Someday, someone will get the whole head-mounted display thing right. Until then, anyone who wants to play games or catch a flick using high-tech mirrorshades will just have to carry a bottle of aspirin and some Pepto. According to TrustedReviews, the LeadTek XEye, currently only available in Asia, suffers some of the same problems inherent in previous similar displays, including an uncomfortable fit, poor video quality, and that old wooziness (described by the reviewer as "feeling that your eyeballs are being slowly sucked out of their sockets") that pretty much makes using this for more than a few minutes a no-go. Still, we're pretty sure that someone will get this right sooner or later. It's been in too many sci-fi films for them not to, right?

[Via Digital Media Thoughts]

Sure, the new XPS boxes and big TVs got the most attention at today's Dell event, but they weren't the only things showcased by the company. Off in a corner (well, not quite a corner; this thing is big), was a full-size version of a kiosk the company is in the process of rolling out to GameStop stores nationwide. The kiosk lets shoppers test out what Dell bills as a "deluxe gaming" platform consisting of an XPS 600 with a massive LCD display. The kiosks will no doubt garner a lot of attention when they start showing up in stores, though Dell may find that the extreme gamers they're targeting with the platform aren't willing to wait in line behind the hordes of 12-year-olds that will inevitably hog the kiosk (of course, if those 12-year-olds have parents who are willing to write a big check, all's right with the world).

PC Magazine has doled out their Editor's Choice award to Dell for their latest top-end gaming PC, the Dimension XPS 600, the follow-up to their XPS Gen 5, which also snagged top honors from the magazine. This latest model comes loaded with a 1TB hard drive (yes, that's a T), a 3.8-GHz P4 670 processor, two nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards in an SLI config, and 1GB RAM, not to mention a 24-inch widescreen LCD.  They found that the system delivered in just about every respect, even going as far to call the system "another milestone in 3D gaming and real-time graphics rendering", saying "the hardware has caught up with — and even exceeds —the capabilities of games today." And while the $5,000 list price is more than most of us can handle, it's still cheaper than some of its overclocked competitors.

We still can't figure out what it is about menial-labor simulations that's just so fun (you know how we dotcommers long for the old days when people actually had to work), but we had to stop stop it up when we peeped Aerosoft's train sim. Not quite as slick as the Japanese versions we've seen around and about, but it still super reminded us of playing with a train set when we're kids. Except we never really had to worry before about hitting cars or missing schedules on the London-Brighton Express.

We know being a PC gamer can hit hard on the wallet (we understand how very grueling it can be) but since when is 2,900 clams a "budget" machine? And we want to know why for the Polywell Poly 925CV-3600's price you're stuck getting a Creative 7.1 audio system and not an LCD monitor (you can see where our preferences lie). All that said, at the end of the day PC Magazine gives the 3.6GHz P4, GeForce 6800-based Polywell a pretty good overall rating, and a 94/100 in the gaming category. Whatever.

Not sure how pleased the good people at Intel will be about this, but Alienware just broke the 4GHz barrier by deliberately overclocking the 3.6GHz processor in their new Area-51 ALX gaming desktop and installing a special liquid-cooling system to keep the whole thing from melting down. And not surprisingly it'll cost you at least 4 G's if you want to get your hands on 4GHz.

PC Magazine checks out the latest way to blow four grand on a high-end gaming laptop, For your money you get a 2.0GHz processor, 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics card, a 60GB hard drive, a DVD+-RW drive, and a battery life of over four hours. Solid, yes, but nothing extraordinary given what else is out there at that price, so Falcon Northwest is doing a few things to differentiate themselves from the Alienwares of the world, like offering to custom paint the FragBook in any automotive finish you'd like (whatever you do, just don't get it in purple) and throwing in a padded aluminum briefcase free with every purchase.

Over at the RetroZone they've taken a slew of classic console controllers and converted them to USB for use on your PC.  The site features NES (including the Advantage), SNES, Genesis, Atari Commodore, and Intellivision controllers/adaptors.  There's also a kit you can buy to build your own "RetroPad".  The prices are fairly reasonable, especially since the rest of the emulation technology is free.

30-inch LCD HDTV? Check. Integrated Media Center 2004 PC? Check. Alienware brand? Check. Options up to a 3.4GHz Pentium 4, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition with 256MB GDDR3 RAM, 12x DVD±R/RW drive, and Dolby Digital 5.1? Check. In a few years when all the hardware on this thing is out of date, it's going to seem like a bad investment for all those peeps who dropped 6½ to 8 dimes on it? Check.

HP is just beginning shipments of its Compaq X line of build-to-order high end PCs, setting their sights directly on the gamer enthusiast market. We suppose this is mainly because they know you didn't feel cool enough with just the letter q in the name of your computer, so they're upping the ante late-90s style, adding an X, which instantly makes it more "extreme" (i.e. faster—see Das Blinkenlights Effekt).  And yet they're leaving out the PCI-express, what's that about?

Red Assed Baboon covers a product from one of the taboo areas of gaming — console PCs. The new Alienware DISCover machine is sexy as hell, but can it really survive in the living room? From the sounds of it, this is how it works. You insert the game in the console for the first time and the DHS recognizes it. You enter the serial number and, according to the reviewer, "about 10 minutes later the game was ready to play." 10 minutes? That's a problem right there, isn't it? Apparently, the games load quickly after that. The reviewer goes on to claim that PCs will die a horrible death if they don't find a slot in the living room — an argument that any veteran in the business can tell you, is hogwash. The new DISCover systems may have a future, but they won't be replacing any PCs in this home.

This weekend Intel announced its new line of chipsets (the controllers that pass data between all of the different parts of a PC, such as the CPU, memory, and graphics).  You'll forgive our scepticism that this is, according to Intel, "the most extensive, most ambitious PC platform improvement in years", but it is obviously a big step forward for consumer computing because of its liberal use of the letter X and the word "Express" (no "Extreme"?).  Introduced into Intel's consumer products (though long available in the server market) is PCI Express (think of it as a broadband connection for your graphics card to your computer), which comes in two flavors: PCI Express X1 and X16.  X1 almost quadruples the throughput of PCI, while X16 (meant primarily for graphics) nearly doubles AGP 8x (and is about 30x the speed of PCI), for a full 4 GBps data throughput.  The chip sets are fascinatingly named the 915 and 925X Express (wasn't the "express" implied?), and they also feature support for serial ATA with RAID (which Intel has dubbed "Matrix" — more X's!), integrated "High Definition Audio", and DirectX 9 compatible integrated video. Score one for the Intel Marketing Team X2000!