After our recent review of the ASUS HD 6970 and seeing the lackluster results that we were presented with, we decided to set out and give the 6970 another shot. Was it just another bad driver from AMD that seemed to have crippled the 6970, or was it in fact just the card itself that wasn’t meeting [...]

Introduction If you haven’t already seen our complete Asus Maximus IV Extreme (MIVE) motherboard review, Parts ONE and TWO, you’re missing out. Part 1 covered synthetic testing with the i7 2600K CPU at 5.1GHz to give an idea of the power that this platform contains. Part 2 was a full blown comparison between X58 and [...]

Introduction For years, I have always been most drawn to value and mid range components with good overclocking potential, in order to extract high end performance, for a fraction of the cost. Having strayed into the extreme end of the spectrum, this often is no longer a viable option for me, as the high end [...]

The codename “Cayman” represents the 6900 series of cards from AMD. The refined GPU boasts of more performance per mm², new and improved image quality features, enhanced multimedia acceleration and next-generation display technology with HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2. It should also be pointed out that with the new 6 series launch, there is a new [...]

Many users are searching around the net these days looking for advice on how to overclock their new systems, but aren’t sure where to start. To help everyone out, I decided a how-to guide was in order. Searching around forums can be confusing and intimidating. There are so many people willing to give advice, but who can you trust? It’s hard to know, and I have seen many users sent on wild goose chases because they follow advice that doesn’t solve or even address their specific problem. I have also seen too much trial and error overclocking, and unless you get lucky, it tends to be far too time consuming and frustrating. What I have attempted to do is create a very simple three step guide for overclocking Sandy Bridge based CPUs. If you want to continue searching out other opinions, please consider each suggestion with caution. Some will undoubtedly be great, while some will not.

Another addition to the MSI Lightning line is the GTX 480, which we will be reviewing today. MSI has slightly overclocked the GTX 480 Lightning by 50 Mhz on the core and 75 Mhz on the memory. This is also not a reference designed card from MSI. They have installed improved voltage controller circuitry and [...]

I was really surprised to see what these lovely sticks did today. This is the Mushkin Ridgeback 1600MHz 6-8-6-24 kit. On AMD, it is extremely difficult to run any ram above 2000MHz. Well today I broke a personal record and clocked these sticks all the way up to 2240MHz 8-10-6-15-1T. I used my trusty Gigabyte [...]

Earlier this month, NVIDIA released their new powerhouse card, the GeForce GTX 580. ASUS has sent us their GTX 580 to put through our strenuous suite of testing. The reference design used by ASUS was somewhat surprising as they will typically use their own custom PCB. The GTX 580 is supposed to bring improvements in power consumption [...]