ITC sales a part of the ITC Group has been awarded for the second year on the run a ” Top UK Growth ” Company award in the UK. This has been aceived by offering outstanding service & value in the IT sector and there long running partnership with Dell & HP. They have also been listed in the Whos Who Top 1% of UK companies in 2008 and 2009.

It’s now March which means Nvidia’s first, brand spanking new Fermi GPU will be launched later this month with the GTX470 and GTX480. Nvidia have revealed some benchmark tests on its new GPU’s against ATI’s great card the HD5870 and although you might be expecting a great increase in ability in Nvidia’s new graphics behemoth, the older Radeon certainly puts up a good fight.

The benchmark shown was on a demo, guesses are devised by Nvidia and not the usual gaming benchmarks most review sites do. Now across the board the new Fermi GPU performs only marginally better but what it does excel at is hardware tessellation(“In the subject of computer graphics, tessellation techniques are often used to manage datasets of polygons and divide them into suitable structures for rendering” – I looked that up on Wikipedia) although when all said and done until future graphic development actually makes use of hardware accelerated tessellation, the extra oomph the Fermi gives is probably a bit wasted.

Basically you can read this two ways, as it stands the new Fermi GPUs won’t be that much better than the current top ATI card but in the future may develop into the better GPU.

Looking for a business laptop, then Dell has the Vostro series, recently with the V13 and now with the 3000 series.

Now with the power of Nehalem (that’s Intel’s new Core i5=3, i5 and i7 CPUs) The Vostro comes in a 4 varieties, the 3300, 3400, 3500 and the 3700 aswell as 3 colours : Red, Silver and Bronze.  The screen sizes start at 13” (Dell has said their 13” 3300 is the thinnest 13” commercial laptop with an optical drive) and go up to 17” with the 3500 and 3700 having the options of HD WLED screens. Powering them you have the option of Intel integrated graphics, Nvidia GeForce 310M GPU or on the 3700 a 1GB GT330M

They also pack the usual varying size HDD, RAM configurations, Optical Drives etc and 802.11b/g/n wireless networking. There is also a 9 cell battery option to extend battery life. Currently available today on the Dell US site prices start for the 3300 at $669 and $679 for the 3700.

Ever had that problem with your new laptop whereby you constantly have to switch between using your power draining GPU or not? If you have then you’ll know how frustrating it can be having to switch your GPU on or off depending on what you’re doing on your laptop to conserve on energy. You have to change power management settings, may have to restart your machine or simply wait an age for your GPU to fire up. Even then you might find that battery life is still a problem even when you’re not using your GPU, not ideal when you might be actually working instead of gaming.

Well NVIDIA have come up with a solution which can see this process done almost instantly between using its GPU or not using it but what makes it special is that when it’s switched off, it draws no power from your battery. Also before the switch had to be done manually, now NVIDIA has programmed power management profiles so your computer just knows when to switch the GPU on and will even recognise when your web browser might require a HD plugin.

What this means is an obvious beneficial increase in battery life to even the most power hungry gaming laptop.

Dell’s Precision M6500 laptops are a bout to get an upgrade to Intel’s new chipset, USB 3.0 and a handful of other goodies making it the first of Dell’s lappies to get the new USB port.

The model is already available with the new Quad-Core i7 CPU(the “Value Package” as it’s known) but has a rather high price tag($2750) so by giving the option of the dual-core i5 it gives customers with a little less cash in the pocket more options to get a very good laptop at a lower price.

Other options supposedly listed for the M6500 include a 3.2MP webcam and the option of a 64GB SSD mini card. Put these in with the current options of 17” RGB LED Display,1GB ATi FirePro M7740 graphics, standard 160GB HDD and up to 2GB DDR3 RAM, you’re getting some serious bang for your buck or pound!

The M6500 currently retails at the “Value” price of $2750 an “Advanced Package” starting at $2869 and the “Covet” starting at a whopping $4219 you can see why Dell need to drop the price and we’re still waiting to see by how much the i5 CPU’s will drop it to.

Usually business-orientated laptops tend not to please in the aesthetics department but one of Dell’s latest laptops to hit the market will be appealing to the eye as well as built for rigours of today’s modern business user.

A few days ago Dell unveiled its new Latitude 13, similar in style to last years Vostro 13 but obviously improves on that model. “the world’s thinnest 13” commercial laptop” says Dell and will measure a mere 0.65” thick.

No real hard evidence of what powers it though but expect in the ranges of 1.2GHz Celeron, a 1.3GHz Core 2 Duo or 1.4GHz Core 2 Solo and probably with a X4500MHD integrated GPU to power the 13.3” screen. What we do know is it will sport eSATA, USB, SD and Expresscard slots and the usual Ethernet connectivity. Keep your eyes peeled on Dell’s website for more information in the next few weeks. We believe prices will start at around $500 for the US (£330 in the UK but as we usually pay more for this kind of thing around £400)

Quad core has been the front of CPU’s for a while now so it seems only logical that the next step was on the horizon. According to Digitimes friends in Taiwan have said that the CPU manufacturing giants will be releasing them later this year.

Intel’s Gulftown chipset should be with us first around the end of March.  It will be based on the Nehalem chip and will carry the name of “Core i7-980x”. No price figures yet but rumours say it’s going to be in the 4 digit range.

AMD always have their version to battle it. Their six core “Thuban” chips will be known as the Phenom II 1075T, 1055T and the 1035T. We’ll be looking at May for these to appear on shelves.

Now remember these are rumours!!

We touched on this before when it was in secret development stage but if you missed that Eyefinity is the name of a development from AMD which allows up to 6 monitors to be run off just one 5000 series ATI Radeon graphics card.

Shown at the current CES convention, Eyefinity allows three supported monitors to run off one card. There’s also Eyefinity6 which then can double the output to six monitors.

The demonstration at CES was shown on six Samsung MD230, ultra-thin bezel monitors pumping out a resolution of 2560 x 1600 each,  which you’re looking at £2000 worth of monitor as well as the price of the card if you need to buy one.

The Eyefinity6 supported cards arent available yet, but won’t be too far off and as our picture shows you cant get enough screen for your games.

Dell in the US has just announced a new mass-market desktop PC to add to its XPS range. Like most it can be changed to suit your needs with prices starting at $649(will have to wait and see for exact UK pricing)

Specs : -

• Intel Core i5 or i7 processor
• Choose from ATI 4350 or Radeon HD 5770, a GeForce GT 220, GTS 240 or GTX 260 graphics card
• up to 16GB RAM
• up to 3TB hard drive
• 19-in-1 card reader
• optional DVD writer or Blu-ray drive
• THX TruStudio Sound
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

You can also add a Samsung 2233R22 monitor and an NVIDIA 3D Vision Kit for when the 3D revolution takes over.

• MSI Big Bang-FUZION Lucid Hydra turns out to be a massive failure. Shame http://bit.ly/7cvPGW #

Powered by Twitter Tools