Media centers' siblings or cousins in the upper half of the PC market, of course, are game machines. CES 2008 circled and underlined last year's impression that hardcore gaming has grown mainstream enough to attract retail consumer vendors as well as built-by-hand specialists. HP, for example, showed its VoodooPC subsidiary's over-the-top SLI machines alongside its own co-developed-with-Voodoo Blackbird 002 gaming tower.
Unveiling its latest FX Series gaming desktops and first FX Series notebooks, Gateway took an intriguing approach to the segment by offering both the usual overclocked, multi-graphics-card screamers and systems aimed at not-quite-so-hardcore game players with not-quite-so-fat wallets.
Among Gateway's ready-to-ship systems, the FX540XT ($3,800) is a fire-breathing Core 2 Extreme QX6850 tower with dual factory-overclocked Nvidia 8800 GTX 768MB PCI Express x16 cards plus 4GB of RAM, two 500GB hard drives, hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD player and DVD±RW burner. By contrast, the FX540B offers Intel's Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor, 2GB of RAM, Nvidia 8600 GS graphics, and just one half-terabyte drive for $1,000 -- but its nForce 680i SLI motherboard is ready for a graphics upgrade in the future.
There's also an FX7020 retail configuration that rings up at $1,100 with a 2.3GHz AMD Phenom 9600 quad-core, 512MB GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, 3GB of DDR-2, 500GB hard and DVD±RW drives, and an analog/digital TV tuner. Such value lets shoppers save for Gateway's new 30-inch, "quad HD" (2,560 by 1,600 pixels) XHD3000 Extreme HD display ($1,700).
Similarly, Gateway's new P-171XL FX Edition laptop claims bragging rights with an overclockable Core 2 Extreme X7900 processor, two 200GB hard disks, and an HD-DVD player for $3,000. But Best Buy browsers will find a P-171X FX Edition priced at $1,400 with Core 2 Duo T8300 power, a single 200GB hard drive, DVD±RW -- and the same 512MB GeForce 8800M GTS graphics found in the flagship.
And while HP's Pavilion Elite m1900 desktop is the first consumer box we've seen fitted with 4GB of RAM and the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium, the company has also turbocharged its pint-sized, entry-level Pavilion s3330f slimline with an HDMI- and DirectX 10-ready GeForce 8500 GT card, Blu-ray/HD DVD player, and TV tuner for under a grand.
That said, the product that had gamers falling onto their backs wiggling their arms and legs in the air wasn't a PC. It was Alienware's wraparound curved monitor, a stunning 42-inch-diagonal, 2,880 by 900 display based on rear-projection technology with LED lighting -- "You can't bend an LCD," the Alienware rep explained. The 48-inch-radius arc boasts a 10,000:1 contrast ratio and under 0.2-millisecond response time; it's due to ship in the second half of the year at a price to be determined (it'll take them that long to count that high).
Wear It, Lock It, Back It Up
Last year, we noted that getting anywhere in the Las Vegas Convention Center called for wading hip-deep through displays of iPod cases. This year, that overexposed role went to digital photo frames, but some other desk accessories were pretty ubiquitous too -- such as USB external storage drives.
Of course flash-memory drives were everywhere, in shapes, sizes, and guises ranging from SanDisk's elegant if unlikely, concealed-within-a-necklace Cruzer Element to Lexar's appalling Hannah Montana and High School Musical bracelets ("Loaded With Exclusive Buddy Icons and Wallpapers!").
Other vendors strove to differentiate their products in the backup-and-file-transfer desktop hard drive market. Seagate's CES display read "Customers want to indulge themselves in the content that makes them who they are," but its products made more sense: The company's FreeAgent Pro and compact FreeAgent Go drives will grow to 1TB and 250GB, respectively, in the first quarter of the year, while its Maxtor brand launched BlackArmor, a portable 160GB drive with built-in, real-time AES government-grade encryption of every byte on the device. It'll ship in the second quarter for $150.
A different spin on backup came from Memorex, whose SimpleSave DVDs find and back up multimedia files automatically -- the SimpleSave:Photo or SimpleSave:Music software launches from and copies files to the DVD as soon as the disc's inserted into a drive.
The software takes only 0.2GB of each disc's 4.7GB capacity, and prompts you to insert another disc when full. A pack of five SimpleSave:Photo backup DVDs will cost $13 when they reach retailers in April; three music backup discs will be $10. Kodak was at the show with similar AutoMagic self-burning CD-Rs ($5 for two), containing software that lets digital camera newbies preview and select photos with just a few mouse clicks.
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