Wednesday, September 26th, 2012

Time	Event
4:01a	Lenovo IdeaCentre A7 All-in-One Review: Starting to Get The Balance Right As we mentioned in our recent review of Dell's enterprise-class all-in-one, the OptiPlex 9010 All-in-One, balancing the needs of an all-in-one system and making it feel like a solid alternative to a conventional desktop is a difficult process. By potentially grafting an entire computer to the back of a display, you immediately reduce the thermal headroom of the hardware by a substantial degree. You're also dealing essentially with most of the trappings of a notebook in a much, much bigger body. On hand today is Lenovo's consumer-grade IdeaCentre A7 all-in-one, and it's a surprisingly solid offering in a product category that seems to be continually struggling to find its true niche and identity. When you buy an Apple iMac, it's because that's the only desktop Mac in that price class, but an all-in-one PC must contend with discrete desktops in its category and offer a reasonable value proposition. Did Lenovo produce a solid offering, or are they offering an answer for a question nobody asked? (Comment on this)
6:24p	AMD’s Enduro 5.5 Public Beta Driver Available About three weeks ago, I met with AMD to go over some concerns with their Enduro graphics switching technology. At the time, AMD gave me a preview release of their Mobility Catalyst driver and promised a public beta by the end of October. We’re over a month ahead of that schedule, and today I received an email from AMD indicating the Catalyst 12.9 Beta for laptops is officially available. I’m still working on the final review of the Clevo P170EM with 7970M from AVADirect, but in the meantime I’ve updated to the 12.9 Beta and everything appears to have gone smoothly. One thing to be aware of is that the current beta may not fix the GPU underutilization issue, particularly with HD 7970M, but AMD is working on a hotfix. They expect that to be released to the public in the next week or two, and they’re offering us a chance to do some early testing of the driver so we’ll be putting it through some tests over the next couple of days. For all of you that have Enduro/PowerXpress 4.0 or later laptops and have been waiting for a driver update, head on over to AMD’s site and grab the latest beta. If you give it a shot and have a minute, post your comments on how the new drivers work (or don’t?) on your laptop. We’d love to get a collection of testing results from a wider variety of hardware than what we currently have on hand. (Comment on this)

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