Engadget recently took a look at the Dell Studio XPS 13, the XPS M1330’s glossy brother. It’s slightly improved over the M1330, with an nVidia 9500M GS graphics card, a stylish glossy-plastic-and-leather- lid, edge-to-edge glass on the display, and a matte keyboard. The Studio XPS seems to be not a replacement for, but a compliment to, the M1330. It feels like a more serious and substansial and machine–and it is. But it does have its flaws, including the small, oddly-placed touchpad and its weight–4.9lbs, one pound heavier than the M1330.

Being an M1330 owner, I wouldn’t give it up for one of these if I could exchange it for free. I prefer the M1330’s brushed aluminum palmrests, properly-aligned trackpad, and sexy red matte lid. The M1330 looks (and probably feels) much more slick than the Studio XPS 13, and despite its slightly slower specs, still remains Dell’s superior offering for mobility.

Legit Reviews took two of Intel’s new Nehalem-based Xeon server processors for a test drive today. These processors boast all of the advantages of the i7 series, including new instructions, Intel Turbo Boost, Hyper-Threading, and improved power management.  Two of these bad boys blow the Core i7 965 out of the water.

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What does $65 million buy you these days? How about a company named SiliconPower which is a big force in the SSD market? Western Digital thought it was a good deal. They purchased the company yesterday and they will be rebranding it as WD Solid-State Storage. They will produce drives for “netbook, client and enterprise markets”. Let’s hope WD brings some fast, affordable SSDs into the fray.

Measuring in at just 22mmx22mm, Intel’s shrunken Core 2 Duos are seriously small and seriously low-power, with a TDP of just 10W. They are scheduled to be released on April 19th for $152 per 1000, and about $70 to large notebook manufacturers. This follows their subtle release of low-power Core 2 Quads with 65W TDP. The new chips are to be used in ultra-portable PCs, which fall in between laptops and netbooks in terms of performance and power consumption.

[via X-Bit Labs]

There have been recent rumors that both nVidia and ATI will be launching “new” video cards within the next few days. ATI will release the HD4890, which is an overclocked HD4870, and nVidia will be releasing the GTX275, which is a GTX295 cut in half. Legion Hardware used this consistency to their advantage and predicted the new cards’ performance by, you guessed it, overclocking an HD4870 and cutting a GTX295 in half. With both cards launching at an MSRP of about $250, will nVidia be able to knock out ATI in a price-performance battle? The simulation makes it seem possible, but only time will tell.

[Read Full Review]

Tom’s Hardware managed to get their hands on Intel’s new ‘S’ series of quad-core processors, which appear to be an energy-efficient refresh of the 45nm Yorkfield series. They sport a narrowed TDP of 65W, an improvement on their predecessors’ 95W, meaning they use up about the same amount of energy as Intel’s 45nm dual-core series. Apart from that, they spec exactly the same as Intel’s current 45nm quads, delivering identical performance. Impressive!

[Read Full Review]

This might sound like we’re bragging, but Benchmark Reviews has been testing Solid State Drive products longer than most consumers have known them to exist. On the other hand, performance enthusiasts have been keeping notes on SSD technology for a while now. SSD products are not mainstream, not yet, but that day isn’t very far off anymore. Lower power consumption and heat output are the least impressive benefits of Solid State Drives. The real payoff is in the practically instant response time and high-performance throughput.

OCZ may not have created the Solid State Drive, but they’ve done more to bring SSD technology mainstream than any other company in the industry. Once SSDs could outperform their HDD counterpart, it was all about price and capacity. The OCZ Core Series helped to offer affordable Solid State Drive technology to the masses, but capacity and stuttering became new issues. Adding up to 64MB of Elpida DRAM to the buffer has permanently solved stuttering problems, making raw performance the last bottleneck. An Indilinx ‘Barefoot’ internal controller commands the bank of Samsung K9HCG08U1M DRAM modules, allowing the OCZ Vertex Series SSD to offer an impressive capacity with unmatched performance. Benchmark Reviews tests the reaction time and bandwidth performance for the OCZSSD2-1VTX120G against over two dozen other products in this article.

Since first making a commercial public debut at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, Solid State Drives (SSD’s) have been a topic of hot discussion among performance enthusiasts. These nonvolatile flash memory-based drives feature virtually no access time delay and promise a more reliable storage medium with greater performance while operating at a fraction of the power level. Moving into 2008, SSDs became a consumer reality for many performance-minded power users. Now that 2009 has revealed promising industry support for Solid State Drive technology, we should hope that mainstream acceptance moves faster than DDR3 SDRAM has.

Back in November 2007, after experiencing the SuperComputing Conference SC07, finding Solid State Drives on sale anywhere was a real challenge. One year later, and online stores are offering dozens of SSD models at reasonable prices. Solid State Drives are rapidly changing the computing landscape, and many enthusiasts are using SSD technology in their primary systems to help boost performance. Benchmark Reviews has tested nearly all of the products available to the retail market in this sector, and several do well while others fall flat. It used to be that performance was the largest hurdle for mass storage NAND Solid State Drives, followed by stability, and later price.

Solid State Drive products are no longer restricted to bleeding edge hardware enthusiasts or wealthy elitists. Heading into 2009, SSD storage devices were available online for nearly $2 per gigabyte of storage capacity while the most popular performance desktop hard drive hovered just above $1/GB. While most consumers are waiting for that day when SSD costs the same as HDD, they seem to be forgetting how Solid State Drives have already surpassed Hard Disk performance in every other regard. Our collection of SSD reviews is a good starting point for comparing the competition.

According to a Q1 2008 report by the semiconductor market research firm iSuppli, the SSD market will grow at an annualized average of 124 percent during the four-year period from 2008 until 2012. iSuppli now projects SSD sales to increase by an additional 35 percent in 2009 over what it projected last year, 51 percent more in 2010, and 89 percent more in 2011, and continue to show dramatic increases in subsequent years.