Samsung’s lighter-than-air laptop

SAMSUNG IS GOING AT Apple’s jugular with their new X360 laptop, at least from what we garner from the Thrusting Reviews article. The 'lighter-than-air' computer is, in fact, lighter than the Apple Macbook Air, but a bit chunkier around the waist. It doesn’t sport a 'custom Intel chip' like the Air, but uses an ULV 1.2GHz Core processor running on an 800MHz bus. The key to the system is the 128GB SSD and the (claimed) 10-hour battery life. Charge in here if you’re the road-warrior type.

Think Computers has a Thermaltake Soprano aluminium keyboard. It’s a solid-looking piece of kit, but it seems a lot of effort and too little hands-on (literally) went into this one. The keyboard feels cramped, the keys are flat (like a laptop) and the layout isn’t the best. But it’s a comfortable typing keyboard, says Greg.

Ryan over at PC Perps is looking at a couple of Velociraptor drives in his tests today. The 2.5-inch spinners manage to chew data at some impressive read/write speeds, in particular when Ryan RAIDed them together. The Velociraptor also comes in a different 300GB flavour, which will offset one of its few weaknesses: capacity. Price also dropped, it seems. You can get this one for as little as $265. Get it here.

The Legion of Hardware has a nice little CPU scaling article for the GTX 280. This is a sort of follow-up to his other article on 4870X2 scaling, which he used for direct comparison. You’ve got Core 2 Quads, Core 2 Duos and Phenom X4s in the pot. The Q9650 takes the cake, but even the Phenom X4 9950 comes out looking like a very capable processor… Read about it here.

DFI is possible best known for its LANParty set of motherboards. These became (and still are) very popular amongst party-goers and enthusiasts, but with inherently complicated BIOS settings. DFI has something called ABS that Tweak Town is looking into. It lets you overclock automatically and in relative safety and, according to Shane, it works just fine. It isn’t 100 per cent automatic, but you get results without having to overclock your brain. Read about it.

OC Workbench has an article (we can’t say it’s an exclusive, Guru 3D had it last week), of the ECS P45GC Atom N330 motherboard. It’s still lacking in features, and like us, OCW can’t understand why partners are still using that crap ol’ chipset. It’s a great little appliance mobo, especially if you stick Linux on it, has really low power consumption, but then again, it’s got no digital output. Read the review.

Speaking of DFI, they’re still churning out brilliant stuff like this micro-ATX at Anandtech. It’s a 790GX mobo which will do Crossfire if you want (2 PCIe x8 electrical), which means you can stuff a LAN case full of gaming power. It’s just a teaser article for something much bigger that’s coming down the road. µ