Green PC designs have become more than just practical; they're cool. Power-sipping Netbooks are in, as are small desktops like the Dell Studio Hybrid and Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Slimline. This is not the case for high-end gaming PCs, where bigger is better. How far this trend can go isn't clear, but a seminal event in Apple's history may offer a lesson. In 2001, Apple unveiled one of the first dual-processor consumer systems, based on the overheating-prone IBM PowerPC G4 processor. The original Apple tower design had a Rube Goldberg feel to it, with a host of fans straining to rid the system of heat. A noise like that emitted by a wind tunnel, generated by the power supply and fans, forced Apple to redesign the system.

While most of the attention at Nvision 2008 seemed to revolve around the LAN party, professional gaming tournaments, booth babes, and interesting games and applications, there was also a professional development conference going on. Most of the action revolved around CUDA (compute unified device architecture), Nvidia's technology for using GPUs in massively parallel applications. However, Kev Gee of Microsoft showed up and gave a quick one-hour overview on Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 11—in particular, Direct3D. Given the brief time, Gee had to compress a lot of information into an hour, but we came away with a better understanding of what DirectX 11 will bring to the table. In some ways, it's not as radical a change as DirectX 10 was. But it does introduce some important features. What follows is based on Kev Gee's talk at Nvision 2008. Since DirectX 11 is a work in progress, some of these bits of information could change before release.

These two cards should be out between 10th and 15th of September and the first scores tells us that performance wise the Radeon 4670 is going next to neck with Radeon 3850, which is one impressive score.

There were certainly a number of interesting results recorded when testing such a large range of processors with the Radeon HD 4870 X2. Perhaps the most interesting thing that we have noticed is how much faster the Core 2 Quad processors were when compared to the Core 2 Duo’s, this is not something that we have really seen before. This was really evident in Company of Heroes, where the Intel quad-core processors were roughly 100% faster than their dual-core parts. While Company of Heroes was the most extreme example, all other games tested still gave the quad-core processors an advantage. Generally the performance margin between the Core 2 Duo and Phenom X4 processors was quite minimal, though more often than not the Intel dual-core processors did outperform the AMD quad-core parts. This is neither new nor surprising, as we have seen this time and time again in the past.

If you look at the Company of Heroes results for the Phenom it is clear that something is broken.

Rivatuner has been updated towards version 2.10 In this release we have included a huge number of new stuff to keep you busy, obviously GeForce 9x00 support has been added as well as ForceWare GeForce drivers up-to 177.92 and AMD ATI Catalyst 8.8 support. With this release comes support for ATI Radeon 4800 class graphics adapters and better GeForce GTX series 200 support as well.