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• CES 2007: Lacie announces $1150 Blu-ray burner

  Pre CES 2007 coverage - Las Vegas (NV) - Lacie will be hitting the Consumer Electronics Show with a bunch of new products. Perhaps most significantly an external Blu-ray writer, Firewire speakers as well as a biometric access hard drive. Get a glimpse of what Lacie will be showing. There is no question that Blu-ray has not yet lived up to the hype its supporters generated at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show one year ago. We expect the format to come out in force this year once again and try to reinvigorate the enthusiasm for the technology. Lacie is first to announce a new Blu-ray product, which the company claims will be the first external Windows/Mac Blu-ray burner available on a worldwide basis. Lacie d2 Blu-ray drive The d2 Blu-ray drive comes with dual USB/Firewire interfaces and supports 25 GB as well as 50 GB BD-Rs/Res and the preceding rewritable DVD and CD formats. There is not much change in terms of pricing from last year, which means that you will pay quite a bit for such devices. Lacie will charge $1150 for this external burner, but at least that will include a 50 GB BD-R disc and Roxio burning software. It is unclear at this time, if the device will include Blu-ray playback software, just in case you have a HD capable graphics system consisting of a HDCP-equipped graphics card and monitor. Lacie also announced a stylish pair of speakers, which connect to a Firewire port. As of now, we aren't sure what advantage that will bring to users besides occupying a port that isn't too common on the average PC anyway, but we'll find out when we will talk to Lacie representatives at CES. For now, the company promises that the designer speaker set will offer excellent sound fidelity for $80. Lacie Firewire speakers The company also announced the d2 Safe Hard Drive, which uses fingerprint recognition to protect data from unauthorized access. Up to ten fingerprints can be recognized by the drive, which sells for $300 in a 500 GB version. The same amount of money will also buy a new 500 GB Backup hard drive ("Quadra") which enables users, much like in similar solution offered for example by Maxtor, to launch back ups by touching a button. On the higher-end side, Lacie will be displaying network storage solutions with capacities of up to 1 TB for $500 and RAID 5 network storage solutions.

• We’re glad that someone at AMD let us know about the 740G chipset; else it likely would have slipped under the radar. Not that we would have been missing something new—740G is really one part 690G and one part SB700, yielding a mixed platform centering on old technology, but still able to serve up a respectable list of features. The bright side is that 740G-based motherboards are priced anywhere from $55 to $65 dollars. The 740G Northbridge AMD’s 740G connects to a Socket AM2 interface by means of its HyperTransport 1.0 interface. If you were planning on building a budget box using an Athlon X2 anyway, the step back from HyperTransport 3.0 won’t affect performance at all. But if you instead use a Phenom X3 or X4, the chipset will force those CPUs to run at a 1 GHz interface speed. Naturally, because memory support is determined by the processor you choose (and its integrated memory controller), the 740G shouldn’t affect you there. However, it is worth noting that the integrated graphics core—unaided by onboard side-port memory—relies on memory bandwidth performance for gaming. If you drop in an Athlon X2, as we have for our most value-oriented configuration, you’ll top out at 800 MHz DDR2 memory. Swap in a Phenom X4 9850 for comparison and you’ll have the bandwidth of 1066 MHz modules at your disposal instead. Can the graphics core even do anything with that extra memory throughput? After all, the 740G is derived from AMD’s 690G, which takes its design cues from the old ATI Radeon X700. It includes four pixel pipelines that satisfy Microsoft’s DirectX 9 SM 2.0b specification—a far cry from the Shader Model 4.0 parts we’ve spent so much time playing with lately. The core runs at 400 MHz, and the BIOS included with our Gigabyte MA74GM-S2 allows manual overclocking of the GPU, though the 80nm part isn’t likely to be as flexible as the 55nm 780G. A pair of independent display outputs (VGA and DVI in the case of our