Ordinarily, yes – but Shuttle doesn’t like to use the big tower cases that have room for all that. Instead, the SX58H7 Pro has a specification we never thought we’d see in a small-form-factor chassis.

For starters, the interior is dominated by an AMD Radeon HD 6950 – the third-fastest card in AMD’s current range, and one that requires a dual-slot cooler to keep the core chilled.

You’d think that wouldn’t leave much room for other components, but we’re struggling to find an area where Shuttle hasn’t gone way beyond the call of duty. The impossibly small CPU heatsink covers an Intel Core i7-950 processor, and storage is provided by both a 60GB Corsair Force SSD and a 1TB hard disk. There’s Blu-ray too and, more impressively, a massive 12GB of RAM.

As usual, Shuttle has done a stellar job cramming it all in, and there’s even a little bit of upgrade room, with a spare DIMM socket and empty SATA port ready for additional memory and storage. USB 3 and SATA/600 are also both included.

That’s not to say we don’t have concerns. When I announced what was inside, the entire office recoiled for fear of the heat it’ll surely belch out into a confined space. There’s little in the way of through-flow: one 80mm fan on the heatsink attached to the back of the machine, a single fan on the graphics card and just two small grilles down either side where air can be drawn into the case.

There’s the other major caveat, too: price.  Shuttle hasn’t let us know how much this particular build of the SX58H7 Pro will cost, but the barebones unit – without processor, graphics card, memory, storage or any other components – is slated to cost £532.

Nevertheless, we’re mightily impressed, so check back next week for the full review. In the meantime, we’re going to take bets on just how hot the SX58H7 Pro will get during our benchmarks and, just as importantly, how much it’ll cost. Got a guess? Let us know in the comments.

Having been writing about photo-realistic 3D graphics rendering for issue 192 of the magazine, I’ve been getting myself back up to speed with the state of 3D graphics and looking into the absolute best techniques for achieving realistic lighting. And along the way I’ve got a new insight into the sheer speed of the latest CPUs.

Turns out the best 3D rendering algorithm is a hugely intensive method known as path tracing, which is sort of like ray tracing’s dad. The theory behind the method actually pre-dates ray tracing, but it’s only now that PCs are getting fast enough for experimental dabbling at home.

The good part is that, while it needs a heck of a lot of computing power to do, path tracing is actually a fairly simple technique to implement.

But where to get a path-tracing application to play with?

Well, Kevin Beason has written a beautiful example of minimalist programming with his path-tracing renderer, smallpt. It’s a complete functioning renderer, with a 3D scene (based on the research-standard Cornell box scene) embedded into the program.

Smallpt generates and saves to disk the fully rendered, near-photorealistic image you can see above. And it’s written in a ridiculously compact 99 lines of C++ code. That’s the entire renderer, including the scene itself.

Kevin provides only the source code on his site, but I fancied running smallpt. So I spent a couple of hours getting it to compile under Visual C++ Express 2010, which is completely free and you can download from here.

The code assumes you’re using the open-source GCC compiler and his code includes some Linux/gcc programming tricks that don’t work under Windows, but a bit of tweaking later I had it rendering the Cornell-box scene.

It is awfully compute-intensive though, taking over 12 minutes to render a grainy 100-samples-per-pixel version on my Core 2 6300 everyday office PC:

Aha! This was a perfect opportunity to put my new quad-core Core 2 Q9400 system, that our lovely IT department built me a couple of weeks ago, through its paces. I added a few lines to the code of smallpt to get it to give me an overall time in seconds for the complete render, and set it going.

Straight away, render time came down to 252 seconds – just over four minutes.

Then I remembered my dual-Xeon workstation muscle machine, originally a test ‘white box’ from Intel that, ahem, never found its way back to them. The only reason I don’t use it as an everyday machine is its excessively loud industrial-level cooling system. But with its dual, quad-core Xeon processors, which cost some frightening amount of money when new, this was the perfect job for the Beast.

I set up the machine in a corner of the PC Pro Labs (well away from complaints about the noise) and installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64, just to make the test fair since that’s what’s running on my other PCs.

