Gaming laptops rounded up

THINKING OF BUYING a new laptop? How about some gaming power under the bonnet? Anandtech has a roundup of gaming notebooks that you’ll want to read about. There’s a big mix of technologies going on there, with most of the high-end gaming notebooks centered around those goddamn Nvidia parts that Charlie’s been talking about. Most rotate around the 8800M part but you’ve got a bit of everything there. Jarred thinks there are still a lot of “concerns” with these gaming systems that need to be addressed. Still it’s a massive undertaking and worth putting in some wibbling time. Read on.

From what we’ve read around the web, the WD My Book series external drive was received at launch with pretty good acceptance from reviewers worldwide. There’s a TB version that TweakTown is covering here, but this one is the Mirror edition. Apart from the obvious advantage of storing a whole lot more, it works in RAID 1 mode, although it also supports RAID 0, providing you with some serious data security. But who cares if you’ve got RAID 0 over USB 2.0, eh?

We must confess Genius has been around for as long as we can remember, but their product line – aimed at users on a budget – has never really caused a big impression. Well, when they build this little “professional gaming mouse” called the Ergo 555, then someone is bound to say “yeah, bring it on Genius”. XS Reviews did just that… XS found it’s actually a well featured gaming mouse with a high resolution (3200dpi), memory and an attractive price tag… just £25.

The Asus Maximus II Formula, based on the Intel P45 chippery is on test at R &B Mods. It’s still pushing DDR2 like there’s no tomorrow, but considering it’s doing DDR-1200, it’s in a class of its own. The mobo and accompanying software is all about tweaking your system settings, whether you’re overclocking (which it does well) or keeping it quiet (which it also does well). Niko gave it a big thumbs-up. Get it here.

Guru3D has a card from BFG’s OCX series in the work. The GTX 280 OCX is what Hilbert calls the “most high-end specced product in whatever product range might be”. Quite true. Out of the box it’s clocked at 666MHz, very ominous (no speed devil jokes, please). Still, although it’s the fastest thing he’s seen on a single piece of silicon, the red team is still offering more value with their products, he concludes. Worth a look.

Those most Elite of Bastards have a couple of HDD cooling systems in the office. The Vizo Orbiter and Voyager. The Orbiter is a single 60mm fan on a bracket that screws on to the belly of your 3.5-inch drive. It’s LED-lighted to give your PC innards a cool look. The Voyager, on the other hand, is a double-fan system, longer and more powerful, that is really just “all business”. If you need the extra cooling on your hot HDD, these do the trick.

Motherboards.org is testing AMD’s latest leader of the Phenom pack, the X4 9950. This is a 2.6GHz CPU with all the usual bells and whistles of the Phenom family, but with an utterly crap 140W TDP. Although Ben is seeing some good value coming from this CPU+chipset combo, he really thinks AMD is in need of upping their game and moving to 45nm quickish. Read about it, here. µ