Fractal Design Arc Midi: The Mid Tower You've Been Waiting For?

The more enclosures we get in, the more amazed I am at just how competitive the market is for $99 cases. That market is made only more competitive by younger, hungrier companies like BitFenix and Fractal Design, along with new entries from Corsair and NZXT. In another welcome change of pace, these enclosures tend to be slicker, more streamlined, and less gaudy than the gaming cases of yore while providing oftentimes excellent thermal and acoustic performance. With those things in mind, today we look at our first of hopefully many cases from Fractal Design: the Arc Midi.

We've heard a lot of requests for a Fractal Design case review, and the company answered by sending us their $100 offering. Targeting the popular mid-tower segment with a reasonable price and good features, let's see just how well this newcomer can stand up to the competition.

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AVADirect's Clevo P170HM with GeForce GTX 485M: High-End You've Been Waiting For

When we reviewed the Clevo W880CU and, by extension, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480M, we were perplexed. Certainly NVIDIA had reclaimed the mobile graphics crown and no one could dispute that, but at what cost? The 480M was a cut-down mobile version of the already dire desktop GeForce GTX 465M. We even begged the question: "Wouldn't the prudent thing to do have been to let ATI have their cake for the time being and try and push GF104 into laptops?" Today we have a better answer. AVADirect has been kind enough to send us a Clevo P170HM notebook outfitted with NVIDIA's latest and greatest, the GF104-based GeForce GTX 485M.

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Mobility Sector Updates: Waiting for Sandy Bridge and Market Analysis

The past week shook up the whole computer industry with Intel’s announcement that a potential flaw in their Cougar Point chipset required a respin to fix. In the ensuing chaos, we’ve had quite a few reviews put on hold or pulled altogether as we await the revised chipset. We also have a few other items to discuss in regards to the mobility sector, so if you’re debating purchasing a new laptop/notebook vs. waiting for “fixed” hardware, we hope to shed some light on the situation.

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