Laughably short return to regular irregular posting
I once read part of an article before I found out it was about how to blog, what I took away from the part I read was something along the lines of if you're going to blog, set up a posting regime and stick to it, write stories in advance and have something regular your avid readers can attach their cranium to. My motto is therefore contrary to this, and sidles sadly towards apathetic laziness.
I brewed some apple wine last week and left it fermenting, we opened one today after a lengthy period of refrigeration, it is fucking fantastic if I do say so myself, just the right amount of honey! Drinking it excessively is probably what has inspired me to write this. Plus Joana is studying Spanish, which isn't very interactive.
We're going to watch a movie in a bit, so this'll be short and sweet and probably interest nobody in particular as not enough tech people read my tripe. Probably 'The Counterfitters', some Austrian/German piece of work apparently: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0813547/
Anybody have a solid review comparing Centrino 2 to Puma? I just read a review that made it sound like puma is the one and only. Piqued interest here.
As I'm pretty much exclusively hard for tablets, in the portable computing market, I went on to read a review of a HP tx2500, and the numbers stacked up with the prior review. 3D Mark 05 numbers ripped apart the competition. Where they fell away was PC mark 05, Intel ran a muck and nothing was even mentioned. Pish.
The second, the Unified Video Decoder (UVD), is a big deal. UVD allows the computer to offload video decoding from the central processor to the graphics processor. While this isn't a big deal for watching DVDs or most any standard definition fare, watching high-definition content can cause processor usage to shoot straight up or even max out completely, leaving you with stuttering video. The inclusion of UVD allows for Blu-ray to continue trickling down the market as well as improving battery life by reducing processor strain in decoding high-definition video.
The HD 3200 also adds support for two different CrossFire schemes, dubbed Hybrid CrossFire and PowerXpress.
PowerXpress may be the more important of the two. One of the major drawbacks of dedicated graphics in notebooks is increased power draw, but PowerXpress doesn't just mitigate this problem, it basically solves it. When a Puma notebook is paired with a Radeon HD 3000 series dedicated GPU, the notebook can actually seamlessly switch between using the integrated HD 3200 and the dedicated graphics. This means that when you're plugged in, the notebook can run full bore with dedicated graphics, while when unplugged, the dedicated graphics can be shut down entirely and draw no power.
Hybrid CrossFire is the other big sell here. Basically, if the notebook is equipped with a dedicated Mobility Radeon HD 3400 series GPU, the HD 3400 can actually be run in tandem with the integrated HD 3200, generally resulting in about a 50% performance increase. This is a bigger deal than it appears because the 3400 is a pretty small, inexpensive, low-powered GPU to begin with. Try to imagine putting NVIDIA's low end GeForce 8400M GS in a laptop and the motherboard being able to boost the graphics performance by as much as 50%, and you start to see the value of this technology.
That's all well and good Mr. reviewer but I want my numbers!
I brewed some apple wine last week and left it fermenting, we opened one today after a lengthy period of refrigeration, it is fucking fantastic if I do say so myself, just the right amount of honey! Drinking it excessively is probably what has inspired me to write this. Plus Joana is studying Spanish, which isn't very interactive.
We're going to watch a movie in a bit, so this'll be short and sweet and probably interest nobody in particular as not enough tech people read my tripe. Probably 'The Counterfitters', some Austrian/German piece of work apparently: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0813547/
Anybody have a solid review comparing Centrino 2 to Puma? I just read a review that made it sound like puma is the one and only. Piqued interest here.
As I'm pretty much exclusively hard for tablets, in the portable computing market, I went on to read a review of a HP tx2500, and the numbers stacked up with the prior review. 3D Mark 05 numbers ripped apart the competition. Where they fell away was PC mark 05, Intel ran a muck and nothing was even mentioned. Pish.
The second, the Unified Video Decoder (UVD), is a big deal. UVD allows the computer to offload video decoding from the central processor to the graphics processor. While this isn't a big deal for watching DVDs or most any standard definition fare, watching high-definition content can cause processor usage to shoot straight up or even max out completely, leaving you with stuttering video. The inclusion of UVD allows for Blu-ray to continue trickling down the market as well as improving battery life by reducing processor strain in decoding high-definition video.
The HD 3200 also adds support for two different CrossFire schemes, dubbed Hybrid CrossFire and PowerXpress.
PowerXpress may be the more important of the two. One of the major drawbacks of dedicated graphics in notebooks is increased power draw, but PowerXpress doesn't just mitigate this problem, it basically solves it. When a Puma notebook is paired with a Radeon HD 3000 series dedicated GPU, the notebook can actually seamlessly switch between using the integrated HD 3200 and the dedicated graphics. This means that when you're plugged in, the notebook can run full bore with dedicated graphics, while when unplugged, the dedicated graphics can be shut down entirely and draw no power.
Hybrid CrossFire is the other big sell here. Basically, if the notebook is equipped with a dedicated Mobility Radeon HD 3400 series GPU, the HD 3400 can actually be run in tandem with the integrated HD 3200, generally resulting in about a 50% performance increase. This is a bigger deal than it appears because the 3400 is a pretty small, inexpensive, low-powered GPU to begin with. Try to imagine putting NVIDIA's low end GeForce 8400M GS in a laptop and the motherboard being able to boost the graphics performance by as much as 50%, and you start to see the value of this technology.
That's all well and good Mr. reviewer but I want my numbers!