Intel’s newest Core i7 quad-core notebook chip is barely out of the oven but Asus is already serving it up in a pair of 16 inch mobile monsters which redline at 2.8GHz.
With Intel officially unveilling its first
Core i7 mobile processor overnight at the annual San Francisco chipfest love-in, a wave of muscle-bound notebooks built around the quad-core powerplant are heading our way.
First out of the gate is Asus with a pair of 16 inch notebooks packing Intel’s Core i7-720QM engine, which runs at 1.6GHz in quad-core mode but can throttle all the way up to 2.8GHz as a supercharged single-core processor using Intel’s ‘Turbo’ mode without going above the chip’s thermal ceiling.
(Intel claims that the superior design of the the Core i7’s ‘Nehalmen’ microarchitecture and the presence of HyperThreading to doubles the number of processes and create two ‘effective’ cores per actual silicon core, mean that even a Core i7 rated at 1.6GHz can outperform a higher-speed quad-core processor).
Asus’ two fire-breathing laptops are the G60J and M60J. ‘60’ is the model number, the G and M prefixes indicate ‘gaming’ and ‘multimedia’ versions, while J stands for “Jesus Christ that thing’s frickin’ fast!”.
The G60J backs the quad-core mobile processor with 4GB of DDR RAM, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 260M graphics card with 1GB of VRAM, a pair of 500GB 7200rpm hard drives, a Blu-ray combo drive and Altec Lansing speakers . Buyers can choose between a 16 inch HD (1366 x 768) panel and a 15.6 inch Full HD (1920 x 1200) panel for the same $2,999 price tag.
The M60J (above) comes fully tricked out with touch controls for multimedia
plus Altec Lansing speakers with Dolby 2 Home Theatre certification
The M60J sticks with the same processor, 4GB of RAM, Blu-ray combo drive and 16 inch HD glass but shifts the graphics down to the GeForce GT240M (still with 1GB of VRAM) and pegs the pair of 500GB drives to a slightly slower 5400rpm spin rate. These tech tweaks drop the price tag down to $2,599.
Both the G60J and M60J will be available next month and come preloaded with the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 Professional.