Dell today, is introducing the Vostro 3000 series of Windows PCs targeting specifically at the Small Business customer.

The new thin, lightweight and durable laptop computers feature powerful processors, high-end graphics and built-in security, and are designed for small businesses; helping them stretch their budget and protect their data, and come with dedicated small business services and support to keep a small businesses moving.

Vostro 3000 series consists of a 17” model (Vostro 3700), a 15” model (Vostro 3500), a 14” model (Vostro 3400), and a 13” model (Vostro 3300). And they come packing quite a “punch”.

The Vostro 3000 series will come with the latest Intel Core processors, including, the optional the quad-core Intel Core i7 processor available on the Vostro 3700. The Vostro 3300 is one of the thinnest commercial 13” laptops with an integrated optical drive. And the Vostro 3400 can offer up to a full day of productivity while “out-and-about” with up to 8 hours (based on lab testing and could vary by configuration) of battery life with an optional 9-cell battery. The Vostro 3700, 3500, and 3400 can come with an optional high-definition WLED screen and the 3700 offers up to 1GB NVIDIA GeForce discrete graphics.

All of the Vostro 3000 series PCs ship with built-in microphones and webcams as well, a full range of wireless options including 802.11g/n, Bluetooth, and mobile broadband. Oh and Dell is also offering an optional fingerprint reader too!

For more information on the new Vostro 3000 Series Windows PCs, see this blog post on Direct2Dell by Alex Gruzen, Senior Vice President for Dell Consumer and SMB. More photos of the Vostro 3000 Series can be seen here on Dell’s Flickr page.

The Vostro 3000 Series of Windows PCs look to be a powerful family of business-class PCs perfect for the small business user.

Lenovo has announced several new ThinkPad-branded Windows 7 PCs today.

The ThinkPad X201 features an extremely thin and light design, but doesn’t sacrifice in performance. The X201 comes with a normal volt Intel Core Processor (some models to ship with Intel Core™ i7-620M at 2.66GHz with Turbo Boost) instead of a low volt processor but is able to offer long battery life at around 11 hours with a 9-cell battery. The ThinkPad X201s is what Lenovo is calling a “featherweight fighter” weighing in less than 2.5 pounds. The ThinkPad X201 will cost $1,199, and the ThinkPad X201s will cost $1,599.

The ThinkPad X201Tablet is designed for business computing, features a 12.1 inch capacitive multitouch screen and comes with Lenovo’s SimpleTap application. You can see a demo of SimpleTap here. The X201 Tablet can be used with a pen or just your finger. This tablet comes with the latest Intel Core Processors, security tools such as a fingerprint reader (Windows Biometric Framework awesomeness!) and WiMAX, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. Fun fact: did you know the first ThinkPad was a tablet? I did not know that. Lenovo has a long history with tablets. The ThinkPad X201 Tablet will cost $1,549.

They are also introducing 2 new ThinkPad W Series models: the ThinkPad W701 and ThinkPad W701ds. These 2 new W Series ThinkPads come with Intel Core i7 Processors and NVIDIA Quadro FX 2800 and 3800 Series GPUs. These 17 inch PCs are perfect for design professionals and digital content creators as they feature optional built-in color calibrator to make sure the most accurate colors are displayed. These PCs can also be configured with an optional built-in WACOM digitizer and pen as well. The ThinkPad W701 costs $2,199 and the W701ds costs $3,799.

For more information on these new PCs, click here to read Lenovo’s press release.

These PCs will be available beginning in March.

Laptops with high-end graphics capabilities offer good performance in areas like playing HD video or games and can consume a lot of energy and battery life while in use. Laptops with lower-end graphics capabilities get good battery life but tend to sacrifice in the performance area. You could either get a laptop that rocked in performance, or a laptop with awesome battery life – but not both. NVIDIA went out to solve this issue: give PC manufacturers the technology to provide the best of both worlds to their consumers. Today NVIDIA has announced their new Optimus technology. With Optimus, NVIDIA is solving the common problem of having a balance between performance and battery life (as it relates to graphics) in laptops.

Many laptops come with either integrated graphics or discrete graphics. Integrated graphics, or what is also sometimes called “shared graphics”, usually utilizes a portion of a laptop’s main system memory and consumes less power. Discrete (or dedicated) graphics provide high levels of graphics performance and have a dedicated amount of memory apart from the laptop’s main system memory though they generally consume more power (bye-bye battery life). People looking for good performance in areas like gaming or HD video likely choose laptops with dedicated graphics. More and more higher-end laptops however now include both integrated graphics and discrete graphics – with the ability to switch between the two for specific needs. This is called “switchable graphics”.

For example, if you’re simply doing some web browsing or editing Word documents, a user would likely be using (and only need) the capabilities of their integrated graphics. But when the user’s needs change and shift to something requiring a little more performance like playing a HD video, they would likely switch to their discrete graphics. In the past, this experience has been a bit, well, wonky. A few years ago, some laptops with both integrated and discrete graphics came with a physical button that allowed the user to switch. But this experience forced the user to have to reboot their PC. Then eventually a software solution was created for switching between integrated and discrete graphics in laptops but that often required the user to log out and log back in or made the user’s screen flicker.

The idea behind switchable graphics in laptops is that it can provide both low-end and high-end experiences and preserve both performance and battery life. But the experience of switching between the two hasn’t been very good.

