NOTEBOOK PC PC : DISCUSSION

Matte or Glossy Screens?
Posted in Notebook PC | August 3, 2009 8am

Last year Apple switched, almost entirely, to glossy screens on its line of notebooks.  It’s more extreme than simply a move to glossy, the new Apple notebook displays are actually covered with a thin piece of glass.  Aesthetically, few will argue that the new MacBook and MacBook Pro are at the top of their class, but the tradeoff is noticeable.I took this picture outdoors last year comparing the previous generation MacBook Pro to the new glass-covered model:

That’s a bit exaggerated since the system is off.  With the display on and at full brightness, it’s still pretty distracting:

Indoors however, it’s not a problem.  Here’s the old MacBook vs. the new MacBook:

In fact, indoors, I do actually prefer some glossy screens to their matte counterparts.  If I were still in school doing a lot of work on nice spring or fall days outside, I would go insane trying to use the new glossy notebooks; the brickyard at NCSU had very little in the way of shade from the sun.  These days, I do most of my work inside and thus don’t really have an issue with the glossy displays.If we see that more users are using their notebooks as desktop replacements, then perhaps the matte vs. glossy debate doesn’t really matter to the majority of users.  So I ask you: do you prefer matte or glossy screens?  Do you use your notebook mostly indoors or outdoors?  Is any form of glossy screen acceptable or is completely matte the only option?  Apple went to the extreme with its glass-covered displays, but they are selling well - should the rest of the industry follow?  

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

My Dream Laptop
Posted in Gamer PC | October 30, 2008 8am

Long ago I failed to understand the point of gaming notebooks. They never seemed fast enough to run the games I cared to play and I always had a decent desktop that I could either build real quick or use whenever the need for gaming arose. In the past few years however I’ve come to really appreciate them, mainly because of their portability and ease of setup.Whenever I’d have an impromptu LAN party at my house the first several hours were always spent scrounging up hardware, installing Windows, configuring systems and dealing with silly problems that never cropped up before that night. I never had the space or spare hardware to leave gaming machines ready, and if I did have a system setup I’d eventually just start using it for testing as soon as our LAN party was over. My friends weren’t the biggest fan of this. Systems that were ready a day before were now running SYSMark.And here’s where gaming notebooks really came into play. Mobile GPUs have gotten powerful enough that it’s possible to play games that are a generation old, quite well. You can even play the latest titles if you’ve got enough GPU horsepower or turn down the settings a bit.Mobile CPUs are also easily comparable to desktop counterparts, so you’re not giving up anything in that department. And with the advent of SSDs you can actually equalize disk performance between your notebook and desktop as well.So when ASUS asked me what I’d like to see in a gaming notebook, without limits, I got a bit excited.Upgradability is terribly important with gaming notebooks; mobile GPUs can quickly get out of date, especially with major PC game titles coming out every 12 – 24 months it’s real easy for your gaming notebook to be lacking in the umph department. The problem with GPU upgradability in notebooks is that the thermals for these things are rarely designed to be forward looking enough to accommodate any GPU, but hey this is my dreamworld so I want a gaming notebook that can accept at least one to two generations of GPU upgrades. CPU upgrades are a necessity but we’ve got those already, so I don’t need to ask for too much here.Display panel technology is particularly important, I’d like to see an IPS or PVA panel used in the notebook, preferably with a 1920×1200 display resolution. The TN panels that are oh-so-common on notebooks can be nice, but I’d prefer something a bit better for my dream gaming notebook.Stylistically I’d point no further to the latest MacBook and MacBook Pro from Apple, they’ve got the best build quality out of any notebook I’ve used and look great. Just because this is a functional device doesn’t mean that it can’t be pretty too.Given that gaming notebooks are generally large I’d like to see two 2.5” drives used here, a SSD boot drive using Intel’s X25-M for applications and main game installs, as well as a large (500GBperhaps?) mechanical disk drive for game images, backups and all other data.The final request would simply be for a healthy set of I/O ports. I’d like to see DVI or DisplayPort out standard for connecting to a larger monitor. I hate to mention Apple again in such a gaming focused discussion, but I believe it may have hit on something important with its latest 24” display. Apple includes a power connector for the MacBook/MacBook Pro on its 24” display, making it easy to keep your notebook charged and connected to an external display without using your cumbersome power brick (speaking of which, a more svelte power brick would be nice too). To get such a thing for our dream gaming notebook would obviously require some standardization and work between both the notebook makers and the display vendors, something Apple doesn’t have to worry about given its control of the entire platform, but a particularly optimistic PC OEM could easily deliver something similar.There are my thoughts – how about yours? Did I leave anything out? What would you like to see on your ideal gaming notebook?

