If you’re a fan of Dell’s Alienware range of “bling-in-on” gaming desktops, you’d be happy to hear that the PCs now come with Intel’s top-end Core i7-3960X or Core i7 3930K six-core CPUs in Singapore.

On the new Alienware Aurora R4 desktop, the LGA2011-based CPUs are water-cooled, and factory-overclocked to between 3.9GHz and 4.1GHz as well, which seem alright, unless you’re the type who regularly pour liquid nitrogen into your PC for extreme speed. 

Among other goodies, the geeked out chassis packs in a motherboard with the enthusiast X79 chipset and up to 32GB of quad-channel DDR3 RAM.

Of course, we know graphics are the main thing for games such as Battlefield 3, so this Alienware lets you add on some of the most powerful options. Think of an Nvidia GTX 590 card, or two of AMD’s 6950s in tandem, pumping out the high-res eye candy on screen.

What we’d like, of course, is an option for a single AMD 6990 or two AMD 6970s in there as well. But for that, you’d have to build your own rig, instead of ordering Dell’s 20kg behemoth, because Dell Singapore doesn’t offer them as an option when we checked.

And prices? The basic S$3,499 version comes with an overclocked Core i7-3930K CPU, 4GB RAM (you’ll want more, really!), 1TB hard drive and an AMD 6870 graphics card.

We know you can get more horsepower for that price if you build your own geeked out rig from components at Sim Lim Square, but hey, not every gamer’s a builder these days.

Plus, you won’t get the bling, which comes in one of six impossible-to-miss colours. Or the trademark ALX chassis with an alien head at the front and “breathable vents” that open up.

What we really want is this particular model with the mirror finish (below), but somehow Dell’s website doesn’t have an option on this. We’ll check back and update this once we find out from Dell.

Gamers and road warriors have some new toys to look forward to this November. Samsung has released their new Series 7 Gamer and Chronos notebooks into Singapore – just in time for the tons of new games coming this Christmas.

The Gamer is loaded with sick specs, beginning with an Intel i7 quad core chip with 8GB of RAM, up to 16GB.  More interestingly, it comes with one of the most powerful graphic cards on the market – the AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5 with DirectX 11 support.

As if that was not enough, Samsung also has added an extra 8GB to the notebook through its ExpressCache system, which effectively acts as an extra 8GB of flash memory on the motherboard, allowing for faster caching that translates into faster startup and application launch speeds.

The on-board 1.5TB storage space offers lots of room for plenty of games, which is exactly what the Gamer is primed to do. Even the keyboard, with its U-shaped key caps and backlit controls, is primed for gaming.

Users can toggle between different performance modes. The Gaming mode boosts CPU performance to its limit, while the Balanced mode is what you’d likely run for everyday applications. There is also the Library mode, which keeps the laptop running quiet, and the Green mode which aims to use as little power as possible to keep the battery running longer.

With a 17.3” SuperBright HD 3D display, gameplay graphics on the go will not be visually lacking. Other essential laptop paraphernalia, such as a Blu-ray drive, 2.0 megapixel webcam, Bluetooth 3.0 and stereo speakers are included in this 3.8kg gaming machine.

For those interested in a desktop replacement that can game, the Gamer is retailing for S$2,899.

And as for those who want a mobile, portable laptop that doesn’t skimp on speed and power, the Chronos is a worth checking out.

Coming in 14- and 15.6-inch versions, the Chronos offers either an Intel Core i5 (for the 14”) or an Core i7 (for the 15.6”) chip packed in a tiny form factor that weighs only 1.95kg and 2.3kg respectively. The aluminium chassis is a boon to those who require durability on the go, and its weight and thin form make it a great laptop to grab and go.

Samsung claims a battery life of up to 8 hours on a single charge. Coupled with their Fast Start technology that enables a 2-second restart time and a 19-second boot up time with Fast Boot, the Chronos is a pretty speedy device.

Graphics are also not compromised despite its size factor, with a dedicated AMD RadeonTM HD6750M graphics card taking advantage of Samsung’s HD screen that features a SuperBright 300 nit brightness, 16 million colors and an anti-reflective screen.

Available in mid November, the Chronos will retail for S$1,688 (14”) and S$1,988 (15.6”). Hit the pictures below for full spec tables.

Let’s start by getting the price of this state-of-the-art laptop out of way, because S$3,999 is certainly not everyone’s idea of how much a good laptop should cost.

No, not even with the full works – a Core i7 chip, 8GB RAM, a 256GB solid state drive – encased in an incredibly thin and light frame weighing just 1.165kg, plus a separate desktop dock that contains a Blu-ray drive and a handy AMD 6650M graphics card.

