A surge in tablet popularity, not to mention continually increasing notebook sales, may well help GPU sales dwindle by well over 10% during the next four years and in turn drive the development of graphics-enabled CPUs.

Tablet devices are having an impact.

Market research firm iSuppli maintains that sales of tablets and notebooks will depress discrete graphics device shipments from 73 million in 2009 to 62 million by 2014. Their rise in popularity may well fast-track the take-up of new graphics enabled processors including CPUs to replace the old style GPUs. Continue Reading

Having announced their existence in the middle of last month, Acer has revealed that its new all-in-one models with multi-touch displays – the Acer Aspire Z5710 and the Acer Aspire Z5700 – will be available here and in the UK on 1 August.

One of the new all-in-ones.

The desktop all-in-ones come with a choice of Intel processors i3, i5, or i7 with the Z5710, and should be perfectly capable of HD movie watching and 3D gaming due to up to 8GB of RAM, 2TB maximum storage (with an optional 160GB SSD) and integrated graphics via an Intel GPU on the Z5700. There’s also a choice of either Nvidia’s GeForce G210M or GT240M with the Z5710. Continue Reading

Samsung has said today that its Q Series notebooks – including the Q530, Q430 and Q330 – will reach in most international markets by end of this month.

The middle child in the new Q Series from Samsung - the Q430.

The company gives the usual line of this series of notebooks offering “powerful features without compromising on the aesthetics”, though there does seem to be substance behind the hyperbole this time.

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Thermaltake has very proudly announced the arrival of the “world’s one and only” NVIDIA certified full-tower chassis – the Thermaltake Element V NVIDIA Edition, which has support for the latest NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 GPUs.

Tom Petersen, technical director at NVIDIA says the new Element V “rocks”.

The Element V has support for up to eleven 5.25-inch drive bays, or five 5.25-inch and six 3.5-inch with two iCage drive modules. This new full-tower gaming chassis also sports an all-black coating inside and out, while it also supports eATX form factor motherboards for future upgrades.

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Processor wars don’t sound quite as exciting as robot wars but news of a simmering row between industry behemoths Intel and Nvidia has just the right amount of tension to keep you interested.

The war of words was sparked by Intel engineers producing a paper last week at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in France entitled, ‘Debunking the 100x GPU vs CPU Myth: An Evaluation of Throughput Computing on CPU and GPU’. The document asserts that graphics processing units or GPUs are, in essence, only 2.5 to 14 times faster than central processing units, or CPUs. Nvidia makes GPUs while Intel’s focus is on CPUs. Continue Reading

Microsoft’s upcoming update to its suite of office applications, Microsoft Office 2010, will be adding the ability to draw on users’ graphics cards to push the suite’s performance a little.

They're getting serious about using people's GPUs now...

Word of the hardware acceleration in Office 2010 comes via AMD, which has posted a blog about some of the new features in this release, as well as its various hardware requirements. Of course, the whole thing shouldn’t prove too much of a surprise, given the fact that Microsoft has been touting the fact that the next version of its web browser, Internet Explorer 9, will boast the ability to do very much the same, taking advantage of users’ GPUs in order to more smoothly and quickly render their web-based content.

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With the introduction of its upcoming 256 Series, Nvidia is aiming to combine its desktop and notebook drivers, meaning that those using their notebooks to play games will no longer be forced to hunt for different drivers.

The shift allows some Nvidia-powered notebooks to output in 3D

Word of the change comes from Electronista, which is reporting that the move to a unified driver structure will see a few interesting additions made to those notebooks carrying recent Nvidia cards, not least of which the addition of CUDA and a few other features until now not normally enabled on the company’s notebook GPUs. Those features stretch from the somewhat less interesting, but still pleasant to see, ambient occlusion, compatibility updates and SLI profiles to the far more intriguing 3D Vision.

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Microsoft has been talking in some more detail about its upcoming update to its browser line, bringing us up to Internet Explorer 9, and how important hardware acceleration and HTML5 support are.

IE has been losing marketshare since the introduction of the browser ballot...

According to a posting on the Internet Explorer blog, the hardware acceleration aspect of Internet Explorer 9 is going strong, with some demonstrations showing that, once IE9 actually starts using your GPU, it’s capable of moving images around in real time at 60fps. The big upside here isn’t just the performance, but the impact it has on the rest of your system; normally the demonstrations shown off in the blog post would keep your processor busy, but with the work being offloaded to the GPU, then your processor can sit at around the 12% mark.

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A couple of weeks back, we ran a competition that was based around the idea of building your own gaming PC on a budget, but with the stipulation that it had to run Colin McRae: Dirt 2. The competition itself got a raft of entries, and we saw some really interesting builds come out of it.

Nice to be doing a build on a less tight budget

Since then though, we’ve encountered a fair few people who are looking for something with a fair bit more oomph, something that will chew through anything you throw at it without giving you too much trouble. When we asked for a budget, we got a couple of replies to say that they’d like to see what we’d do with a build around the €2000 mark. So, with that in mind, we decided to put together a solid PC build that, while it’s that bit more expensive than the other builds we’ve done,] manages to smoke them in terms of performance. The idea for this build came from people who attended our recent Build Your Own PC Classes, who wanted to build some serious, high performance PCs but weren’t quite sure on how to kit them out.

For those with an interest in building their own PCs, but who haven’t tried it before, you might want to check out our Build Your Own PC classes coming up on April 17th. Anyway, without further ado, we’ll move on to the build itself.

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When it comes to picking up a PC, we’re massive advocates of the “do it yourself” route. The fact is that just about anyone should be able to put together a machine if they’re given all of the right parts; it’s mostly a question of ‘insert tab A into slot B’ from start to finish. The difficult part tends to be in choosing parts in the first place without going overboard, which is one of the big reasons we’re happy to put together builds on the blog as much as we do.

You'd be surprised how often a little mistake can utterly knacker things...

Still, when it comes to building your own PC, there are a few issues that tend not to come up in many “Build Your Own” articles, but that we do see and hear people talking about a lot. This post is basically just a run down of some really common issues that we encounter that could very well set you back a fairly substantial amount of money if you’re not careful. Some won’t cost a thing no matter how badly they do, but the others… well, let’s just say it’s no walk in the park.

Given that we’ve got our Build Your Own PC classes coming up, we thought it’d be worth a look at some of the little things that can go wrong…

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Microsoft seems to be of the opinion that the company that will see the most benefit from the release of its upcoming browser, Internet Explorer 9, will be Google, a company more and more often finding itself competing with Microsoft.

Microsoft's IE9 should help graphics intensive web services in general...

According to a report from Stuff, Microsoft’s own senior product manager for Internet Explorer, Pete LaPage, expects to see Google reap the benefits of Microsoft’s upcoming browser, and not for reasons that are necessarily anything to do with search, which Microsoft will likely still be directing towards Bing as much as possible. Instead, LaPage expects Google to see its userbase for other services bolstered by additions made to IE9.

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Rumoured for a few weeks now, it seems there’s more concrete evidence today that Intel plans to announce a new notebook platform – Huron River – in the first quarter of 2011 as well as launching several new desktop CPUs later in 2010, according to sources from motherboard and notebook makers.

The Huron River platform includes a 6-series chipset (Cougar Point), Sandy Bridge processor, and wireless modules codenamed Rainbow Peak and Taylor Peak, the sources – who spoke to DigiTimes – indicated. Continue Reading