If you respect yourself as a gamer, you know that the best mouse out there is not enough to keep you on the cutting edge. You really need a feature-packed keyboard to go along with the blazing fast mouse. Razer is well known for its gaming products and, to go with their top of the line Lachesis laser mouse, they designed the Lycosa keyboard. Lycosa further develops the best things that Razer put into the previous Tarantula keyboard. You can now execute more complex maneuvers with customizable key configurations.

Razer Lycosa is designed to offer comfort even when it is intensively used. With its non-slip rubber finish, the keyboard offers optimum tactile comfort so you can forget about that annoying slip-ups. The blue backlight illumination helps players when there’s little light in the room. Optionally, you can light only the WASD cluster. Furthermore, the macro capabilities let you program combination of keys that would be triggered at the touch of only one key.

Here are some more highlights for the Lycosa keyboard:

• Slim keycap structure with Hyperesponse™ technology
• TouchPanel™ easy access media keys
• Gaming mode option for deactivation of the Windows key
• 10 customizable software profiles with on-the-fly switching
• 1000Hz Ultrapolling™ / 1ms response time
• Earphone-out and microphone-in jacks
• Detachable wrist rest
• One integrated USB extension port

Online retailers have the Lycosa listed for about $80.

This world is moving faster with each day, and when talking about computers, higher clock speeds require better cooling. One of these days, I was talking with a friend of mine about its next upgrade - he's going to get an Intel E8400 CPU, and intends to push it somewhere past 4GHz, on water cooling. We didn't talk about the video card he should use yet, especially since he doesn't have much time left for games, but I am sure the BFG 9800 GTX w/ ThermoIntelligence Copper water block would be a great choice for him, and maybe even for some of you, as we're going to see right away...


As you can see in the image above, this card looks great, and it won't take up too much space inside your case, either. The water block on the BFG NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX H2OC 512MB graphics card is a custom one co-developed by BFG and Danger Den, and you can bet they overclocked it to the highest stable level, but you can always try to go higher, of course!

"With the addition of our custom high-performance water block, we’ve been able to safely overclock the 9800 GTX to an unprecedented 780MHz on the core clock, and 1944MHz on the shader clock. Each card is hand-built by a trained BFG technician using Arctic Silver® thermal compound, and is exceptionally cool and totally silent—delivering up to a 28°C lower GPU operating temperature than reference cooling solutions," said John Malley, senior director of marketing for BFG Technologies.

Since I am sure you were wondering about it, here you have the frequencies:
- Core Clock: 780MHz (vs. 675MHz standard)
- Shader Clock: 1944MHz (vs. 1688MHz standard)
- Memory Data Rate: 2320MHz (vs. 2200MHz standard)

Unfortunately, the BFG NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX H2OC 512MB graphics card is available only in limited quantities at leading online retail outlets throughout North America and Europe, so you shouldn't think to much about it - grab it or miss it!

Getting cheap GPUs or CPUs and overclocking them afterwards, thanks to their huge overclocking potential, has been a nice budget trick for some time now. Most of the overcloking world records have been achieved using mid-range products and some manufacturers even started to encourage this sort of performance improvement by introducing special mechanisms that simplify the whole process. Even the GPU integrators like to show off some cool boosters on their cards, and to sustain this further, MSI comes along with a beefed-up GeForce N9600GT Diamond graphics card.

The new card was demonstrated at the ECOlution press conference in Taipei and the audience saw that MSI added a bright red overclock button to make overclocking a stroll in the park for non-experimented people who’d like to push their cards to the limits. When pressed, the graphics core and memory clock speeds are overclocked, and the voltage increased.

To further increase the overclocking potential, MSI added 2GB of GDDR3 memory to the Diamond version which also comes with a whole bunch of connectors: HDMI, DisplayPort, dual DVI and optical audio output. The card will also be bundled with the Dr.MOS software that monitors real-time performance and cooler speeds.

Although the card is going to be released in June, there still are some minor problems to fix. In SLI dual graphics mode the button won’t work, but MSI are keen to point out that it’s definitely on their to-do list for the near future. Moreover, we don’t know yet how far the overclocking capabilities will go. The card is expected to cost around $250.

Alienware and Voodoo sure put together some of the best custom-made gaming rigs out there, but it looks like these two will have some new competitors. We know there are several smaller companies that specialize in custom-made PCs in the US, like Falcon Northwest, and a few days ago I told you that even Acer has decided to step into this arena. Realizing this market could bring fair incomes, it’s time for Diamond to show us its latest PC rig. Diamond Multimedia, the good ol’ sound and graphics card company.

The cool looking gaming rig is not assembled by Diamond Multimedia. Diamond just provided a proprietary Radeon 3870 X2 graphics card for the system, but they also took care of the promotion. Responsible for the customization is Smooth Creations, a rather new system builder from the US. Smooth Creations is well known for its custom painted chassis and this system is certainly no exception.

Apart from the powerful Diamond Radeon 3870 X2 card, the system integrates a Phenom 9750 CPU, an AMD 700-SB600 based Abit AX78 motherboard, 4GB of Kingston RAM, a 500GB Western Digital hard drive and Coolit Systems Eliminator CPU water cooling system. Diamond and Smooth Creations though that hardcore gamers could go ahead and add a second dual-GPU card, so they included a Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1250 power supply to keep everything under control when power-hungry components are overclocked. The gaming rig is claimed to score an impressive 14,019 points in 3Dmark06.

You can order one of these monsters directly from the Smooth Creations’ website for $2,262.92.

Despite the fact ATI is still far from having a clear lead in the discrete graphics market (they don't even hold the first position, anyway), they always managed to arrive first in some areas - first cards using GDDR4, then first cards with DirectX 10.1 hardware support, and now even the first cards with GDDR5 support! The HD 3xxx generation of video cards is still pretty fresh, but it seems we already have the specifications of the upcoming goodies, the HD 4870 and HD 4850!


Regarding the standard dimensions, it's enough to say both cards will have the same length, and that is 23 cm(9 inch). UVD 2 promises to allow hardware decoding for Blu-Ray 1080p content, and even beyond, while the on-chip HDCP feature allows easy playback of HDCP protected content. At last, there's the HDMI support we're already used to, but wait and see the real goodies, because we're just getting started...

The memory to be used with these cards is going to be GDDR3/GDDR5, probably depending on the manufacturer of a certain model. The DirectX support is still at 10.1, probably waiting for NVIDIA to catch up(;)). The 256-bit memory interface isn't something out of this world, but dynamic geometry acceleration and game physics processing sound really great, together with the 24X custom filter anti-aliasing.

No, I have no idea about pricing yet, but rumors say that the R700-based cards, including the HD 4870 and HD 4850, should arrive in August. If this proves to be true or just a rumor, that's what remains to be seen, but you'd better start saving now, because I have the feeling we're going to have a 9800GTX killer from ATI for less than $250!!!