"As you no doubt know, nearly all video game benchmarks are based on a single unit of measure, the ubiquitous FPS, or frames per second. FPS is a nice instant summary of performance, expressed in terms that are relatively easy to understand.

Now well established in the desktop space, Nvidia's Fermi architecture is about to enter the professional graphics market. This morning, Nvidia announced a trifecta of new, Fermi-based Quadro graphics cards, plus a new mobile Quadro GPU and a Fermi-powered Quadro Plex system.

"Value comparisons have become a bit of a tradition here at TR. We rolled out our first CPU value article way back in 2007 and followed up with a second look a year later. A quantitative assessment of the value proposition has since become an integral part of our CPU reviews, and we've even considered the value of graphics cards. What can I say? We loves us some scatter plots.
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"We've all done it. You find yourself at the computer late at night. It's dark out, and maybe the lights are off. You're alone. Inevitably, your mind wanders from the task at hand to a far more carnal desire... for the perfect enthusiast's PC. Some build dream rigs in their heads, while others prefer to fill online shopping carts with their perfect mix of components. Occasionally, I'll consider the sort of world-beating machine I'd assemble if money were no object.

AMD's six-core Thuban processors will soon go head on against Intel's Core i7s, if prices leaked by Bahrain-based online retailer Advanti are accurate. The folks at AlienBabelTech have encountered a posting on the e-tailer's Facebook page, and the contents don't leave much to the imagination:

We just received the official prices from AMD:

Phenom II X6 Six Core

1090T Black Edition: 125(W), AM3 Socket, 9MB Cache, 3.2 GHz Freq @ 295 USD

1055T: 125(W), AM3 Socket, 9MB Cache, 2.8 GHz Freq @ 199 USD

For quite some time now, mechanical hard drives have stored data in 512-byte chunks called sectors. That sector size worked for lower capacity points, but as areal densities rise, it's become increasingly inappropriate for new drives. As a result, the industry has decided to transition to a 4KB sector size dubbed Advanced Format.

Say you're AMD, and you make graphics chips that nearly double in performance with every generation. Yet games haven't been getting all that much more demanding over time. What would you do with all of that excess power, especially if you wanted to stir up interest in your latest product? AMD's answer at the moment is a new feature it calls Eyefinity.