As soon as you back off, say by switching off the background music and allowing your foreground process to have all the processing power (and thereby complete its task more quickly), the benefits of having a dual-core machine will become far less tangible.
Core private-sector machine orders - seen as a key indicator of corporate investment - were down by 4% from 2006.
According to its label, this swivel-hinged machine packed a Core i7-3520M, 8GB of RAM, 500GB 7, 200rpm hard drive, Blu-ray burner, LTE radio and a 72Wh (6, 700mAh) battery.
Knobs and switches on its World Core synthesizer module adjust the game machine's maps, graphics, characters and even physics through voltage tweaks.
In fact, they firmly stated that it's only a surefire recommendation to those who will be utilizing the 3D panel with great frequency, noting that the decision to toss a power-hungry Core i7 into an otherwise portable machine led to subpar battery life that would frustrate frequent travelers.
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Testing the cards on an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700-powered machine with 2GB of RAM, the single R600 card bested the solo 8800 GTX in basically every benchmark they tried, with common applications seeing minimal gains, but games saw between ten-percent (Half-Life 2: Lost Coast) and 42-percent (1701 A.D.) hikes.
ENGADGET: ATI R600 graphics card benchmarked, cruises by NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX
Though this machine was announced with a Core i3 CPU, only the AMD option remains available here in the US. And while the dm1z is a tad heavier than the Aspire V5 (3.2 versus 3.05 pounds), we like its patterned lid -- and the optional red color scheme.
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Let's focus on the actual machine first: here we have a Core i5-2410M (2.3GHz to 2.9GHz) rig packing a 14-inch 1, 366 x 768 LCD, Intel HD Graphics 3000, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 500GB 7200rpm hard drive, and a DVD burner that can be swapped with a secondary battery.
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On the Windows side, the machine is powered by a 2.7GHz Core i7 CPU with 4GB of RAM, a beefy GeForce GT 650M GPU with 2GB of dedicated RAM and a 128GB SSD.
ENGADGET: Origin and CUPP wed x86 and ARM in 11-inch gaming laptop, we go hands-on (video)
Baker tells me he can make a sock core just as cheaply as anyone in China or Honduras - the machine costs the same, so does the yarn, there's hardly any labor.
Other than that, this isn't a machine for spec hunters: it will initially ship with a Core i5 Sandy Bridge processor (that's what was available when the product was being developed) and the screen resolution tops out at 1080p, which is fairly low considering those pixels will be distributed over a 55-inch panel.
Its 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and full-size drive is way snappy -- the machine boots from cold to desktop in 26 seconds (granted, it's a clean install without any third party software installed).
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Until now all these devices have been one-off prototypes, but CUPP's partnering with Origin to make the PunkThis board available as an option on the EON11-S. The machine we played with was a pre-production unit using CUPP's single core ARM module running Gingerbread, but the company is working on a multi-core version with Jelly Bean.
ENGADGET: Origin and CUPP wed x86 and ARM in 11-inch gaming laptop, we go hands-on (video)
At 0.98 inches thick, with a multitouch glass trackpad, up eight gigs of memory and an available 2.93 Mhz Intel Core Duo processor, it's a must have for spendy Mac fans who need a widescreen machine.
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