Zotac is known for overclocked video cards (mostly NVIDIA-based) and, although the company is relatively new to the market, it seems it’s selling pretty well. To mark this achievement, Zotac now aims to diversify its product array. So, instead of presenting yet another oc-ed card at the Games Convention this year, Zotac came with a sort of innovative device designed for overclockers.

According to Fudzilla, the Nitro overclocking device allows gamers to overclock their cards in real time, without having to use the infamous al-tab key combination and leave their games. The overclocking procedure is dead simple: you just press one of three keys located at the front of the device. Those three buttons will allow you to overclock the GPU, memory and even the shaders clock.

Zotac Nitro can also act as a hardware monitor, showing the current clocks of the card, its temperature and the fan speed. The product showed at GC ’08 was not finalized. The final version could also include a customizable display screen at the bottom part of the LCD screen.

Apparently, Nitro will be released in October and will work with Zotac’s cards, possibly with other NVIDIA-powered cards. At first, the device is going to sold separately, but Zotac says they could later bundle it with premium graphics packages. Nitro is set to be available for $99.

The new Intel Nehalem CPUs will fit the current-gen mobos, although, in order to get the most out of them, you’ll have to switch to a X58-powered motherboard. Asus and Gigabyte have already announced their upcoming models which should be launching at the same time the first Core i7 CPUs hit the market. MSI is also preparing an X58 model and Syndrome-OC have some exclusive info on this one.

The mobo is known as the Eclipse X58 and from what we can see in the pictures provided by the French site, MSI still has to add several things to the design before they actually get to commercialize it. The official specs are not yet out so what we see in the pictures is prone to suffer some slight modifications. Thus, it appears that the current layout includes three X16 PCIe, with the bottom two ones sharing bandwidth via a digital switch. There also are two PCIe x1 slots and two PCI slots on top of that. Since Nehalem offers support for triple channel DDR3 configurations, the MSI comes with six DDR3 memory slots that can be stuffed with up to 24GB of memory.

MSI included its latest DrMOS technology on this board, while the MOSFETs have been redesigned, coming now with a 10 phase PWM. Also present on the board are the Power, Reset, DLED and Turbo buttons, which hint at a overcloker-oriented solution. The Turbo button may instantly overclock your CPU or it could be enabling the Core i7 Turbo feature that Intel announced during IDF earlier this week.

Other features include a CMOS reset button, two PS/2 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA ports and a FireWire connector. There are no audio connectors, which could mean that MSI is going to include a separate PCIe sound card, possibly and X-Fi one. An outstanding feature is represented by the inclusion of no less than 10 SATA ports, with four of these connected to a third party controller.

More info can be found on the S-OC site.

Several days ago I was telling you about OCZ and its new PSU lineup, but that’s not all OCZ got to update. In a recent event, OCZ has also presented the second generation of its gaming mice - the Dominatrix.

The Fudzilla guys were present and managed to play around for a while with the new mouse. Their first impression was that the new Dominatrix could be regarded as a much more serious gaming mouse than the previously released OCZ Equalizer. However, OCZ claims that the new mouse is rather a budget gamer type as it comes with exchangeable weights, on-board memory for multiple button schemes and the DPI of 2000 in standard mode or up-to 3200 DPI which can be defined by the user. The design and the rest of the functions seem to be standard with most of the budget mice out there, although the mouse again features the blue and black combination of colors which was also present on the OCZ Equalizer. Looks like OCZ is trying to build a signature color scheme for their mice.

OCZ didn’t exactly mention when the new mouse is going to be released, but we already know it’s going to be priced at around €30.

If you really want to build a CrossfireX configuration with Radeon HD 4870X2 cards, than you have to consider replacing your PC case. Not that th cards are quite long and might not fit the case, but they sure require a powerful PSU and as many case fans as you can get, since the GPU cores work best at 90 degrees Celsius. Why not go for a full-tower case? From Cooler Master, that is.

We know Cooler Master has some top cooling solutions, however its high-end products are sometimes outperformed by competitors. With the new HAF 932 case, Cooler Master hopes it can regain supremacy on high-end PC case market, and the features included in the new case show that those hopes aren’t in vain at all.

Many PC cases tend to forget about the airflow aspect, but for the new HAF 932, the airflow issue is top priority. Fudzilla informs that, In order to maximize the airflow, Cooler Master has decided to include steel meshed vents which are vertically stretched over the whole front panel. These meshed panels are fitted with some of the biggest fans I’ve seen on a case - three massive 230mm fans on the top, the side and the front of the chassis.

Cooler Master claims that the HAF 932 is capable of maintaining low temperatures in any hardware configuration you might imagine. Moreover, if air cooling seems a bit too outdated and inefficient (noisy maybe?) for you, HAF 932 can also be upgraded for water cooling by adding an internal radiator and routing the kit through the pre-drilled holes on the rear.

Other outstanding features include logical cable routing for improved airflow, support for four 200mm/120mm fans on the side panel, enough room for a dual power supply configuration, removable HDD racks, easily accessible liquid coolant fill port and many others which will be revealed by launch time. That’s when we’ll find out about the price, as well.

AMD introduced a couple of months ago the Cinema 2.0 program which will allow game developers and film producers to include photorealistic characters and objects in their works without the need of render farms. Analysts said that photorealism in CGI would be attained in about 5 years, but AMD/ATI has now teamed up with Image Metrics and claim that they are able to render photorealistic characters and environments and integrate them seamlessly into games and movies. First, take a look at what happened at the AMD conference in New York a week ago.





Now, let’s take a closer look at that Emily clip.

As you can read from the clip itself, Emily was produced using a new modeling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated. The Emily you see in the clip is practically the digitized version of actress Emily O’Brien. According to TimesOnline, this is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

The team at Image Metrics has also taken care of the facial animations in Grand Theft Auto computer game. The basic aim of the company is to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical, but without using motion capture devices. So that’s how they came with the Light Stage superscanner you can see in the first two clips.

OK, we have the technology to make photorealistic characters in upcoming videogames, but what kind of supercomputer do we need to actually play at smooth frame-rates? AMD claims we only need a decent quad-core CPU coupled with their latest Radeon HD 4870X2 graphics cards, which can process up to 2.4 TFLOPS.

I reckon we won’t get to see characters as detailed as these before DX11 gets introduced later next year. They will double the processing power, anyway, but AMD representatives say that the line between what is real and what is computer generated will still remain visible up until 2020.