Category Archives: Hardware

New toy, Gigabyte Ultrabook u2442n..

Gosh I like my latest acquisition – Gigabyte’s U2442N ultrabook! This laptop has very powerful i5-3120M processor, 8 gigs of RAM, 128 SSD (+one vacant 2,5″ spot for another), discrete NVidia 640M GPU, 14″ display with resolution of 1600×900 pixels and all this weights only 1,56 kg. It is like MacBook on steroids while weighting only about 200 grams more. Gigabyte has done pretty good job with keyboard (backlit btw) and connectivity. U2442n has full sized RJ-45 port, 2 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.0, HDMI and SD card reader.

Only thing that bothers me is CPU & GPU fans. It sounds like they are always on.. Gladly I read that Gigabyte is working on BIOS update to fix fan issues, so soon my only complain will be gone, I hope.

Ultra compact PC..

Odroid has released a new set of Ultra compact ARM based boards. Smaller Odroid-U2 is only 48x52mm in size (less than credit card), its big brother being 90x94mm. Both devices have quad core ARM processor (Samsung Enyxos 4412), with 2 gigs of RAM, MALI-400 quad core GPU, 10/100 Mbps LAN, USB 2.0 ports, HDMI port and MicroSD/eMMC sockets.

These computers are able to run Android or Linux based OS (E.g. Ubuntu) and there is already few videos in the Youtube where you can see these tiny computers in action.

See more information from the manufacturer’s site: ODROID – product catalog

And check the great videos from: ODROID videos on Youtube

AMD Bulldozer

NDA on AMD’s new FX CPU series “Bulldozer” was lifted yesterday and a lot of reviews are now available in the Internet. It looks like the new CPU architecture has its potential but it was released unfinished. Single threaded execution is lagging behind AMD’s old CPU architecture and the sheer size of the chip looks like a bad deal for AMD. Bigger chips are more expensive to manufacture and therefore AMD will have hard time to compete with Intel in pricing. Power consumption seems to be on a par with Intel i7 and i5 when in idle but jumps as high as 230W while Intel processors stay around 132W. This means more heat and more noise which is always a bad thing.

I was hoping fresh competition from AMD with their new architecture but it looks like they got a miss. Hopefully issues will be fixed and AMD’s new flagship shall shine. There is always hope..