Lenovo laptop is tough competitor for Dell

BIOSMAGAZINE reviews the Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop. Lenovo appears to be releasing laptops on a daily basis since they took over IBM's PC division. The lappy comes with a widescreen display, a dual core processor and most importantly, from a management point of view, the Lenovo Care tools. It even comes with a webcam, a fingerprint reader, a dual layer DVD burner and Firewire. BIOS says that it has a basic design, but as long as it has the right boxes checked, it will be a favourite amongst IT departments.

Cowcotland, a French website, tests the Advance Acube with three external bays, LCD temperature, USB, Firewire in the front of it. It comes with a handle as well, a nice idea. It is not that heavy and is made primarily of aluminium. Nice surprise, it comes four extension slots with a 120mm fan as well. It is only a casing without any motherboard, which is a definite plus should you want to build your own computer from scratch.

Extremetech has a workstation RAID card shoot-out including three 4-port SATA RAID controllers which are compared with onboard RAID from the ICH7R southbridge - bear in mind that ICH8R is coming up very soon. Interestingly, the ICH7R comes on top in quite a few scenarii. Granted the CPU usage under RAID5 is rather high, but for the rest it seems the ICH7R does the job pretty convincingly. Nvidia's southbridge was not included in there.

The Dell Ultrasharp 2407WFP 24in Widescreen monitor is on test at Trustedreviews. Based on S-PVA technology which meant a 6ms response time, the 2407WFP also supports HDCP and comes with a built in card reader on top of the USB 2.0 ports and the usual connectors. The revelation for me came from seeing the monitor in portrait mode. Putting two of those side by side in this configuration is perfect for DTP and web browsing. It has minor image quality issues but can't dislodge the Samsung 244T from the first place it seems.

GDHardware reports on the Leadtek Geforce 7950GX2 video card. Under the large heat sink fan, there's two G71 GPU with 1GB memory, all on a two slot card. Note again that there's only two DVI port and that Quad SLI is possible whatever Nvidia will say right now. A stunning piece of technology although he card runs very, very hot. Fortunately, it is one of the cheapest 7950GX2 available and makes ATI's range uninteresting for now.

Hardware Hell turns its eyes on the Corsair Twin2X 1024-8500 memory modules. It is designed to run at 1.066GHZ FSB, which is the speed processors reached only a few years ago. It comes with lifetime warranty and is covered with a streamlined heatsink. Performance of the modules is generally very good, although you have to pay a premium for it. Still, if money is no problem, grab two pairs of those and watch Windows fly. µ