By Chris Scott Barr

Being a gamer, I tend to watch the release of new video cards rather carefully. Well in case you missed it, AMD released the first DirectX 11 cards last month. This allowed them to take the crown for fastest card and left Nvidia in the dust so to speak. Anyone that’s paid attention to these releases over the years will know that Nvida won’t be far behind with their own DX11 cards. In fact, we now know that they will be hitting stores before the end of the year.

Nvida has stated that they will have their latest cards, dubbed the GT300 out in time for ‘Black Friday.’ That gives AMD a 2 month head-start into the market. The big question is whether or not people are going to jump on AMD’s offerings, or wait to see what kind of performance the new GT300 cards show. Either way, it’s going to be an interesting holiday season.

[ Nvidia ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

By Shane McGlaun

I have a couple gaming PCs in my house and none of them can be called green. In fact, my personal gaming PC can double as a heater in the winter and after a few hours use in the summer it makes my office unbearably hot.

Maingear has announced a gaming PC for the eco conscious gamer called the Pulse. According to Maingear, the Pulse is the world’s greenest gaming PC and is the first upgradable NVIDIA Ion PC ever. The machine uses NVIDIA Ion graphics for power savings and can be upgraded with a GeForce 9800 ECO video card.

The 9800 ECO is similar to the 9800 GT but draws 40% less power than the normal 9800 GT. The computer starts at $799 and can be fitted with Intel Core 2 Duo processors or Intel Core 2 Quad parts. The machine can also be stuffed with up to 8GB of RAM and optional Blu-ray.

[ Maingear ]

By Shane McGlaun

A few years ago most computer users had probably never heard of MSI. After the netbook revolution began the MSI Wind surfaced as one of the better netbooks on the market and brought the brand to the masses.

MSI has unveiled a new and very slick looking new notebook computer with a 15.6-inch screen. If Darth Vader had a laptop the GX633 would be it with its brushed black aluminum and red trim. Also featured on the notebook are MSI’s turbo mode and ECO Engine.

Turbo mode overclocks the notebook when on AC power for more performance at the press of a button and the ECO Engine allows the user to tweak power settings by pressing a button for different uses. MSI uses a 15.6-inch LCD on the machine and it uses an AMD Turion X2 Ultra dual-core processor. Graphics are via the NVIDIA GeForce GT 130M and the machine has 4GB of RAM and up to 500GB of storage. Blu-ray is optional as well.

[ MSI ]

By Shane McGlaun

I am a big fan of PC gaming and I really like computer hardware as well. I am not really that into overclocking though, I prefer to get my video cards overclocked from the factory so I don’t worry about frying what I just spent big money on.

If you are into overclocking things like your video cards, MSI has the perfect new product for you called the N260GTX Lightning and Lightning Black Edition. Both of the cards feature solid caps for durability and a world’s first 10 phase PWM.

The PWM has 8 phases for the GPU and two for the memory allowing for more stability when overclocking. Both of the cards also double the standard GTX 260 RAM to 1792MB. The Black Edition has a touch sensitive Air Force panel that lets users overclock the video card from the front of their computer as needed. Pricing and availability are unknown.

[ MSI ]

by Shane McGlaun

I am a big fan of PC gaming and if you have ever compared graphics on games available on PC and console systems when the PC is well equipped, it is easy to see the graphics on PC are much better. The rub for many PC gamers is that the hardware costs much more than buying a game console. The video cards alone often cast more than an Xbox and a Wii put together.

NVIDIA has announced a new mid-range video card called the GTX 275 that puts good performance into the hands of gamers looking to spend about $250. Sure, that’s still more than a Wii, but you can do so much more on a computer than you can on the Wii. The GTX 275 slots into the lineup between the GTX 260 and GTX 285 in price and performance.

The card offers 240 processing cores running at 1404MHz, 80 texture processing units and a 448-bit memory interface with 896MB framebuffer. The card is NVIDIA PhysX and CUDA compliant and supports Windows 7. NVIDIA 3D Vision stereoscopic gaming is supported as well. The exact availability date isn’t offered, NVIDIA just says that the card will be available on or before April 14.

[ NVIDIA ]