TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Most laptops are not meant to be upgradeable, but Asus is trying to change that with the Asus C90. It will be the first user upgradeable laptop. You can upgrade the CPU, video card, and the optical drive, quickly and easily. Gizmodo has pictures and more details.

Now this is one sweet computer! Two 3.0Ghz Quad-core Xeons in a nice package with OS X. The base price with the 2 quad-core cpus is a few bucks under $4000. Of course with only 1GB of RAM which is pathetic not only by today’s standards but relative to the overall capabilities of an 8-core machine. You can easily upgrade the RAM and I would recommend most people do it themselves rather than pay for Apple’s overpriced memory. You can also probably find cheaper hard disks than Apple offers, but I haven’t checked the prices lately on either RAM or hard disks.

That being said I’d love to have one of these to replace my home-built Athlon 64 x2. I certainly won’t be spending $4k on a new computer any time soon, though. I’ve loved my Apple laptops through the last 5 or 6 years of owning one including my latest Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, but considering I can build my own desktop PC for far cheaper I’d have to have a lot of money with nothing better to do to buy one of those. But it’s still very tempting. If only Apple would release OS X for non-Apple hardware. Not that I need an 8-core computer or anything…

PC World takes a look back at the revolutionary technology products that have changed the way we live today. I have to agree with most of the choices, although their ordering is a bit more controversial. Nevertheless it is a nostalgic look back at what technology products brought us to where we are today. Check out the article.

News.com.com.com is reporting that the release date for the Apple iPhone has been set for June 11. Replies to their story are contradicting this information, however. No official announcement has been made and until we hear something official I’m going to remain skeptical of the exact date.

In any case, I think I want to wait on the next version of the iPhone. I have a fully working iPod nano so I wouldn’t use the iPod functionality of the iPhone anyway. I just want a nice PDA phone. Since I’m already using Cingular it would be an easy switch, especially since my contract is already up and the whole reason I haven’t gotten a new phone yet is to wait for the iPhone. Unfortunately my 2 year old phone, a Motorola V551, just got a crack on the hinge of the flip ear piece. I think its days are numbered and certainly it will not last until a 3G version of the iPhone is released. If I want a phone discount I have to renew my contract and that pretty much means no iPhone for another 2 years. Decisions… decisions…

NVIDIA is finally getting a reasonably priced motherboard out there for the Core 2 Duo chipset that hits the price/performance sweet spot based on the HotHardware review.

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HotHardware takes a look at two newly released HDMI capable cards. These cards are not meant to be high-end gaming cards but rather power your high definition theater. Based on their review, it looks like the EN7600GT is the best of these two cards.

Most sub-$1000 PCs from major manufacturers are decent, but they’re not quite optimized for games. Sometimes you can get very close; just a video card upgrade and you’re good to go. Often, name-brand PCs keep their prices down by making a little extra money on the side, agreeing to pre-load your system with software that sucks up valuable resources and bogs everything down. The solution? Build your own! Our recipe for a gaming PC costing around $800 is surprisingly powerful, with room to grow.

Check out the rest of Extreme Tech’s article on building your own $800 gaming PC.

The Tech Report weighs in with a review of five quad-core desktops. Those that need some serious compute power or just like to have the fastest machine on their block, should take a look at their review.

AS YOU MAY KNOW, we’ve already reviewed the top-end desktop quad-core processor rigs from Intel and AMD. We examined the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 upon its debut, and we covered AMD’s Quad FX platform even before it hit store shelves. What we found, in a nutshell, is that four processor cores is a wonderful thing to have, but only if you have some heavy multitasking to do or you happen to make extensive use of one of the few applications out there capable of taking full advantage of four cores simultaneously. But things have changed somewhat since our last dance with quad-core systems, and so we’re gathered here today to take another look.

Chief among the new developments is the availability of cheaper—err, less expensive—quad-core options like the Core 2 Quad Q6600 and Athlon 64 FX-70. Intel and AMD like to showcase their top performing chips in order to show off what they can do, but top-speed-grade processors are rarely the best values. What’s more, we’ve found that practically any top-speed-grade incarnation of a processor tends to be in a rough spot with respect to heat and power consumption. Lower speed grades promise higher performance per watt.

Read the rest of The Tech Report review.

From [H]ard|OCP:

Certainly it is good to see ATI’s next-gen graphics cards showing up even if it is not pushing pixels. We have been able to confirm some other R600 news that is not good. ATI is stating that a SINGLE R600 high end configuration will require 300 watts of power (+/-9%) and a DUAL R600 “CrossFire” high end configuration will require, as you might guess, 600 watts of power (+/-9%). Compare that to a single GeForce 8800 GTX that will pull 150 to 180 watts. Add in a CPU to that mix and you overtake most power supplies’ peak ratings on the retail shelves today.

Also many have been worried about the size of the new R600 video cards. ATI is stating that 345mm / 13.6″ will be the required space to fit the cards in a case. (Yes, the retail version will be somewhat shorter, or at least that is what is told to us even though we have yet to see one.) This figure is the card’s 335mm physical length plus 10mm to properly install the card. A GeForce 8800 GTX is just under 11 inches longs while the 4 GPU 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 comes in at 11.75 inches. Certainly if you have an R600, it looks like you will be able to claim having the longest in the room….

It’s going to be a monster card. And really expensive. Being that I currently have a GeForce 7800GT 256MB (BFG’s OC’d version) I think I’ll wait another year before upgrading video cards. By then they’ll have smaller cards with much lower power consumption at a much cheaper price. It’s always good to see the hardware companies pushing the envelop again and again to help bring us better stuff. This card looks nice, but my NEO-HE 550 watt power supply would also need to be upgraded to use this thing.

Check out the rest of the article.

From PCLaunches.com:

Shuttle is back with a new small form factor computer which sports quad core processors and up to 8GB memory. It features Intel Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme processor, Intel 975X/ICH7-R chipset, Nvidia GeForce 7950GX2 / 8800GTX or ATI Radeon X1900XTX graphics card, and up to 3×300GB hard drive, which can be run in combination as RAID 0, 1, 5 or 10.

Check out Shuttle’s page for more information on this product.

Shuttle makes some quality small form-factor systems, judging from reviews on Newegg. These days you can fit a lot in a small amount of space. From Mac Minis to these small form-factor PCs to 16-bay RAID arrays that hold 12TB to iPod nanos that hold up to 8GB of music. I’d be curious to hear your opinions on small form-factor systems you have built.