Then I fired up smallpt.exe and postponed making my next cup of tea, knowing it would rip through the render before I could even rise from my chair.

Oh.

Turns out my once-mighty eight-core workstation, barely over three years of age, is now slower for raw compute speed, and by a heck of a margin, than my quad-core machine.

In fact its two Xeon X5340 CPUs took 493 seconds to churn through the smallpt render: getting on for twice as long as my quad-core.

Deflated, I switched off the machine, then wandered over to Mike Jennings in his own corner of the Labs, engrossed in a graphics-card group test for the next issue of PC Pro.

“What’s the CPU in your test rig, Mike?”

“Oh, it’s a Core i7 980X. Six cores. Really fast!”

“Ah. Fast you say? Um, mind if I use it when you’re done?”

“Sure.”

So I did.

It’s not often I class a computer as astonishingly fast, but hell’s teeth this one certainly is.

The render completed in 73 seconds. That’s almost three-and-a-half times faster than my nearly-new Q9400 machine, and nearly seven times faster than my not-exactly-old, dual-Xeon workstation that was worth a good four thousand pounds when it was new.

Let’s consider those results on a per-socket basis.

With this pure-CPU, highly multithreaded task, the latest generation of enthusiast-level Intel CPUs are over thirteen times faster per processor than the professional-level Xeon CPU of three-and-a-bit years ago. And about five times faster per core.

I knew all this before, but seeing that machine chew through the render with such ferocious speed really brings home the level of engineering achievement that Intel continues to manage, year after year.

Try it yourself

If you want to try the unofficial PC Pro smallpt render test on your machine, you can download my compiled version here.

But wait! The multithreading needs the Microsoft OpenMP support DLL, vcomp90.dll, and the program won’t work without it.

The free-but-faffy way to get it is to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package from here.

Once the redistributable is installed, search for vcomp90.dll – it should be hiding in a subfolder somewhere within C:\Windows\winsxs – and just copy it to the same folder as smallpt.exe.

Now double-click the smallpt.exe file and the renderer will open in a command-prompt box, churn away for a while and save the rendered image file to the same folder when the render is complete. It’ll also give you the time taken to render when it’s finished.

You can open the resulting .ppm image using GIMP for Windows.

Let us know your results, for machines both old and new.

Has anybody out there got a machine that will break the minute mark?

Update:

Check out the posts below and you’ll see that Intel itself has risen to the challenge. Read all about the superchilled Intel test rig.

Perhaps reflecting our new era of austerity, the Portégé R700 has a mainstream price: £629 exc VAT for the base model with a Core i3 processor. Not that this has stopped Toshiba from investing in new features.

Top of the list is its “Airflow Cooling Technology”, which Toshiba developed in tandem with Intel. This involves a miniaturised motherboard that positions the processor and all the other components that require cooling near the edge of the chassis, allowing a single fan to constantly cool them. And, rather than wait for the processor to become hot, it blows air all the time.

According to Toshiba, this is what allows it to include a Core i3, i5 or i7 processor in such a slim machine. While we do have some criticisms – which we’ll come to later – this shouldn’t undermine what is a notable achievement. If you wanted a 13in ultraportable measuring under 30mm thick before, your options (think the Lenovo ThinkPad X301) were limited to ultra-low-voltage processors. Indeed, while the X301 is impressively thin at 24mm, the R700 measures 17mm at its thinnest point.

The R700 is staggeringly quick too. Our test sample used a 2.4GHz Core i5-520M with a healthy 4GB of DDR3 memory for company, and it sliced through all the apps we threw at it without any hint of a delay.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a silent laptop, however. In our tests, the fan was audible despite its relatively low spin rate, and when we pushed the Core i5 sample in our test machine the fan audibly revved up. That said, this was a pre-production unit so we’ll wait to see how the final machines cope with hard graft.

Another change in the R700 compared to the R600 is the lid. We criticised the R600’s for having a little too much flex for comfort, and the addition of magnesium alloy has certainly stiffened it in the R700’s incarnation. It’s not ruggedised by any means, but should withstand daily bashes.

