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Alienware's M18x: a beautiful beast for the gamer on the go
A sneak peek from the Great White North showed us Alienware's new mobile gaming flagship, but now we've got the real specs and a whole gaggle of pretty pics for you to drool over. It turns out the M18x has a massive 18.4-inch 1920 x 1080 Full HD display, an Intel Core i7 Extreme chip overclocked to a frag-tastic 4GHz, your choice of AMD CrossFireX or NVIDIA SLI graphics, up to 32GB of DDR3 RAM, a 3D-capable HDMI 1.4 port, WirelessHD for the cable-averse crowd, and five macro-programmable keys wrapped in a otherworldly anodized aluminum shell. We're still not sure when you'll be able to get your hands on one, but we do know it can't get here soon enough. Would-be alien abductees can catch a glimpse of their new overlord in the gallery below -- not to worry, no neuralizer's included. [Thanks, Thatoe] %Gallery-121015%
ASUS ARES cries havoc, lets slip the GPUs of war: a review roundup of the world's fastest graphics card
When you name your graphics card after the God of War, you'd better hope it brings some heat, but judging by early reviews, that's just what ASUS has done. The three slot monstrosity above is the ARES, a $1200 limited edition, fully custom board, sporting twin Radeon HD 5870 GPUs, four gigabytes of GDDR5 memory and practically enough raw copper to smelt a sword. We're not joking: the thing weighs nearly five pounds and requires a 750 watt power supply with three power connectors (two 8-pin, one 6-pin) to even run. Of course, you're getting a graphical behemoth for that kind of price, steamrolling every other GPU on the planet -- paired with even a 3.8GHz Core i7-930 CPU in 3DMark Vantage (on Extreme settings), Overclock 3D racked up a fairly ludicrous 15,000 score, and the card ripped past 25,000 with a Core i7-980X and a second ARES in CrossFire. The card was less impressive in actual gameplay, merely spanking the (much cheaper) Radeon 5970 and GeForce GTX 480 by a modest amount, and several reviewers complained it was fairly loud... but as the old adage goes, nobody needs a Ferrari to drive the speed limit, but we'll all drool over them anyhow. Bring on the liquid nitrogen, folks. Read - Legit Reviews Read - Overclock3D Read - Guru3D Read - PC Perspective Read - TechPowerUp Read - Hot Hardware
TweakTown slathers four Radeon HD 5870s in liquid nitrogen, crushes some benchmarks (video)
The PC hardware community recently discovered that quad-SLI was a huge waste of cash, so when we heard that TweakTown were stringing together four Radeon HD 5870s in a similar CrossFireX configuration, we figured they were about to throw away their time, too. Boy, were we wrong, because the hardware site never intended to seriously benchmark the rig as a viable gaming PC -- their intent was to make our jaws drop, and right now they're somewhere around our ankles. The contraption brought 3DMark03 to its knees with a soul-shattering score of 200,000 and achieved average framerates approaching a ludicrous four digits in Devil May Cry 4. How? Liquid nitrogen, of course. By attaching LN2-filled copper pots to each of the four already-powerful graphics cards and physically tacking on extra capacitors to direct the voltage, they bumped the Core i7-980X CPU clock to 5.8GHz and each GPU to 1250MHz, in what we think you'll agree is a healthy jump from 3.06 3.33GHz and 850MHz, respectively. Watch them build the mean machine after the break, and remember kids, don't try this at home. Update: The Core i7-980X runs at 3.33GHz, or 3.6GHz in Turbo Mode, not 3.06GHz. Our bad!
