Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Lenovo IdeaPad U350
The Lenovo IdeaPad U350 is a 13.3" thin and light notebook based on the Intel CULV platform. It offers Intel processors ranging from the single-core SU2700 to the dual-core SU7300 with up to 4GB of DDR3 memory and your choice of 4-cell or 8-cell batteries for extended battery life. In this review of the Lenovo IdeaPad U350 we take a look at how well it performs in a wide range of tasks, including time away from the power outlet, to see if this is indeed the perfect travel companion.Our Lenovo IdeaPad U350 Specifications:
* Windows Vista Home Premium with SP2 (Now available with Windows 7 64-bit)
* Intel Pentium SU2700 CULV (1.3GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB cache)
* 4GB DDR3 SDRAM (1066MHz)
* 320GB 5400 rpm SATA HDD
* 13.3-inch diagonal WXGA (glossy, 1366x768)
* Intel X4500M integrated graphics
* Intel 5100AGN, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
* Ports and connectors: (2) USB 2.0 ports, VGA, HDMI, 2-in-1 SD-Card reader, RJ-45/Ethernet (Gigabit), stereo headphone/line out, stereo microphone in, 1.3 megapixel webcam
* Dimensions: (LxWxH) 12.9" x 9.0" x 0.7-1.0"
* Weight: 3lb 10.3oz (not including weight of AC adapter).
* 4-cell 41Wh battery
* One-year standard warranty
* MSRP: $749
Build and Design
The Lenovo IdeaPad series has always featured unique designs compared to other Lenovo notebooks, and the U350 is likewise a unique-looking laptop. For starters, the U350 features a cross-weave texture imprinted on the top of the screen cover where most notebooks are only covered with glossy paint. This gives the user a completely different tactile experience: you can feel the difference in texture the moment you touch this laptop. I think it looks kind of cool and unique, but not everyone will agree with that. Inside the U350 youll find a plastic palmrest painted with a brushed metalic finish to simulate the look of metal. This is one design element I dont agree with, since it gives the illusion of better construction than what plastic provides.
Build quality is still very good thanks to a solid chassis and durable components throughout. The plastic exterior feels strong with very little flex even under moderate pressure. The textured plastic lid not only looks nice, but hides day-to-day abuse by making scratches blend in with the imprinted pattern. It also does a very good job at hiding smudges and fingerprints compared to laptops with glossy plastic exteriors. Inside, the palmrest and keyboard feel solid under the weight of your hands and arms. The chassis doesnt twist or flex when you hold the notebook by the edge of the palmrest. In short, the laptop feels like it should stay in one piece over its lifetime.
People who like to tinker with computers or add aftermarket features will really enjoy the way Lenovo built the IdeaPad U350. A single panel on the bottom of the notebook gives you access to the hard drive, system memory, WiFi card, and an open WWAN slot. While Lenovo doesnt currently offer a WWAN option on the U350 series, the notebook comes prewired with capped off antenna leads in case you want to install your own 3G card. There is a slot for a SIM card underneath the battery for those consumers needing GSM-based WWAN options. We couldnt find any explicit "warranty void if removed" stickers inside the notebook, but there were some Lenovo-branded stickers covering the edges of the RAM, Wi-Fi card screws, and heatsink screws which may be used to indicate tampering.
Screen and Speakers
The 13.3" screen is average, providing decent color and contrast but suffering from noticeably shallow viewing angles. Low-quality TN display panels are normal since most of the thin-and-light notebooks costing very little, but some displays are better than others. For standard activities like browsing the web or typing documents you dont really notice the color shift, but when viewing pictures or watching a dark movie the color shift is very noticeable and distracting. Vertical viewing angles are good until about 10 degrees forward or back when colors start to shift considerably. Horizontal viewing angles are a little better as colors remain true except at very steep angles. The screen backlight level is rated at 200nit by Lenovo, and in our testing it works very well under bright office lights. The screen isnt quite powerful enough to overpower the reflections off the glossy screen outdoors under direct sunlight.
The speakers are fine for listening to streaming radio or the occasional TV show. That said, headphones are a much better option to really enjoy music and movies from this notebook thanks to the weak bass and midrange from the built-in speakers. Another alternative is using the HDMI-out to pass digital audio to a home stereo.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The full-size keyboard is great for typing and the 13" form-factor is the perfect compromise between size and user comfort. Too much smaller and the palmrest wont actually support your wrists. Any larger and the notebook becomes too large to be travel friendly. Key action is smooth and quiet with a very mild click emitted when you fully press a key. Key wiggle is minimal and each key top is solidly attached to the scissor mechanism below. We didnt notice any keyboard flex unless we pressed down very forcefully on the keys. In short, the keyboard on the U350 easily ranks as one of the nicest ones weve used on a thin-and-light notebook.
