Desktop Replacement Notebook: iBuypower M865TU

You want a speedy desktop replacement notebook wrapped in an unassuming, businesslike shell? That’s precisely what the iBuypower M865TU delivers, courtesy of an 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo Mobile and a GeForce GTX 260M under the hood. Like the classic mullet, this speed machine lets you work all day then party all night, for a mere $US2000. [Review]

Inexpensive Gaming Laptop: Asus G51Vx-RX05

If all you wanna do is have some fun, the G51Vx-RX05 gives you all of the raw gaming performance of the M865TU – it sports the same GeForce GTX 260M GPU – but instead of a spendy 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo, the Asus economizes at 2GHz. While the G51Vx’s dual-core is down two cores and about a gigahertz from the iBuypower machine, when it comes to games, the big videocard is all that matters. [Review]

Over-the-Top Crazy-Awesome Desktop: Velocity Micro Gamer’s Edge DualX

What do you get when you put a Core i7 CPU overclocked beyond 4GHz, three GeForce GTX 285 GPUs in tri-SLI, four lightning-fast Intel solid-state drives running in RAID 0, and a shiny new copy of Windows 7 Ultimate in one case? Enough computing power to make your Xbox 360 piss itself and run screaming for mummy. This machine doesn’t just demolish benchmarks, it rapes and pillages them, leaving nothing behind but a smoking crater and a host of lesser machines. The downside? It costs $US9000. [Review]

“Cheap” Crazy-Awesome Desktop: Falcon Northwest Talon

From one of the original boutique PC manufacturer’s comes the Talon. Packing 90 per cent of the raw performance of Velocity Micro’s $US9000 wonder for a mere $US4000, the Talon’s watchwords are “extreme” and “efficiency”. With a new Lynnfield Core i5 CPU and a pair of ATI’s hot-off-the-presses Radeon 5970, this rig uses all four GPUs and all four CPU cores to deliver kick-arse performance. [Review]

Will Smith is the Editor-in-Chief of Maximum PC, not the famous actor/rapper. His work has appeared in many publications, including Maximum PC, Wired, Mac|Life and T3, and on the web at Maximum PC and Ars Technica. He’s the author of The Maximum PC Guide to Building a Dream PC.

It happened in the “Seinfeld reunion” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The iMac seems to be from the previous generation, not the 16:9 model. Jerry’s classic Mac was only replaced once before, during the last season, with an Apple Macintosh 20th Anniversary.

It wasn’t the only wink to the Cupertino company during that episode, but it certainly was the most significant sign of time change.

I wonder if Jerry’s iMac actually runs Windows (and that sound you heard was the scream of the million Apple fanboys reading these lines). I know. I’m a cruel man. [Macenstein and Edible Apple]

The two types of issues we’re seeing most are cracks in the screen and a completely dead computer on delivery. What’s most plausible is that the packaging just wasn’t designed to handle the size and weight of the giant 27-inch iMac as it gets tossed around the cab of a FedEx truck. Apple has so far been extremely responsive and effective in making repairs and exchanges, but it’s still a discomfiting sign – if you’re about to buy a new iMac, you might want to wait and see if Apple announces a fix for whatever’s going on before you take the plunge. [Apple Forums via Engadget]

I think my hard drive flinched in fear when I pulled up these instructions for turning a laptop into an Etch-A-Sketch. How could it not when the project is a freakin’ awesome Arduino-powered Hack-A-Sketch that you actually shake to erase.

The shake-to-erase action works because of a hidden mercury switch which detects movement and you don’t really need to worry about the hard drive since this project kinda destroys your screen. [Project Lab via Make]

And I’m not sure that the solution is just a refresh away.

The Mac Pro was once the only viable option for an OS X lover in need of serious horsepower for tasks like editing media. Now, with the new iMac? I think it’s straight up stupid to buy a Mac Pro.