That is – until now.

With Optimus, NVIDIA is providing an absolutely seamless experience between switching from integrated graphics to discrete graphics in laptop PCs. The user literally has to do nothing. There is no physical button, there is no weird software solution that forces you to log out and log back in or the screen to flicker. It just, well, switches. I went to NVIDIA’s office here in Bellevue to get a demo of Optimus in action earlier today. I came with my HD camcorder ready to film the demo for this very blog post. But, the experience with Optimus was so seamless; there was no point in filming the demo because there was nothing to see! NVIDIA did have a small little custom app that would tell you when the integrated graphics would switch to the discrete graphics - but when people use this technology in the real world there is no app to tell them when things switch. It just happens.

The magic of Optimus lies in a combination of software and hardware. Optimus only works today on Windows 7. NVIDIA’s software and Windows 7’s driver model (Windows Driver Model – or WDM) and APIs (like DirectX and DirectCompute) allow for the kind of experience Optimus provides. NVIDIA GPUs that support Optimus Technology provide the hardware component of the equation.

On Optimus-powered Windows 7 PCs – when the user launches an app that requires a little more power for graphics, it will automatically and seamless switch from integrated graphics to discrete graphics. I asked NVIDIA how Optimus knows when to switch from integrated graphics to discrete graphics. NVIDIA tells me that through regular online updates via the NVIDIA Verde Driver Program , NVIDIA will update the application-specific Optimus profiles with the suggested settings that will tell Optimus to use either integrated or discrete graphics.

No action is required by the user however if you’re a geek and want to tell Optimus to switch or not to switch for a specific app or game, you can via the NVIDIA Control Panel as well.

So to re-cap: with NVIDIA’s Optimus technology, laptop PCs can now provide an absolutely seamless switchable graphics experience to the consumer while preserving battery life and performance.

At NVIDIA’s office, I was given the demo of Optimus on ASUS’s new UL50Vf Optimus-powered laptop. While playing some HD video content and a few games, battery life went to a little over 3 hours. After we stopped playing video and games, sat a bit and chatted, we checked the battery life and it went up to 8 hours. We checked the battery life using Windows 7 Power icon in the Notification Area.

For more on NVIDIA’s Optimus technology, see their product page and this blog post for more details.

With a great price at $299, here is a small form factor PC that can hold all your HDTV decoding and PC gaming needs. The AspireRevo is based on the Nvidia ION graphics chip platform and the Intel ATOM 230/330 processor. Nvidia’s ION platform is based upon the GeForce series 9400M G graphics chipset — a low-cost, low-power GPU capable of HD video decoding and DirectX 10-compatible PC gaming graphics power.

NVidia’s ION enables the AspireRevo play 1080p HD movies, play DirectX 10 games, and run Windows Vista Premium with all 3D capabilities. It’s small, sleek, space-saving, and can be used as a fully functional home office PC or as a living room PC for casual gaming on your television.

Besides being equipped with the Intel Atom 230 processor and NVIDIA ION GPU, the AspireRevo comes with a choice of a Serial ATA Hard Drive or Solid State Drive and up to 4GB of DDR2 memory. A Mini PCI Express slot offers the possibility of expanding memory capacity to make space for continuously growing multimedia files.

(Source) Examiner

Nvidia has announced their latest graphic card solution, obviously aimed at the high influx of 3D. They are quite expensive and are sure to be aiming the businesses like Dreamworks and Pixar as far as better solutions for 3D graphics rendering. Let it be known though that this new Nvidia Quadro graphics card is not really meant for gaming. It is purely for business!

Whether designing the next aircraft or delivering seven-day weather forecasts, today’s professionals seek a reliable, robust visualization platform designed to address their unique challenges and needs. Highlighting a decade of innovation that match the exact needs of professionals, NVIDIA today introduced its most powerful and advanced top-to-bottom line of Quadro professional GPU solutions available to date.

Based on the company’s revolutionary CUDA parallel computing architecture, this new series provides high-performance visualization and new capabilities to solve highly complex challenges such as: real-time ray tracing, video encoding and interactive volume rendering. These new solutions also contain added graphics memory, double precision support and advanced display capabilities, giving professionals the right features to move beyond visualization barriers, reducing time-to-insight.

NVIDIA Quadro solutions are widely available through leading system manufacturers such as Dell, Fujistu-Siemens, HP and Lenovo; leading workstation system integrators; and NVIDIA channel partners PNY Technologies (US and EMEA), Leadtek (APAC) and Elsa (Japan).

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Here is another of the many graphic cards being released in the market. The Quadro NVS 420 Graphics Card is said to be able to support up to four monitors with a resolution of 2,560 by 1,600 pixels each.

The Quadro NVS 420 is designed for smaller desktop systems that require multidisplay support. The graphic card has a total of 16 processor cores on two GPUs and a total of 512 MB of memory with a bandwidth of 11.2 GB per second per processor.

What makes this new graphics card from Nvidia is that it only consumes 40 watts of power. The card supports either Intel’s or Advanced Micro Devices’ microarchitectures as well as Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems. The NVS 420 is expected to be available next month with a suggested retail price of $499.

Nvidia has customarily been strong in the high end of the graphics market but has recently announced plans to release products in the middle of the year that would fit in low-cost mini-laptops, a fast-growing segment of the PC market.

That bit of news is surely something many PC geeks are sure to love.

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