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Posts Tagged ‘Intel’

Welcome to this week’s edition of the System Builders guide boys and girls. Today we’re into the mainstream segment where most people are buying and saving up for and this is the sweet spot. At this level you’re getting some bang for your buck and there’s even some overclocking to sweeten the deal. We can also afford to shove in niceties like USB 3.0 ports, SSD drives and monster graphics cards. Unfortunately for this week, a higher exchange rate with the US Dollar does result in a few price upsets. Prices don’t change that much in South Africa on a daily basis, but the new Haswell CPU family definitely is affected by it. As such, recommending Intel’s latest and greatest chips necessitates some compromises on other parts of the system. If you’re buying your rig this week or this month, hit the jump to see what you’d be able to afford.

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Alienware updated their laptop lineup at E3 today and its the first major redesign that the company’s Alienware lineup has ever undergone. It still retains the extraneous use of LEDs for lighting effects and they still look like they weigh a brick, but hey – it’s still the premium gaming brand after all these years. The new family updates itself with Intel’s Haswell processors and Nvidia’s Geforce 700 graphics card family and makes a few changes to the internals as well. Details and pictures from are inside.

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Hello buys and girls, welcome back to the System Builders guide. We have a lot of changes happening in the high-end space, but the low-end product ranges stay the same for the most part. However, I’m swapping up a few things here and there and changing my recommendations. The Dollar-Rand exchange rate changes weekly now and it’s never a sure thing about when’s the best time to buy your system – but I say that the best time is now.

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At Computex 2013, Acer decided to do something extra the day before opening and announced a few new Ultrabooks and one interesting Windows 8.1 tablet. Acer has been getting some good publicity after they bought in Packard Bell to make the low-range laptops and let the company scale up their quality so they could compete with the bigger brand names and it shows – the Aspire S3 and S7 are great Ultrabook choices. Hit the jump for more info.

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Intel’s HD graphics have previously been notoriously bad since they began integrating them on motherboards and in notebooks. Over the years they’ve improved and the first real shot at Intel having “good enough” graphics was reached with the HD3000, which allowed for 1080p decoding and could run browser-based games with little trouble.

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Beyond that, however, was still a slideshow. HD4000 brought that up even more and even made some games playable at 720p. Now, with Haswell, Intel’s going for better performance with the HD4600. Chinese site ITOCP released a preview of Haswell’s performance and it looks like the latest pre-release drivers have solved some performance issues. Hit the jump for more details. 

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The month of May is upon us and in a few short weeks it’s going to be absolutely crazy – Computex, Intel’s Haswell reveal, the PS4, E3 and everything in it and whatever AMD decides to squeeze in to steal the limelight. It will also be the last month of Intel’s Ivy Bridge for desktop processors. This month, it’s pretty much the end of the road for Intel’s mobile Ivy Bridge processors – from June onwards, all the focus will be on Haswell and rightly so – it will change a lot of things. But for now, lets focus on bargains that laptop buyers can look forward to this month!

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It seems McAfee has decided to join the party with software to detect piracy. The company has put forward a patent that links into SiteAdvisor to help block and stop illegal activities such as piracy on tne net. SiteAdvisor is a link scanner in the McAfee anti-virus and anti-malware security suite. McAfee hopes that the software will help curb piracy and bring down unwanted or unintended malware infections by downloading software on sites that are not trusted.

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As we close up the month of April with this guide, we finish off with the high-end systems that people that saved up oodles of money from their piggy bank to spoil themselves. If you’re one of those people, well done – here, you deserve a Noddy badge. For the rest of you not able to buy anything in this episode of the guide today, click through anyway to join the other NAGlings in drooling over beautiful hardware.

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Microsoft SA managing director Mteto Nyati yesterday tweeted that the company will be launching Surface Pro locally in the second half of 2013, which is around June/July. Pricing and availability details aren’t available yet and Microsoft will have a tough challenge eking out a profit where others like Dell and Gigabyte have already begun to steal the limelight, especially since they don’t run on ARM chips but are on Intel’s Atom Z-series and Core i3 mobile chips. Surface Pro is powered by Intel’s Core i5-3317U dual-core at 1.7GHz, uses either 64 or 128GB of storage, peaks out at 4GB of RAm and has been rated by iFixit with a score of 1/10 in terms of repairability. In the US, the 128GB Surface Pro retails for $1050.

Microsoft Surface Pro

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In the future, Intel will be slowly moving away from a socketed processor lineup to a non-socketed one, secured by soldering it down into the motherboard using a ball-grid array (BGA) socket. The upside of this is lower production costs for Intel and the third-party OEMs that have to make the sockets and the socket adapters. The downside, however, is that once the processor is in, getting it out or even replacing it are expensive options. Both Intel and AMD have been using BGA sockets for laptops and low-power desktops for years but that doesn’t seem to have impacted or bothered consumers too much. But is the move to BGA really as bad a future as some people think? A recent review of ASRock’s VisionX HTPC offers us something of an answer.

Asrock VisionX HTPC front

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