We begin this concise graphically pertinent piece with a literary dispute. A multitude of expressions I use to interpret facts, qualify opinions and provide the occasional twist of linguistic amusement are accompanied by a supercilious red squiggle. You know the one. The grammatical equivalent of a security guard in an Apple Store, silently scrutinizing your […]

“x-treme” “x-plosive” “x-traordinary”. What was it about the letter X that attracted designers of anything targeted at the technologically inspired and improbably rich?  It might be hard to believe, but there are commercially viable words beginning with every letter of the alphabet that could yet secure status as equally influential marketing tools and scorch similarly […]

So, here we go again! Not having access to an HD 7970, I’ve decided that this particular series of benchmarks will focus primarily  on comparing the GTX 680 with the card it is intended to displace, its older sibling, the 580. Having three cards available in each case will also allow us to determine scaling […]

Well, the forecasts may have lacked authority, but this time, they were wholly accurate.  Nvidia’s apparent stubbornness to disclose any firm details regarding its latest hand caused one notable hardware review site to break the “unofficial” NDA and post its extensive article half a day early.  Aside from frustration, one must assume that their decision […]

In March of last year, AMD/ ATI introduced us to the last and most powerful of its “Cayman” based family of video cards, the dual GPU HD 6990. Though significant refinements to the companies 40nm chip design led to a healthy increase in performance, it was one that came at the price of efficiency. Just […]

Rumors prompted by the temporary lock-down of Apples online store on the 3rd of May were promptly justified, with the company now flaunting several new recruits in its IMac product range.  Swiftly following the March refresh of the Macbook line, four “Sandy Bridge” based IMacs now feature variants of Intel’s highly praised, energy effecient CPU.  These include two models with […]

Ati’s latest flagship offering  builds upon the success of its forerunner, the HD 5970 and is once again based around a dual GPU design.  The formidable 5970 emerged in the winter of 2009 and in terms of the overall level of performance yielded by a single card, arguably retained the number one spot throughout the whole of 2010.  Within this […]