While the bottom of the chassis is again magnesium alloy, the palmrest area (despite its brushed metal appearance) is plastic. That could be an issue if ham-fisted users lean down on the left-hand side, as the hard disk sits directly beneath.

The isolated keyboard is unexceptional but usable, but we’re fans of the responsive touchpad – and Toshiba has added a nice touch by including a switch above it to turn it off. That can be incredibly useful when typing, as it prevents the annoyance of accidentally tapping the touchpad and moving the cursor to a different part of your document.

We also enjoyed using the 13.3in screen. It may not have the highest resolution in the world – 1,366 x 768 – but this ensures system text is easy to read without fussing about with dots per inch.

And it’s this size of screen (combined with the Core i3, i5 and i7 processors) that helps turn the R700 into a very usable everyday laptop, as opposed to an ultraportable you turn to when portability is your priority. Note that some models include an optical drive as well.

We were using a pre-production sample for testing, so we’ll hold off a full verdict until a finished unit arrives in our Labs for benchmarking. It’s only then that we’ll be able to verify Toshiba’s claims of up to nine hours’ battery life as well.

But in terms of outright power in a highly portable form, we’ve been blown away by the latest Portégé. if it lives up to its promise, the R700 could well be vying for a place atop our Executive Laptops A List.

This prompted one commenter (giving his name as Wilbert3) to raise an insightful point. Hyper-Threading is great for everyday multi-tasking: for example, it lets a dual-core Core i5 CPU service four concurrent processes. But it works by presenting each core’s spare execution capacity to the OS as a virtual second core. Under heavy load, where there is no spare capacity, it would seem unable to offer any benefit. In such cases we shouldn’t expect to see a Core i5 achieve performance anywhere near what a true quad-core architecture would provide.

That analysis sounds persuasive, but is it borne out by the evidence?

To find out, I’ve done some tests on our standard Core i7-920 test rig, using our highly parallel 3D rendering benchmark and selectively disabling physical and virtual cores. Here are the results, in seconds, showing how long it took to render the same scene in different CPU configurations:

For the record, this was tested on a 32-bit Vista Home Premium installation, running at 2.66GHz with 4GB of DDR3-1066 RAM and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard disk.

Clearly, Hyper-Threading does help, cutting the dual-core render time for our test scene from 185 seconds to 165 seconds. It seems even highly parallel tasks waste some execution capacity that Hyper-Threading can exploit. But when we switched off Hyper-Threading and stepped up to four physical cores, render time was slashed to just 118 seconds — a performance boost more than three times greater than that offered by Hyper-Threading.

(Update: At the request of some readers, I subsequently repeated the four-core test with Hyper-Threading enabled. This brought render time down to 107 seconds, representing a speed improvement of 10% — almost exactly the same proportional change, to within 1%, as observed in the two-core tests.)

The conclusion is clear: Hyper-Threading can eke some extra performance out of even the most demanding tasks, and to that extent it’s certainly a plus point for Intel’s architecture. It’s also clearly worth having if you need to service many parallel lightweight demands — in a server, for example. But when it comes to proper grunt-work, it’s no substitute for real silicon.

When it arrived on the desktop scene, Intel’s Core i7 levelled the opposition. With enough power to embarrass Intel’s own Core 2 architecture, not to mention AMD’s efforts, and coming at a cost that would make even a banker weep, Core i7 set the benchmark and set it high. Now, with the new Clarksfield range of processors it’s set to repeat the trick in the laptop market, and we’ve got our hands on a sample boasting the mid-range quad-core 1.73GHz i7-820QM.

The first processors to arrive will be quad-cores based on a 45nm process, with 32nm dual-core models following in early 2010. Intel has kept the quad-core line-up refreshingly simple too, with the 1.73GHz i7-820QM flanked on both sides by the 1.6GHz i7-720QM and the top of the range 2GHz i7-920XM. Unlike their Core 2 Quad predecessors, all four cores boast Hyper-Threading; a move that allows the processors to handle as many as eight separate threads at once.

