By now you all have heard about that Dell XPS 600 Renegade computer and how it was something like the 52nd fastest supercomputer in the world. Well, I saw a computer (manufacturer will go unnamed) that had a Core 2 Duo (Conroe) processor in there AND the Quad SLI 7900’s. It was playing Quake 4 at 1920x1200 resolution on maximum details, and it was absolutely amazing.

After playing around on that monster setup for a little while, I spoke with an Intel representative about Merom, the mobile version of Conroe. He had a side by side demo of a Centrino Core Duo notebook with the Core Duo processor in it, versus a Centrino Core Duo notebook with the Core 2 Duo processor in it; all other specs were the same. He had a time demo setup in Quake 4 and had both computers run it at exactly the same time. The result was an approximately 50% performance increase on the system running the Merom processor. I also asked him about what they expected the battery life to be on these processors, and he said that they won’t be any different than what we have currently seen on Core Duo processors. This is a tremendous statement, it means the performance of Merom is 50% greater than the performance of Yonah and yet the power consumption will be nearly identical. Since the rest of the specs on these laptops were the same, this also means that notebooks that currently support dual core Yonahs should also support dual core Meroms.

Another very cool feature was setup on a nearby laptop that was playing the latest patch of Guild Wars. Those of you that game on a laptop or have played games on a laptop in the past know that it drains the power pretty quickly. Often times it is nice to have the ability to adjust settings based on whether or not your laptop is plugged in, in order to conserve a little bit of power. When we unplugged the computer, a window automatically popped up notifying us that the power had been disconnected and the laptop was running on battery. It then prompted us asking whether or not we would like to adjust settings. From here, it took us to another window that had check boxes for all sorts of video and audio settings in the game. Also, if any of you have ever played games wirelessly, you know that keeping the signal strength up is often directly related to your performance in the game; if you lose signal strength, you lose in the game. Well, incorporated into this game were two little icons. One of these icons notified us of our signal strength (like the bars you see on cell phones), and the other one told us the percent of battery life remaining. These features are tremendously important when gaming on a laptop.

After that we started on our GotFrag Open tournament that got cut short due to reports of delays at the airport. Basically the only games we played were Mortal Kombat and Quake 4, where Anomoly won everything convincingly.

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