What’s the best gaming rig out there? Well, if you have enough money, you can go ahead and build your own atom-smashing-data-crunching-powerhouse. Or you could check out what companies like Alienware have in store for you. Among these companies, Asus is quite a new-comer, but it can easily stand out with the Ares line-up. Along with the GTX 200 series launch, Asus thought it would be a good opportunity to announce its new Ares “ridonk” system.

Why “ridonk?” First of all, the new Ares CG6155 is integrating a GTX 280 Tri-SLI setup. Immediately following is the impressive power-related part: “the ultimate gaming powerhouse" features no less than 2 kW of power with its "dual power supply design."

At the heart of the new Ares lies an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 factory overclocked to 4.0GHz, thoroughly supported by an Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and up to 8GB of dual-channel DDR3 1333MHz memory. Optionally,, you can equip the monster with up to 4TB of HDD storage, Blu-ray drive, specially designed gaming keyboard, Logitech's G9 mouse and a headset.

Asus is pretty good at leaving people craving for more, without specifying availability dates and pricing, and this case makes no exception. You don’t really expect it to cost a little bit over you average system now, do you? Additionally, in case you plan to buy this behemoth, you might also consider the acquisition of a tachyonic field generator to provide enough continuous power for this rig.

Pretty soon, the world as we know it is going to end. This has nothing to do with any natural disaster, because I am talking about the computer hardware landscape, and not the Earth. Why? Well, according to ATI's senior VP of marketing, Richard Bergman, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 GPU is the last high-end monolithic "megachip." So... no more single-chip GPUs??? Good question!

According to EETimes , Mr. Bergman said "I predict our competitor will go down the same path for its next GPU once they see this. They have made their last monolithic GPU."

Looking at it closer, he may be right - NVIDIA's GTX 200 GPU has a die size of almost 600mm², because its dimensions are 24X24mm, while the 55nm GPUs from ATI are smaller, with only 16X16mm. The catch? We'll leave power consumption aside, and mention one big factor - pricing, because the less chips fit on a wafer, the more expensive is to produce them, so that's why we'll soon get to see incredible performance from ATI for about $300(I hardly wait!).

In the end, it seems AMD doesn't need to go with large monolithic GPUs. If they may not get the best monolithic GPU for desktop computers, which may not be true anyway, because the current test results look amazing, ATI will end up with the most powerful GPU ready to use in notebooks, while there seems to be "no way this new Nvidia core will be in notebooks this fall," according to Bergman.

...what else should I say? I just have to ask what do you think - will NVIDIA shrink the die size and go with the flow, or keep hanging to those large DirectX 10 GPUs and DDR3, while ATI already stepped into the DirectX 10.1 and GDDR5 era?

The battle for desktop computer graphics is set to begin once again, but this time, there’s going to be a price war as well. NVIDIA has recently launched the GTX 280 and GTX 260 cards, and we can already spot a €283.89 GTX 260 version coming from Asus. Of course, these are not yet available, but by the time ATI volumes in its new HD 48XX cards, things should be getting tighter. However, ATI is very proficient at price wars, as the company started this nasty game with RV670, Radeon 3870 and 3850 cards. On the other hand, NVIDIA learns pretty fast and it’s willing to put some early pressure on the Canadians.

Fudzilla estimates that the Radeon HD 4870, which is supposed to cost $329 at launch, will probably drop to $299 very fast and at the same time NVIDIA will go ahead and slash prices for the GTX 260, way under the initial $399. Further speculations point out that the GTX 260 will end up costing around $349 in about two weeks, putting pressure on its direct contender, the Radeon HD 4870.

Moreover, NVIDIA plans to cut prices for the 9800GTX to under $299 to complicate things a bit more for ATI’s Radeon HD 4850. Tough calls for ATI, but all this price war is going to prove beneficial either way for us end users.

Tired of your old video card? When talking about video cards, it seems "old" means less time with each year that passes, even less. Recently, NVIDIA and ATI are releasing new video card generations at a rate that's absolutely insane, and only a small part of the large computer users crowd can keep up with this. The good part is that, for most people, buying a card that was high-end less than a year ago becomes more and more affordable, and today I will tell you about the EVGA e-GeForce 8800GT 512MB, an excellent addition to any average gaming computer.

When looking at the NVIDIA 8800 cards available, we have the 8800 GT, the more powerful 8800 GTS and 8800 GTX, and the "king of the hill," the (once) almighty 8800 Ultra. The catch is that while the 8800 GT delivers outstanding gaming performance for everyone, the 8800 GTX and Ultra have a much lower performance/price ratio, so that's why I have chosen this card today. Regarding the producer, I am sure that, for most of you, EVGA needs no introduction, and for the others, it's enough to say that you'll get lifetime warranty for any card you buy from them!

Ok, so what's so special about the EVGA e-GeForce 8800GT 512MB, after all? Obviously, there's the lifetime warranty, and the reliability backed up by it, but other than these two, you'll get a video card based on the NVIDIA 8800 GT reference design, powered by the G92 GPU, of course.

Using the world's first PCI Express 2.0 GPU, the EVGA e-GeForce 8800GT 512MB has a GPU clocked at 600MHz, 512MB of DDR3 memory running at 1.8GHz, with a 256 bit bus, 112 stream processors, and a bandwidth of no less than 57.6GB/s.

When talking about support for latest technologies, I am sure you'll be just fine with DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0, OpenGL 2.0, as well as the chance of setting up two of these cards in a SLI configuration. Even more, the EVGA e-GeForce 8800GT 512MB features NVIDIA's Quantum Effects technology for physics processing, as well as the second generation PureVideo HD technology, able to greatly enhance HD video.

If you want to use two monitors on this card, there's no problem, because the Dual DVI-I connectors are all you need. As most cards manufactured in the last year, the EVGA e-GeForce 8800GT 512MB was labelled as "built for Microsoft Windows Vista," but that's not the best part of it...

At last, you should know that these cards have a very good overclocking potential, and the price is simply amazing, because you can find the EVGA e-GeForce 8800GT 512MB for prices as low as $159, and there is still enough room for them to become even cheaper, with the NVIDIA 9xxx series unleashed on all fronts!

The PCI (Peripeharal Component Interconnect) standard was created in 1993 and it was quickly adopted by motherboard manufacturers as a reliable solution to boost the performance of video cards in particular. Then 3D accelerators appeared and the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) was created in order to offer even more performance gains for the graphics cards. Apparently, the last AGP standard, the 8X, hit a bottleneck and PCI made a surprise return in the form of PCI Express in 2004. All of these standards were created by Intel. Although some say there isn’t much of a performance gain over the AGP 8X with the first PCI-e and even the second version of this standard, Intel is willing to change this perception and plans to release the third generation some time in 2010.

The good news is that the existing PCI Express 2.0 hardware will still work once motherboards switch to the PCI Express 3.0 standard. PCI-SIG chairman Al Yanes has recently disclosed more details about the PCI-e 3.0 connector, which should be able to manage speeds as fast as 8.0 gigatransfers per second

Yanes confirmed that the only real difference between PCI Express 2.0 and 3.0 has to do with the electrical specifications. The actual hardware itself will not see any major optimization, with PCs using one socket and servers two.

However, the 3.0 specs will be decided only by the end of 2009, with testing scheduled for the second half of 2010.