No one is saying when they’ll be released. If I had to guess I would say that you would be seeing these in stores around late August to the middle of September. I think you’ll see t&z versions again but when these come out the t will have the core duo 2 and the z will have the AMD x2 chips.
The new generation will most likely have the DVI out I would bet. But as for the GPU being anything other than a 7600 I wouldn’t hold my breath. The dv9000 is built to compete with the Toshiba Qosmio, Sony AR series, the Dell e1705, and some others to a lesser extent like the 17” Acer and Fujitsu, I say lesser extent only because these companies have a somewhat limited distribution compared to the big 4.
All of these computers, excluding the e1705, have the 7600, while the top of the line AR series notebook has the 7600GT, and the Acer uses an x1600. It seems HP wants to keep the dv series in the multimedia classification and if that’s what they want the chances of seeing a 7900gs being put into dv series is going to be pretty remote unless everyone starts doing it. I think you are more likely to see a model with a BlueRay/HDDVD drive, before you see the 7900gs. The Qosimo has HDDVD and Sony’s AR series is available with Blue Ray so it stands to reason the a dv9000 would have this option no matter how useless it may currently be.
I do think that you may see a new series from HP with more of a gaming emphasis since it’s a fast growing segment of the market, see Dell acquiring Alienware. This is even more likely since Toshiba is really pushing there new P105 series, a 17” notebook with the 7900GS. However the reason why the gaming segment is attractive to manufacturers is because of the high profits. I think the bare minimum you could get into a HP gaming system for would be around $1800 at today’s prices. So the good news is that you’ll probably be able to get all the goodies you want in 6 months but they won’t all be in the same machine from HP.
