With six cores and twelve threads, the Intel Core i7 980 X is believed to be the speediest consumer chip that the world’s most recognized chipmaker has developed. How soon it will be implemented in standard desktops remains to be seen but there is no doubt that gamers and content editors who always wish to work with devices on the cutting edge of technology, will want to get their hands on this high performance device.

There had been growing anticipation as people waited to see what the successor to the highly successful Intel Core 2 line would have to offer. And the developers at Intel did not disappoint with the new Intel Core i7 950 offering significant improvements in both architecture and performance but at affordable prices.

The world of technology is used to new gadgets and devices being unveiled on a regular basis, each claiming to offer better features than the previous ones. However, experts agree that the Intel Core i7 processors represent a significant leap in the microprocessor industry.

The competition between Nvidia and ATI, the premier graphic cards manufacturers, has been a classic battle with each outdoing the other every few months with the unveiling of cutting-edge graphics cards. However, with the launch of the highly acclaimed Radeon HD 5870, the first video card with DirectX 11 support, ATI seemed to have taken somewhat of a lead over Nvidia. Experts and gamers waited with bated breath to see what Nvidia would be coming up with – and they did not disappoint.

Though there was an unusual delay in the revelation of their latest graphic cards, Nvidia has finally launched one of the most anticipated graphics cards that is believed to be a gamer’s delight. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 400 Series uses the Fermi architecture and is aimed primarily at the high-end digital media and gaming enthusiasts. Many believe that this series triumphs not just over previous Nvidia offerings but also over AMD’s Radeon HD 5000 series.

ATI has been outperforming Nvidia with the launch of its Radeon HD 5870 as well as the Radeon HD 5850 graphic cards. Now, it has launched a graphics card - ATI Radeon 5970 - that is competing for the title of the fastest graphics card. And with the same GPU configuration as in Radeon HD 5870 and, with the same core and memory frequencies as Radeon HD 5850, the ATI Radeon 5970 comes with an unprecedented memory bandwidth of 256GB/s.

Upgrading a Windows Edition was once very simple – if you were a home computer user, you could simply upgrade your Home edition and if you used Windows for your business, you upgraded the Professional version. While the reviews of Windows 7 have been great so far and your decision to upgrade to Windows 7 is the right one, you will now have to decide which edition of Windows 7 is best for your needs.

For a while now, Asus has been bringing out boards in what is famously termed as the Republic of Gamers or RoG series. The Rampage III Extreme is the latest model and also possibly the best for gamers who like to go in for extreme overclocking. There have been some complaints about the new RoG boards but this latest one should satisfy both the experts and the passionate gamers.

The Intel’s Lynnfield platform had impressed many in the enthusiast as well as the mainstream market. Its new CPU-powered PCI Express controller and 1156-pin socket had been revealed in an exciting lineup of processors. Many brought out motherboards that included the Lynnfield platform as their main attraction. However, now the same manufacturers have started tweaking the existing motherboards that were based on the Lynnfield to increase their capabilities even more.

When Nvidia launched their first latest technology graphic cards in the GeForce GTX 400 series, the reception might not have been as warm as they had anticipated. After all, their GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 480 were supposed to offer hot competition to ATI, which so far has been the dominant player in the DX11 field. However, the graphic cards proved to be fairly noisy and generated a lot of heat though there was general agreement that they did offer superior performance and great speeds.

Nvidia’s new Fermi architecture had been creating a buzz for some time now and though some bits and pieces of this technology had been shown at select technology conferences, it had been under wraps for a sufficiently long time. And who could blame them? Facing hot competition from the folks at ATI, Nvidia probably wanted to make sure that they had every aspect of their card absolutely right before revealing it to the world. Finally, the world did get to see the much-awaited GTX 400 series from Nvidia.

When in November 2008, Intel launched the dazzling array of Core i7 series, experts were impressed and customers delighted. Using the Nehalem architecture they proved to be an instant hit in the high-end of the market and gaming enthusiasts as well as digital media professionals, all appreciated the tremendous power these processors provided. However, the mainstream market remained open and there was always a need for some processors that could provide a good combination of performance and price. The Intel Core i5 750 and the Intel Core i7 860 are here to fill exactly such a gap in the mainstream.

