Mobile 8800s spotted in the wild

OF ALL THE PLACES you don't expect to find hidden gems, Clevo is always near the top of the list. This year, there were a bunch of them, and a GPU we really were not supposed to notice.

The hidden part was curiously the one noticed first, attached to the M570RU laptop. It looks like an ordinary enough computer, a Santa Rosa based 17-inch laptop with a rather modest 1280*800 rez.

It will sport the obligatory Merom CPU, PM965 chipset and DDR2/667 memory. It has a fingerprint scanner, subwoofer and a video camera, basically everything you would expect. It also looks spiffy.

That is when you notice the sign says MXM-IV Module. Hmmm. Then it says "Enthusiast DirectX 10 VGA". I do believe we have spotted a mobile 8800 dear Watson, fetch the elephant gun, we have a big one here. A quick check of the hardware confirmed it, mobile 8800 parts in our hand.

The next one over was a return to the luggable days of non-mobile parts in a laptop. This one is technically called the D900C, and it has a 17" 1920*1200 screen. It sports a full on Conroe CPU and a normal P965 chipset, RAID, TPM, a TV tuner and camera.

It is basically a decent enthusiast PC in a moderately sized package, only slightly smaller than a DTX box, but far more portable. Not a bad mobile Conroe system, but why they bothered putting a battery in it is beyond me.

That brings us to the big boy of the bunch, one that goes far beyond luggable and into mid-sized animal crushing territory, the M590KE. This is a 20" Turion X2 based system with a rez of 1680*1050. If it had an absurdly high resolution, I would be all over it, but the lack of even 1080p makes this one a pass for me.

Last but not least we have something that is not a laptop but also not far from it. It is an all-in-one PC wrapped in the same stylish glass frame Dell is about to introduce. It isn't anything shocking in the spec department, 22" 1680*1050 screen, Viiv kickbacks, and a G965 supplemented by a Geforce Go 7600. Couple this with a Logitech DiNovo and you have one heck of an executoy.

All in all, quite a nice lineup from Clevo. The star of the show was definitely the 8800 mobile part, something they did a really good job of disguising. The rest were all fairly solid but nothing to blow me away. µ