The IdeaPad U350 offers a spacious Synaptics touchpad that is one of the better models weve seen in this form-factor of notebook. The surface texture is mildly rough and gives good traction without making it difficult to slide your finger across when moist. Speed and accuracy are great and we barely noticed any lag in our tests. Refresh rate of the touchpad surface is very good and prevents any "stutter" like what weve recently seen on a few Synaptics touchpads. The acceleration on each axis is adequately matched and helps guarantee that cursor movement on the screen matches your finger movement on the touchpad. The touchpad buttons were excellent thanks to a soft, springy action with a very long throw. The only complaint I have regarding the buttons is you need to make a full press all the way down as far as the buttons will go, otherwise you dont fully engage the button.
Ports and Features
Port selection is very good with three USB ports, VGA and HDMI-out, gigabit LAN, audio in/out, and an SDHC card slot. The SDHC-slot is spring loaded, but doesnt allow the card to sit flush in the slot. When you fully insert a standard SDHC card into the slot it still sticks out partially. Dont expect to see a built-in optical drive in this notebook, so if you plan on reinstalling the OS or ripping DVDs, pick up an external USB optical drive. Multimedia keys are limited to a mute button and a direct access button to the Lenovo recovery software suite.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Review Averatec AV2575
Our review unit of the Averatec AV2575 has the following configuration:
- AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-64 (2.2GHz)
- Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
- 2GB DDR2-667 dual-channel RAM (2 x 1GB)
- 250GB 5400RPM Hard Drive
- 12.1" WXGA (1280x800) Glossy
- ATI RS690T Integrated Graphics
- Super Multi DVD Burner
- Atheros AR5007EG 802.11b/g
- Built-in 1.3 megapixel webcam and microphone
- Ports: 3 USB, Kensington Lock Slot, LAN, Headphone/Mic, VGA, SD Card Reader, ExpressCard/54, 10/100 LAN
- Size: 12.88 x 9 x 1.0/1.53"
- Weight:
- Notebook 4lbs 0.8oz
- AC Adapter 13.5oz
- 65w AC Adapter
- 4-Cell Battery (14.4v, 2500mAh)
- Warranty: 1 Year standard, 6 months on battery
- Price: $1,099.99
Pros
- Clean basic design
- Durable, rigid chassis
- Low noise and heat
- Great keyboard
Cons
- Sluggish gaming performance
- Glossy finish scuffs easily
Sunday, June 2, 2013
HP Pavilion DM1 4175NR Laptop
The HP Pavilion dm1-4175NR Laptop comes with AMD Fusion E-450 dual-core processor, and 4GB DDR3 SDRAM enhance multitasking performance, an AMD A50M FCH chipset and pre-installed with the 64-bit versions of Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium for operating system, and 500GB SATA hard drive disk, and also equipped AMD Radeon HD 6320 Discrete-Class graphics up to 1973MB total graphics memory, also with HP TrueVision HD Webcam with integrated digital microphone offer good quality face to face video chats with your friends, and equipped Windows Media Player, Windows DVD Maker, HP Marketplace powered by Amazon, Cyberlink YouCam DE, HP MovieStore powered by Rovi, Blio eReader application, HP Games, Free 60-day Norton Internet Security 2012 Subscription, Lojack for Laptops, Windows Live Essentials 2011, Adobe Reader X, Adobe Flash Reader, Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Office Starter 2010. Via : HP Pavilion DM1-4175NR Laptop. To Buy a New laptop
Thursday, May 30, 2013
AMD OpenCl APP SDK 2 5 update
AMD OpenCl APP SDK 2.5 update
With this latest release we have added key performance enhancements for APUs that free applications from the CPU-to-GPU bandwidth limitation imposed by the PCIe bus, achieving effective data transfer rates as high as 15GB/s. See the other post “CPU-to-GPU data transfers exceed 15GB/s using APU zero copy path” for additional details.
On Windows platforms the run-time now includes broad multi-GPU support. Included in this is OpenCL support for APU plus discrete GPU providing compute performance scaling across the GPUs, and including support for PowerExpress.
The Khronos FP64 extension is enabled for the “Cypress”, double precision capable, family of GPUs, and is planned to be enabled for all double precision capable GPUs as we go forward.
Further details on new features in this release are:
- Kernel launch times have been further reduced.
