One of our forum users from the Philippines noticed that a webshop has the GeForce GTX 670 on pre-order. The card is a Gainward GTX 670 and comes with 2GB of graphics memory apparaantly ties to a 256-bit memory bus. The memory is GDDR5.

The card is priced at Php 19990 which is approximately USD 420. Considering that is aa pre-order price we might look at prices below 400 USD duroing launch.

We review the ECS Z77H2-AX motherboard which screams gold and features. The Z77H2-AX is gold plated everywhere. The changes for Z77 primarily can be found in native USB 3.0 support as well as an upgrade towards PCie gen 3 PCIe x16 slots.

ECS however really pimped out the motherboard with a lot .. seriously LOT of extra's with even embedded WIFI and Bluetooth.

Read the review right here.

Sony today unveiled its new AV receiver in the form of the STR-DA5700ES. Crafted using premium grade materials and precision engineered audio components, the AV receiver features a 7.2 channel surround sound, which is expandable to 9.2 channel surround using a pair of additional front height speakers.

The STR-DA5700ES AV receiver is equipped with six HDMI inputs, two HDMI outputs and a USB DAC to connect the device to your PC using a USB cable for play various types of audio files. Other features include a network connectivity for wireless entertainment, a 3D capability and a Full HD upscaling for analogue input devices. The Sony new AV receiver will be launched in November 2012. Too bad, there is no info on pricing at this time. [Sony]

Netgear has proudly introduced the R6300 Wi-Fi router, which is claimed to be the world

X-bit Labs shared some more details about AMD's price cuts since the arrival of Intel's Ivy Bridge lineup. The AMD FX-8150 is now available for $215 (down from $245), while the FX-6200 fell from $165 to $149.

Advanced Micro Devices has quietly slashed pricing of its top-of-the-range eight-core AMD FX-8150 central processing units and adjusted pricing of some other chips in the light of the Intel Core i-series "Ivy Bridge" product launch. The eight-core flagship offering from AMD can now be obtained starting at $215 in the U.S.

AMD FX-8150 Black Edition (3.60GHz/4.20GHz, eight cores, 16MB total cache, 125W TDP, AM3+ form-factor) microprocessor officially costs $245 in 1000-unit quantities, but at present it can be acquired starting from $215 in the U.S. and starting from

Club3D shows off the Radeon HD 7870 Joker, a new model that will start shipping in the second week of May. The card features a custom cooling solution but sticks to the stock clockspeeds, it has a 1000MHz core and 2GB GDDR5 clocked at 4800MHz.

Club 3D proudly presents the Club 3D Radeon

The nVIDIA Inspector Tool is basically an nVIDIA only GPU-Z utility but with a decent OverClocking feature and you can set your clocks and fan speeds. Orbmu2k has released this program, which seems to NVIDIA graphics cards and offers information on tools for GPU and memory clock speed, GPU operating voltage and fan speed increase.

This is a quite simple user interface with an application that will rely entirely NVIDIA drivers, so there is reason to be downloaded from NVIDIA's website WHQL-certified driver. The program offers roughly the same information as the GPU-Z program, but with a few extra spice box.

Version 1.9.6.5

• fixed wrong bandwidth calculation for GDDR3
• added invalid bios detection
• added some vendorids
• finally fixed trilinear optimization setting 1 = off / 0 = on
• changed prerenderlimit setting for 0 (is now app controlled since 300.xx)
• minor changes in default value handling
• updated some settings constants for 300.xx drivers
• added CLI param "-restartDisplayDriver" (Vista/Win7 only)

Download

We review the ASUS Maximus V GENE Z77 Motherboard. a smaller motherboard (mATX) yet a product that just oozes with dandy features and overclock potential. Next to the tweaking possibilities this is a ROG (Republic of Gamers) motherboard, and means extra enthusiast features alright.

Next to the tweaking possibilities this is a ROG (Republic of Gamers) motherboard, and means extra enthusiast features alright. New FAN Xpert 2 FAN regulation has now been embedded, we spot Smart DIGI+ Technology (Smart DIGI+ Key & Smart CPU Power Level), USB 3.0 Boost and the lovely USB BIOS Flashback (simply insert a USB stick with firmware, press a button and boom your mobo firmware was flashed). Very complete -- very small, read all about it right here.