A perfunctory look at the modest-looking clockspeeds is enough to leave the keen bystander a mite underwhelmed, but those figures don’t take any account of the ace resting up Core i7s sleeve – Turbo Boost.

Basically, if two or more cores are sitting unused, and the processor isn’t running too hot or drawing too much current, Turbo mode kicks in and ups the speed of the remaining cores. For the i7-820QM, this can take the stock speed of 1.73GHz up to a maximum of 3.06GHz, while the i7-720QM and i7-920XM push up to 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz respectively.

Performance

If you’re not bothered about the details and just want to know how fast it is, the answer is very, very fast. Take, for example, the fastest laptop we’ve ever seen: the Dell Precision M6400 Covet costs the same as a nice second-hand car (£4,100) and offers a Core 2 Quad QX9300 running at 2.53GHz, 8GB of DDR3 memory, a 7,200rpm hard disk and high-end Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M graphics.

That combination earned an overall score of 1.64 in our application-based benchmarks, so it was with some surprise that we saw our early i7 sample sidle up alongside with 1.59. It might not beat the Dell, but put it in perspective – the CPU is rated at just 1.73GHz, it has half the amount of RAM and a 32-bit OS installed (to the Covet’s 64-bit OS), an inexpensive 5,400rpm hard disk and a far more modest GT 240M Nvidia graphics chip. Whichever way you cut it, that’s an impressive achievement by the Core i7.

It’s the Turbo Boost feature that really impresses, though. In our testing it worked without a hitch, dynamically overclocking cores to suit single and multi-threaded applications, while disabling unused cores to keep power consumption within acceptable limits.

Attaching a power meter to the laptop shows the Turbo Boost function in action – stress one core to 100% load and the clockspeed rises to 3.06GHz while power consumption hovers around 58W. Fully load another core and the overclock reduces to 2.8GHz and the power consumption to 70W. Load either of the two remaining cores, and Turbo Boost keeps power consumption hovering around the 70W mark by lowering the overclock to a maximum of 2GHz. Finally, with all four cores flat out, it falls to a maximum of 1.73GHz with power consumption hitting peaks of 74W.

(Click on graphs to enlarge)

And, if you’re expecting all this power to turn your notebook into a mobile fireball, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Our test sample was a modestly-proportioned 16in laptop, and with just a single vent at its side the i7-820QM idled at about 37 degrees centigrade, only hitting 77 degrees once the CPU was working flat out. Compare that to the 2GHz Core 2 Quad Q9000 in the recently reviewed Asus G71GX gaming beast, which idles at 50 degrees and peaks at 75 degrees, and the Core i7’s efficiency shines through.

As you might imagine, this efficiency helps improve battery life drastically. We rarely see quad-core laptops last more than a couple of hours even while sitting idle, but this one defied our expectations by lasting for over three and half hours with a bog-standard 4,800mAh battery. Push it to its limits, however, and our heavy usage test drained the battery in a mere 46 minutes.

Don’t forget, though, if you have to work on battery you can always engage Vista’s Power Saver mode – a measure which disables Turbo Boost and drops the CPU down to just 1.2GHz. In this scenario, with all four cores at full load, power consumption drops from 72W to a much more battery-friendly 52W – if you need all the benefits of multi-core computing, but longevity is important, too, then it’s a measure that can raise heavy usage battery life to a far lengthier 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Conclusion

Think it through briefly, and Core i7’s move to the mobile market might not make too much sense – indeed, combine huge power draw with massive heat output and you’ve pretty much nailed the absolute worst combination for the slimline confines of a laptop chassis.

However, Core i7 is a better match than anyone might have imagined. Several of its key features even seem to make more sense in a laptop than they do in a desktop PC, with Turbo Boost in particular making the perfect mobile match.

Price may yet prove to be a stumbling block, especially for the quad-core models, but going by the reasonable cost of Intel’s desktop-based Lynnfield platform upon which the mobile i7 platform is based, we can keep our fingers crossed that the forthcoming dual-core CPUs will bring all the i7’s benefits – Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading included – to laptops of all prices, shapes and sizes.