Considering how laptops are costing less by the day, I’m not sure how many of the new Vaio Z – which costs twice as much as many albeit lower-powered rivals – will get sold here in Singapore.

But what makes this Sony machine so impressive is that it might just herald a new generation of devices. While the previous Vaio Z was a well-built, fast machine for the business user, the new incarnation is a whole new class of device altogether, in that it is both a PC on the go and on the desk.

I’m surprised no one has thought of doing this before, really. Many users these days try to bridge the best of both worlds that a laptop and desktop offers us by hooking up a large-screen monitor, keyboard and external drive to our laptops once we reach our desks. But almost always – other than with humongous gaming notebooks – graphics on laptops really suck.

Answering that need, the Vaio Z comes with an external graphics card that you can easily plug in and boost the graphics performance on your machine. Once you plug in the Power Media Dock, the faster AMD 6650M graphics automatically switches from the onboard Intel HD Graphics 3000 chip that offers power-efficient usage on the go.

It’s also nice to know that this dock comes with a Blu-ray drive, and an array of ports including a couple of USB 2.0 ports and a USB 3.0 port as well as a Gigabit Ethernet port, an HDMI connector and an analogue VGA link. Instead of those ugly docks of old, this actually adds more than the boring stuff – it brings desktop performance to your laptop.

From my tests, hooking up is mighty easy. The only thing that Sony warns you not to do is to unplug the dock when you are running a graphics intensive program, which may suffer as a result of going back to the low-end graphics on the laptop itself.

Essentially, what you need is a monitor and keyboard and you’ll have two machines in one – an attractive proposition for the business user.

The main unit itself, of course, is nothing short of impressive as well. Never mind that this is a machine with a powerful Core i7-2620M chip, 8GB of RAM and a zippy 256GB solid state drive to rival what you get on the fastest desktops. This svelte machine also comes with a display that will make other laptops green with envy.

On the 13.1-inch screen, Sony has packed in an enormous amount of pixels – and detail – in the 1,920 x 1,080 resolution. If that number looks familiar, it’s because the same amount of detail is packed into TV screens as big as 55 or 60 inches.

What this means on the Vaio Z is that text is sharper than almost any rival and pictures are displayed with pinpoint clarity. You also see the “full picture” in terms of the amount of data to be displayed, since the screen is capable of showing entire windows without needing your to zoom out and scroll.

The downside, of course, is that text can be small to read. This can be rectified by simply switching up the zoom – once – for your icons and text. But in my two weeks using the Vaio Z, I never had an issue with the higher resolution. My eyes loved the greater detail on display.

I’m also impressed by the portability of the Vaio Z. I teach part-time at the National University of Singapore and anyone who walks up the hill regularly from the carpark to the Arts Canteen (called The Deck now) will tell you it is quite a steep climb, especially with a laptop on your back.

Those two weeks I walked up the hill with the Vaio Z, I didn’t need to bring my usual Crumpler laptop bag – I simply walked up with the laptop in my hand, tucked along with some files. The climb was a breeze, compared to when I carried my 2.5kg  HP Envy 14 with me.

The other thing about the Vaio Z is its speed. The SSD under the hood is one real monster. Sony says the machine will boot up in 15 seconds or less. I can say safely it’s often less than 10 seconds. I almost never powered off the machine in the two weeks I used it because it took mere seconds – under five, to be sure – to resume from hibernation after I had closed the lid each time.

The battery life on the standard power pack is also surprisingly good. I did not manage to do the usual drain tests, but from my everyday usage, this is what I found out: I could use it for a couple of hours in class while jotting down notes, then put it to sleep for a week (apart from opening it up occasionally to surf the Web at home) then still use it for another couple of hours the next week, before it finally gave up.

Beyond the power-packed performance, there are many nice touches on the Vaio Z that make it a no-holds barred premium laptop.

What impressed me: the lightweight but sturdy case reminiscent of older Vaio Zs, the textured touchpad giving you a better “feel” when moving your cursor around the Windows 7 desktop and the wide array of ports on the slim chassis. These include USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, an HDMI link and yes, regular LAN and VGA ports. Take that, proprietary Apple connectors!

One really interesting feature I should single out is the way the laptop hinge pivots to give you an elevated keyboard when you open up the clamsell. The hinge actually pushes the main chassis up at an angle instead of just staying put on the table like on most laptops. Speaking of the keyboard, the keys are short-travel, or shallow, chiclet keys, which I’m not a fan of, but fortunately, they seem quite easy to type on, compared to, say, Apple’s keyboards.