There is no doubt that solid-state disk drives or SSDs are the latest attraction, impressing many with their non-volatile NAND flash memory. Not only do SSDs not have any moving parts but also there is also no read/write head or actuator arm like in the hard disk drive or HDDs, which seeks out the data on a rotating platter. This actually allows the SSDs to read and write data much faster. However, SSDs are much more expensive than HDDs while at the same having lesser capacity as well. Obviously, an average desktop consumer today will have to decide whether to go in for the higher capacity HDDs or the faster SSDs.

The HAF series always had a reputation of being some of the most stylish and well-built cases that could not only accommodate the latest technologies and afford exceptional cooling but also have enough room in them to fit any type of setup. However, as time went on, many of the features that were once considered innovative and unique, went on to being part of many similar cases. Naturally, the HAF has moved on to the new Cooler Master HAF-X with many new features that are to make it the leading product of the HAF series.

Intel’s P55 and X58 Express chipsets are aimed at two different sections of the computing market – the X58 aimed at the gaming enthusiast willing to pay more for extra power while the P55 is aimed at mainstream users. It is therefore interesting to see how they differ in their performance and how one should decide which chipset is best for them.

When AMD released their Radeon HD 5800 series, experts believed that this was the best to come out of the AMD stable for quite some time. And with good reason. The Radeon HD 5800 series was not only the first to offer complete DirectX 11 support but had other unique features such as Eyefinity and the ability to enjoy games on multiple monitors. However, with ATI Radeon HD 5970, AMD also laid claim to the single, fastest GPU in the market. Finally, the Radeon HD 5800 series offered wonderful image quality, had great power consumption even at peak performances and they were very competitively priced. Most of us believed that AMD would take a while to top this as it takes time to perfect a new architecture and make it available at lower prices. This is where AMD has surprised everyone, experts and the competition alike by almost immediately coming out with the Radeon HD 5700 series, offering unbeatable features at unbeatable prices.

Gaming enthusiasts waiting to run their high-tech games on more and more powerful processors finally have something to cheer about. The AMD Phenom II X6 processors with six cores are finally in the market. And what is so impressive about these processors is not just the fact they have very efficiently managed to fit in six processor cores but that they have also developed a new frequency enhancing technology called the AMD Turbo CORE. This new technology is now available on all the new six-core processors called the ‘Thuban’ processors.

When AMD launched the highly powerful ATI Radeon HD 5870 with support for DirectX 11, there was great excitement in the PC gaming world. Very quickly, the Radeon HD 5870 went on to become the top 3D performance graphics card. Not only was the performance of high-end games on this card impressive but the entire range of features, the exceptional image quality, competitive pricing and excellent power consumption quickly earned it a large fan following. Even at the time of release of the Radeon HD 5870, AMD had mentioned that they would be following this up with a slightly watered down version that would also be cheaper. However, no one anticipated that it would be launched so quickly or that it’s performance would match that of the Radeon HD 5870.

AMD has achieved great success with its new generation of video cards, partly because of the competitive pricing and partly because of the impressive performance of the ATI Radeon Premium Graphics. AMD graphic cards have been able to provide gaming experiences unmatched by many of its competitors. And now it leads from the front by coming up with the first graphic card series with DirectX 11 support.

The ASUS P6X58D-Premium version has received great reviews from experts and gaming enthusiasts alike. The only criticism, if any, that could be leveled against this high performing motherboard is that it is fairly expensive. The demand for a motherboard that could give the same performance at a reduced price had been growing for some time and ASUS has met those demands with the ASUS P6X58D-E motherboard. It is almost the same as the ASUS P6X58D-Premium version but by reducing some of the fancier features, ASUS has managed to bring down the price.

The ASUS Crosshair IV Formula is an AMD based motherboard and is based on AMD's 890FX chipset. Many believe that the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula motherboard is probably one of the best AMD motherboards to come from ASUS in a long time. While the 890GX range of chipsets had already proved popular, the FX series just ups the ante and improves on the GX chipset. Therefore, even if some find the price of around R2,600 for the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula, a little pricey, they can be rest assured that they are going to get only the best performance from this motherboard.

