Lenovo, a company which appears to be inching out from under the thumb of parent IBM, today announced two new desktops christened with the ThinkStation moniker aimed at the enterprise market. On the more "conservative" side, the ThinkStation S10 offers either an Intel Core 2 or Core 2 Extreme processor, an NVIDIA graphics chipset, plus "multiple slots, bays and USB ports." Big brother ThinkStation D10 ups the ante on the CPU-side by adding an Intel Quad Core Xeon processor, which should warm your lab nicely. The systems are aimed at users engaged in "graphically and computationally-intensive" tasks, though the workstations also meet Energy Star 4.0 requirements, and contain more than 50-percent recycled plastics content. The new PCs will be available in January, with the S10 starting at $1,199, and the D10 at $1,739.

[Via Reuters]

It's always a lucky day for the writer who gets to cover a new Alienware release, because you wouldn't be doing your readers justice without building your own fantasy rig on the retail site and seeing just how high you can jack the price up. So today is especially thrilling, because we got to throw together two $12,000+ workstations without breaking a sweat: the Intel Xeon-powered MJ-12 8550i and AMD Opteron-powered MJ-12 8550a. This being Alienware and all, you can load up either machine with two top of the line chips, creating either a 2.8GHz quad-core Opteron 2220 monster or an outlandish 1.86GHz octo-core Xeon 5320 beast. Add to that 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA Quadro FX 5500 graphics (or 2 FX 4500's in SLI on the 8550i), 16GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, up to four HDD's (max storage: 3TB; max coolness: 600GB worth of 15,000 RPM drives), and two dual layer burners -- and well sir, you've got yourself quite a workhorse right there. Unfortunately for the average consumer whose games and apps aren't optimized for multi-core processors, these specs wouldn't really translate to blazing fast performance for day to day tasks -- plus both rigs only ship with XP, which might be a dealbreaker in and of itself. Since not everyone is gonna want to blow twelve grand on their email and web surfing box, (much) cheaper configurations are available, with both the "a" and the "i" starting at $2,550.

We can't help but feel a twinge of melancholy as we ponder Silicon Graphics' announcement today that the company is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. However, the SGI of today is a mere shadow of it former self, with a mixed bag of products that range from overpriced, Linux-based, Intel-powered workstations to overpriced, Linux-based, Intel-powered supercomputers. But it wasn't all that long ago that the SGI Indy was considered the hottest thing on the market, and seemed to herald the future of multimedia computing. Of course, that future was pre-empted first by cheaper Unix and Linux options, and later by Mac OSX and even Windows, which was hardly a factor in the graphics industry back in the early 90s when the Indy debuted. So, best of luck emerging from bankruptcy, SGI. We'd like to see you stick around for a bit just for old time's sake. But if we want one of your boxes, we'll skip the new ones, and hunt down an Indy on eBay.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in.]