NOTEBOOK PC PC : DISCUSSION

Where would you use a touchscreen?
Posted in Notebook PC | August 10, 2009 1pm

Before the iPhone, touch was mostly a gimmick.  There were very few touch interfaces that I really felt worked well.  Touch panels in airports, home automation systems and even smartphones were just a burden to use.  Your touch would either not register or you had no feedback, whether visual or tactile, and it confused the experience.  The iPhone changed all of that for me at least.  From that point on, whenever I used anything with a touch UI I wanted it to work like the iPhone.  And unfortunately, nothing did.We’re finally at the point where other manufacturers are catching up to what Apple has accomplished, even in the smartphone market with devices like the Palm Pre.  The inevitable question is what role will touch play in PCs?Is it something that will be segmented by use: work, play or home?  Or perhaps device: notebook or desktop.  Necessity is the mother of invention, so where do you guys see touch screens and touch based interfaces being most useful to you?  The match in smartphones makes total sense, but the question is how should it be brought to other computing devices?  The touchscreen kitchen PC is easy to see; a flat non-porous surface is far easier to wipe off than a physical keyboard with keys.  A large touchscreen tablet also makes sense, but what about on your notebook or desktop?  Do you see a touchscreen being useful there at all?  And what comes after touch?  Will it stick around like physical interfaces like the keyboard and mouse have for decades or is it a stop gap solution?

The scene from Back to the Future II always comes to mind where Marty is playing on an old arcade machine in a diner of the future and two kids walk up to him and say that the game looks like a baby’s toy because you have to use your hands.  Are gesture based inputs ultimately what will transcend touch?

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

How much power is enough?
Posted in Gamer PC | November 26, 2008 8am

Towards the end of the Pentium 4’s lifespan we got the first indication of power being a limiting factor in chip design.  When the smoke cleared we now knew the limits and you can expect that all future generations of CPUs will be sold into the very same TDP segments that they have been for the past few years.  At the high end we’ll always have 130W parts, you can expect some at 95W, 65W and then the small form factor desktops/notebooks will come in at 45W, 35W, 25W and below for ultra portables.GPUs finally saw a similar wall, although a bit later.  GPU power is mostly constrained by the number of slots the card can occupy and the number of power connectors it will require.  While AMD is shooting for 150 - 200W for total board power, NVIDIA is pushing closer to 250W with its GeForce GTX 280.  Again, these are mostly fixed values - we can’t really exceed them since there’s only so much power that can be delivered over a standard household circuit.Factor in another 40 - 50W for the motherboard and less than 10W for storage and you’ll quickly see that even if you were to build a system out of top end components, it’s hardly likely that you’ll need a 1000W PSU.For most users the requirements are actually pretty light, if you don’t have a top bin GPU in your machine then a well made 350W PSU should actually do just fine.  Start pushing SLI and you’ll need something that’s 500W+, but these 750W, 850W, 950W and beyond power supplies are largely unnecessary.If you’re building a machine using integrated graphics the power requirements can be even lower.  A midrange dual core CPU on an integrated graphics platform (Intel G45, AMD 780G) will only need around 50 - 60W of power at idle, and under load we’re still talking well under 100W.  Most companies don’t make readily available, well built 100W PSUs but the point is that a good 300W unit should more than cover the requirements.You can easily move to even a quad-core CPU without really needing more than a 300W power supply, it’s really the combination of a fast CPU with a high end graphics card (or two, or three) that push the limits.So why do we even have these 1kW or 1.2kW power supplies?  For the same reason that we have measurements of top speed on sports cars, there are those who need that much power.  Most, simply don’t.Although, I am curious - what PSU and components do you have in your system?