Online store Brando has started selling the USB 3.0 Quadruple SATA HDD dock. The device can hold four 2.5-inch/3.5-inch SATA HDD/SSD with up to 3TB of storage capacity. The new SATA HDD dock supports the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface with up to 5.0Gbps of data transfer rate and the eSATA interface with up to 3Gbps of data transfer rate. It is backward compatible with USB 2.0/1.1. In addition, the Brando USB 3.0 Quadruple SATA HDD dock also features hot swap functions. [Product Page]

iiyama has just dropped their latest multi-touch LCD monitor

With Ivy Bridge announcedlets take a look at next year's motherboard chipsets for the Shark Bay platform, as reported by vrzone:

Intel's upcoming LGA-1150 Haswell CPUs will be quite different from the current Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge CPUs and Intel will as such have to offer a range of suitable chipsets to go with these changes and so far we've only known the new chipsets as Lynx Point.

As you might already have been able to deduct, Intel is simply moving to the 8-series of chipsets. No big models changes have taken place and as such the desktop platform will get the Z87, H87 and Z85 models for your average consumer, as well as the Q87, Q85 and B85 chipsets for the various corporate and SMB platforms. There's also the C228 chipset for Intel's LGA-1150 based Xeon processors which is the replacement for the C216 chipset.

One thing that is changing compared to the current line-up is that the Z85 chipset will lack support for RAID, something that might not be a great loss, but it's nonetheless a peculiar change. Intel is also updating its Rapid Storage technology in the 8-series chipsets and give the user some basic control over the hard drives/SSDs. Simply put there will be three different settings, power efficiency, maximum performance or a balanced setting. Another new addition is Fast Boot which is a sneaky feature that allows the system to detect the boot drive quicker and as such help improve the overall Boot experience. However, this only works if there's an Intel SSD in the system, which almost sounds like an anti-competitive feature.

We'll be doing some more digging to try and find out some additional details about what else is new with Intel's 8-series chipsets. We're already expecting additional USB 3.0 ports and a full set of SATA 6Gbps ports according to earlier leaks, but we don't know which chipsets will get what features at this point in time. 

PowerColor introduces the Radeon HD 7870 Eyefinity 6, a new graphics card that simultaneously supports up to six displays. The card has a 1000MHz core clockspeed, 2GB GDDR5 memory clocked at 4800MHz and six mini-DisplayPort outputs.
TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, today releases the only HD7870 graphics solution which can support up to 6 displays simultaneously: the PowerColor HD7870 Eyefinity 6. The latest edition optimizes multi-display Eyefinity technology, enabling up to six monitors to be operated from one card through its six mini display port onboard design. This unique feature allows gamers to enhance productivity to get more things done at once, also delivering the most vivid HD gaming experience with wider view.

Flexible display configurations
The HD7870 Eyefinity 6 clocks in at 1000MHz core speed and 1200MHz of memory speed; with 2GB GDDR5 onboard memory, the latest edition allows more bandwidth for demanding DirectX

Details about three of NVIDIA's upcoming Tegra 3 SoCs have appeared on the web, and also notes that the first handset with Tegra 4 (aka Wayne) will be available towards the end of the year. Wayne is based on the ARM A15 architecture and will be announced at or around Computex in June. Full details over here.

The AP37 which is a faster version of the AP33 which is currently found in most high-end Tegra 3 handsets. As you can see, clock speeds are set to be increased, but sadly we don't have an exact figure although nVidia is targeting 1.7GHz for the high-end parts with the possibility of some slower 1.5GHz parts. Note that the 1.7GHz speed is only likely to be single core clock speed, but we haven't managed to confirm this.

The GPU performance is also said to be boosted by about 25 percent and this has simply been done to be able to drive higher resolution displays as the market moves towards full HD and beyond for high-end tablets and smartphones. Yes, you did read that correctly, smartphones are expected to get 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 displays this year and we know of at least two, if not three panel makers that are already busy churning out displays and it's likely that there are even more companies working on it as we speak...

An infographic from AMD Korea reveals details about the performance of the A10-4600M, an upcoming 32nm Trinity APU.
It has four x86-64 cores spread across two "Piledriver" architecture modules, 4 MB of total cache (2x 2 MB), CPU clock speeds of 2.30 GHz (3.00 GHz TurboCore), and integrated Radeon HD 7660G graphics that has 384 VLIW4 stream processors, and GPU core speed of 685 MHz. The chip integrates a PCI-Express 2.0 root complex, and dual-channel DDR3-1600 MHz integrated memory controller.
CPU performance isn't mentioned, instead AMD focuses on GPU performance.

Our company appeared in March 2012 in Kiev. Ten years earlier, when at GSC Game World we started developing the renowned S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series and continued working on it until December 2011 when the studio was unexpectedly shut down and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 project � frozen. We did not reach agreement with the rights owner regarding the use of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. brand, that�s why we made the decision to move forward as an independent studio with a new project. That day became our starting point for Vostok Games.