What can Sony improve? Obviously, the Vaio Z should have a bigger trackpad. The current one is mighty small, even given that this is a small laptop. Though it is very sensitive, it still doesn’t feel as accurate as what you find on Apple’s Macbooks, which are the industry’s best.

But that little gripe would not be a deal breaker, of course. For most users, the biggest obstacle is that sky-high S$3,999 price. At a time when corporations are careful with costs, it must be a challenge to convince the bean counters in any company to okay the purchase of a Vaio Z, never mind a fleet of them for a department.

The task is made even harder when even a fully-spec’d 13-inch MacBook Air with a 256GB SSD will likely cost less than S$2,500. Sure, this may not be an apple-to-apple comparison, but think of how you can spend the rest of the S$1,500 saved from buying a Vaio Z on a desktop or a really fancy monitor if you want.

Then there are the so-called ultra-books from other PC makers. These MacBook Air rivals, like the Lenovo U300, will cost around the price of the Apple favourite and offer almost the same power as the main Vaio Z unit. Okay, they won’t have an external media dock and may not always be built as solidly, but to many users, they make the Vaio Z look like something from the old era of really expensive corporate laptops.

What then do you make of the Vaio Z? It probably won’t sell as well as many of its cheaper rivals, but I suspect folks who want one handy machine for both on the go and desktop uses will buy into this class of all-in-one devices.

Should you buy it? I’d say no if you are looking for comparative performance versus price, in other words, value. But if you are after the best all-in-one portable and desktop machine out there, there’s nothing like it now.

Every once in a while, an iconic device comes along and redefines the space that others compete in. The MacBook Air, for example, offers great value in an era where cloud computing lets you take the computing off your mobile device and focus on things like small-capacity but speedy SSDs to fire up apps in a jiffy.

As for the Vaio Z, it could well be the first of a new breed of devices that will make you think twice about buying a desktop in future. It’s an all-in-one machine that gives you the best of both desktop and mobile worlds. The current iteration is too expensive, but I’m looking forward to cheaper versions of the Vaio Z concept.

Following in the footsteps of rivals Apple and HP, the Japanese PC maker unveiled on Thursday a lineup of Lifebook laptops refreshed with Intel’s Sandybridge CPU and chipset, along with a new gaming notebook boasting a generous 17.3-inch screen.

But while the souped-up hardware promises to be less power-hungry and run faster at the same time, notebook fans will be disappointed that Fujitsu has kept to the shiny and somewhat unattractive design for its top-end SH761 laptop.

Since the phasing out of the older, better S series, which featured all the bells and whistles like a near-borderless screen (and which I am using to type this article), Fujitsu’s premium models have, in my opinion, not managed to liven up things with new features or retain the good stuff that made the old S series so good.

Sure, the new model, the S$3,488 SH761 shipping in April 2011, is no slouch. Within that light 1.6kg frame is a speedy Core i7 2620M CPU, 4GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GT 520M graphics chip and a 640GB hard disk.

More importantly, on this 13.3-inch model, is a battery that packs no less than 6,200mAH of juice, and promises 5 hours of usage when run at the most taxing, maximum performance mode (under the Bapco MobileMark benchmark test). There’s also a screen that promises a “SuperFine” 1,366 x 768 pixels.

Yet, there is something missing here. The Fujitsu design looks a little dated these days when chiclet keyboards and large touchpads are the rage among new laptops like the Apple MacBook Pro, one of this Fujitsu laptop’s main rivals.

Even Lenovo Thinkpad laptops, which feature a decades-old and hardy design loved by corporate travellers, now come with chiclet keyboards. Fujitsu’s latest S (or SH) series is less than three years old and should have incorporated the newer designs favoured by users who now compare every new laptop with the MacBook series.

I’m afraid I’m not upgrading to the new Lifebooks from my existing S-series Lifebook, which I recently souped up with a solid state drive, and is running fast as lightning despite almost three years into the game.

Among the other Fujitsu releases today, what’s perhaps more interesting is the S$2,988 Lifebook NH751, which signals the company’s foray into gaming notebooks.

With a quad-core i7-2630QM CPU, 8GB of RAM, an Nvidia Gefore GT525M graphics chip and a 640GB hard disk under the hood, it should give gamers a powerful alternative to gaming notebooks such as Toshiba’s flashy Qosmio. Also, like its Toshiba counterpart, the Fujitsu machine is not really a laptop, as in you probably won’t like 3.7kg sitting on your lap for long.

Take Nouveau for example. The open source project started in 2006 with the aim of building high quality drivers for Nvidia graphics cards. Although Nvidia provided a Linux driver several years ago, it was a basic driver with no 3D support. The Nouveau project gained momentum and a year later, its driver soon outperformed Nvidia’s in 2D performance.

