They’re just machines made of metal and plastic and obsolete before they even hit the retailers’ shelves. But new PCs still have the ability to attract. Just pay a visit to any Jarir Bookstore on a Thursday night. There you’ll see consumers touching the hardware lovingly; caressing the keys and comparing the specs. It’s as if they are seeing something brand new, although the PC has been with us now for nearly three decades. With the computer increasingly becoming a lifestyle accessory, vendors are creating new products designed to appeal to various market segments. So the attraction between man — or woman — and machine grows ever stronger for the target customers.
Consider the new, luminous white mini-tower PCs and matching monitor from eMachines — an Acer brand. The eMachines ET1300-02, ET1810-01 and ET1810-03 desktop PCs all deliver solid performance and expansion capabilities in a fresh, alternative design. Bundled with a matching keyboard and widescreen display with built-in speakers, they’re a fashionable addition to any room in the house.
It’s clear that these PCs are designed with women in mind; women who don’t want an ugly, black computing monstrosity sitting in the living room. Yes, this is technology for consumers on a budget, but as Glenn Jystad, senior manager, eMachines desktop products confided, “Our new mini-towers provide the horsepower and technology needed for today’s applications at a very reasonable price, and are stylish and compact as well.”
With prices ranging from $299.99 to $449.99, the new eMachines PCs are ideal for a wide range of uses and applications. They include AMD or Intel processors and 2GB or 3GB of DDR2 memory, providing solid performance for back-to-school, home office or general home use. Consumers doing photography, video and casual gaming will appreciate the crisp, vibrant images NVIDIA graphics brings to their digital entertainment. With 160GB or 320GB hard drives, there’s plenty of storage for managing movies, music and photo libraries. A conveniently located media hub on the front of the PC makes it easy to connect peripherals and to transfer data from cameras, flash drives and other devices.
Complementing the new PCs is the eMachines E182H wm 18.5-inch widescreen LCD display. Matching the desktops’ white exterior, it delivers audio through built-in speakers. The display offers 720p high definition support, a 10,000:1 contrast ratio and quick 5ms response time. It includes a VGA input and is VESA compatible for multiple mounting options, whether on a desk or on the wall.
The contrast this summer to the latest eMachines’ products, is the Alienware M17x from Dell. This is not your mother’s PC. Hard-core gamers and technology enthusiasts will find much to celebrate in this new PC. The Alienware M17x is being promoted as the “most powerful 17-inch gaming notebook in the universe,” but despite the Middle East’s incredible youth demographic, this gaming delight won’t be sold here.
The Alienware M17x features an anodized aluminum industrial design with color options and personalized laser engraved nameplate. In terms of technology the machine can handle dual 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M graphics processing units (GPUs) with SLI technology. It’s configurable with Intel’s Core 2 Extreme Quad-core overclockable mobile processor. It can be loaded with up to 8GB DDR32 1333MHz memory and up to 1TB3 7200RPM or 512GB of solid-state storage capacity (Raid 0). Display can be purchased as “Beyond HD resolution” with a WUXGA 1200p (1920 x 1200) Edge-to-Edge LCD design. And then there’s the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU, internal wireless a/g/draft-n with MIMO (2x2) technology, an illuminated keyboard and it runs on Microsoft Windows Vista (64 bit). If this sounds like the machine you’ve been dreaming of, check it out further through www.allpowerful.com.
Unfortunately, life can’t be all fun and games. So those of you searching for powerful technology for the workplace might consider the latest offering from HP.
HP has announced the immediate integration of the six-core AMD Opteron 2400 Series processor into the HP Workstation family. Ideal for high-end workstation applications in fields such as engineering, 3-D digital content creation, oil and gas and science, the HP xw9400 Workstation taps the power of the new AMD Opteron processors to deliver higher productivity, especially for multi-threaded applications, multi-tasking and mega-tasking environments.
With the built-in engineering advantages of HP’s highly tuned workstations, the HP xw9400 Workstation can accommodate up to two six-core AMD Opteron processors — for a total of 12 cores — each of which offers up to 34 percent more performance per watt over the previous-generation quad-core processors. AMD HyperTransport 3.0 technology (HT3) increases interconnect rates from 2 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) up to a maximum 4.8 GT/s, allowing the entire system to provide superior performance. Additionally, the HP xw9400 can be configured with the ATI FirePro V7750 3-D workstation graphics accelerator.
All this power doesn’t come at the expense of the environment. The HP xw9400 Workstation is registered as an Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) Gold product, the highest rating available. The HP xw9400 workstation also includes an 80 PLUS power supply, which is substantially more efficient than a standard power supply, reducing both overall energy usage and the amount of waste heat released into the environment.
Companies use HP Workstations to design everything from running shoes to race cars, animated characters to deep-sea submersibles, and to manage everything from billions of dollars of tradable securities to mission-critical IT environments. See if the HP xw9400 Workstation is the productivity tool for your needs at www.hp.com/go/workstations.