Posted 03/10/10 at 12:01:35 PM by Nathan Edwards

The Sony Vaio P is a weird device. It’s much smaller than a netbook, but much better-equipped. It has wireless broadband access from Verizon, onboard GPS, a ThinkPad-style pointing stick, and an eye-straining high-resolution screen. It’s also incredibly expensive. So who exactly is the Vaio P for?

At just 9.8 inches across, 0.8 inches thick, and 4.8 inches deep, and weighing just one pound, five ounces, the Vaio P is made for mobility—it makes a 10-inch netbook look like a desktop replacement. Into those tiny dimensions Sony crams parts that—on paper—put your old Atom netbook to shame. The Vaio P uses a 2GHz Atom Z550 paired with the US15W chipset and GMA500 integrated graphics. By comparison, last year’s typical netbook used a 1.6GHz N280 on an Intel GSE945 chipset with GMA950 graphics. The Vaio P also ships with 2GB of DDR2/533 and a whopping 256GB Samsung MLC SSD, which itself is responsible for $700 of the Vaio P’s price tag. The full Windows 7 Professional OS is a welcome change from Windows XP—or worse, Windows 7 Starter.

The Vaio P’s eight-inch screen offers an eye-watering 1600x768 resolution. This is the first time we’ve ever seen a screen that was too sharp; reading text on it for more than a few minutes hurt our eyes.

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Posted 03/09/10 at 04:17:06 PM by Loyd Case

There’s no doubt in our minds that the HIS Radeon HD 5970 offers superlative performance and extremely high frame rates. The combination of dual AMD Cypress GPUs, each coupled with its own dedicated 1GB pool of fast GDDR5 memory, makes this graphics card one of the fastest we’ve ever tested.

This particular card is based on AMD’s reference design, so the two GPUs clock in at 725MHz, while the memory clock is set at 1GHz. It’s an enormous card, too, at just over 12 inches long. If you buy the card from Newegg, you get a compact PC toolkit, though HIS is looking to expand the toolkit bundle. Also included is a coupon for a free Steam download of Dirt 2, the DirectX 11–capable racing game from Codemasters.

Assuming HIS built the cards to AMD specs, there should be plenty of headroom for overclocking. The beefy cooling system, with its full-length vapor chamber, can dissipate up to 400W of power. Of course, for best results, you’ll want to tweak the card’s voltage. AMD initially offered its own tool for overvolting GPU and memory, but has since withdrawn the utility. However, MSI’s Afterburner tool (http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner), which apparently works with any AMD-based graphics card, allows you to tweak the core voltage but doesn’t provide a way to alter memory voltage.

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Posted 03/09/10 at 03:31:31 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

There are two things we think of when we hear the word “supercomputer.” The first is the failed 1970s NBC show Supercomputer (now available on DVD from Shinehart Wigs). The other is a massive room full of HAL9000-like scary boxes just two MIPS away from declaring thermal nuclear war on humanity.

So, what was Gateway thinking when it decided to call its FX6831 a Gaming Super-computer? This is, after all, just a simple desktop housing a single 2.8GHz Core i7-860. Surely, that’s not the stuff of supercomputing, is it? OK, we know that in January, Fabrice Bellard used a single Core i7 to smash a record set by, umm, a supercomputer for calculating pi. Still, Gateway’s gone way over the line, right?

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Posted 03/08/10 at 12:41:12 PM by Dan Stapleton

Somehow, blowing things up never gets old—especially blowing up Nazis. Sixty-five years after the fall of the Third Reich, it’s still a gaming favorite.

As the titular Saboteur, Irish mechanic turned French freedom-fighter Sean Devlin, you throw a wrench into the gears of the Nazi occupation in 1940... except this wrench is actually a wad of TNT that detonates in a spectacular fireball. The game equips you with an ample pile of explosives and turns you loose in a target-rich open-world version of Nazi-occupied Paris (complete with Eiffel Tower and Louvre) and its surrounding rural areas. Much of the joy of playing comes from planting bombs on poorly guarded Nazi equipment and casually strolling out of the blast radius before it blows, then watching it crumble down, jackbooted thugs and all.

