Lenovo’s delivers lightest heavyweight

LENOVO WAS QUITE successful with its Thinkpad X300, a laptop so sharp you could shave on it. Now it’s readied the successor, the duly named X301 which is a basic systems update. In case you didn’t pay attention to the X300, this is a 13.3-inch lappie with good design and strong power-efficient features. This particular version (pricey, you’ll see) comes with an Intel U9400 ULV processor and a 64GB SSD drive. The screen is also ultra hi-res for the size, in good Stinkpad tradition (1440x900), but you’ll appreciate the DisplayPort inclusion. Read the review, here.

The very businessy-oriented Portégé series M800-106 is on review at Thrusting Reviews. In truth, the system looks aimed at the same target as the aforementioned Stinkpad, only a bit on the chunky side. It does have some serious advantages and disadvantages, good price, crap screen/battery life. It’s all a matter of trade-offs, in the end. Read all about it.

The Penguin Hordes of Phoronix are reviewing Samsung’s Syncmaster 305T. The disciple of Linus was in great awe today as he unwrapped his new goodie. On observing the device, Michael noticed there was no HDMI or DisplayPort, but just dual-link DVI, a USB 2.0 4-port hub and a decent panel. The price isn’t amongst the most expensive, like… say… Apple’s, but you can find Dell’s own at about the same level: $1250. Read Michael’s review.

Hilbert at Guru3D is testing Palit’s HD 4870 Sonic Dual, the slightly overclocked (775MHz/2GHz) flagship of the non-reference line-up of Palit’s single-GPU graphics cards with a little twist of its own. The card ships with a dual BIOS and a micro-switch to change between OC and non-OC modes. However, Hilbert isn’t that convinced that the switch (and additional BIOS) is really worth the effort, as the overclock is so small. Read the why’s here.

Tweak Town has some Kingston HyperX 2x1GB goodies at the lab today. These are rated DDR-1800 and feature an XMP profile so you can have an easy life on Intel-chipped boards. Not the cheapest thing on the block, but Cameron is thoroughly convinced it’s one of the better kits out there. Give it a go, right here.

Niko at R&B Mods has some odd bits of RAM kit that might tingle your inner enthusiast. It’s called the RAMorb, from ThermalTake, and it… well… cools your RAM. It combines a RAM heatsink with a heatpipe and fan, which Niko feels reduces temps considerably, albeit at the cost of a little purring. Go get some if you’ve got the headroom.

Xbit is giving Zotac’s GTX 280 AMP! a going-over. Although GTX 280s – no matter what the maker – stick to the reference cooler, the behemoth GPU comes in overclocked at 700MHz core, 1400MHz shader, 2300MHz memory. This translated into a 8-10% overall performance gain in benchmarks, but the “take home message” as Charlie would put it is: if you don’t want to stick a massive heat generating HD 4870 X2 in your rig, then this card is about the fastest kid in the single-core world. Read it here.

Yesterday your dear wibbler here most erroneously pointed out that SPCR had the first review of the EeeBox (at least that he’d seen). Well, both Hot Hardware and Personal Computer World UK published theirs prior to this, so SPCR gets the bronze. The links people, the links: Hot Hardware; PCW UK. µ