sample) sets the stage for as many as four monitor outputs if you add an inexpensive discrete board. Remember, this is older technology. So while AMD does include its Avivo video processing engine, it isn’t the Avivo HD block introduced with AMD’s DirectX 10 parts. You do get scaling support, decode acceleration for MPEG-2, and 3:2 pulldown detection. Not part of the package is acceleration of Blu-ray content—a handicap that you’ll see manifest itself in our benchmarks. The SB700 Southbridge All there is to know about AMD’s SB700 southbridge is already known. And it’s hardly exciting after the announcement of SB750 alongside the 790GX platform. Nevertheless SB700 is at least a step up from the SB600 component that accompanied 690G. With SB700, you get six SATA 3 Gb/s ports with RAID 0, 1, and 10 support (RAID 5 surfaced with SB750). The I/O controller also enables 14 USB ports, 12 of which are of the USB 2.0 variety. And of course, the southbridge has the same troubles with AHCI as AMD’s other storage components. We tried to get Vista installed with AHCI enabled, just to be sure, and the setup hung before completing. The Platform More important than the chipset itself is the platform we’re building with it. Truly a product of penny-pinching in the name of science, we actually put together quite the collection of go-fast hardware. 740G Platform Motherboard Gigabyte MA74GM-S2 Processor AMD Athlon X2 4850e @ 2.5 GHz Memory 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) Corsair Dominator DDR2-1066 5-5-5 Graphics Radeon 2100 Integrated Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB SATA 3 Gb/s Total cost for the platform, sans optical drive (grab a dual-layer DVD burner for $35) and chassis (InWin’s BK623 with a 300W power supply runs $60) is about $360. With those other components, you’re looking at a $450 machine. Spend an extra $50 on graphics, and the platform becomes even more capable. The benefits of this setup are clearly upfront cost- and energy-related. Though the CPU runs at 2.5 GHz and sports two cores (each with 512 KB of L2), it’s a 45 W part sitting on a microATX motherboard with integrated graphics. In fact, you could probably shave $75 off the price by stepping back to 2GB of DDR2-800 (we used Corsair’s Dominator modules for the sake of drawing an even comparison to the other benchmarked configurations).

• The Area-51 m17x can be conveniently configured at home using Alienware’s informative configurator. Some of the components on our sample, such as the GeForce 9800M GT graphics cards, aren’t yet available through the site. But you can expect them to be a standard option soon. Processor Though the Core 2 Extreme X9000 isn’t the fastest mobile processor in Intel’s arsenal of Penryn-based CPUs, it’s right up there, just underneath the 3.06 GHz X9100 and newer quad-core QX9300. The X9000 operates at 2.8 GHz on an 800 MHz front side bus. Each of the chip’s two cores has its own 32 KB instruction and data cache, and a shared 6 MB L2 repository mimics the Wolfdale desktop design. The 44W Core 2 Extreme drops into Intel’s mobile Socket P interface; this is a true mobile platform, despite its large size and meaty graphics subsystem. The CPU supports dynamic front side bus throttling, Enhanced SpeedStep Technology, and of course, the C6 Deep Power Down state. In any other notebook, those features might actually be appreciated. Of course, this is a gaming platform first and foremost, and as we’ll see from the battery run time measurements, power consumption probably won’t be your first concern with a desktop replacement machine like this one. Rather, performance is the most important factor here. Memory Alienware employs an ASUS-designed board based on Intel’s PM965 chipset to drive its m17x. Despite the Centrino 2 launch in July, the platform is still not quite ubiquitous as you’ll see from some of our other gaming systems. As such, memory support is limited to DDR2-667. The Area-51 m17x sample we received included two 2 GB modules of Quimonda’s DDR2-667 memory—all of which was visible to the copy of Vista Home Premium that Alienware sent with the notebook (likely due to manually forcing PAE mode and theoretically incurring a small performance hit). However, in the interest of normalizing our test subjects, we reinstalled Vista Ultimate, took the ding in capacity to get slightly faster memory addressing, and continued