Vostok Games is a new studio founded by veterans of Ukrainian game industry with multi-year experience of developing and releasing commercially successful projects. In March 2012 we reached agreement with Vostok Ventures Ltd. to back up the financing of our new game � free2play MMOFPS Survarium(working title).

Download AMD Catalyst 12.4 WHQL 32-bit driver for Windows XP, Vista and 7 Download

Package Content

The AMD Catalyst software suite 12.4 contains the following:

• AMD display driver version 8.961
• HydraVision
  

We review the ASUS Maximus V GENE Z77 Motherboard. a smaller motherboard (mATX) yet a product that just oozes with dandy features and overclock potential. Get this -- we took a Core i7 3770K processor towards 5.0 GHz. Next to the tweaking possibilities this is a ROG (Republic of Gamers) motherboard, and means extra enthusiast features alright.

We review the MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard with the Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge processor. The MSI Z77A-GD65 is intended for Intel's 22nm Ivy Bridge processors on Socket LGA1155, and they tend to overclock rather well as we'll show you. On (really good) air cooling you can reach 4.7 to 5 GHz with a motherboard as used today. Have a peek at what was just released, this is the MSI Z77A-GD65 'Ivy Bridge' motherboard.

Read the review here.

AMD announced a collaboration with Adobe Systems Incorporated to optimize a new set of GPU-accelerated features for Adobe products including the newly announced Adobe Photoshop CS6. Implementing GPU acceleration and incorporating OpenCL optimization improves the end-user experience by dramatically speeding up critical imaging features and generating real-time results when editing with key tools in Adobe Creative Suite 6.

"AMD brings its expertise in GPU and APU compute in the latest release of Adobe Creative Suite," said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. "This technology integration allows us to provide creative professionals with exciting new creative options and lightning-fast performance."
The collaboration between AMD and Adobe marks the first implementation of OpenCL within the Adobe Creative Suite family of products by accelerating features within Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. The new Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine within Photoshop CS6 utilizes both OpenCL and OpenGL, to accelerate new and existing features such as the new Blur Gallery that runs up to 10x as fast on the upcoming "Trinity" APU with OpenCL GPU acceleration turned on. AMD has also worked with Adobe on a dramatically accelerated version of the Liquify tool, a filter within Adobe Photoshop CS6 that lets the user push, pull, rotate, reflect, pucker and bloat any area of an image for artistic effects. There are dozens of other GPU-accelerated features in the new Adobe Photoshop CS6.

"AMD engineers have worked closely with Adobe to ensure creative professionals have the best computing experience possible with the latest Adobe CS6 suite," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Content, Applications and Solutions at AMD. "By working with Adobe on industry standards, we have helped bring GPU and APU acceleration and new levels of performance to the market's premier digital imaging software."

AMD and Adobe will be teaming up again on June 11-14, 2012 at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) where Tom Malloy, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs will deliver a keynote address. In addition, the Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Flash teams will provide attendees of the summit's technical breakout sessions with the latest updates and insight on working with open standards on heterogeneous compute.

Intel Ivy Bridge processors are out now, so now is the turn of new systems based on the third generation Core family to come out of bag. We have learned that one of the first system to come out with Intel Ivy Bridge processor will be HP Bodie all-in-one PC.
HP Bodie 27?? all-in-one PC with Ivy Bridge coming!

Intel Ivy Bridge processors are out now, so now is the turn of new systems based on the third generation Core family to come out of bag. We have learned that one of the first system to come out with Intel Ivy Bridge processor will be HP Bodie all-in-one PC.

There?fs hardly any information on this machine, but we know that it?fll be a 27-inch all-in-one powered by the latest 3rd generation Intel Core ?gIvy Bridge?h processors.

The new HP Bodie all-in-one PC features a large 27-inch LCD display with a 1920?~1080 pixel resolution. The computer supports up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a choice of a 256GB SSD or a 3TB hard disk drive and the latest 3rd generation Intel Core ?gIvy Bridge?h processors. Unfortunately, there is no info on pricing or availability at this time.

Thermalright, the heatsink maker revealed a new brand named Leetgion and introduced Hellion, which it claims is world's first mechanical gaming mouse. The switches are the mechanical part of this mouse, the Hellion uses a combination of Cherry MX Blue and OMRON Japan micro-switches.

The main buttons apart from center are backed by OMRON switches, while a side "attack" macro button is backed by Cherry MX Blue. Under the hood is an AVAGO 9500 laser sensor with a tracking resolution as high as 5,000 DPI. The non-primary buttons can be assigned macro functions, and macro profiles can be switched on the fly. Leetgion comes with three macro profiles optimized for Starcraft player classes.

