We use computers on a daily basis, at home, at work or while traveling to access the Internet, play computer games, watch movies and so much more. Yet, most of the times if not ever, we never give a second thought to just what our computer is made off. You know it contains hardware components but what exactly they are, how are they called or what is their function within our personal computer are usually questions without answers or with vague ones. I'm going to be talking bellow above about the hardware components for a personal computer that are essential to it:

1. The PC Monitor is the device on which you visualize movies, games, and programs like word editors and Internet browsers. Older models featured a Cathode Ray Tube (hence the name CRT) with controls housed in a plastic case. Their diagonal ranged from 13 to 21 inches. Today LCD monitors have flooded the market, providing wide screen image display and smaller weight compared to their older counterparts, the CRT computer monitors. Most monitors feature controls used to adjust contrast and brightness while others have options to move the image left, right, up or down. CRT monitors also have a degauss option which can be used when the image isn't displayed correctly.

When it comes to picture quality we basically speak of resolution and refresh rate. Resolution is measured in pixels and is connected with how well our monitor displays images. Refresh rate refers to how often your image quality gets refresh. The recommended quality is usually 60 Hz, but since there are so many types of monitors it is best to consult the monitor's manual for the right value. Bear in mind that using a different value other the one recommended in your manual can damage your monitor.

2. The motherboard is the board that contains the CPU, the memory, BIOS, CMOS, Video devices, sound devices, storage devices, chipsets, etc. together with the connectors and logic circuits that tie all parts of your PC together. Together with the wiring in your computer it resembles to the network of veins in your body.

3. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is considered by some to be a computer inside another computer. This isn't to far from the truth since the processor manages the huge number of instructions given to him by the other computer hardware components similar to how the computer manages the instructions you give it by using external input devices like the keyboard and mouse.

4. The "hard drive" is a storage device with one or more metal disks (called platters), arranged on a spindle, one above the other; with a read/write head (often on an arm that can be moved to a specific point on the recording surfaces. This read/write machine can probably be called the first true 'robot'. Hard drive units are sealed hermetically to keep out dust. Even the smallest particle of dust can damage the platters so it's recommended you don't open them. The most recent hard drives can have up to 1.5 Terra Bytes.

5. The video card is an essential part of any computer. It provides your computer to play video files, computer games and other things. Without a video card to convert the binary code from the CPU and transmit in a graphic way to your monitor you wouldn't be able to watch anything. In some cases the video card can be integrated on the motherboard.

6. The sound card is very much like the video card, with the small difference that instead of converting CPU binary code and send it to your monitor it uses a different type of conversion allowing you to hear sounds in your computer speakers.

7. Over the years the CD-ROM drive and the DVD-ROM have proven to be essential to a personal computer. Information transfer had at its heart this hardware component. In recent years, with the development of the Internet, flash drives and portable hard drives, CD and DVD-ROMs have started to register a slow decline from the information transfer market. They will still be around for some years to come since they are the backbone of the music and movies commercialization.

8. As a last entry to the list of computer hardware components I'll add a duo of hardware parts, namely the keyboard and the mouse without which you couldn't control you computer. That is until technologies similar to the touch screen will appear on the market, but this will undoubtedly take some time.

2007 saw quite a few overclocking records. I remember seeing a Core CPU pumped up all the way to 8 GHz. Pretty impressive, but now we have the Core2’s and the upcoming Core i7. It seems tht the Core 2 CPUs are not that susceptible to highly overclocked frequencies. The most recent record was set by Vince Kingpin and Peter Tan, who managed to overclock an Intel Core2 Extreme QX9650 to 5.6 GHz.

The two professional overclockers used the latest EVGA 790i SLI FTW motherboard which comes with digital PWMs. According to Fudzilla, they used 3Dmark 06 and Vantage and all things were stable. The Corsair Dominator DDR3 memory was clocked at 1864MHz, the board FSB worked at 467MHz, while the multiplier was running at 12X. This is enough for 5605MHz and they scored 32929 marks in 3Dmark 06. The system also featured a three-way SLI configuration with three GTX 280 video cards, which were overclocked as well.

The new motherboard is practically the same as the EVGA 790i FTW model, but comes with digital PWMs for extreme overclockers. EVGA is clearly determined to stick to high-end mobos and NVIDIA chips. The new board is said to be the first ever mobo to come with digital PWMs.

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.

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.

We already know that NVIDIA is about to release a PhysX driver for the GF 8/9/GTX 200 and it also mentioned something about making the PhysX platform open source. It would be nice to see how my GTS 8800 can act as a PPU, but I actually plan to make the jump for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 later this summer and I certainly won’t be happy if ATI doesn’t care to release some PhysX driver for the new 4800 family.

According to NGOHQ, ATI does want to include support for the PhysX platform, but AMD is somehow holding things down. ATI feels that AMD is still not being cooperative enough and it fears that the CPU maker could go ahead and strangle the PhysX adaption since AMD and Intel have Havok.

Now, prepare for a bit of a shocker, which, surprisingly enough, stands as the good news. AMD might be reticent about this PhysX deal, but guess who’s teaming up with ATI? Would you believe that NVIDIA is now helping ATI with the project and it seems they are giving ATI their blessings?!!? ATI thinks that NVIDIA is acting this way so it can take on Intel with CUDA and to deal with the latest Havok threat from both AMD and Intel. Wait a second, isn’t ATI supposed to be part of AMD now?

ATI also informs that the CUDA Radeon library is almost done and everything is going as planned on this side. The thing is, ATI can easily integrate the CUDA instructions into the Radeon GPUs, but it also needs to get CUDA support on AMD’s driver level and this make take some more time.