Lenovo X300 13.3" Notebook "Leaks" Onto Web

It seems quite convenient that just days after the launch of the MacBook Air that a new lightweight notebook from Lenovo finds itself leaked onto the web. We're not ones to sweep such items under the rug, so here's the skinny on Lenovo's latest and greatest.

According to Gizmodo, the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 uses a Merom-based 2.0GHz "Dual Core Hybrid LV" processor with a 12W thermal envelope. The hybrid nature of the processor could mean that it is related to the special processor that Apple worked with Intel to develop for the MacBook Air.

The ThinkPad X300 features a 13.3", 1440x900 LED backlit display, two DIMM slots for a maximum of 4GB of DDR2 memory, fingerprint reader, touchpad and trackpoint inputs, webcam, and a full-size keyboard.

When it comes to connectivity, Lenovo throws in everything but the kitchen sink. Physical connections include three USB 2.0 ports, three internal PCI-E slots and GbE. Lenovo covers the entire wireless spectrum with Bluetooth, 802.11n, Verizon EV-DO Rev A, Cingular HSDPA and WiMAX options.

Surprisingly, Lenovo lists just one internal storage option for the ThinkPad X300: a 64GB solid state disk (SSD). There is no mention of a HDD, but surely there will be one available, otherwise the X300 will start off as an extremely expensive notebook. For those looking for optical storage, Lenovo hasn't forgotten about you and they do in fact include a DVD burner onboard.

Most importantly, Lenovo managed to pack all of these features into a 12.5" x 9" x 0.73" - 0.92" frame that weighs 2.5 pounds. The 2.5 pound weight is likely calculated with a 3-cell battery. Lenovo lists an upper limit of 3.17 pounds which probably takes into account a 6-cell or 9-cell battery.

We don't have any information with regards to pricing or availability, but stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

GeForce 9600GT Benchmarked Out in the Wild

NVIDIA's upcoming 9600GT graphics card lives up to the company's performance claims

Earlier this month DailyTech reported details of the next generation of GPUs from NVIDIA -- specifically the mid-range GPU codenamed D9x. Recently, the GeForce 9600GT was spotted in the open and Chinese review site PC Online was able to put the new reference card to the test to see what it's made of.

As far as the technical specifications are concerned, little has changed from our report earlier this month. The 9600GT will come factory configured with a core clock speed of 650 MHz, a unified shader clock speed of 1625 MHz, and an 1800 MHz memory clock.

From the photographs it looks like 512MB of GDDR3 1000 MHz memory is connected to the GPU by way of a 256-bit bus with a memory bandwidth of 57.6 GB/s. The G94 chip will also offer 64 unified stream processors; double the number on the 8600GT and half the number on the 8800 series.

The photographs show a smaller GPU die size than the G92 chips but slightly larger than the G84 die.

Additional details of the 9600GT include PCIe 2.0 and support for the Quantum Effects physics processing engine.

PC Online was able to measure the performance of the 9600GT and the results confirmed NVIDIA's claims of a 100% performance increase over the 8600 series for the most part. The 9600GT reached an overall score of 10813 while the 8600GTS and 8800GS had scores of 6251 and 10391, respectively.

Additionally, the 9600GT scored higher than the 8800GTS in many of the tests including 3DMark06 and games such as Crysis, BioShock, and Unreal Tournament 3. The 9600GT came up just a little short behind the 8800GS in only a few games such as Need for Speed: ProStreet and Colin McRae Rally (coincidentally, both being auto-racing titles).

Testing of the 9600GT was performed using Beta drivers so we may see additional performance squeezed out of this card and variants from NVIDIA's partners upon official release of a final product and drivers.