with benchmarking. Graphics Being the big dog in town has its advantages. In this case, Alienware’s muscle means that it’s one of the first vendors to get its hands on Nvidia’s GeForce 9800M GT mobile graphics cards—and the Area-51 m17x has two of them connected through a fragile little SLI ribbon cable. Now, here’s the interesting part. Although the 9800M GT might sound bigger and badder than last-generation’s 8800-series, both are actually based on the same G92M core manufactured at 65 nm. In fact, the 9800M GT and 8800M GTX in Killer Notebooks’ Odachi are both revision A2 parts with 330 square millimeter die and 754 million transistors. Not that there’s anything wrong with the 9800M. Just bear in mind that it centers on similar technology before you let Nvidia’s poor choice in naming convention fool you into thinking you’re getting something better. On the flip side, the 9800M GT is still a very capable part, armed with 96 shader processing units and 16 render back-ends. No less than 512 MB of GDDR3 memory on a 256-bit bus enables a tad more than 51 GB/s. Each of the m17x’s two GPUs is clocked at 500 MHz with 1,250 MHz shaders. The GDDR3 memory runs at 799 MHz, per TechPowerUp’s GPU-Z. Of course, keep in mind that the PM965 chipset comes equipped with 16 lanes of PCI Express 1.1 connectivity, so the 9800Ms must share that data pathway, although GPU-Z reports each card running on its own x16 interface. When we checked in with Alienware, representatives confirmed that the company uses a bridge chip to make a pair of x16 pathways available. But you can’t get around the fact that the PM965 is going to bottleneck graphics performance one way or another. Storage Alienware arms the Area-51 m17x with a pair of 500 GB Samsung SpinPoint H6 HM500LI 2.5” SATA drives—a tremendously spacious disk given its 9.5 mm height. Spinning at 5,400 RPM and armed with 8 MB of cache, these wouldn’t seem to be the best choice for a high-performance gaming machine. However, Alienware uses the RAID 0 capabilities of Intel’s ICH8-M controller to stripe them together into a 1 TB configuration. A quick word of warning here: striping two drives together on a notebook carries the same risks as it does on a desktop with the added peril of bumping, throwing, and dropping those sensitive components in a portable machine. Even stationary on our test bench, one of the two HM500LIs started throwing up errors as we installed benchmarks. And while neither drive failed outright, the error warnings should be enough to give any enthusiast pause when it comes to RAID 0 on a notebook. Networking Gigabit Ethernet and Intel’s Wireless 4965 a/b/g/draft-n mini-card both come standard on the m17x, with no option to remove either. It’s all the same to us—the freedom to hook up to high-speed Gigabit or the latest draft-n routers is functionality we’d want anyway. Chassis/LCD By virtue of its name, the m17x sports a 17” widescreen LCD. Alienware’s options include an XGA+ display with a maximum resolution of 1440x900, a 1920x1200 UXGA display sans illuminated keyboard, or the same panel, plus AlienFX keyboard. Though the dual GeForce 9800M GTs are not always sufficient to run games at 1920x1200, the higher-resolution screen is incredibly sharp in Windows at its native resolution. The chassis itself is kept classy. There’s an infrared receiver on the front of the notebook, which works with an optional ATSC MiniCard TV tuner and ExpressCard-based Media Center Remote Control. The right side of the chassis features a card reader, an ExpressCard bay, a USB 2.0 port, an HDMI output, a FireWire 800 connector, a FireWire 400 port, and an RJ-45 jack for Gigabit Ethernet. The left side boasts three more USB 2.0 ports, speaker/mic/headphone connections, optical audio output, and a CATV input. Of course, there’s also a bay for an optical device (or a SmartBay, if you need more hard drive capacity). Alienware’s choice in optical drives ranges from an 8x dual-layer DVD drive to a Blu-ray player (and DVD burner) to a 2x Blu-ray DL burner. The back, like the front, is nothing but screens and ventilation, which is nice since so many competing whitebooks tend to situate fans on the bottom of the chassis where they’re easily blocked. The Area-51 m17x includes a 12-cell 6,600 mAh battery, which you’ll see in the battery benchmark doesn’t last long when you’re driving such serious computing hardware.