TG Roundup: Cheap Gaming Notebooks, $99 Quad-Cores, Linux Lovin’

Whew… *wipes sweat from brow*. It’s been busy over here! Over the past week or so, we’ve published a variety of content that simply shouldn’t be missed, from a review of an affordable gaming notebook to a look at the industry’s absolutely first sub-$100 quad-core processor.

Last Saturday, we posted an in-depth look at the latest gaming notebook from ASUS, the G51Vx, coming in at 15.4-inches. What makes this notebook special isn’t so much the fact that it can handle pretty much any of today’s games at the display’s native resolution of 1366×768, but also that it looks good while doing it. The notebook features awesome styling, great performance, and costs only $999. What’s not to like?

Towards the middle of the week, Bill posted his look at SilverStone’s latest full-tower chassis, the Raven RV02. This chassis is a follow-up to the RV01 (no surprise, huh?), and does a lot to remedy complaints from the original. It features a very unique design with a superb airflow scheme, is built incredibly well, and caters to making installation a breeze. Although the RV02 retails for close to $200, Bill was so impressed, that aside from a few minor issues, he believed it was almost the perfect chassis.

Late last week, we somehow managed to post two Linux-related articles back-to-back, and each of the two have been very well-received, or… very popular at least! Brett published another one of his fantastic editorials, this time taking a look at Ubuntu, and the reasons why experienced Linux  users tend to look down upon it. Brett says there’s no need of it, and I agree. The following day, I posted an updated view of what I think about the KDE 4 desktop system, and all I can say is… I really, really hate that I went so long before giving it another go. I’m still using it as I type this, and I’m loving it.

On Tuesday, I posted an article that may have caused many to ask, “What the?!”. It was of Gigabyte’s GeForce GTX 260 Super Overclock, and yes, it is a little weird to post a review of such a card today (the GTX 260 is over a year old), but Gigabyte didn’t create a new model for nothing. Nope, the Super Overclock boasts an overclock that’s actually impressive, and that’s rare. It’s overclocked so high, in fact, that it actually beats out NVIDIA’s own GTX 275, which costs about $40 more than a typical GTX 260.

To wrap this week up in style, I posted an article taking a look at AMD’s latest quad-core processor, the Athlon II X4 620. Yes, you read “Athlon” there, but don’t balk… this is a $99 processor we’re talking about. That fact in itself is rather impressive, but the chip is actually a great performer for the money, so it’s well worth a look if you are wanting to build a cheap machine that has a lot of raw horsepower. The lack of L3 cache hurts, but since we managed a stable overclock that added 35% to the total clock speed, we’re not complaining too much!

We’re set for another busy week coming up, and I can assuredly say that you don’t want to miss some of our content next week, so check back, and check back often! Also, don’t forget about our forums, which is a great place to hang out while you wait for us to publish some fresh content!