So, we hear you're edging ever closer to pulling the trigger on a shiny new XPS 420, huh? Lucky you, as it looks like Dell just opened up your options. While the only processor choices on the XPS 630 are the E8500 and the absurdly expensive QX6850 (it's an $850 addition), the XPS 420 now has a half dozen CPUs to pick from. Most notably, users can now get their rig equipped with a Core 2 Quad Q9300 / Q9450, both of which provide much more oomph than the baseline chips while not forcing you to refinance your home and pick the QX9650. So, when can the aforesaid 630 expect similar selections?

[Thanks, Evan]

MSI's been making some noise with the Wind lately, but the company is still busy turning out solid-but-uninspiring PCs as well, like the new Titan 700. The mini-ITX PC features a VIA CN700 processor at 2.0GHz, 1GB of RAM, dual-layer burner, and a 120GB 2.5-inch drive, all in a 2.7 x 7.2 x 9.5-inch package with Gigabit Ethernet and 4 USB ports. The only thing you won't be getting for your £234 ($458) is an OS -- you'll have to supply your own. Of course, for $500 you can probably get a slightly-larger computer with much more powerful processor and an actual OS, so unless you're somehow taken with the Titan's industrial-chic case, you're probably not too sad that this thing hasn't been announced outside of the UK yet.

[Via TrustedReviews]

Although NVIDIA's pledged to simplify its lineup for consumers and ATI's been getting better, the current state of the graphics card market is still a pretty wild alphabet soup of model numbers and specs lists, so the crew over at The Tech Report decided to break things down using the only stat that matters: price. While the results aren't exactly shocking (surprise: more dollars equals more FPS), what's interesting is that multi-GPU rigs are really quite cost-effective, delivering performance on par with higher-end cards at significantly lower prices. For example, two Radeon HD 3850s run nearly as fast as a single Radeon HD 3870 X2, even though they cost a fair bit less, and two GeForce 9600 GTs can potentially outgun a GeForce 8800 Ultra. That's always been the promise of SLI and CrossFire, and it looks like it's paying off -- any system-builders out there care to share their experiences?

Given the absurdity of the AlphaGrip Handheld Computer, we're pretty stoked to see something fairly snazzy emerge from entries in Microsoft's Next-Gen PC Design Competition. The Illusion PC is a 8.25-inch cube that hides a Mini-ITX motherboard, 200-watt power supply, slot-loading DVD burner and provides room for two internal hard drives. Theoretically, a 6-inch LCD and TV tuner card could also be thrown in, but we're digging the minimalist feel, personally. Hit the read link for a gallery of shots -- heck, the magician even reveals his secret to pulling the whole thing together. Like, that never happens.

[Via SlashGear]

AMD may be busy sorting out issues with its quad-core Phenoms and hard at work on "completely different" chip architectures, but that isn't stopping the company from aggressively updating its roadmap, announcing today plans for 6- and 12-core server-grade Opterons. Both the new 6-core chip, codenamed Sao Paulo, and the 12-core unit, codenamed Magny-Cours, are based on a brand-new platform called "Maranello," and slotting in to replace the planned 8-core Barcelona chip, which appears to have been canceled. According to AMD, 12-core chips are easier to manufacture, so it's going to skip over 8-core chips and go straight to the good stuff. That must be news to Intel, which is planning on shipping 8-core Nehalem chips later this year, and will probably then hold the coveted "number-of-cores" crown until AMD releases the 12-core chips in 2010. There's no word on whether any of these chips can make these processor roadmaps comprehensible or even chronological, but we can dream, can't we?

[Via TG Daily]

NVIDIA isn't joking around when it says it's after a dominant position in the consumer tech industry, and it's apparently willing to take some aggressive steps to get there -- like totally revamping its product lines. Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, NVIDIA veep Roy Taylor (the same guy who said Intel was "dead", you remember him), said that his company needed to "simplify the product line for consumers," and that if NVIDIA is going to "widen our appeal, there's no doubt we have to solve that problem." No specific plans were offered, but might we suggest a moratorium on the random-numbers-and-letters product-naming scheme? Just a thought.

It looks like a group of researchers at UC Berkeley have come up with a rather unique way of solving the problem of getting supercomputers past the processing power / energy consumption barrier, with them now touting the possibility of using millions of low-power embedded microprocessors instead of conventional server processors. That tantalizing prospect has apparently already lead to a deal with Tensilica Inc, which will provide the Berkeley researchers with some of its Xtensa LX extensible processor cores to use as the "basic building blocks in a massively parallel system design." Ultimately, the researchers say they could one day build a massive supercomputer consisting of 20 million embedded microprocessors at a cost of $75 million, which they say would have a power consumption of less than 4 megawatts and a peak performance of 200 petaflops. That, they say, would be enough for it to create climate models at 1-kilometer scale or, as the researchers put it, more than 1,000 times more powerful than anything available today.

[Via TG Daily]

Intel has been boasting of DirectX 10 support for its various integrated graphics options for some time now, but it's only just recently gotten around to actually releasing a Vista driver that brings its GM965 and G35 Express chipsets up to speed. Of course, NVIDIA just couldn't help itself from getting a few (more) digs in at Intel's expense, and it's now kindly provided a few benchmarks to show just how badly Intel's integrated DirectX 10 solution stacks up against the bleeding-edge DirectX 10-ready games it now ostensibly supports. They couldn't find a single game that was able to crank out more than 5 fps, even at a lowly 1280 x 1024 resolution and with the usual graphics intensive settings turned off. Then again, 4.4 fps in Crysis is pretty much par for the course.