While some Linux drivers can be as good as proprietary ones from hardware vendors, others only allow basic functionality with sometimes abysmal performance. My interest in Linux was rekindled recently when I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my three-year-old Macbook. The basic hardware like the keyboard and graphics worked right out of the box after the installation, with the exception of the iSight webcam which only worked after I installed a software that reverse engineered the right driver out of Apple’s proprietary iSight driver.

Driven by commercial interest through a stranglehold over the unique features of its hardware, it is not in Apple’s interest or any hardware vendor to release open source drivers. A recent feature in Linux Magazine on the Nouveau project pointed out that Nvidia “still gains far too much advantage by keeping their driver closed. They get support for brand new models, extra performance, better power management, extra features like VDPAU, and certain technology components can remain a company secret”.

Meanwhile, Linux users have to continue tinkering with their boxes to make things work, but with the support of the community through hundreds of thousands of forums and interest groups on almost every Linux distro, there’s bound to be a workaround out there. But hey, it’s also what makes computing fun isn’t it?

It’s that time of the year again.

I’m talking about when Digital Life rolls out the Dream PC – one of the favourite stories I get to do each year as a techie. This PC is the fastest, meanest and well, “best-est” machine that we put together using the top-end components that every geek would want to own.

Last year, we had an Asus Rampage II Extreme X58-based mobo with an Intel Core i7-965 and Corsair’s Dominator DDR3 memory modules in a monster rig. This year, though the leap has not been as big as from Core 2 to Core i7 or DDR2 to DDR3, we have some awesome graphics power packed in. And we have a biggie in terms of a new case to stuff all those goodies in.

Without giving too much away, here are some pictures of the components, as they were awaiting the big build. Look out for next Wednesday’s Digital Life, which is bundled free with The Straits Times, for a no-holds-barred, state-of-the-art PC that you can build with the best of today’s components.

Sweaty crowds, loudspeakers and lelong prices. What else would you expect from the latest quarterly IT bazaar happening at Suntec City from today to Sunday, right?

Crowds at the ongoing PC Show seem thinner than the previous IT Show in March, perhaps due to the fears over the H1N1 swine flu, or maybe the bleak economy is finally getting to some folks. Sony, noticeably, did not turn up with a bang as before – there were no Level 2 booths you’ve come to see at Suntec City.

Still, there are bargains to be had. And here are my own few Goondu recommendations.

1. LG 32-inch HD-ready TV (S$499)
With 37- and 40-inchers going for as low as $899, the smaller screens are obviously free-falling in price. One deal I saw at the LG booth was an HD-ready 32-incher with a built-in terrestial DTV tuner going for a mere S$499.

Just a few shows ago, 32-inchers went for S$799 and they were not even HD-ready. At this price, this LG TV is great for a second TV in the bedroom, or for your console games.

2. Toshiba 42AV550E HD-ready TV (S$1,099)
By the time you head down to the show, this might be going for even cheaper, perhaps due to the competition in the halls. But still, a 42-inch HD-ready TV for about S$1,000 is a not a shabby deal. I saw this at AudioHouse, which have a few other Toshiba TVs on offer too.

3. Linksys Wireless N WRT610N router bundle (S$308 with USB stick)
I’ve been a D-Link fan for a while, but finally switched back to Linksys today. Yes, I bought the WRT610N router, which offers simultaneous 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, which is great for me as I am getting swamped by these nasty SingTel 2Wire routers blasting their 2.4GHz signals into my apartment.

Considering that the D-Link DIR855 is still too expensive (S$299), I thought about buying a cheaper WRT320N (S$169), which could do only 5GHz or 2.4GHz at one time, which is fine because I wanted to keep my old D-Link DGL-4300 router as a 2.4GHz router and run the WRT320N as a 5GHz-only access point.

But in the end, I was seduced by the considerably cheap offer from Linksys – a S$308 bundle for the more powerful simultaneous dual-band WRT610N + a WUSB600N USB stick. I’m going fully 5GHz now for my laptop and my wife’s laptop. The PDA goes on 3.5G!

4. Dell Studio XPS 435 (about S$1,999, depending on config)
Silly Dell did not bring any Alienware gaming notebooks on show, despite launching the much-vaulted brand in Singapore recently. However, it did bring the nice Studio XPS desktops, which were huge full-tower PCs with a nice reflective finish at the front. Chio!