Sure, the story, which follows Sean’s quest for revenge against a sadistic S.S. officer/race car driver is a little hammy and more than a little absurd, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. In fact, it works well with the roguish Indiana Jones–style attitude of the character. The voice actors play along, delivering entertaining performances with caricature Irish, French, and German accents.

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Posted 03/04/10 at 09:45:23 PM by Nathan Grayson

Dragon Age: Origins is the first in a new franchise from role-playing powerhouse BioWare, and while its swords ‘n’ sorcery setting may, at first glance, appear to be the result of an especially fruitful attempt at robbing J.R.R. Tolkien’s grave, don’t let that fool you. Dragon Age may very well contain one of the finest, most compelling videogame worlds ever created.

But that on its own isn’t what makes Dragon Age great. Rather, the game’s heart lies smack-dab at the intersection between setting and character development. It’s a fine line that many sprawling RPGs attempt to walk, yet BioWare has managed to cross the proverbial tightrope with startling ease. Chalk it up to years of experience with similar games, but with Dragon Age, BioWare has truly perfected its craft.

The story initially appears to be something of a straight line but quickly spins out into a complex web, with you at the center. It’s a surprisingly personal experience—especially when contrasted with other story-based RPGs—that begins with your choice of an origin story. Depending on your race/class combination, you’ll encounter any one of multiple, wildly different opening scenarios. Your origin, then, follows you through the rest of the game. Human, elf, or dwarf, male or female, rich or poor—the whole game changes in ways both big and small to reflect your humble (or not-so-humble) beginnings.

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Posted 03/04/10 at 11:53:07 AM by Loyd Case

Most all-in-one PCs make extensive use of notebook technologies: The processors are low voltage, the GPUs are mobile designs, and the optical drives are low profile. This tends to endow all-in-ones with a natural price premium, because compact, lower-power components add cost. Be that as it may, the $700 HP Pro All-in-One seems a tad overpriced—particularly when you consider that the nearly identical home version, the Pavilion MS200, costs $100 less.

We don’t think this boost is entirely an attempt to gouge corporate buyers, though. For one thing, the Pro All-in-One ships with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, which adds domain networking, Windows XP mode—a virtualized PC running Windows XP—and network-backup capability.

The MS218 consists of a monitor (with all the workings of a PC built into the same enclosure), a keyboard, a mouse, and a 120-watt external power brick. Although efficient (the entire PC draws just 36 watts at idle), the brick seems to be overkill. Even when running system-intensive tasks, we never saw power consumption rise above 66 watts.

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Posted 03/02/10 at 11:25:04 AM by Nathan Edwards

It’s been a long time since we reviewed a USB external drive—not since November 2008, to be exact—mostly because they’re essentially commodities now. With transfers capped at USB 2.0 speeds and drive sizes mostly standardized, portable hard drives have had few features by which to distinguish themselves from their peers—the usefulness of included software, eSATA support, and full-disk encryption among them. On the eve of USB 3.0 drives, the Western Digital My Book Elite 2TB seems to be the state of the USB 2.0 drive art, with a custom e-ink display. But is it more than a gimmick?

The My Book Elite shares the vaguely book-like formfactor of the My Book World and Essential lineups, but along its “spine” is the e-ink display, which shows a custom 12-character drive label, a capacity meter, and a little lock icon if you’ve enabled disk encryption. Despite its limited usefulness, we dig it—mostly because we geek out over any applications with e-ink.

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Posted 03/01/10 at 12:28:15 PM by Loyd Case

Featuring a microATX motherboard the HP Compaq 6005 Small Form Factor PC is relatively svelte, measuring 13.3 inches by 14.90 inches square and less than four inches tall. (Note: HP also sells the model 6005 in a micro-tower configuration).

Built around a motherboard with an AMD 785G chipset, the system sports a 3GHz AMD B95 CPU. The “95” in B95 denotes a thermal design power (TDP) of 95W, while the “B” means “business.” These business-class CPUs are identical to their 45nm retail cousins and offer 2MB of L2 cache (512KB dedicated per core) and 6MB of shared L3 cache.

As with many business desktop PCs, this system uses integrated graphics; in this case, the ATI Radeon HD 3200 core built into the 785G. It won’t win any gaming benchmarks, but it should handle most light-duty business 3D chores, including running Windows 7’s Aero mode.

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