Core2quad

Disclaimer: Scott Raymond is married to an Adobe employee who does not work in the Flash group, and to avoid any conflict of interest she did not assist in any way with this article. Also, to provide separate, corroborating tests, Jason Perlow handled his own testing independently. There's been a substantial amount of press about web-based video performance lately, specifically aimed at Adobe Flash - and with good reason. Historically, Flash has been buggy, used a great deal of CPU, and consequently drained battery life as a result. However, Adobe has taken great pains to try to alleviate these issues. We propose to test the three most prevalent web-based video formats, comparing CPU usage and battery life. Jason Perlow and I each picked a movie we owned on DVD over 90 minutes in length; I chose "Big Trouble in Little China" and Jason chose "The Empire Strikes Back". We used AVS Video Coverter; to generate videos of identical output in each of the three formats. The particular … [Read more...] about Web video showdown: Flash vs. QuickTime vs. Windows Media

Canadian PC manufacturer Eurocom has launched what it claims is the world's first quad-core notebook. The D900C Phantom-X Mobile Workstation is billed as a laptop, but it has a build more similar to that of a full-blown workstation, with up to three physical SATA-300 hard drives, giving 750GB of total storage space offering RAID 0/1/5. According to Eurocom, the D900C uses modular VGA technology based on Nvidia GeForce Go7950 GTX GPUs, GeForce Go8700GT or Nvidia Quadro FX1600M. It runs in single or dual SLI  (Scalable Link Interface) video technology mode. The Intel processor at the heart of the quad-core model is the Intel 2.66GHz FSB1066 Core2Quad processor, but it is also available with the dual-core FSB1333 Core 2 Duo. Users can also choose one of two single graphics cards in Nvidia SLI mode for gaming and image quality. It is a sizeable machine, measuring 15.8 inches wide by 11.9 inches deep and 2.05 inches thick, and weighing 12lb. … [Read more...] about Eurocom launches quad-core notebook