Lenovo G530 Notebook

Lenovo is a company that offers a wide range of notebooks. From multimedia notebooks, to gaming notebooks, to value notebooks to netbooks, Lenovo has their bases adequately covered. We've spent some time with a few of the company's prior offerings, but we've never quite seen a product like this. The simplistic G530 is a computer that's easily overlooked. It's not flashy, the model name isn't memorable and the specification sheet has nothing on it that will immediately grab your attention. But what this machine lacks in pizzazz it makes up for in value, so it follows logic that the G530 is a critical pillar in the somewhat undercover Value '3000' notebook line at Lenovo.

MSI GT627-216US Gaming Notebook

We’ve seen plenty of gaming notebooks that are meant to dazzle potential customers with outrageous designs, ultra high-resolution displays, twin GPUs, and quad-core processors. The MSI GT627-216US isn’t such a notebook. Instead, the GT627-216US takes a more subdued approach to offer budget-minded gamers a powerful machine at an affordable price.

Although the MSI GT627-216US may take a budget-minded approach, it doesn’t skimp on what’s important to gamers, namely the graphics card. The NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GS at the heart of this notebook helps it to produce more than respectable scores in many gaming benchmarks. In addition, the GT627-216US has an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 processor and 4GB of RAM backing up that graphics subsystem.

Available for under $1,200, the GT627 employs the increasingly popular (and durable) brushed metallic look and adds red accents that give the notebook a bit of flare. Because it uses a 15.4-inch widescreen display as opposed to the 17-inch displays seen on many gaming notebooks, the overall machine is also lighter than its larger competitors. There’s a tradeoff, however, since a smaller display also means resolution sacrifices, and the GT627 is not immune to this. With a native resolution of 1280 x 800, you’ll definitely miss some of the detail you’d enjoy with a larger gaming notebook.

Read on as we take a closer look at the design and features of the GT627-216US. We’ll also run the GT627-216US through a rigorous set of benchmarks to see just how well it compares to some other gaming notebooks

Asus Eee PC 1008HA "Seashell"

Anyone who has followed Asus' continually expanding Eee PC line will understand just how significant a diversion the product we'll be looking at in this showcase is for the company. Since the very beginning, Asus' pioneering netbooks designs have looked about like the Eee PC 1000HE that we reviewed back in February. Simple, if not boxy enclosures were a given, and while you may find a few curves or accents here or there, you could tell that style was not always in the foreground with these utilitarian, low-cost notebooks.

Today, we're looking at the very first Eee PC netbook that looks nothing at all like its predecessors. In fact, we'd wager that Asus included this machine in its Eee PC line simply because of the brand recognition. Although, Asus isn't content with labeling this only an Eee PC. The Eee PC 1008HA is the first member of the burgeoning "Seashell" line, a family that already includes this machine and the to-be-released 1005HA. The 1008HA was originally unveiled in March at the CeBIT conference in Germany, but the ultra-slim laptop has just now started filtering out to the US market.

Atmel ATmega128-16AU AVR Microcontroller, 64 QFP, 16 MHz

The ATmega128 is a low-power CMOS 8-bit microcontroller based on the AVR enhanced RISC architecture. By executing powerful instructions in a single clock cycle, the ATmega128 achieves throughputs approaching 1 MIPS per MHz allowing the system designer to optimize power consumption versus processing speed. The ATmega128-16AU is the Pb-free version of the ATmega128-16AI. It is functionally identical.