The $4499 Mac Pro, desperately in need of a refresh, gives you a 2.66GHz Quad-Core (i7), 3GB of RAM (triple channel, but seriously?), 640GB hard drive (again, seriously?) and a nominal graphics card. Spend $1400 more and you’ll get a another processor and 3GB more RAM.

The $2599, 27-inch iMac obviously includes a screen, plus you get a 2.66GHz Quad-Core (i7), 1TB drive, 4GB of RAM and a nominal graphics card.

But beyond those clock speeds, the Mac Pro’s i7 processor is the more premium Bloomfield edition, while the iMac uses the Lynnfield. (More on those differences here.)

Still, the bottom line is that the iMac’s Lynnfield processor is newer, and it shows in performance.

Macworld benched the new iMacs against the latest Mac Pros. And, you know what? The i7 iMac more than held its own. It basically defeated the quad-core Mac Pro across the board.

And other than a few specific tasks in which the most expensive Mac Pro’s eight cores proved beneficial (Handbrake, Cinebench, etc), the iMac outperformed the competition or kept things close enough not to be relevant, plus it straight-up won in the eyes of Speedmark 6.

Performance-wise, the base Mac Pro makes no sense at all. The eight-core Mac Pro offers a touch more power, sometimes, and other times (in many day to day tasks) even it is outgunned.

Of course, any Mac Pro still allows multiple internal hard drives, three PCI slots, more FireWire ports (four vs one) and more room for RAM expansion (32GB vs 16GB). But once again, even in the worlds of professional media creation, that’s a pretty questionable upsell, especially with external storage solutions and the fact that most high, high end media pros (like special effects artists) turn to dedicated render farms to do their heavy number crunching anyway.

With the new iMac, Apple has shrunk the Mac-Pro-needing niche even smaller. And I can’t tell anyone with a straight face that a handful of expandability is worth $US300-$1100 with no monitor, no matter how deep their pockets are.

Apple needs to re-examine their pricing model. Even with an inevitable processor refresh (i9, anyone?), it’s time for a price drop and/or some free with purchase displays. Just because you’re a pro doesn’t mean you’re a sucker.

570,937,778 computers are online, with the average weight of 88 pounds (40kg), with monitors, printers and any other peripherals. Ehhh… I’m still a bit sceptical of that number, given the popularity of laptops, but let’s keep coming because this is fun!

There are an additional 175,480,931 servers, and about 100 million Blackberries/iPhone/iPod touches to worry about. Plus, there’s a 2840m transatlantic cable connecting one half of the digital world to the other (it in itself weighs 191,802,168 pounds) to account for.

Anyway, the final number they come up with is 1,098,868,920,000 pounds (or just over a trillion pounds, for those too lazy to count commas).

To put that number in better perspective, it’s about the same weight as 25,000 cloned Sears/Willis Towers. [Crave UK and image]

[Thanks Eduardo Lozano]

The original 1.2GHz Core 2 Solo U2200 processor (which was soldered in place) has been swapped with a 1.33GHz Core 2 Duo overclocked to 1.438GHz. And the 48GB SSD is replaced with a fast RunCore ProIV 128GB SSD. Amazingly, the battery life is said to be pretty much the same.

It’s a pretty involved mod, but it’s a hackintosh I’d definitely like to take for a spin. That 4.5-inch touchscreen doesn’t look too bad, either. [MicroPCTalk via UMPC Portal via SlashGear]

The system runs Android 1.5 through its 7-inch (18cm) 800×480 glass touchscreen display, plus you get Wi-Fi (b/g), GPS, microSD reader, 2-megapixel camera, 0.3-megapixel webcam and a USB port that can always add 3G (though, the whole idea becomes sort of silly at that point).

Plus, a built-in stand on the back means it can double as a picture frame. Yes!!

My only concern is the bit of lag you notice in this video. If the final production models have that issue ironed out, this could be an attractive little tablet. [Camangi WebStation via Gearlog]