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.

CompUSA stores offer the retail-boxed Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Ivy Bridge Socket H2 Processor, model no. BX80637I53570K, for $179.99 with free shipping. (Micro Center stores charge the same.) That's $10 under an April deal with rebate hassles and one of the least expensive...

When I first started writing about x86 CPUs Intel was on the verge of entering the enterprise space with its processors. At the time, Xeon was a new brand, unproven in the market. But it highlighted a key change in Intel's strategy for dominance: leverage consumer microprocessor sales to...

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.

Intel started the trend of integrating a GPU along with the CPU in the processor package with Clarkdale / Arrandale. The GPU moved to the die itself in Sandy Bridge. Despite having a much more powerful GPUs at its disposal (from the ATI acquisition), AMD was a little late...

Borderlands 2 succeeds at building on the foundation laid three years ago, delivering an improved menu system, revamped skill trees, new characters, more weapons, smarter foes, and the same addictive loot-driven co-op first-person shooter action. As exciting as all of that may be, we're more interested in seeing how the game runs on the finest PC hardware from Intel, AMD and Nvidia.

Built on a highly modified version of Unreal Engine 3, the game only uses DirectX 9, opting to exclude the engine's DirectX 11 support. It's worth mentioning that Borderlands 2 is a "The Way It's Meant to be Played" title, supporting many Nvidia features such as PhysX and 3D Vision Surround. Let's get down to business...

Ever since the relatively disappointing debut of AMD's Bulldozer microarchitecture, we've been curious to find out what happens next. New architectures sometimes have their share of troubles, but they often bring with them quite a bit of headroom for improvement, especially once there's...

Although applying thermal grease isn't rocket science, there is some guesswork involved, especially if it's not something you do often. It's not uncommon to see questions about the application of thermal paste or even horror stories about the overuse of such compounds...