Posts in Notebooks

Intel announces Extreme mobile CPU

Michelle Thatcher | Jul 16, 2007

Editors' note :

At press time the major notebook vendors are unable to comment on when the first portables with Core 2 Extreme will become available in Asia-Pacific markets.

Mobile gaming just got sweeter: Today Intel announced the Core 2 Extreme X7800, its first laptop CPU under the Extreme Edition brand. The 2.6GHz dual-core processor features 4MB of L2 cache and an 800MHz front-side bus, making it the highest-end chip in Intel's mobile lineup. Of greater interest to gamers, though, is the fact that the chip's overspeed protection has been removed, meaning laptop manufacturers and users will be able to overclock the X7800 for even more performance (Intel, of course, denies any responsibility for the consequences of overclocking).

Like Intel's other mobile product offerings, the Core 2 Extreme X7800 includes such power-saving features as a dynamic front-side bus, which lets the system drop into a "low-frequency mode" to conserve energy, and Enhanced Deep Sleep which uses less power when the system is idle. Another feature, Advanced Media Boost, is designed to provide better performance for video editing, music, and photography, signaling Intel's intention to market this chip for mobile workstations and multimedia laptops as well as gaming rigs.

Intel claims the Core 2 Extreme X7800 realizes a 28 percent performance increase over the previous generation of dual-core processors--though that's in comparison to the Core Duo T2600, one of the first mobile dual-core processors released in January 2006. We suspect the X7800's performance gains will be more modest when compared to the current crop of Core 2 Duo processors on the market. Nevertheless, we're excited to see a gaming-oriented processor for laptops, and we hope that pairing it with dual SLI graphics (like those found on the Alienware Area 51 m9750 available in the US) will bring true desktop-level gaming performance to the mobile space. Laptops built around the X7800 processor will appear on the market in two weeks, and you'd better start saving your pennies: The processor alone costs US$851 (US$300 more than the current top-of-the-line Core 2 Duo CPU).

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Sony launches FZ series in Asia

Darius Chang | Jul 03, 2007

Descended from the FE series, the new VAIO FZ sports the same slim chassis as its predecessor. But is a refreshed chipset the only differentiating factor?

A cursory inspection will probably reveal that the Santa Rosa-based portable sports an HDMI connector for streaming high-definition video to an external display. However, one would have to look closely at the specification sheet to realize that the FZ series may be one of the first portables to incorporate an SDHC-compatible slot. The SD card format has a 2GB restriction, thus the newer SDHC standard was announced which allow capacities to exceed the previous limit. Unfortunately, SDHC is not backward-compatible. Hence, though you may use an SD card in the SDHC reader, you cannot read SDHC in older devices.

The FZ series comes in three flavors with different processor clock speeds justifying the respective prices. The VAIO VGN-FZ15G costs S$2,499 (US$1,644.08) and has a Core 2 Duo 1.8GHZ processor. The VGN-FZ17G goes for a 2GHz chip at an additional S$500 (US$328.95) premium, while the top-of-the-line 2.2GHz VGN-FZ18G model retails at S$4,699 (US$3,091.45). The latter is priced so much higher because it incorporates a Blu-ray optical drive under the hood. All models come with a 15.4-inch display with an Nvidia GeForce 8400M GT graphics processor driving them. The 15.4-inch FZ notebook may be rather light for its category. Unfortunately, the tradeoff is that it has only an ExpressCard/34 slot, while other similarly sized models use the larger ExpressCard/54 interface.