Loyd Case

Are you a gamer with a big electricity bill every month? Are you looking to build a great gaming PC that doesn't sound like a jet engine every time you start playing Diablo III? This build guide is for you.

Imagine a PC that will hit 60 frames per second running most games on today’s 1080p displays. Now imagine that system idling at under 70 watts. Even under the heaviest load, it consumes just 336 watts. That’s 336 watts generated when the system is running an eight-core instance of Prime 95 while simultaneously running 3DMark 2011 at 2560 by 1600 resolution with 8x antialiasing on--a far heavier load than most games will produce.

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.

Virtual machines is one way enterprise IT departments addresses the issue of security when users want to use their own platforms. Virtualized solutions like Citrix and VMWare allow users to run approved applications. These applications run in a server in the local or internet cloud.

However, some power users, including heavy users of graphics and design applications need access to more robust graphics than most virtual solutions provide. The latest versions have allowed high performance GPUs to be virtualized, but it was an expensive solution, since each user still needed a dedicated GPU.

Nvidia launched its latest line of Tesla GPU compute engines at the company’s Graphics Technology Conference in San Jose today. One model shipping immediately is based on the existing GK104 chip used in the recently released GTX 680. Dubbed the Tesla K10, the board delivers as much as 4.6 teraflops of single precision floating point performance, roughly three times the single precision FP of the older, Fermi-based Tesla. The card can also handle an aggregate memory bandwidth of 320GB per second. This board is targeted towards oil exploration, signal processing and seismic processing applications.

Nvidia’s GTX 670 arrives hot on the heels of the super-expensive, dual-GPU GTX 690. The 690’s rarified price--a cool grand, if you can find it--makes it of limited interest to most gamers. The GTX 670, on the other hand, offers performance as good or better than last year’s high-end GTX 580 while consuming much less power. At roughly $399, it’s still not a budget card, but it’s certainly affordable for users looking for a robust PC gaming experience on HD-resolution displays, but unwilling to shell out the $500 or more necessary for its high-end cousin, the GTX 680.

Let’s take a quick look at the speeds and feeds for the GTX 670, and see just how it’s different from its pricier cousin. Note that clock frequencies are for the reference board. Shipping retail boards may differ in clock frequencies, depending on the design of the board and what the company shipping the board wants to support.

If you've ever opened a PC case and stared inside, or looked at a bare motherboard, you may be taken aback by the number and variety of connectors, pins, and slots that exist on a modern PC motherboard. In this guide I'll identify some of the most common (and a few uncommon) connectors on motherboards used in most home PCs. I won't cover server- or workstation-class boards here, just what you might find in a typical midrange or high-end home PC.

For a similar discussion of the ports that you're likely to encounter on the exterior of a PC case, see "Multiple Ports on Your PC: What Do They Do for You?"

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.

Intel's newest generation of desktop and mobile CPUs, code-named Ivy Bridge, debut today. In our tests, the chips showed moderate overall performance gains and substantial graphics improvement, all while sipping significantly less power.

Built in the company’s 22-nanometer, tri-gate manufacturing process, the new CPU contains 1.4 billion transistors in a scant 160mm² die area. The CPU includes the redesigned Intel HD 4000 graphics processing unit, which delivers the best integrated graphics performance we've ever seen. In fact, in our tests, HD 4000 graphics blew away the performance of an entry-level discrete graphics card.

The most impressive feature of Intel's new Ivy Bridge CPU is the graphics portion of the chip. The HD 4000 GPU built into these processors is a huge improvement over the chips found in current-generation Sandy Bridge products, and is fast enough to make inexpensive entry-level graphics cards obsolete. You'll still want a good discrete graphics cards for serious gaming, but our benchmarks show that there's just no reason to buy a $50 graphics card anymore.

This stands in contrast to the processor's general compute performance, which is just slightly faster than current Intel CPUs. (For more, take a look at our testing of overall Ivy Bridge performance.) Ivy Bridge is more energy-efficient, which will be especially useful in laptops, but the most noticeable change in performance will be felt when you run 3D graphics applications.

The Acer Timeline M3 is a study in polar opposites. Its thin, elegant chassis and superb performance for its class suggest that the M3 might be a true category leader, but an painfully poor LCD panel prevents the Acer from achieving that goal.

At 4.5 pounds, the Timeline M3 is very light for a 15-inch laptop, and even with the 65W power brick factored in, it weighs only a scant 5.25 pounds. Acer dubs this machine an Ultrabook, which just goes to show how vague that moniker is. Still the M3 is sleek and quite light for so large a laptop.

First impressions are important, and the HP Envy 14 Spectre makes a great one. The glossy, glass-topped display bezel and keyboard tray look elegant and understated, and the uniform, thin chassis gives the laptop a sleek appearance. Second impressions are a little less positive, though: When you pick up the Spectre, it seems heftier than you’d expect. That’s because HP covered it in impact-resistant glass, similar to what you might see on a high-end smartphone. That pretty glass top is a fingerprint magnet, too.

Encapsulating the monitor bezel in glass, however, allowed HP to build a 14-inch display into tight quarters--the Specre offers essentially the same width and length as most 13.3-inch Ultrabooks do. HP took advantage of the bigger display area, packing in a 1600-by-900-pixel native-resolution LED-backlit IPS panel. It looks great, and it offers superb video playback fidelity. Rather than matching the tapered shape of many competitors, the Spectre is just under 0.9 inch thin (barely meeting the Ultrabook specs that Intel set) throughout, which makes the system seem somehow larger than other laptops in its class. It also weighs more than many Ultrabooks (a spot-on 4 pounds without the power brick), partly due to the glass surface and partly because of the larger LCD panel.

Contemporary browsers are much more than just a window into the World Wide Web: Browser developers have turned the software into sophisticated application platforms in their own right. But browsers are not the same as hardware platforms--rather, they function as virtual environments accessible from a variety of platforms. For example, you can have Google’s Chrome browser on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Android devices.

The current set of Web browsers--Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Safari--support assorted standards, including HTML 5, the latest version of HyperText Markup Language. HTML 5 is an ambitious extension of HTML, incorporating an array of features. The standard is still in flux, however, and the World Wide Web Consortium hasn’t finalized it yet. Some of the important new features in HTML 5 include canvas rendering, tighter integration of SVG (scalable vector graphics), and video and audio tags. These new elements are specifically designed to make it easier for Web developers to present and manage multimedia content. What HTML 5 currently doesn’t have is a built-in standard way to handle 3D graphics.