In addition, Intel announced the P9700 and P8800 Core 2 Duo desktop processors, which have speeds of 2.8 GHz and 2.66 GHz respectively, as well as the 1.3 GHz SU2700 ULV Pentium processor and accompanying GS40 express chipset.

UberGizmo says the SU2700 is the chip that will power the influx of ultra-thin laptops they've been touting as of late. But for the time being, that's it for details. Pricing and availability will come later. [Intel via UberGizmo]

Take your pick of Core 2 Duo processors, see it all on a 14.1-widescreen LCD (no word on what resolution), and enjoy those sweet, sweet super-fast graphics. No pricing yet. – Charlie White

Asus A8Jr - The First Laptop with ATI X2300 Graphics [64-Bit Computers]

All this durability comes at a price, though: depending on configuration, you'll spend around $4000 for the 10.4" screen Toughbook-19, and around $4500 for a fully-equipped Toughbook-30 (pictured above) with its 13.3" screen. Still, it's probably worth it if you're taking your laptop along when you go bungee jumping. – Charlie White

More luminous TOUGHBOOKs! [Akihabara News]

Gateway FX530XL [via Ars Technica]

Luckily, we can just look at Dell's own jump from the identical Core Duo to the newer Core 2 Duo chips to get the Apples to Apples comparison, without the marketing bullshit. Jump to find out how the fast the new chips really are...

Dell's XPS M1710 made a similar jump from a 2.16GHz Core Duo to a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo. The folks at CNET tested these machines out and though they saw modest gains in battery life, performance gains were small, hopping from a 254 score to a 257 score (MobileMark 2005). Even though the XPS M1710 and MacBook Pros are different monsters (the Dell packs a ton of bells and whistles the Macs don't.) And we're sure that in some specific tests, like Apple's Apature tests, it really is 39 percent faster. But mobile mark's benchmark of running scripts of different applications at once, including disk churn and pauses, like in real life, makes Apple's 39% speed claim something to take with a lump of salt.

Or peanut butter. We like apples and peanut butter.
CNET Dell XPS M1710 Core 2 Duo
CNET Dell XPS M1710 Core Duo
Fine Print (footnote 1)

Press Release (in Korean) [LG via I4U News]

All was not sweetness and light, though, where the rigorous testing revealed that even though the Core 2 Duo processors are faster than their Core Duo predecessors, they didn't score the full 20% speedup claimed by Intel. At the same time, battery life wasn't as robust as Intel had claimed, either. Even so, these are still the fastest mobile processors they've ever tested. Especially interesting are the comparisons between a Core Duo MacBook Pro running Windows XP and this Core 2 Duo notebook. Check out the full review after the jump. – Charlie White

Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M65: Intel Core 2 Duo Inside [Digital Video Editing]

The HD-DVD-ROM drive will actually play HD-DVD discs (I seem to remember something about the BWU-100A having a hard time actually playing commercial Blu-ray movies) and the inclusion of an HDMI means that this Qosmio wouldn't be a bad traveling multimedia hub. Windows XP Media Center Edition powers this little choo-choo train.

You can grab the Toshiba Qosmio G45-AV660 from ToshibaDirect for $3,499. – Nicholas Deleon

Product Page [ToshibaDirect via BIOS]

But we're not going to believe Intel, are we? Trusty testers at Laptop Magazine checked out Intel's claims and it turns out the chip giant's boasts were accurate, even conservative in some cases. The testers used two identical notebooks, where the only difference was one of them had the fastest Core 2 Duo processor and the other had the fastest Core Duo processor. Sure enough, the new Core 2 Duo processor was 22% faster than the old Core Duo, while battery life was still pretty much the same. The newer processor did even better in multitasking operations.

Twenty-two percent faster processor, same battery life? Neat trick. See Laptop Magazine's benchmark results tables after the jump.– Charlie White

Special thanks to Laptop Magazine for the use of these graphics!

Case in point: Dell, updating its XPS series laptops with Core 2 Duo processors, with the Inspiron, Latitude and Mobile Precision lines also soon benefiting from the Intel-quoted 12% overall system performance improvement over first-generation Core Duo processors.

The XPS notebooks now offer a choice of three Core 2 Duo processors, including the T7600 (2.33GHz), the T7400 (2.16GHz) and the T7200 (2GHz), and are priced from a steep $3500 for a XPS M2010, $2300 for the the M1710 (pictured above), down to the first Merom-packing Inspiron E1705 for $1124. Other Core 2 Duo-equipped Dell Inspirons, Latitude and Mobile Precision Workstation notebooks are forthcoming. We'll be reviewing one of Dell's Merom-packing notebooks in a couple of days, so stay tuned. – Charlie White

Dell XPS M2010
Dell XPS M1710
Dell XPS M1210
Dell Inspiron E1705

Our test machine ($3893) arrived equipped far beyond its basic $1050 configuration, powered by the fastest Core 2 Extreme processor, a dual-core 2.93GHz "Conroe" chip. Along for the ride is 2GB of DDR2 533MHz RAM, a workstation-class NVIDIA PCIe Quadro FX 3500 graphics card, and an 80GB SATAII 7200RPM system drive. Then there's a little high-tech jewel, a Raid-0 array with two tiny one-inch 146GB SAS hard drives spinning at 15,000RPM, a brand new piece of technology which gave us remarkable speed test results.

How fast was this monster workstation from Dell? Find out after the jump.

Don't be fooled by that 2.93GHz clock speed, because this is the fastest processor we've ever seen here at the Midwest Test Facility. That's because these Conroe processors have an extra speedy front-side bus design, a 4MB L2 cache and a 64-bit dual core architecture. They're just more efficient all around, and Intel's blather about how they're faster by 50% or more is not really blather, it's all true.

Along with that efficiency comes serene quietude. Dell has always been expert at hushing even its most powerful workstations, and this Precision Workstation 390 is no exception. Of the dozens of workstations we've tested here, this one is the quietest, and a few times we wondered if it was even running, only confirming such by observing its backlit power button on the front. Yes, this speedster is quiet enough to be in "church mouse" territory.

Exactly how fast is it? Let's start with that pair of 146GB SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard disk drives. This is the next generation of hard disk drives, and these 15,000RPM babies lashed together in a RAID-0 array added $1000 to the price of this configuration, but showed us astonishing speed, tipping our disk speed benchmarks at 160MB per second writing and an even faster read speed of 178MB per second.

The main event? Since this is the workstation-class machine, we ran a suite of benchmarks concentrating on Adobe After Effects compositions, and the Dell Precision Workstation 390 blew the doors off every machine we've ever tested using our suite of After Effects benchmarks. It lags slightly behind an HP dual core dual Opteron machine we tested a few months back on CineBench rendering tests, which demonstrate 3-D graphics performance, but then that dual-core dual Opteron machine costs $1500 more than this one.

Overall, the Dell Precision Workstation 390 performs as advertised, with its Intel Core 2 Extreme 2.93GHz processor delivering speeds on some benchmarks that were nearly twice as fast as a dual-core dual-processor Opteron 280 machine. If you're looking for power, efficiency, and quietude, look no further. – Charlie White

Full review [Digital Video Editing]

Product Page [Dell]