MSI have announced that its laptop ranges will be modernised with the latest Intel Core i5 and i7 chips and Windows 7 improving them by a minimum of 30%.

The Classic ranges will come in 3 models of CR420, CR620 and CR720 and will have LED screens starting from 14” to a massive 17.3”. These will be the general all round laptop you need for everyday work and web use and will pack the i5 chips within. No details on release for these or prices yet.

The Gaming range will come in 2 models. The GX640 and GX740 will contain the more powerful i7 chipsets and will also come bundled with ATi Mobility Radeon HD graphics chips supporting DirectX 11 gaming and will really make good use of the HD screens.  Release is looking at March 2010 and prices will start at £999

The gaming lappies will also benefit from what is called “Turbo Boost Technology” which will efficiently distribute system power and resources with Intel Hyper-Threading Technology. They’re also packing Smart Cache and Graphics Media Accelerator HD to improve multimedia operation. The top end GX740 will also have 5 speakers for surround sound gaming but also a 7.1 optical out.

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MSI updating its Classic and Gaming Series Laptops

Recently Alienware were telling us that they were planning some new rigs for us to drool over but were keeping tight lipped on the details. However those lovely father figures at Dell let slip some details on the first of those that we’ll look at that. The Alienware M15x Laptop is the epitomy of a max power gaming laptop. As with all Alienware kit (who doesn’t love building ridiculously good PC’s that we could only buy with monopoly money) its a bit pricey. The barebones laptop starts at £1,199 but this can skyrocket with added features. Read on for more

Specs :

• Intel Core i7 processor
• up to 8GB of RAM
• Blu-Ray Drive
• 15” HD 1920×1080 Screen
• 9-cell battery

Then there’s the desktops. Two new ones dubbed the Area-51 and Area 51 ALX. These will need a premiership footballers wage to buy as we know but come on this is what you need to spend to future proof your PC and squeeze those top end frame rates. Housed in the usual fancy Alienware cases these liquid cooled monsters will have plenty of options for you to change. We’ll list a few of those now.

• Core i7 chip
• ATI or NVIDIA GPU options
• up to 12GB of RAM
• six hard drive bays
• twin Blu-Ray drives
• CPU overclocked to 3.86GHz(ALX)
• dual GeForce GTX 295(ALX)

Alienware Area-51 starts at £1,699 and the Area-51 ALX a massive £2,899

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New Alienware Laptop and 2 Desktops

Nvidia have announced that they’re updating they’re mobile series of graphics cards with five DirectX 10.1-capable chips(G210M, GT 230M, GT 240M, GTS 250M, GTS 260M) just in time for Windows 7 release, but disappointingly after the MacBook upgrade, which will contain the older series of GPU. Smaller(40Nm),  less demanding on power consumption, improved performance and more importantly to NVIDIA, cheaper to make.

Check the images for how they compare to the other cards.

Source : Gizmodo, Ubergizmo

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NVIDIA updating its mobile GPUs

NVIDIA 3D Vision is a clever little gadget that will bring 3D tech to your PC without having to buy a dedicated screen.

It is now on sale in the UK from a variety of retailers and works by lashing up a pair of wireless 3D specs to an infrared transmitter and use some software that displays two different pictures simultaneously, so there’s no flicker.

You should then get depth perception in PC games which should be handy for shooters.

You will need a PC running Vista and compatible graphics card and you will also need a monitor or TV that can run at 120Hz and higher.

Nvidia GeForce 3D Vision plus a 120Hz Samsung SyncMaster LCD should now be available for around £400

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NVIDIA 3D Vision goes on sale

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has finally been released to thousands of eager fans.

More than 2,000 people waited outside an Oxford Street store on central London to get an advanced copy of the second expansion pack for WOW.

The Wrath of the Lich King includes a bonus continent for high-level players, a plenty of new enemies, extra equipment, spells, and new professions.

The expansion will give players access to a new character, a Death Knight.

The Knight is a plate-wearing tank/DPS hybrid and will be available for players around level 55+. It is meant for end-game use only.

World of Warcraft has is currently the most popular online game (and most likely to stay that way for a while yet!) and has more than 11m registered players.

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World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich Kind Released

Well Spore has finally arrived after so many delays and seems to be receiving some mixed responses, though on average they do seem to be positive.

It looks like it could be a love it or hate it sort of game. A lot of gamers are criticising it for being repetitive and shallow. This appears to stem from the fact that the game covers 5 gaming genres over 5 stages. This has led to each section being implemented in a somewhat shallow manor compared to its fully fledged counterparts. However fans are praising it saying it is not a hardcore RTS but a great sandbox game appealing to the masses. Also the game should be viewed a whole rather as 5 individual games.

