Nehalem numbers from around the web

INTEL’S CORE I7/NEHALEM marchitecture has been widely flaunted to the vulnerable hacks attending IDF (the poor things). However, Hexus.net seems to be the first one out of the gate with a Nehalem first-person hands-on benchmarking experience. That includes encoding apps, pro apps, synthetic benchies and gaming benchies. The non-optimised nature of the system and the limited time available for tests left some issues unresolved over the results. This is IDF after all. Read Hexus here.

Driver Heaven is testing the Novatech X80R Pro lappie. Through the online ordering system, DH was able to determine just how simple/hard ordering one of these can be, but once it arrived in the office, Stuart threw everything he could at it. Performance-wise, it looks like itcould face-off with Alienware’s and Voodoo’s gaming lappies costing just a fraction of the price. The tested config was about a £1200 saving over an equivalent Alienware product. Sheesh. Read all about it.

The ClassmatePC has reached its 3rd incarnation and Thrusted Reviews snuck in a review on it. It’s interesting that the classroom experience wasn’t that much impacted by the Classmate PC, so Intel’s gone Tablet PC all over again. The new Classmate PC also includes the Atom marchitecture, which will provide users with a bit more than the Celeron 900 that was standard on 2nd gen Classmates. Read the first impressions at Thrusted Reviews.

There’s a Lenovo Stinkpad on review at Laptop Mag, the R500. This is naturally aimed at businesses and professionals – as there’s a strong focus on security and manageability – but what really shines is the performance and battery life on this sub-$1250 lappie (ok, ok, they did use the 9-cell battery for the test). The camel walked in the desert for around 6 hours before it needs to take a sip of water. That’s almost a day’s work, innit? Read it here.

The Madshrimpers have tested OCZ’s water-cooled Flex II PC3-16000 memory kit. This operates at 2GHz, in case you don’t want to do the math, and use the Flex II XLC heatsink to course some liquid cooling through its insides. It’s got all your watercooling bits’n’pieces included, too. The price isn’t bad, but it’s lower than you’d expect for water-cooled memory, we guess… €178/$260. Read ye mad shrimpers here.

The russkie crowd at XBit has produced yet another CPU cooler review – this one targeting the Thermalright IFX-14. This extremely priced $90 cooler (plus $10 for each of the two non-included 120mm fans) does a great job at cooling your CPU, but naturally, price is an issue. If you can invest more money into it, and upgrade it to three 140mm fans (!) you can achieve watercooling-level efficiency… not bad for air cooling. Get it here.

Finally, Extremetech Reviews has the low-down on Microsoft’s latest wundermaus, the Sidewinder X5. It’s an impressive batmobile, if someone would care to copy the design. The X5 offers just one real improvement (over its predecessor), says Extremetech: price. Microsoft didn’t redo the hardware as much as it did its marketing strategy. You can buy this for just $59.99 now, but the original seems to be a better performer. Read about it.