Jason Cross

If you think people couldn’t stop talking about Ultrabooks a few months ago, just wait until June. That’s when Intel will make available the dual-core version of the Ivy Bridge CPUs, ushering in a whole new wave of slim laptops. One such Ultrabook will be the new Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A, successor to the Zenbook that launched with the first Ultrabooks at the end of last year. We liked that system a lot, save for a few issues. With the Zenbook Prime UX31A, Asus seeks to address some of those.

I got my hands on a pre-production system that is nearly up to the quality standards of the final shipping units, or so I’m told. It’s really very nice. Much like the original Zenbook, it’s all metal with a very solid and rigid feel. The 13.3-inch UX31A weighs a little less than 3 pounds, and has a very small and light power adaptor. The left side provides access to a USB 3.0 port, headset jack, and SD card slot. The right has the power plug, another USB 3.0 port, mini-VGA, and mini-HDMI. As with other exceptionally thin Ultrabooks, you’ll have to use the included mini-to-VGA dongle to plug into a legacy display or projector. Asus supplies a USB-to-Ethernet adaptor for those needing wired connections, but the dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n radio should provide good wireless throughput.

Remember a couple weeks ago when we discussed Ivy Bridge CPUs running a lot hotter than Sandy Bridge CPUs when overclocked? Well Loyd Case found a site that did a little experimentation and solved the mystery. (Hint: it's the awful thermal compound Intel uses.)

We're joined by Facebook expert Mark Sullivan to talk about the impact of Facebook's IPO, which should happen today. I think we're all in agreement that the company is way overvaulued, and will start snapping up other companies when the big flood of money comes in. With any luck, they'll avoid Yahoo's object lesson in how not to spend money.

I lot of headlines this week proclaimed that Intel's new Ivy Bridge processors actually run a lot hotter than the Sandy Bridge processors they're set to replace. The truth is not that simple. We'll break it down for you in the podcast.

We also discuss the merits of Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, which is essentially two GeForce GTX 680 cards for the price of...well...two.

Though the Radeon HD 7750 is meant to be an upgrade that anyone can afford, and to be a GPU that works in any PC, the faster 7770 model reviewed here has some restrictions. While it runs modern games 25 percent to 30 percent faster, it also requires enough room in your system for a double-wide card and a six-pin PCIe power plug, which not all computers have. It’s fast enough for modern games, but just barely.

Nobody likes spending more than they have to, but serious PC gamers will probably want to pony up more than the $139 asking price for the Radeon HD 7770. There’s a vast difference in performance between graphics cards priced around the $200 level and this one. The 7770 is even a fair bit slower than its closest competitor in price, the GeForce GTX 560. We can look at an individual game, like Crysis 2, and see that the Nvidia card is a good 20 percent faster.

Make no mistake: The AMD Radeon HD 7750 is not a fast graphics card. It will not play the latest games at a smooth frame rate at full 1080p resolution with all the details turned up. You’ll have to reduce the resolution and dial down the features in hot new 3D games to achieve good performance. Still, it’s a nice improvement over integrated graphics, and you can it add it to almost any PC.

With the introduction of Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors, new computers really don’t need entry-level, $50-to-$70 graphics cards anymore. But what if you have an older system with less-capable integrated graphics? Though the Radeon HD 7750 isn’t a barn-burner, it is a good step up from integrated graphics, and it does offer some advantages. At around $109 (as of April 23, 2012), it’s inexpensive. The card is physically short and doesn’t require any external power, so you can plug it into just about any desktop system. All you need is an empty PCIe slot--no need to check how powerful your power supply is or anything.

Wondering which carrier to tie yourself to for the next two-year contract? If speed is a factor, you'd definitely want to check out our 3G and 4G wireless speed tests. On the podcast, Mark Sullivan gives us the lowdown - which carriers are fastest in the real world, and how we tested to determine that.

Ed Albro also discusses the four versions of Windows 8. In realitiy, there are only two you will ever have to choose from, plus one that will come preinstalled on ARM-based tablets and another that is for big volume enterprise customers that develop custom deployments.

Only members of a small class of PC enthusiasts will spend $500 on a graphics card. You have to have pretty stringent requirements--perhaps a large high-res monitor or two or a taste for extreme image quality--to make use of that sort of performance. Most modern games run well enough on a graphics card costing half as much. But if you're not satisfied with "well enough," the GeForce GTX 680 may be for you. Among expensive graphics cards, it takes the crown for delivering the best performance, with excellent features and very impressive energy efficiency.

The GeForce GTX 680 is Nvidia's first card to incorporate a new graphics chip architecture, code-named Kepler. It's similar to the Fermi architecture found in the GeForce GTX 580 and the GTX 480 before it. Nvidia has taken the fundamental principles of the Fermi architecture and reworked it for greater efficiency, improving performance per watt and performance per square millimeter. The Fermi chips are also manufactured on a smaller 28-nanometer process, whereas the GTX 580 was made on a 40nm process. The 28nm process means lower power draw, higher clock speeds, and more-densely-packed transistors. In fact, Kepler is considerably smaller than Fermi at less than 300mm² (full-size Fermi chips are 520mm²).