BlowEeeing in the Wind

LAPTOP MAG BRINGS YOU the tie-breaking review of the Asus EeeeekPC (1000H) vs. the MSI Wind notebook. These systems are a bit different from the original Asus design based on the Celeron – these are both 10-inch, 1024x600, Atom-based, 80GB-endowed little notebooks with pretty spacious keyboards for demanding typists. Joanna compares feature by feature and MSI comes out trumps – largely due to the extra $150 you drop for the Asus – otherwise they were more or less evenly matched… Duel at sunset, right here.

Two reviews raised our ‘brows today, both covering 30-inch panels from Samsung and NEC. You’ll be wanting some 30-inch, 2560x1600 real-estate to display those GTX280s or HD4870s – we know we need to get one of those in the lab for *cough* benchmarking purposes. Remember your card must support Dual-Link DVI in order to push those pixels…

Hardware Canucks has a look at the Samsung Syncmaster 305T which offers “very good picture quality” (quoting here), although you’re left sucking thumbs if you want HDMI or DisplayPort – so if you can live without them, the monitor is yours for just $1400 CAD. You can find the eager beavers, here.

NEC has launched the Multisync LCD3090WQXi 30-incher, and Bit-Tech is reviewing it today. NEC has concentrated its business in the office and professional panels, but this one sits at some mid-point (no pro colour calibration but it isn’t your average office LCD). You can rotate it to portrait mode, which is interesting for people freehanding on tablets, or DTP’ing in an art department, but that’s pretty common these days. Performance was impressive, it seems. You can read Tim’s smittened rant, here.

Hilbert at Guru3D is in “green” mode, and by “green” we mean “reviewing everything Nvidia under the sun”. His latest review is on the GeForce 9800GTX+, the “plus” version as it is known. The card that magically appeared on the day the HD4850 broke cover, is more or less an equal to its competitor, thinks Hilbert, winning, tying or losing by a hair in every other benchmark. He’s pretty excited about the mainstream these days, and we have to agree. Read the review here.

We’re pretty sure this is the first we’ve heard of this: the Zalman LQ1000 Z-Machine Hybrid Liquid – an enthusiasts water-cooled computer case with integrated everything. XS Reviews is on the job. The LQ1000 will cool your components and keep everything humming very silently throughout, but it is a simple install. You’ve even got gauges on the front panel to read the status off the system. It’s a tad bit expensive, coming in at £400, but it *does* all the work for you, doesn’t it? Catch the review here.

Still following the HD 4870 take-off of yesterday, we’ve gathered a few more reviews for you to gawk at. Mostly non-english sites, but benchmarks are benchmarks, and a few do give a different perspective on things.

In some order, or somethin’:

MadBox PC (Spanish), or Googlenglish

Puissance PC (French) , or Googlenglish

Ére Numérique, or Googlenglish

Hardware.fr (French), or Googlenglish and… OCC. µ