Read - Crave, "Intel updates graphics with multimedia capabilities"
Read - Hardware Secrets, "Are Intel chipsets really capable of running DirectX 10 games?"

At last the moment you've been waiting for. Microsoft wants to hit your version of Windows with an update, and this time you don't have to go rummaging around the internet to find it: just fire up Windows Update and let Microsoft do all the work. After a few false starts XP users get the much-anticipated SP3 update, which promises speed boosts and some of the fancy security features found in Vista. If you're a Vista user you're also in luck, since Microsoft has restarted its Vista SP1 distribution after some compatibility problems with Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Sounds like a party.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Do you absolutely love Gateway desktops? If you said yes, prepare to be seriously stoked. The company is releasing a slew of new systems this week, ranging from cheapo starters to pretty heavily equipped gaming / multimedia models. We've got all the info that's fit to print (and frankly, some that isn't), and we've rounded up the basic specs and features after the break. Enjoy!

Although Cubans have been able to get underground PCs for a while now, the Cuban government only recently lifted the official ban on them, and the first publicly-available machines just went on sale Friday. The state-approved QTECH PCs are only available at one store, where crowds formed to gawk at some pretty clunky tech -- the $780 towers feature Celeron processors, 512MB of RAM, Windows XP, and come with a CRT display. Not only that, but most Cubans won't even be allowed to have Internet access as only "trusted officials" and state journalists are allowed home net access. That's a pretty weak state of affairs, but it's not necessarily as dire as it seems: now that computers are legally available, some Cubans expect black market prices on up-to-date gear to come down. The managed economy in action -- anyone know if Cubans have unofficial ways of getting online as well?

[Via CNET]

Apparently Dell is busting out the big, expensive guns with its new gaming rig, the XPS 730 and 730 H2C. The previously outed system is quite serious, utilizing NVIDIA's nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset, a wide variety of Intel CPUs (ranging from the Core 2 Duo up to the Core 2 Duo Extreme), support for ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 (CrossFireX) or NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT (SLI) graphics chipsets, up to 8GB of RAM, and the ability to install up to four hard drives in various configurations. The real kicker, however, is the H2C cooling system, which has been "enhanced," so this won't blow up when you're playing Crysis (which runs smoothly at 1920 x 1200 resolution, we're told). HotHardware has a nice unboxing of the beast, and PC Magazine has given a $6,629 configuration a full review, and they didn't come to the sweetest conclusion ever. The XPS 730 and XPS 730 H2C are available now from Dell, starting at $3,999 and $4,999, respectively.

Read - Dell XPS 730 H2C: Four-Barreled Gaming Horsepower
Read - Dell XPS 730 H2C Unboxing and Preview
Read - Review of the Dell XPS 730 H2C

Engadget NYC might have gotten to play with Apple's latest and greatest iMac yesterday, but we keep it dirty in the Chi -- yep, we've got the first Psystar Open Computer shipped out for review. We're just getting it set up, but check out the unboxing below, and hit us up with anything you want to know in comments -- you know we're going to put this thing through its paces.

Update: We've done some preliminary testing and benchmarks, check 'em out.

The geriatric set most definitely has plenty of cellphones catered to them, but finding a computer that's equally simple to operate isn't nearly as easy. According to a BBC report stemming from a Digital Inclusion conference in London, Microsoft UK is aiming to develop a "senior PC" which will feature a simplistic interface and come tweaked to handle tasks such as managing prescriptions and photos. The outfit is teaming up with charities Age Concern and Help the Aged, and it's just one of the many projects meant to tackle the issue of "digitally excluding" millions of citizens. Additionally, Microsoft is working up an "ad-funded PC" that would come preloaded with a step-by-step guide to get online, remain safe, perform "simple computer tasks" and, of course, fire up Doom. Just kidding about that last part... maybe.

Although most of the attention in the increasingly-competitive CPU market has been focused on Intel and newcomer NVIDIA lately, AMD's still in it to win it, and it looks like it's taking some bold moves. First up, the company says over 100 laptop designs based on the new Puma mobile platform are being developed for delivery in June, over twice as many as it's had in the past. AMD's touting Puma's Hybrid Graphics mode that allows the system to intelligently switch between a Radeon HD3400 and integrated graphics for max power-savings, so it'll be interesting to see how the system stacks up against Intel's Atom and VIA's Isaiah -- like NVIDIA, AMD seems to be betting that consumers care more about graphics than raw horsepower.

That bet might also explain why AMD's technical director of sales and marketing Guiseppe Amato also recently told CustomPC that its next generation of chips will look "completely different" than Phenom, and that it will be capable of solving "problems that today we think can never be addressed by hardware." That's a pretty bold claim -- the whole processor market is getting pretty boastful lately, have you noticed? -- but we're at a loss to explain what it means. Any ideas?

Read - 100 laptops to be based on Puma at launch
Read - AMD's next CPU architecture will be completely different