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Dell to Offer an "Ultra" SSD Option for New Laptops

Paul Lilly — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:25:34 -0500

It seems everyone is getting bitten by the high-performance SSD bug, and that now includes Dell. The dudes at Dell have started selling its 2.2-pound Latitude E4200 with the only storage option being solid-state drives. But that doesn't mean you don't get a choice. Customers picking up the E4200 can opt for either a standard SSD or "Ultra."

As you might have surmised, the Ultra bumps up the performance specs a notch with a rated 100 MB/s read speed and 80 MB/s write speed. According to Samsung, these numbers represent a 60 percent performance hike over SATA I drives, and Dell's own testing claims a boost over its 5400RPM drives.

"Our labs benchmarked this drive in a Latitude notebook and saw a 35 percent overall system performance increase a over a standard 2.5-inch 5400RPM notebook hard drive using SYSmark '07," Dell said."That's even more impressive when you realize that the difference between standard 5400RPM and performance 7200RPM drives (in the same generation) is 10 percent on average."

Are you sold?

Image Credit: Dell

EVGA eForce 790i Ultra

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:19:07 -0500

We weren’t impressed with Nvidia’s follow up to the popular 680i chipset. The 780i felt like a retread of the original and lacked support for Intel’s top proc: the 1,600MHz FSB Core 2 Extreme QX9770. Plus, PCI Express 2.0 was simply tacked on as an extra chip and DDR3 support was glaringly absent.

Nvidia heard our complaints and created the 790i chipset, represented here by EVGA’s Ultra SLI board. It has native PCI-E 2.0, 1,600MHz FSB support, and DDR3. This board even addresses another shortcoming of the 680i and 780i reference boards: lack of eSATA.

The board’s physical layout is well thought out, and all the SATA ports are accessible, even with two honking dual-GPU cards installed. We’re not thrilled, however, with one feature of this board (and, by extension, all Nvidia reference-design boards): The massive heatsinks are held in place with screws that protrude too far through the bottom of the board. So, if you put the board down on a table and apply pressure while installing the CPU heatsink, the screws can push forward, unseating the chipset heatsinks. That’s just sloppy design. For our build, we propped the board up on Dixie cups to keep from pushing out the screws.

In performance, the board redeemed itself. It was neck-and-neck with the pricier Asus Striker Extreme II in the majority of our benchmarks, a close second to that board in memory tests, and superior in real-world gaming tests.

Heatsink screws aside, there’s not much to complain about. Sure, there are boards with more luxury items, but if you want solid, bare-knuckle performance—with SLI support to boot—the EVGA 790i Ultra SLI has it.

Ultra m998

David Murphy — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:40:02 -0600

Ultra’s m998 is a sad combination of two phrases: “Looks are deceiving.” and “A for effort.” Funny, because when we consider the case strictly on face value, it’s anything but a cliché. For starters, the m998 is wider than the standard cases we’ve tested, but the aluminum body keeps the enclosure rather light.

The m998's interior is all contours and class.

Opening up the windowed side panel of the m998 is like throwing open the doors to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. There aren’t any lake-drinking chubby kids or Oompa-Loompas, but a number of new delights await curious rig-builders. The first thing we noticed was the motherboard tray. We like the neat look of its reflective surface—too bad there aren’t any labels for the motherboard standoffs. That’s misstep number one for Ultra.

Ultra's proprietary power bar limits cable clutter in the bottom half of your machine.

The second thing we noticed was a fanciful panel studded with Molex connectors running vertical to the motherboard tray. We assumed this was a new power strip of some sort, as lord knows the manual told us absolutely nothing about the unfamiliar feature. Only after happening upon the information on Ultra’s website did we realize that the top portion of the so-called Ultra Power Bar is for inputs—your various power supply cables—while the bottom of the bar is populated with outputs—from which Ultra’s short, uniform cables extend to your peripherals. As for which input corresponds with which output… well, that’s an awesome game of trial and error.

That said, the power bar is pretty sweet if you can figure it out. While it’s not a one-stop shop for cable management, it does help relegate the unsightly snarl that typically occupies a case’s interior to just the top half of the enclosure, keeping the bottom half neat and tidy. Trouble is, you’ll have to negotiate that northern tangle of power supply cables to fit multiple devices into the 5.25-inch drive bays. Tread carefully, you water coolers.

Front-panel connectors are hidden ninja-style beneath a push-spring covering.

Less-adventurous builders will find that the m998 does little to ease their construction efforts. The chassis loves screws. It loves them so much that it doesn’t give you a single screwless way to interact with your case. Nada. For the lax computer builder, that’s a terribly weak move on Ultra’s part. Speaking of lazy, the m998 comes with front-panel eSATA. It’s just not plugged in. You have to pop a side panel and string your own SATA cable. That’s certainly the first time we’ve ever done that with a case.

This is Maximum PC, not Masochist PC. We aren’t happy when the build process is made needlessly tedious, be it through half-baked features or a dearth of instructions. The m998 would be a strong contender if a bit more attention were paid to the details.

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Dell to Offer an "Ultra" SSD Option for New Laptops

EVGA eForce 790i Ultra

Ultra m998

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