CES 2009 - Day 1: Netbooks, "Talking" Cars and more
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on January 9, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
BFG Gets Into the Gaming PC Market with Phobos
BFG showed off its Phobos gaming PCs at NVIDIA’s booth:
The chassis looked cool, two slot loading drive bays at the front, iPod dock at the top and a big touch screen LCD screen:
The LCD screen is powered by an ARM processor and has information about current temperatures, CPU/disk/memory utilization and you can even play music from it.
The graphics options are obviously BFG/NVIDIA-only, SLI will be available. The system I saw ran on MSI’s X58 motherboard with a water cooled Core i7 CPU.
These systems will be pretty pricey; starting at $3000 and going up to $8000 the Phobos machines will come with a “free” concierge service. You’ll get in-home installation and setup of your machine as well as the option of in-home upgrades. A tech will come out to your house to swap out any components you want to upgrade.
You’re obviously paying for the concierge service in the initial cost of the machine, and the number of in-house visits are limited (two visits with the initial purchase), but it’s an interesting angle used to get into a competitive market.
The Phobos web configurator will launch in the next month with systems shipping some time later.
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Zoomer - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link
To be fair, the eee isn't 1.2lb like the sony is.Would probably make a difference in their overstuffed handbags.
VooDooAddict - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
Netbooks are slow. Even these $500-$900 units being toted here.People are usually willing to take 2 out of 3. I'll take slow, portable, and cheap. but not slow, portable, and expensive. Netbooks have a perfect niche under $400.
I've got an Acer Aspire One it's perfect... for $300. If I had paid $500+ for this kind of performance I'd feel robbed.
To even get a glance $900 that Sony for $900 needs a dual core Atom and 2gb of ram.
JonnyDough - Saturday, January 10, 2009 - link
Netbooks aren't THAT slow. A modern netbook could run Windows 95 fantastically. They can even handle XP ok. But Vista + Atom = slow, no. You simply can't run Vista with the current Atom lineup.aeternitas - Sunday, January 11, 2009 - link
I hope you mean Windows 2000. There is no reason to run Win95 on anything anymore. We have light distros of Linux for hardware that slow with way more functionality and compatibility.JonnyDough - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
You'd be an idiot to run Windows 95 on anything connecting to the internet. My point was that Vista cannot run on crap hardware.OCedHrt - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
I believe Microsoft's dev team has released an unsupported driver that allowed the wireless NICs under Windows to be emulated, allowing you to link an emulated wireless with any of the free Wireless AP software that is available today.Also, many MB manufacturer's who have the wifi cards also bundle it Wireless AP software.
strikeback03 - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
Or, verify that the hotel actually does not allow multiple devices to use the same MAC. I accidentally found that our network (with MAC filtering) at work does not care if two systems use the same MAC address.