There is uniform agreement that the ASUS Republic of Games is one of the best series that has come into the motherboard market. Of course, if one were to compare individual boards, it is possible that a board here or there could outshine one of the RoG ones, but as a series, there is very little to match the lineup that ASUS provided through the RoG series. And to beat them all comes the new Asus Rampage III Gene X58 Motherboard.

AMD has constantly tried to stay at the cutting edge of technology with all their past motherboard chipsets. The 785G, with robust features, great performance and integrated graphics, has been one such popular chipset. Yet, enthusiasts were looking forward to something that would deliver more power and more features than the 785G. And AMD has not disappointed! The new 890GX from AMD has retained all the features from the previous chipset and in addition includes the new USB 3.0 specification so that all the new USB 3.0 products could be operated at high speeds. ASUS has taken the technology of the 890GX chipset further, combined it with some exciting new features and come up with the ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 890GX Motherboard.

With the release of the highly-waited AMD 890GX chipset, manufacturers of motherboards are now scrambling to put out new models that will have this new chipset as their platform. This is not surprising considering that there have been rave reviews of the AMD 890GX chipset. One can easily expect that there may not be appreciable differences in the motherboards developed by different manufacturers but the few differences could have an enormous impact in a highly competitive market. One of the top motherboard manufacturers has brought out a new model that it claims has not one or two but three unique features that sets it apart from the other manufacturers. The Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H 890GX claims a 333 Onboard Acceleration – in reality this is a combination of USB 3.0, SATA III (6GB/s) and Power 3X.

AMD first released its 800-series chipsets aimed at the budget-conscious consumer. The 890GX-based motherboards could provide fairly decent integrated graphics along with SATA 6Gb/s support and CrossFire compatibility not to mention many other attractive features. However, many enthusiasts were looking for something a little more powerful that would help them in overclocking and not feel the heat. For these demanding customers, AMD came out with the 890FX chipset. Let us take a quick look at how these two chipsets compare.

There is no doubt that Intel created quite an impression with their Clarkdale and Arrandale series of desktop and notebook processors. Using the latest Nehalem architecture of Intel, these chips displayed many innovations, one of them being that they were one of the first to actually incorporate a GPU and a CPU on the processor itself. Intel Core i3 530 is another fast dual-core processor and its abilities have surprised most experts.

Many consumers might wonder why there is so much excitement about the new Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 Graphics Card, when there already appear to be more powerful players in the market in the form of the GeForce GTX 480 as well as the GTX 460. However, a closer look at the number of gamers or computer enthusiasts who actually use high-end resolutions such as 1680 X 1050 reveals that they form only a small fraction of the total number that buys Nvidia hardware. In fact, surveys have shown that if a large percentage of gamers – close to 60% - prefer Nvidia hardware, just a little more than 25% of them actually use very high resolutions.

There was great excitement when Nvidia launched the GTX 480 (codenamed GF100) but this was dampened somewhat by the actual performance of the card. It was undoubtedly fast but there were major issues regarding the amount of heat levels it generated, power it consumed and the noise it generated. Not surprisingly, the Nvidia GTX 480 did not quite catch the imagination of early adopters or extreme gamers.

For a long time now, many technology enthusiasts have been propagating the use of solid state disks or SSDS for a variety of reasons; speed and stability being the main ones. Though one might say that this technology is still in its early stages, there is enough evidence to prove that SSDs undoubtedly, speed up the working of the main operating system and the applications manifold. In fact, many suggest that the ideal combination would be to get a neat little SSD for the operating system and the main applications that you run, along with a large hard disk drive or HDD for mass storage purpose (like storing all your data, music and movies). This makes eminent sense and with this in mind we look at one of the most impressive SSD models to hit the market in a while – the G.SKILL Phoenix Pro Series FM-25S2S-120GBP2 Internal Solid State Drive.

When ATI Eyefinity Technology unveiled their revolutionary multi-display gaming technology last year, gamers were stunned and excited at the same time. At last, they could truly enjoy the true power of some of the latest games to hit the market. Though the idea of having multiple display gaming had been around for some time, there had been no single elegant solution till the advent of ATI Eyefinity Technology and the idea had just remained a distant dream. However, with the new technology, multi-display gaming is not only possible, it is highly accessible and easily manageable by mainstream gamers everywhere.