As one of its daily deals, TigerDirect offers the AMD Phenom II X4 945 Barebones PC Kit for $224.99. These mail-in rebates drop it to $149.99. With free shipping, that's $236 less than the lowest total price we could find for these items purchased separately elsewhere...

Six years later and it seems the developer is ready to revive the infamous Agent 47 in Hitman's fifth game, which crept onto shelves last Tuesday, November 20 -- or the 47th week of the year. Among its other advancements, Hitman: Absolution is the first game to be developed using the new Glacier 2 engine.

The updated engine was specifically built for Hitman, with a strong emphasis on enabling very dense crowds and allowing players to not only interact with characters but also to influence their behavior. The engine is said to be able to handle up to crowds of 1200 characters, which makes Absolution unlike any other game.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) has published its third quarter statistics for the graphics processor market showing weak seasonal performance with shipments down 1.45% quarter-over-quarter and 10.8% year-over-year. The underwhelming results were largely blamed rocky PC shipments...

After a busy year with numerous GPU releases by mid-September things had settled down for good. And then, AMD threw us a curve ball. Their Catalyst 12.11 beta drivers delivered major performance gains in many popular games such as Battlefield 3, Borderlands 2, Civilization V, Skyrim, Sleeping Dogs and StarCraft II. Around the same time, Nvidia released a new beta driver of its own which claimed gains in several titles, and this driver has since been replaced by the GeForce 310.61 update, which made further performance enhancements.

With updated pricing and performance across the board, we figured it would be worth revisiting both company's offerings to see where you should spend your hard-earned cash this holiday season and into early next year.

There is no single event responsible for ousting AMD from its lofty position in early 2006. The company's decline is inextricably linked to its own mismanagement, some bad predictions, its own success, as well as the fortunes and misdeeds of Intel.

AMD has long been subject of polarizing debate among technology enthusiasts. The chapters of its history provide ample ammunition for countless discussions and no small measure of rancour. Considering that it was once considered an equal to Intel, many wonder why AMD is failing today. However, it's probably fairer to ask how the company has survived so for long -- a question we intend to explore as we revisit the company's past, examine its present and gaze into its future.

For Call of Duty fans, developer Treyarch just delivered an early Christmas present when they released Black Ops II this week. As the ninth game in the Call of Duty franchise and the sequel to the 2010 game Black Ops, we are hoping to see something meaningfully new from Black Ops II.

But as usual, our main concern from a performance article perspective has to do with the game engine which has been slow to evolve over the years. The key changes to the game engine include a new technology called "reveal mapping" and HDR lighting. On paper the upgrade also calls for the move to the DirectX 11 API for the PC version of the game. This means PC gamers should enjoy better visuals when compared to those using console versions.

Folks shopping for a new gaming notebook with Windows 8 preinstalled have at least one option from MSI. The new GX60 is properly equipped to handle most modern PC games on respectable settings, and although it's pricier than you'd pay for a desktop equivalent, the system...

Ending today, TigerDirect offers the OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD for $59.99 with free shipping via the directions below. That's $0.50/GB, tied with a deal from two weeks ago, and the lowest total price we could find by $21. Features include read speeds of up to 550MB/s and write speeds...

Medal of Honor: Warfighter calls for no less than a 3GHz quad-core processor paired with a GeForce GTX 560 or Radeon HD 6950. Given those upper-end requirements, we expect the title to be fairly demanding with its visuals maxed out, and we'll be putting a ton of past and present-gen cards through their paces.

We'll be testing 29 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations from AMD and Nvidia across all price ranges with their respective latest beta drivers that claim to improve performance.

As one of its daily deals, TigerDirect offers the AMD Athlon II X4 3GHz Barebones Kit for $239.99. These $20 and $20 mail-in rebates cut it to $199.99. With $11.91 for shipping, that's $38 below a deal from two weeks ago of a similar bundle (which included an AMD quad-core CPU...

About this time last year, AMD's new Bulldozer-based FX series launched to bright-eyed system builders who expected the new architecture to challenge Intel's increasingly comfortable position in the upper-end processor market. Unfortunately, Bulldozer wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Now, the company is refreshing its desktop processors with Piledriver, an enhanced version of Bulldozer that focuses on improving instructions per clock and frequency. In other words, instead of a major overhaul, Piledriver picks up where Bulldozer left off, which may disappoint those who wanted AMD to abandon the architecture.

AMD has continued refining its Fusion offerings since launching the first APUs early last year. Just four months ago the company launched Trinity for mobile platforms -- arguably where its APUs provide the most value.

Now AMD is finally prepared to offer a desktop version, which brings a new socket and a new high-end chipset. Given that Piledriver improved Bulldozer's power consumption, we expect Trinity to be more efficient than Llano, while Cayman's VLIW4 architecture should boost the GPU's speed -- or so we hope.