Summer Tech?

Hello there. I'm a college student entering my second year, and I'll finally able to get the budget adjustment necessary to buy my first laptop (ever, I might add). I will be getting the money a week or so before school starts for the Fall semester, which is around the third week of August. I was just wondering, is there any exciting new tech/laptops/other hardware from now until then that I should watch out for? Will it be something to really be patient about and grab on to before I head back to school? My budget will be $1500, so I hope it's something that also looks out for those that are looking at those real nice mid-range laptops.

Thank you much for any help you can give, guys. I'm really looking forward to the Acer Gemstone (5260G, I believe), but if there's something awesome to look forward to, I'd love to read it.

 

Many laptops will come out this summer/early fall. Many new laptops of all budgets and sizes have been announced already and will be for sale soon. Just keep checking the news section.

AMD also has a new CPU out that uses less power. Less news on that but you will also find info in the news section.

Apple will bring out Leopard in October if you are interested in that.

ATI and Nvidia will keep bringing out new graphic chips. The very powerfull ones like 8800M but I think also new budget chips comparable to the go7300. Also hopefully integrated chip solutions.

Intel Penryn looks to be a nice upgrade on paper but it is not due till late this year or early next.

 

As mentioned, Santa Rosa was just released and the market still has yet to populate in the refeshed models with that platform. The next big upgrade for Intel is Penryn which isQ4 of this year or Q1 of next.

 

Sounds great! I'll definitely keep an eye out. The 8800M sounds pretty interesting.

By the way, has there been a review for the 8600M yet? That looks pretty interesting to me, since a lot of Santa Rosa gaming-oriented laptops carry it.

 

There are two versions, the 8600M GS and the 8600M GT. There are some reviews of laptops carrying both graphics cards online, but they're from "weird" sources and can't be confirmed by someone at a place like NBR. In any case, these sources say that the 8600M GT gets a 3DMark06 score of about 4,000, placing it performance-wise around where the Geforce Go 7900GS falls. The 8600M GS gets a 3DMark06 score of around 3,000, which is about one and a half times as powerful as the old Geforce Go 7600.