Sony sub-laptop is impressive but expensive

LAPTOPLOGIC puts the Sony Vaio VGN-SZ270P sub laptop to the test. This thin and light model even comes with a docking station and a carbon fiber lid. Inside you will find a Core Duo T2500, 1GB memory, a dual graphics chip solution, a 120GB HDD and a widescreen LCD. Pricewise though, it is hardly a bargain so to say with prices nearing £2000 if you factor the docking station. But it would be ideal for the status seeking business man/woman.

Anandtech reviews the Asrock ConRoe 945G-DVI motherboard which is geared towards the budget segment of the dual core market as it costs nearly $50 less than other Core2 Duo motherboards. The board is mATX in format, but that doesn't prevent it from having DVI and DSub ports as well as GbE LAN, 8-channel audio, SATA RAID, PCIe x16 and much more. It is not a particularly overclockable board.

Asrock must be sending quite a few boards around. Legitreviews tests the Asrock 775Dual-VSTA Motherboard. This board is a full size ATX model and supports the Core2 Duo as well. However, there are a few things that make it particularly remarkable. It is based on the VIA PT880, supports DDR memory and even has an AGP Slot. Alas, it is not what I would call an exciting overclocker. Even then the E6300 used reached slightly more than 2GHz. Asrock is praised for its work. The board holds its own against boards costing four times more and the reviewer is now using it in its main system 24/7.

Hardwarecentral is positively impressed by the Gateway E-100m laptop. This super slim model is based around the Core Solo U1400 processor with 512MB memory, with a 80GB HDD and a 12.1-inch 1280x800 pixels display. Not a power laptop, but certainly a good example of how to make a convenient portable sub-laptop. The 6-cell battery averaged 220 minutes in real world tests, which is not bad. Many will appreciate the fact that the optical drive is an external model which you can leave behind.

Shuttle once produced motherboards but since they have moved to produce barebones, it looks like they've given up on mobos. Anyway, they've just released two top of the range SFFs. The SN27P2 and the SD37P2, the first one is for AMD and the other one for Intel and they are shockingly expensive at around £350. The PS2 ports are out and the screws are in again. Also the SFFs are putting on some weight. This means that there's four DDR2 slots and both SFF are even dual card/GPU compatible.

AMDzone reports on the performance of Battlefield 2142 multiplayer. The base system is an Opteron 144 overclocked to 2.07GHz with three different Geforce video cards - 7900GTX, 7900GT and 7600GT. The latter struggles at the higher resolutions, while disabling AA has a notable impact only in low resolutions. AMDZone did not check whether the game was CPU or GPU limited.

If you want to send in reviews, hardware or software, don't hesitate, just bring them in. I am particularly fond of exotic hardware that you won't find elsewhere. Even if the review is not in English, as long as it is interesting and entertaining. Send it in. Also I would be glad if someone could point me to a recent directory of hardware websites. µ