Though not a particularly popular brand in the US, Gigabyte has earned some loyal fans (one of them being our very own Chippy!) thanks to their ability to make quality computing products. Now Gigabyte has entered the Ultrabook segment with the U2442 “extreme Ultrabook”, as they’re calling it. There are two variants of the U2442: the U2442N and U2442V (which is the one that we’ve got); the only differences is the processor (Core i5 vs. i7). There’s also talk of a non-Ultrabook version which is likely to be referred to as the U2440 — be sure not to mix them up! Does Gigabyte’s first entry into the Ultrabook realm stand up to their prior products? Step inside to our full U2442V review to find out.
Our pals at Dynamism sent us over the new Gigabyte U2442 Ultrabook with discrete graphics to have a look at. Gigabyte is also launching non-Ultrabook versions of the U2442, but the U2442V which we’ve got is the high-end Ultrabook model. Pretty much every spec is what you might ask for from an ideal Ultrabook. I’ve been using the U2442V for a few days now and have some initial thoughts to share about this performance powerhouse.
Acer America has just announced two new Ultrabooks as part of a new ‘Timeline Ultra’ series. On offer is a 14″ and 15.6″ display, the latter of which has a full numpad on the keyboard. The bezels appear to be nice and thin but the resolution leaves much to be desired. Discrete graphics from Nvidia are included as well as optical drives. Both come in at rather affordable prices, but we’re unsure that the inclusion of the optical drive is such a great idea.
Another huge day for the Ultrabook world as Computex gets started on day one! Most of the big surprises like the Asus TaiChi and Transformer Book were outed on Day 0, but there was still a flood of exciting news today. We worked hard to bring you detailed coverage here at Ultrabook News and now we’ve got a handy round-up of all the Computex Day 1 news; come on in and check it out!
If you’ve got an Ultrabook, it likely has either integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics or discrete Nvidia GeForce graphics. Recently we gave you 6 excellent game suggestions for your Ultrabook. Now we’ve got a suggestion to make sure your Ultrabook is running those games as well as possible. One of the best ways to keep the graphical capabilities of your Ultrabook performing at maximum capacity is to ensure that you’re using the latest driver for your graphics card. Intel and Nvidia regularly update their GPU drivers to address bugs and other problems. Sometimes there are game-specific fixes, and other times there are general performance-enhancing changes. In this article I’ll show you how to quickly and easily update your Ultrabook’s GPU drivers in order to maintain maximum graphics performance. Note that this guide will also apply to Intel HD4000 graphics when Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks are released later this year.
I don’t believe any of the Gen-1 Ultrabooks should be taken off the market to be replaced with Ivy Bridge models but there’s a risk that they will be if manufacturers adopt a two-prong approach with low and high-end Ivy Bridge devices. News just in via The Verge says that new Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks, the UX32A and UX32Vd, will start at $800. Does that leave any space for price drops on the UX21 and UX31?
While old stock may go for cheaper prices in Q3 we think it’s unlikely that the UX21 and UX31 will continue on the production line.
There are several reasons why iOS devices have always managed to beat Android devices in the touch-responsiveness department. For one, the way that the on-screen elements are rendered is different between the two operating systems. Then there’s the fact that each Android device may use different touch-controllers from one device to the next. Nvidia is taking a stab at upping the touch-responsiveness of Tegra 3-equipped devices by offloading some of the touch input responsibilities directly onto Tegra 3. They call this ‘DirectTouch’.
Nvidia demonstrates that the Xoom with Nvidia Tegra 2 can handle around 110 touch samples/second with one finger. As each finger is added, the number of samples/second drops. With Tegra 3 and DirectTouch, samples/second nearly double to around 200 for one finger. As more fingers are added, it seems that DirectTouch intelligently scales to keep the samples/second around 200, even with 10 individual inputs!
What an increased number of samples/second really means is more accuracy. Increasing the samples/second by 2x as we see here means that the hardware and software are able to record where the input is happening twice as often. At slow speeds, such as scrolling a webpage, this isn’t all that important. However, as the speed of the input increases, the samples/second become more important to maintain accuracy, which is why Nvidia says that this will be particularly useful for gaming.
LG has announced, and will be showing off at MWC (starting tomorrow), the Optimus 4X HD. This is LG’s first quad-core phone and uses the Nvidia Tegra 3 platform. It’s likely that we’ll see a number of Tegra 3 smartphones announced and shown at MWC this year. Tegra 3 has actually been on the market for a few months in the form of the Asus Transformer Prime, but we’ve yet to see it available in phone-form.
I’m happy to report that the Optimus 4X HD comes pre-installed with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich which will help really make use of the 1.5GHz quad-core CPU which is equipped with 1GB of RAM. There is 16GB of in-built memory, and the screen is a monster 4.7″ 1280x720p IPS display which, if anything like the LG Spectrum’s screen, is sure to please in terms of colors and sharpness. There’s an 8MP camera on the back and a 1.3MP camera in the front. Additionally, the phone is equipped with 4G LTE; LG will have to be really careful with this phone to ensure that it has reasonable battery life. The battery capacity is 2150mAh.
Chippy is on the show floor at MWC starting tomorrow, stay tuned for more!