I have had chance to play it for an hour or so and I personally quite like it. I have found that I hardly game any more as I don’t have time and I just can not be bothered concentrating enough for complex RTS games or games where I actually need to follow the story line. With Spore I can load it up eat a few creature and evolve a little in whatever spare time I can find and just generally kill time.

Unfortunately I do have a serious issue with Spore which I think could massively effect its popularity. EA in their great wisdom have decided to use a modified version of the oh so popular and controversial SecuROM DRM software which will require authentication upon installation and when online access is used, it will also be limited to three installations. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all up for a company having some DRM on their software, after all they have spent millions developing it and I can imagine it is quite annoying when everyone copies it, however limiting the number of installations to 3 is criminal in my opinion. I personally re-install windows at least once a year because all the crap I have on it slows it down, my Girlfriend has a smaller brother and sister and they must of re-installed the Sims 20+ times because the computer can barely last a month before some of the crap they download slows it down.

Once 3 installations have been used the game will become un-playable and EA must be contacted to have the count reset. Now call me a pessimist but this sounds like it will cause no end of headaches. From my experience customer support centres have a tendency to be occupied by people no more intelligent than chimps. I will also bet any money that the customer support phone number will not be free-phone.

So OK what did EA expect to achieve with this copy protection? I am assuming they are trying to stop millions of people downloading the game via BitTorrent. Have they succeeded? Erm no, I read reports of it being available on Wednesday 2 days before the UK release. This included a keygen and crack. So well done EA you did a good job of stopping that.

Personally I think they best method of stopping piracy is to offer more than just single player offline gaming. I realise this is not always possible for games, but if online gaming is available and requires an original copy then I feel that most people are happy to fork out the money. The best example is Call of Duty 4. I think I paid about £30 for it and I have had hours of fun with it, easily making it worth its money.

Anyway even though I think EA are stupid for using this DRM I still bought it and I will still enjoy it!

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Spore – Good game, shame about the crappy copy protection

Scan’s Great White, as shown to the left, has won the coveted Custom PC Dream PC 2008 award, beating competition from HP and Armari. Armari’s machine technically wasn’t fully entered, as the magazine chose not to fully review it since the submitted computer was a prototype not available for mass production.

Custom PC has had a Dream PC competition dating back to 2004. Previous winners include SavRow in 2004 (for a water-cooled machine featuring a single core Athlon64 and GeForce 6800 Ultra, a spec that cost several thousand pounds at the time and would be outgunned by a £500 laptop today), Armari in 2005 and Vadim in 2006. Scan’s back-to-back wins in 2007 and 2008 make the firm the first supplier to win twice.

Scan’s beast is based around the following spec:

• Silverstone TJ07 super tower case, finished with extensive chrome plating and laser-etched Great White logo. Various sections of the case are lit with white LEDs to give it a slightly more upmarket feel.
• nVidia 790i SLI motherboard
• 1kW Corsair PSU
• 3 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1
• Extensive, custom-manufactured water cooling equipment from Aqua Computer and Alphacool
• Core 2 Quad Q9650 – overclocked to 4.4GHz from its stock 3GHz speed
• 2x2Gb Corsair Dominator DDR3
• 3 XTX GTX 280 graphics cards with 1Gb of GDDR3 RAM each, GPU clocked at 670MHz and RAM at 2500MHz
• 64Gb OCZ SSD – 2.5″ device with 143MB/sec read and 93MB/sec write
• Panasonic slot-loading DVD writer
• Panasonic slot-loading Blu Ray writer as well
• X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty sound card
• KillerNIC M1 network interface card with 400Mhz processor
• Vista Ultimate 64bit
• 24″ Zalman 3D monitor

How does it perform? In a word, fast. Custom PC unfortunately don’t provide extensive benchmark results but they claim to have seen it perform their standard video encoding benchmark to within a couple of points of an overclocked Skulltrail rig.

Price? That’s the tricky part. If you want the best, you can’t compromise – and that means paying Scan a total of £11,162.49 inc VAT. Reckon you could build better for less? What would you change? Leave your comments and let us know.

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Scan Retains "Dream PC" Award

NVIDIA have finally enabled PhysX support via a free GeForce Power Pack download that contains a free full copy of Warmonger, three PhysX-enabled Unreal Tournament 3 maps, demos of Metal Knight Zero and the Nurien UT3-based social networking service, and a couple tech demos.

As you may know Nvidia bought Ageia and the PhysX engine in February 2008 effectively rendering the PhysX add-in card redundant. PhysX is currently the only available solution for physics hardware acceleration.

Download the GeForce Power Pack

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NVIDIA enables PhysX and CUDA support for GeForce 8+ Cards