ASUS Eee Monitor: A Rival To Apple iMac?

Sony's Round VAIO VGX-TP1 Becomes More Powerful

OCZ Announces Core Series SATA2 2.5-inch Solid State Drives

MSI Wind Arrives To Europe In September

Radeon HD 4850 and Intel Nehalem Test Results

ASUS Eee Monitor: A Rival To Apple iMac?

While personal computers built into monitors are not rare, they are, as a rule, expensive. Without a doubt Apple iMac is the most popular among such solutions, but PC market also offers similar machines, e.g. Dell XPS One.

Nevertheless, ASUS is going to boldly enter this market - to revolutionize it, naturally. For 500 USD its new Eee Monitor will offer the same level of integration and performance that should be enough for home users.

While complete specifications are not known yet, the novelty is said to feature Intel Atom N270 CPU and integrated graphics. Users will be able to select between 40 GB SSD and 80 GB HDD.

Other features are to include 6 USB ports, Ethernet adapter, modem, IEEE 1394 interface, usual audio connectivity and Denon speakers.

All this will be integrated into a 19-inch LCD monitor with no external VGA or DVI.

Unfortunately, even approximate release dates of Eee Monitor are not known yet.

Source: Eee PC News

Sony's Round VAIO VGX-TP1 Becomes More Powerful

The PC, which resembles a round cake box, has recently become more powerful. In addition to models introduced early this year, two new configurations are now available: VGX-TP1D and VGX-TP1DQ/B.

The former has white enclosure, the latter - black one. VGX-TP1D configuration includes 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo T8100, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive, GeForce 8400M GT graphics card, Wi-Fi card, DVD recorder, HDMI and VGA interfaces. The black VGX-TP1DQ/B differs by 500 GB hard drive capacity and Blu-ray drive.

Both models also feature 4 x USB 2.0, FireWire, TV tuners and card readers and come bundled with remote controls and wireless keyboards.

VGX-TP1D and VGX-TP1DQ/B will debut in Japanese retail this month at about 1400 and 1850 USD respectively.

Source: Akihabara News, Sony

OCZ Announces Core Series SATA2 2.5-inch Solid State Drives

OCZ Technology Group unveiled its OCZ Core Series SATA II 2.5-inch Solid State Drives.

According to the press release, OCZ Core Series offers SSD products at a 50% less price per gigabyte than other high speed offerings currently on the market. In particular, this means that MSRPs at time of launch are 169, 259 and 479 USD for 32GB, 64GB and 128GB models respectively.

The drives feature a durable yet lightweight alloy housing, and because SSDs have no moving parts, the drives are not prone to damage from common mishandling. These drives have 1.5 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF) and come backed by a two year warranty.

As mentioned above, Core series SSD drives are available in capacities of 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB and deliver 120-143 MB/s and 80-93 MB/s read/write speeds and seek times of less than 0.35ms.

Specs:

• Available in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB capacities
• Read 120-143 MB/sec
• Write 80-93 MB/sec
• Slim 2.5" Design
• 100.2 x 70 x 9.5mm
• Lightweight 77g
• Low Power Consumption
• Shock Resistant 1500G
• RAID Support
• MTBF 1.5 million hours
• 2 year warranty
• Part Numbers: Core 32GB - OCZSSD2-1C32G, Core 64GB - OCZSSD2-1C64G, Core 128GB - OCZSSD2-1C128G

Source: OCZ Technology Group

MSI Wind Arrives To Europe In September

MSI follows ASUS in its successful initiatives. An answer to Eee solutions, the Wind series often has rival's issues considered and fixed. A drawback is that MSI releases its products much later than ASUS. But while the lag is about 6 months in case of notebooks, it might be reduced down to a quarter in case of desktops.

ASUS Eee Box was introduced this month, and MSI Wind PC desktops are to arrive to Europe and Asia in September. It's interesting that no USA releases dates have been disclosed so far.

MSI Wind PC will be based on the MS-7314 Micro-ATX motherboard. A single aluminium heatsink will be enough to cool down its Northbridge along with 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU.

Other features of Wind PC include 1-2 GB of DDR2-533, up to 160 GB hard drive, optical drive, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g card. At that, desktop dimensions will be 300 x 260 x 65 mm and energy consumption will make about 35 W.

Wind PC prices are to be within the 200-300 USD range.

Source: TweakTown

Radeon HD 4850 and Intel Nehalem Test Results

A very interesting configuration was tested by colleagues from Tom's Hardware Taiwan. Firstly, the graphics card was Gainward Radeon HD 4850 (actually only the name is interesting here, since the card was made at Palit's fab), secondly, the platform comprised Foxconn Renaissance motherboard based on Intel X58 and Nehalem CPU at 2.93 GHz.

Unfortunately, their test method is very different from ours, so a direct comparison would be justified only for Radeon HD 4850 test results. We tested the latter in 3DMark Vantage with Core 2 Extreme QX9650 at 3 GHz (the detailed review is to be published very soon). Note that the Nehalem-based system lost a little, having scored 7,182 points versus 7,260 points at 1280x1024 without AA and AF.

In other tests Nehalem and Radeon HD 4850 scored:

• PCMark Vantage: 5632
• PCMark 05: 9852
• 3DMark 06 (1280x1024): 12786
• 3DMark 05 (1280x1024): 20300
• Crysis: 1280x1024 w/o AA: CPU TEST1 - 33,7, CPU TEST2 - 18,29

Source: Tom's Hardware Taiwan

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