MacBook attack launched

LEAVE IT TO THE big Pomme to unleash its MacBook Air on unwitting editorial directors. You’ve seen it, you’ve gawked at it, you’ve probably re-run the ad in your browser just to see the damn thing come out of its envelope. Yes, it’s quite impressive from a design stand-point, but is that enough to convince Jason Snell of MacWorld? Hardly. We bet Jason’s inbox is filling up with fanboi rants as we write these sentences…

The Asus Nova PC (not a tribute to our own Nova, we imagine), is – literally – dissected in this here article at VR-Zone. They popped the hood (aka bonnet) and checked out what kind of kit Asus was hiding underneath. It’s a pretty thorough walkthrough and a lesson in small PC engineering. The chaps at Asus did the best they could. It’s quite a decent PC overall, and if you stuck a more serious GPU inside, it could be a better console to sit in your living room.

A while back, a company called Zonbu went out on a limb and launched a really cheap desktop PC (and later a notebook) on a quaint payment plan. It was built to much the same concept of the screamin’ Asus eeePC, but never got the props. Now the chaps at Hardware in Review thought they should enlight obscure minds with their review of this mini PC. It’s a Linux box with a - quote - “Intel-like” (muffled snorts of laughter) C7 1.2GHz with 512MB of hardwired RAM. In the end, it’s not the hardware that fails the author, but the commercial acumen of the company behind it. Read the gory details here.

Michael at Big Bruin has landed a review of the Thermalright Ultima-90 Heatpipe CPU Cooler. Contrary to the general trend, Thermalright tried to give the Ultima-90 a smallish footprint (but it’s still a tall device). It ships without fan, but BB sees that as a plus, as you can pick an aftermarket fan of your choice. It provides pretty good cooling in their tests, which you can see right here.

Headsets are likely to be the greatest invention for online gaming that ever was (at least until we actually develop a mass market form of virtual reality). Razer has provided the gamers at Playreaction with their Piranha model. The earpieces seem to be their biggest flaw, thinketh the reviewer, but it’s an instant winner if you can wear them. Get your ears stuffed here.

Rob is reviewing the E8400 Wolfdale at the House of Techgage, today. He underlines the amazingly low 1.1V he needed to keep this CPU working, and how that translated to a low power consumption and low heat. To further stress the beast, he reached 4.23GHz on an overclock, but pushing the upper electrical limits of the CPU. For the dual-core CPU that it is, Rob thinks the bang-for-buck ratio is very high. Get the review here. µ