Dell’s dresses Ubuntu in a Mini

THE DELL INSPIRON MINI has finally arrived, much to the relief of gadget sites everywhere. Laptop Mag and Anandtech have posted their reviews revealing the much-awaited, unsurprising, netbook. Dell’s got it just two months late, but it does seem to have trodden a well laid-out path. We won’t mention the specs as you already might’ve guessed what’s on the inside, but for an OS it uses a custom Ubuntu. It’s thin, it’s light and can take you on a three+ hour ride. The keyboard didn’t impress much, it seems. Check it out.

TechPowerUp is mucking around with S3’s Chrome 440GTX. If you compare this card to the market’s mainstream you’ll notice it’s slightly under-specced. That 64-bit memory interface is a downright killer when it comes to performance, but according to TPU’s tests, the Chrome 400 core actually performs admirably compared to what we’ve come to expect from S3. You’ve got everything you need for an HTPC (the card is even low-profile), and you can even get some gaming done on it. You can catch all 30 pages of the article, here.

Xbit Labs is writing up chapter 2 of the their “400GB RAID 0, RAID 5 and RAID 10 arrays” article. They’ve now rounded-up some 7 second generation drives which are all specced very much the same, but when submitted to the RAID configurations, mileage will definitely vary. WD and Hitachi seem to be more prepared for the server load, while Samsung and Seagate seem to prefer workst ation uhm… work. Highly technical geekspiel from our fave Russians.

More gaming mice at large today, only this one is down under. TweakTown has the NZXT Avatar, a USB 2600dpi optical (laser?) mouse with a 1000Hz polling rate (!). The review doesn’t mention any onboard memory, but Andrew says you can program the buttons and set profiles through the included software. He liked it, indeed he did, but where’s the price? We checked $59.99 on-line…

Mad Shrimpery today has an interesting article that faces-off the GTX 280 and the HD 4870 X2 in anti-aliasing under both XP and Vista. The article features some very high AA and AF settings being run in several demanding games. ATI seems to have done great work on its AA, especially under Vista, and considering AA was the RV670’s greatest weakness. There are some notable exceptions, as the GTX 280 supports some additional AA modes that ATI doesn’t have, but once we get to 16x… well, draw your own conclusions. µ