#ThrowbackThursday With the release of Pascal the time has come to revisit history and see how 6 generations of Nvidia GeForce graphics cards compare. From Fermi-based GTX 480 to today's flagship, the GTX 1080, how much faster do you think today's cards are?

#ThrowbackThursday Launched in 1970, Xerox's PARC has played an instrumental role in the engineering of many of the technologies that compose the personal computer -- most famously the graphical user interface (GUI), ethernet, laser printing, the mouse, among others. We'd like to take a few and give credit where credit's due.

#ThrowbackThursday Enthusiasts' early overclocking endeavors involved soldering and replacing crystal clock oscillators, but evolving standards brought more accessible means to change system bus speeds, while the most daring would gain boosts through hard modding. These are but a few of the landmark processors revered for their overclocking prowess.

There have been many popular and important games included with operating systems over the years. But only one game can lay claim to having once been the most-used Windows application in the world, as Microsoft’s Chris Sells described Solitaire back in 2004. This is the story of Solitaire, which has been included with every copy of Windows since version 3.0.

The new millennium brought a closer relationship between people and computers. More portable devices became the conduit that enabled humans' basic need to connect. It's no surprise that computers transitioned from productivity tool to indispensable companion as connectivity proliferated. This is the fifth and final installment in a series exploring the history of the microprocessor and personal computing.

Intel's existence traced back to the breakup of Shockley Electronics and Fairchild Semiconductor. Determined to avoid the same fate, lawsuits became object lessons to employees, a means of protecting its IP, and a method of tying up a competitor's financial resources. This is the fourth installment in a five part series, where we look at the history of the microprocessor and personal computing, from the invention of the transistor to modern day chips.

IBM's stature guaranteed the PC to initiate a level of standardization required for a technology to attain widespread usage. That same stature also ensured competitors would have unfettered access to the technical specifications of the Model 5150. This is the third installment in a five part series, where we look at the history of the microprocessor and personal computing, from the invention of the transistor to modern day chips powering our connected devices.

This is the second installment in a five part series, where we look at the history of the microprocessor and personal computing, from the invention of the transistor to modern day chips powering our connected devices.

The personal computing business as we know it owes itself to an environment of enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and happenstance. The invention of the microprocessor, DRAM, and EPROM integrated circuits would help bring computing to the mainstream. This is the first in a five-part series exploring the history of the microprocessor and personal computing, from the invention of the transistor to modern day chips powering our connected devices.

What makes a product iconic? Design, functionality, styling, and innovation will get you part of the way there, but the true tests are how these products distinguished themselves from their competitors, how widely those traits were imitated by those competitors, and how history remembers their status. Here are some products that left their mark on the PC industry, whether in the form of full systems, CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards, cases or peripherals.

You pay $60 for many of the new games you play, but how much does a blockbuster game cost to make? Many in the industry don't even know the budgets of games. It is not unusual for developer working on a big-budget game to have no idea of the game's budget. To answer the question, we've pulled a bunch of scattered data from public sources as a first attempt to get a comprehensive sense of how much money the world's biggest and most expensive games cost.

Twenty-thirteen has been an eventful year marked by a changing landscape in the computing world, product refreshes in the mobile scene, a new generation of consoles, the rise of Bitcoin and the harsh realization that pretty much nothing you do online (and sometimes offline) is private. Our yearly recount of the most relevant tech happenings awaits...