- The LLVM compiler version used for OpenCL kernels has been upgraded.
- Includes support for use of SSE3 and SSE4.
- Added support for partial use of FMA4 and XOP instructions.
- It is no longer necessary to use the -fno-alias compiler command line option.
- PCIe transfer overhead has been reduced under Linux.
- Transfers between CPUs and GPUs are improved for buffers declared with either the CL_MEM_USE_HOST_PTR or the CL_MEM_ALLOC_HOST_PTR flag.
- For APUs, zero copy buffers created as CL_MEM_ALLOC_HOST_PTR | CL_MEM_READ_ONLY offer improved GPU read performance.
- The runtime supports multi-GPU, including simultaneous use of the GPU on both and APU and a discrete GPU on systems running under Windows.
- OpenCL built-in functions leverage AVX on capable CPUs
- Support for PowerExpress 4.0.
- Support for atomic counters for discrete GPUs.
- Support for headless GPU operation.
- OpenCL can be used by a Windows service.
- UVD3 / MPEG-2 support.
- The clFFT library supports radix 3 and radix 5, including support for mixed radix 2/3/5.
- The BLAS library supports the D/S SYRK, D/S SYR2K, D/S GEMV, D/S SYMV functions.
- The Khronos FP64 extension is supported for the ATI Radeon™ HD 5900 and 5800 series, as well as the AMD FirePro™ V8800 and V8700 series.
- gDEBugger 6.0 extension is available for Visual Studio.
- Starting with Catalyst 11.8, improved runtime features appear regularly in the monthly Catalyst releases for Windows.
- Kernel Analyzer 1.9 supports Catalyst releases 11.4 to 11.7.
- APP Profiler provides
- Improved API trace.
- Improved timeline visualization
- Support for analyzing OpenCL Application trace.
- Thread ID and sequence number now are included in the profile output.
Overview of OpenCL AMD APP
OpenCLWhat is AMD APP Technology?
What is the AMD APP Software Development Kit?
The AMD APP Software Development Kit (SDK) is a complete development platform created by AMD to allow you to quickly and easily develop applications accelerated by AMD APP technology. The SDK allows you to develop your applications in a high-level language, OpenCL™ (Open Computing Language).
What is OpenCL™?
OpenCL™ is the first truly open and royalty-free programming standard for general-purpose computations on heterogeneous systems. OpenCL™ allows programmers to preserve their expensive source code investment and easily target both multi-core CPUs and the latest GPUs, such as those from AMD.
Developed in an open standards committee with representatives from major industry vendors, OpenCL™ gives users what they have been demanding: a cross-vendor, non-proprietary solution for accelerating their applications on their CPU and GPU cores.
More information and download can be obtained at http://goo.gl/7lf7S
Monday, May 27, 2013
MSI Megabook S262
The motherboard schematic for MSI Megabook S262 laptop/notebook, MS-1057 Motherboard.
CPU: Yonah 478
North Bridge: INTEL 945GM
South Bridge: INTEL ICH7-M
Document Number: MS-1057
PCB: P30-1057110-D05
P30-1057110-T53
Attachment :
Megabook M660
[536.70Kb]
CPU: Yonah 478
North Bridge: INTEL 945GM
South Bridge: INTEL ICH7-M
Document Number: MS-1057
PCB: P30-1057110-D05
P30-1057110-T53
Attachment :
Megabook M660
[536.70Kb]
Friday, May 24, 2013
Asus U36S Ultra Thin Laptop Specification
Asus U36S. The U36S will launced in Europe starting next month. The U36S which powered by a 13.3-inch 1366 x 768 LED-backlit display, a 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-2620m processor, a GeForce GT 520M 1GB graphics card, a 4GB DDR3 RAM, a 160GB SSD, a 0.3MP webcam, WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, a USB 3.0. an HDMI port, an 8-cell battery and runs on Windows 7 Professional 64-bit OS. The details related to the specs of the device are discussed below.
Specifications Asus U36S Ultra-Thin Laptops :
*Processor : Powered by a 2nd-gen Intel Core processor
*Display : 13.3-inch glossy display with resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels with aspect ratio 16:9
*Hard Drive : Up to 750GB
*Operating System : Windows 7
*connectivity : Wi-Fi, and Gigabit Ethernet LAN
*Memory : Dual-channel DDR3
*Data transfer : USB 3.0 port
*Multi-gesture touchpad, and a Chiclet keyboard
*Multi-card reader, and fingerprint reader
*HDMI output
*Battery : a 4-cell/8-cell
*Measuring : 19mm thick and
*weight : 1.9kg
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