Two treats for the price of one here folks, we’ve got the latest
laptop from style gurus Asus and titbits on a new mobile nVidia 7
series graphics card before its official launch.
Funnily enough, this happens more than companies would like to admit:
one launches a product not realising it has unannounced peripherals
inside. That said, nVidia doesn’t seem to be on the warpath so
something must have been agreed beforehand. Let’s start with the laptop
and work our way down.
As always, it’s a bit of a looker – dubbed the A6Vm – it has a 15.4in
WXGA screen yet weights only 2.8Kg. This can be backed up with an AMD
Turion 64 or Pentium M 700 sequence processor, a maximum of 2GB of DDR2 533MHz RAM and a 100GB HDD. A swanky extra is the integrated 1.3 megapixel camera, with more standard stuff like Bluetooth, wireless g, and SPDIF output making up the numbers.
Standing out a mile, however, is the installed nVidia GeForce Go 7300
graphics card, a previously unknown mobile option from the 3D
specialist. Little is revealed about this mysterious offspring but Asus
does let slip that it comes in either 128 or 256MB configurations, is
DirectX 9.0 and Shader Model 3.0 compatible and uses nVidia’s PureVideo
technology for smoother playback. Performance is ambiguously described
as “increased by 41 per cent over previous graphic solutions” but
compared to what exactly? I very much doubt it is going to outrun a Go
7800GTX.
In addition, the fact that it uses TurboCache suggests it will be more
of a midrange offering but we’ll have to grab one by the throat and
benchmark it within an inch of its life to know for sure. No pricing or
release dates have been made available yet, but we’re curious to say
the least…
