The news is official today. The first Thunderbolt-enabled motherboards will be shipping soon, starting with vendors such as Asus, and users can look to hook up external drives much faster than with current USB 3.0 ports.

The first boards from Asus unveiled today include the new top-line model from its Intel Z77-based lineup, the P8Z77-V Premium, as well as a version of the existing P8Z77-V Pro which will come with a Thunderbolt connector included.

Apple’s Mac laptops and desktops have been the first machines to feature Intel’s new technology, which promises to be twice as fast as USB 3.0. Now, PC builders can also hook up a number of drives from the likes of Promise, Elgato and Lacie.  …

In the market for a new laptop? Just hang in there a while longer, as Intel’s newest chip, codenamed “Ivy Bridge” is just starting to roll out in laptops worldwide.

The Ivy Bridge upgrade brings a number of significant improvements, including a 5 to 15 percent increase in CPU performance and a whopping 20 to 50 percent increase in integrated GPU performance.

This means that unless you’re an enthusiastic gamer, the integrated graphics are now powerful enough to handle 3D graphics and many existing games. This in turn translates to better battery life for your laptop.

I’m sure if you wait a while longer, your choices will increase exponentially, but for now, here are three “Ivy Bridge” laptops which caught our attention. …

If you had asked just six months ago if you should buy a solid state drive (SSD) for your PC, I’d have said “only if you are using it for a laptop.”

Besides the pure speed of an SSD, the low power consumption, light weight and durability mean that SSDs are a perfect fit in portable machine. So much of our data is stored on the cloud now, be it e-mail or music, that we don’t need all that space onboard after all. There’s always an external hard disk you can call on if you need storage.

So, what about desktops then? Well, I used to think they can do with a hard disk.

But having used SSDs in all the laptops at home now, I have to say, once you get used to the speed of SSDs, it’s hard to go back to hard disks. And that’s what I did this past weekend – I finally relented and bought a Corsair Force GT for my desktop PC.

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Tired of your MacBook-toting friends boasting about their fast Thunderbolt link that lets them hook up speedy external drives, monitors and a whole host of other stuff?

Well, here’s some good news for DIY desktop builders: Asus will now include the new interface on a number of its motherboards.

Top-end models like the Maximus V Gene will come with a header onboard, called TB_Header, that lets users hook up a connector that enables their custom-built PCs to enjoy the same connectivity.
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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.  …

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. …

You’ve probably seen those Apple ads that proclaim that there are no/few viruses for Macs.

Well, it doesn’t matter that virus writers don’t bother with Macs because they only take up less than 5 per cent of the world’s personal computer market.

But guess what, now that Apple’s iPhone is hyped up to be the best thing that happened, security holes are appearing. According to a report in Computerworld, there are vulnerabilities in the software that can lead to users being “phished”.
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