5. XFX ATI HD4870x2 graphics card (S$539)
The guy at the XFX booth said that there’s only one of these king-of-the-hill graphics cards going for a whopping S$200+ off the regular Sim Lim Square price (about S$750 – S$800). By the time you read this, it might even be gone. If you are looking at a great deal for a top-end gaming card, quickly head 0n down.

6. MSI X340 laptop (S$1,188 to S$1,388)
Forget about the Apple Macbook Air. The cheap and good laptop that you can bring everywhere comes from MSI, the lesser-known Taiwanese motherboard maker. This svelte, ultra-thin notebook (at just 6mm at its thinnest) with a 13-inch screen is really something to fall in love with.

There are two models – a S$1,388 one with Intel’s SU3500 low-power CPU, and a cheaper S$1,188 one with a slower Intel Atom Z530 CPU. Both look great in black or white. If the cheap S$588 MSI Wind netbook (the cheapest netbook around, I think) doesn’t seduce you, then the X340 notebook should do the job of parting money from your wallet.

More pix here from the show… have fun shopping and tell us what you bought!

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Just when you thought you have seen the last tacky CPU cooler or graphics card, along comes Asus with a zany range of graphics cards that bear a cooler shaped like… a Formula One car.

Its new Formula series graphics cards, featuring ATI’s HD4890 and HD4770 graphics chips, will come with a cooler that is not just shaped like a Formula One car, but actually claims the benefits of aerodynamics.

This, says the Taiwanese electronics maker, offers 7 per cent better airflow for superior cooling. On the cooler is what it calls a Micro Surface Treatment Technology that is said to improve heat dissipation by up to 14 per cent.

Not just that, the airflow mechanism is claimed to be dust-proof, thus extending the Formula graphic cards’ lifespan by 25 per cent over cards with traditional cooling. And among the other figures trotted out: 33 per cent better heat dissipation and 30 per cent quieter operations.

We leave it to you to tell us if Asus lives up to its claim. The heat pipes at the side do look good at dissipating heat, though we are not sure if there’s a need for aerodynamic qualities… your graphics card isn’t moving any where fast in your PC, is it?

Fortunately, the perennial challenger and alternative CPU maker is doing much better on the graphics front, with its speedy ATI Radeon 4870×2 chips still being king of the hill. And, for once, AMD is not sitting on its pants as the competitor (this time, Nvidia) closes in.

Just a week after Nvidia’s latest GeForce 280 series drivers were released, AMD posted its brand new Catalyst 9.1 drivers. This was out in the United States on Jan 29.

How do they perform? Some hardware sites are reporting that there’re some improvements in the popular Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead first-person shooters. Others are a bit disappointed with the lack of even more speed to be squeezed out of the hardware.

Either way, you can download Catalyst 9.1 here and try it out yourself.

We seem to have forgotten that printers were once the thing to buy at these shows. Visiting the HP booth brought to my attention this nice little gem of a colour laser printer.

The Color LaserJet CP1515n costs a nice S$479 and comes with networking and 96MB of RAM for faster printing. Compared to a slightly cheaper S$379 LaserJet CP1215, this one seems a better deal with all the added features for a SOHO. Oh, and there’s free delivery for these colour lasers (they’re damn heavy, after all).

Another find is the XFX graphics cards, which make their appearance at every quarterly bazaar. This time round, the good deal is in the S$699 GTX280, Nvidia’s top-end card now.

The price may just seem so-so, until you find that the box comes with the Far Cry 2 game (S$61.90 the last I checked at Sim Lim) instead of some crappy old title. The slightly slower GTX 260 with 216 cores, at just over S$500 also looks attractive. Fix two of these together and you get one speedy SLI rig!

There are the usual memory card discounts, of course. This time, the cheapest stuff is going for a throwaway price of S$6 for a 2GB micro SD for your phone. Amazing.

But unlike what some media are saying, not everything is cheaper at Sitex, of course. D-Link’s much-sought after dual-bay NAS enclosure, the DNS-323, was going for S$209 – S$10 more than at the last show.  You might as well get it at S$209 at Funan and avoid the jam at Sitex.

What’s missing from D-Link is also its long, long-awaited simultaneous 2.4GHz and 5GHz dual-band Wireless N routers, which have been selling in the US for months

Hello, don’t tell me you’re going finish selling all your existing Wireless N products before bringing the new ones in (last time I checked, D-Link said these new Wireless N routers would ship here in November, and we are already in the last week of November).

Without a doubt, D-Link is leaving Linksys to cream off this top-end market, with its S$259 WRT610N, which offers dual-band Wireless N. I can’t wait to get one of these to get my Wireless N laptop on a separate 5GHz from the wireless signals spilling over from my neighbours. C’mon, D-Link, don’t make your users switch to Linksys.