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?

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

Building a HTPC is Easier than Ever
Posted in Gamer PC | May 19, 2009 8am

I built my first real HTPC in May of 2008.  I’d built machines to play videos on a TV before, but this thing was designed to go in my home theater.  It was quiet, could play HD content and generally worked pretty well.

I used an AMD 780G micro-ATX motherboard with an Athlon X2 4850e processor.  The CPU wasn’t fast enough to decode Blu-ray discs but the 780G could do all of the video decoding on its graphics core, negating the need for a fast CPU.  I paired the entire system up with a 385W Enermax Pro82+ power supply and connected it via HDMI to my receiver.I don’t like the idea of swapping discs so I used AnyDVD HD to decrypt Blu-ray discs and tossed them on a large NAS I built on my network.  I then used two applications: MyMovies and Sam Saffron’s Video Browser (now just called Video Browser for MCE) to manage content on the box.  The end result was a pretty sweet interface for browsing movies under Vista Media Center:

The machine worked quite well but just this past month I had the opportunity to test something that was just as capable, but consumed far less power and was noticeably smaller.I’ve talked about NVIDIA’s Ion platform before, it’s the combination of a CPU and NVIDIA’s GeForce 9300 chipset.  The first incarnation of Ion uses Intel’s Atom processor and Zotac was the first manufacturer to release a mini-ITX motherboard based on this platform.I reviewed Zotac’s Ion last week and was thoroughly impressed.  The system just worked.
With minimal configuration (thanks to a better state of codecs and DXVA acceleration under Vista to begin with), I had a drop in replacement to my HTPC.  Decoding Blu-rays wasn’t an issue, although admittedly the Media Browser interface was a bit sluggish compared to my regular box.  Power consumption is a meager 28W under load and the board/CPU/GPU are fine running without a fan (although a slow spinning case fan wouldn’t hurt to keep things cool.I believe a HTPC is still the best way to get access to all of your content on a TV and with fairly modest (and affordable) PC hardware, it’s now even more possible.
 

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

Q4, 2009 or Q1, 2010: When you Should Buy your Next Notebook
Posted in Gamer PC | May 12, 2009 7am

It’s codenamed Arrandale and if you’re looking for a reason to upgrade your notebook, I believe this may just be that reason.

Intel’s Arrandale processor is a member of the Westmere family.  None of these code names really matter because they’ll be gone by the time the product ships.  All you need to know is that Arrandale will be the 32nm mobile version of Intel’s Core i7.  It may get called something else (Core i5 perhaps?), but it’s the lineage that counts folks.
Arrandale is a dual core chip with Hyper Threading, meaning it can work on four threads at once.  If the impact of HT on Core i7 is any indication, we should see some serious performance gains simply due to HT on its dual core brethren.
Intel launched i7 at the very high end and the technology will trickle down over time.  Thanks to its high end nature, the chips all drew high wattages. Despite that fact, the Core i7 was particularly power efficient.  At the same TDP as its Core 2 predecessor, the Core i7 will generally draw less power while offering the same performance, or offer better performance per watt.  While this is a nice feature to have on a high end desktop, it’s absolutely necessary on a notebook.
My guess for performance?  I believe, depending on the app, you’ll see similar improvements to what we saw on the desktop with i7.  That is 0 - 30% at the same clock speed compared to an existing Core 2 notebook.Battery life should improve as well thanks to Arrandale’s superior power efficiency.
All of these are safe bets but there’s just one more thing.  Arrandale ships with a 45nm graphics core on the same package as the CPU.  It’s not going to be anything earth shattering in terms of gaming performance (albeit better than existing Intel graphics), but power consumption should be quite good.
Arrandale is due out in the last three months of 2009, but OEMs may not have notebooks until the start of 2010 (hence the range in the title).  I’m betting the wait will be worth it.