AMD is refreshing its desktop processors with Piledriver, an enhanced version of Bulldozer that focuses on improving instructions per clock and frequency -- just like it did with the new Piledriver-powered Trinity APUs. In other words, instead of a major overhaul, Piledriver picks up where Bulldozer left off.

Windows 8 remains a nice upgrade, possibly a Service Pack-plus caliber upgrade when you look at the desktop improvements. Metro doesn't make Windows 8 more capable, but it does pave a way for Microsoft to sell slates and appeal to a mainstream user base that craves simpler devices.

With most Thunderbolt products available today being storage-related, we wanted to see what the new Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH motherboard and its dual Thunderbolt ports had to offer in terms of performance. Put to the test: Western Digital's Velociraptor Duo, which boasts of a pair of 10K RPM Velociraptor hard drives.

XCOM is about as perfect a remake of an old game as I could have hoped for, in that while changes have inevitably been made, they're mostly for the better, and anything genuinely new introduced is only there to improve things.

Having attacked the mid-range and upper-end markets, Nvidia has its sights set on the sub-$200 range, unleashing its GTX 650 Ti. At $150, the new arrival is roughly 34% cheaper than last month's GTX 660 and about 7% pricier than the Radeon HD 7770, which fetches around $140 depending on features and rebates.

With a mix of familiar MMORPG tropes and new, modern approaches to delivering them, Guild Wars 2 is an excellent, welcoming take on the genre.

AMD is finally prepared to offer a desktop version of Trinity, 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.

The Aspire S5 comes with a beefy Core i7-3517U clocked at 1.9GHz, 4GB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage. In most instances, an SSD is the best addition period, for any modern system, but Acer took things a step further with two 128GB SSDs in RAID0. It goes without saying that the storage subsystem should be blazing fast.

The sixth-generation iPhone has finally landed. Apple has almost completely redesigned the phone's exterior, yet it still looks very much like the iconic handset everyone is familiar with. There's a larger 4-inch screen, LTE, a faster processor, and a new dock connector not everyone is a fan of.

While the Samsung 830 SSD and many of its year-old peers may still be attractive, Samsung is ready to move on to bigger and better things. The new flagship offering, the SSD 840 Pro, refines the 830 Series' firmware with faster random and sustained performance as well as improved reliability.

Borderlands 2 benchmarks and performance analysis -- Borderlands 2 succeeds at building on the foundation laid three years ago, delivering new characters, more weapons, smarter foes, and the same addictive loot-driven co-op first-person shooter action. We take the game for a spin on today's finest hardware.

We took notice when Crucial announced its m4 mSATA SSD in a 256GB capacity at under $1/GB. The mSATA drive is tiny compared to Crucial's standard 2.5-inch m4, and despite the size difference, both 256GB models feature the same read and write speeds of 500MB/s and 260MB/s.

Torchlight II is much more of a beast than its predecessor; in terms of scale and ambition, it's right up there with the biggest names in loot-collection and click-based combat. And so of course, Blizzard's Diablo III looms large over the entirety of Torchlight II. How could it not?

Ever eager to keep AMD on its toes, Nvidia continues its push into the mid-range market with a Kepler-based card that is expected to retail for about $230 -- right in-between AMD's Radeon HD 7850 and 7870. The GTX 660 is based on the new 28nm GK106 architecture which inherits all the key innovations introduced by the flagship GTX 680.

The question is, does the phone manage to outshine its Bruce Banner exterior to show off what it's Hulk-scale guts are capable of? In short: yes. It turns out that what the Optimus 4X HD lacks in external appeal is more than made up for by its good nature and brainy innards.

The Silencio 650 not resembles a cleaner version of Cooler Master's more aggressive HAF series, but it touts many attractive features, chief among which is sound absorbing foam mats and specially designed air vents to minimize noise while maintaining low operating temps.

By mid 2012, SSD prices fell through the floor, costing approximately half as much as last year. Granted, that's still nowhere near as economical as standard hard drives, so companies have continued to offer affordable solutions such as the OCZ Agility 4 and the Crucial v4 reviewed today.

Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 660 Ti has its crosshairs set on the HD 7870. Assuming it's priced competitively, the GTX 660 Ti seems like it could put a real hurting on AMD's offering, as it features the same DNA as existing Kepler products and boasts the same number of CUDA cores and texture units as the GTX 670.

For comparing Windows 7 and Windows 8 we will measure and test the performance of various aspects of the operating system including: boot up and shutdown times, file copying, encoding, browsing, gaming and some synthetic benchmarks.

More than last year, 2012's ultrabooks have been and will continue to be about tradeoffs: low-res screens vs. high-res, snappy SSDs vs. capacious HDDs, power-sipping IGPs vs. muscle-bound GPUs, and so on. Acer's new TimelineU makes its own compromises to manage an attractive $830 price tag.

Massively multiplayer online gamers have different needs than those of first-person shooter or real-time strategy fans. They need social interaction. They need extremely comfortable chairs. But most of all they need buttons. So many buttons.

The Iconia Tab A700 is Acer's latest update to its Android tablet line-up. Featuring Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and a quad-core processor, the A700's claim to fame is its new 1920 x 1200 pixel, full HD display.

Apple’s coveted Retina display has finally found its way to a full-size notebook courtesy of the latest MacBook Pro. But anyone familiar with this new system knows that Apple didn’t simply add a higher resolution display to the standard MacBook Pro frame. Instead, there’s an entirely reworked chassis that’s nearly as thin as the MacBook Air and weighs more than a pound less than the standard Pro.

Armed with five fans, nine heatpipes and a king-sized vapor chamber, one might consider the HD 7970 SOC to be overkill, and to that we say: hell yes! Our inner enthusiast has a penchant for all things impractical -- even if they're tough to recommend from a value perspective.

Motorola's new Atrix HD has some seriously stiff competition in AT&T's smartphone lineup with the Samsung Galaxy S III and the HTC One X. The Atrix HD has most of the specs to match the top tier Android smartphones, but does it put them together well enough to be a real competitor?

The first MacBook Air debuted in 2008 to mixed reviews, but a series of redesigns and hardware refreshes have resulted in a product line that has had a huge impact on the industry. New for the 2012 MacBook Air is the Intel Ivy Bridge processor sporting HD 4000 graphics, higher capacity storage and memory options, as well as an improved 720p Facetime HD camera, and support for USB 3.0.

A powerful graphics card is likely the most expensive component in your PC if you're a gamer, but with all current and past-gen GPUs available it can be tough to pick the right solution for your needs. We compare today's most relevant offerings as we look for the best graphics cards for gaming at resolutions of 1920x1200 and 2560x1600.

The HP Omni 27 is very similar in design to the TouchSmart 520, using the same beefy aluminum base that additionally serves as a keyboard shelf. However, equipped with a 27-inch, non-touch display and a third-generation Intel Core processor, the Omni 27 is in a different class.

Google has released a number of Nexus branded 'hero' smartphones in the past, but the new Google Nexus 7 is the first ever tablet to bear the Google Nexus name.

The Vertex 4 series is aimed at performance buffs, with initial Indilinx Everest 2 based models offering capacities of 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. Performance is the name of the game here and OCZ doesn't disappoint.