB kit. You’ll have to go Vista 64-bits to take advantage of all this memory, mind you. The Reapers have that characteristic Heatpipe+spreader combo design and they pretty much kicking around the competition. You just need to be careful about the memory clearance inside your rig – the Reaper design is about twice as “tall” as the standard heatspreader. Read on.

The right honourable chap at XSReviews (Whoopty) has posted a review on the Evo-G MP1 gaming mat. Complete with an intro on Evo-G, the gamer-oriented company, proves there is such a thing as a too good gaming mat. The sentence was read to the following idea: If you’re into FPS gaming, stay well clear of this mat... you’ll overshoot your target. Otherwise it’s a pretty decent product, he thinks. Headshots are no-go, here.