Measuring 123 x 73 x 42 mm (LxWxH), the Hellion has a fixed weight of 105 g. It uses a wired USB connection to the host, the cable is sleeved. The mouse also features a true-color LED illumination, a color can be chosen form a pallet of 16.7 million colors in the software.

Cooler Master presents the HAF XM, a mid-tower version of the HAF X that will be sold for $99.

HAF XM - a "mid tower" version of the HAF X, which comes with full tower features for PC enthusiasts. The side window panel offers the best inner view for built system. It supports up to four 200mm fans to keep constant cooling while housing high-end components, such as AMD Radeon HD 7970 and NVIDIA GTX 680. It also supports up to 9 HDDs and 8+1 expansion slots for 3-Way SLI/CF. The smart design of latch on side panel and sliding PSU cable cover ensures the convenience and neatness of system building. The two USB 3.0 Super Speed ports are located on front panel for faster data transfer and easy access.

Features

• Enthusiast case with the support for four 200mm fans
• Latch on 90
  

Rockstar Games now offers digital preorder details for Max Payne 3, along with some new screenshots as well as PC system requirements for the upcoming third-person shooter sequel:

Today, we've got brand new screenshots from the PC version of Max Payne 3 along with updated details and system specifications. Developed in parallel with the game's console versions, Max Payne 3 for PC supports DirectX11 including tessellation, as well as a number of additional advanced graphics options and is optimized to run across a wide range of PC setups.

Max Payne 3 PC System Specifications

Operating System:

• Windows 7 32/64 Service Pack 1, Windows Vista 32/64 Service Pack 2, Windows XP 32/64 Service Pack 3
• Processor: Intel Dual Core 2.4 GHZ - i7 3930K 6 Core x 3.06 GHZ / AMD Dual Core 2.6 GHZ - FX8150 8 Core x 3.6 GHZ
• RAM: 2GB - 16GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA� 8600 GT 512MB VRAM � NVIDIA� GeForce� GTX 680 2GB VRAM / Radeon HD 3400 512MB VRAM - Radeon HD 7970 3GB VRAM
• Sound Card: 100% Direct X 9.0 compatible � Direct X 9.0 compatible supporting Dolby Digital Live
• HDD Space: 35 GB - DVD Drive

Please refer to your hardware manufacturer and www.rockstargames.com/support for current compatibility information. Some system components such as mobile chipsets, integrated, and AGP graphics cards may be incompatible. Unlisted specifications may not be supported by publisher.

Max Payne 3 for PC will be available May 29th in North America and June 1st in Europe, with the Special Edition available in North America exclusively through GameStop and throughout Europe from select retailers. For those who prefer their PC releases served up via digital download, you can pre-purchase Max Payne 3 from select digital retailers and receive pre-order bonus content including some of the bonuses from the Special Edition (The Classic Multiplayer Character Pack & Disorderly Conduct Multiplayer Weapons Pack). Check out what Steam, GameStop Impulse (US only), Amazon Game Downloads (US only), Gamesplanet, Gamesload and Gamersgate have on offer and stay tuned for further updates.

Ubisoft announces Anno 2070 Deep Ocean, an add-on for Anno 2070, the real-time strategy sequel expected this autumn.
New Civilization Level - For the first time in the history of the Anno series, an add-on brings a new civilization level: the Tech faction is expanded by the Genius population class.

Deeper Game Experience - The new population class grants access to the new Tech Monument, new corresponding production chains and consumption goods. Furthermore, this new class features all-new vehicles and new items allowing players to develop industries, strengthen economies and exploit new resources.

Additional Content and Challenges - Players will also be able to:

• Acquire enemy territories without military force using the Hostile Takeover feature.
• Resolve energy problems by building the new underwater geothermal power plant.
• Optimize energy supply through Energy Transfer between islands.
• Face a new dangerous disaster: the Tsunami!
• Unlock new rewards for each faction's career ladder.
• Take advantage of new underwater trading routes.
• Experience over 150 new challenging quests.
• Unlock over 30 new achievements.
• Access player comparison via new leaderboards.

Half-Life fans, here is some bad news. In a recent interview with SevenDayCoolDown, Gabe revealed that Valve's silence is fairer to the Half Life fans. According to Gabe, Valve has not finalised the formula yet and they are still experimenting with Half Life 3's concept. As Gabe said:

The problem is, we think that the twists and turns that we're going through would probably drive people more crazy than just being silent about it, until we can be very crisp about what's happening next.

In addition, in an email exchange with a forum member at Valve Time, Valve's Gabe Newell revealed that Valve would not announce anything new in this year's E3. So there you have it guys :-P