In the forever war between CPU vendors, AMD and Intel have traded places many times—one leads, then the other. Since the advent of Intel’s Core i7, though, AMD hasn’t been able to touch the performance of Intel’s high end, and Sandy Bridge further increases the gap. But, well, you couldn't buy Sandy Bridge motherboards when I wrote this build-it story in February for the May print issue—something about a bad chipset—and I'd been meaning to build an AMD-powered machine for a while now—with CrossFire, even. Why? Partially because I can, but I also want to witness the performance delta firsthand.
The original Radeon HD 6950 cards shipped with a 2GB frame buffer, and you can still get those if you want. But some manufacturers have begun shipping the HD 6950 with 1GB of video memory, which is a fine fit for the current generation of 1080p displays. 
Celebrities and athletes have great sway over how and what we buy. Cars that win NASCAR races peak consumer interest. Gear that we see experts and athletes use on TV generates far more interest than run-of-the-mill hardware.
Ditch the discs! We show you how to rip, convert, store, and stream all your media—while retaining the highest possible level of quality
Listen up, mediaphiles, because this might just be the last time we tackle the preservation of physical media in the hallowed pages of Maximum PC.
Audiophiles, hear this: The amazing Asus Xonar Essence STX finally faces a true competitor. 
Don’t think you’ve got it good with that dinky cam built into your laptop. Whether you’re exploiting that five-second window of opportunity on ChatRoulette, posting your latest Polka performance to YouTube, or catching up with your folks over Skype, a good webcam can make all the difference. An external cam doesn’t just offer vastly superior video and audio quality. The flexibility of being able to freely maneuver and position the device opens up lots of possibilities, letting you take photos and video of more than what happens to be right in front of your laptop screen.
While D-Link’s DCS-930L is designed to be placed anywhere in your home or office, the Y-Cam Bullet is a big, heavy outdoor cam designed to be bolted to the wall. If you have what it takes to make that happen and run electricity to it, you’ll have yourself an amazing piece of surveillance equipment. Connecting to your network wirelessly or through Ethernet, the Y-Cam delivers excellent video and audio recording capabilities. It even has a speaker, so you can interact with whomever wanders onto your property. The infrared LEDs not only look way cool, they let you see in the dark up to 50 feet.
If you had any lingering doubts that we’re living in the age of surveillance, the DCS-930L should dispel them. Never has it been so easy to watch what’s going on when you’re not there. Once you follow the simple instructions in the installation CD to set up the wireless networking and your account with My D-Link, you can place this light little box almost anywhere indoors. Then, wherever you are in the world, you can log into D-Link’s website by way of a web browser, iPhone, or Android phone and see what’s going on. More advanced users can set up the camera to upload video to a local or remote file server, either continuously, or in response to motion detection.
Microsoft’s LifeCam Studio looks almost identical to HP’s HD-4110, from the cylindrical shape to the flexible base. In our view, though, Microsoft’s got the upper hand. For one thing, the omnidirectional microphone produced some of the most natural, noise-free audio of any cam we tested. For another, the LifeCam Studio is unique in this roundup for including threading for a tripod—a feature you may not use every day, but when you need it, it makes all the difference.
