We know what you’re thinking, what more could a motherboard vendor put on the PCB that would convince anyone to part with $400? Asus thinks its latest Rampage II Extreme board in the Republic of Gamer’s series will do it.

This X58-based Core i7 board features support both Tri-SLI and CrossFire X, six DDR3 DIMM slots, EAX 4.0 software support, an audio card riser, heat pipes, LCD poster displays and a joystick and probe ports to connect your multi-tester.

What the hell do you need a joystick on a mobo for? Using the provided small single-line LCD display, you can toggle voltages, overclocking profiles or clock speeds. Want even more insane features? The board features probe ports to connect a multi-meter to the motherboard to read direct voltages for the RAM, southbridge, PCI-E, CPU, QPI and CPU PLL’s.

One feature the board doesn’t have that we expected was support for Nvidia’s nForce 200 chip. Instead of the Nvidia hardware, Asus has SLI certification for up to three-way SLI in a x16/x8/x8 configuration. There’s no word as to whether Asus plans to offer a board with an nForce 200 part in it yet.

Hit the jump for another pic!

If you thought EVGA was out of the motherboard game with Nvida sitting out the Core i7 chipset game, think again. EVGA just released the spec’s of an upcoming Nehalem motherboard with SLI support.

EVGA’s X58 SLI FTW mobo won’t be based on an nForce chip, instead it will use an Intel x58 chipset. The board will feature a six-DIMM slot configuration and support for both 2-way and 3-way SLI. The board is one of several that Nvidia will “bless” with SLI support in drivers. The other option to obtain SLI support is for board makers to integrate nForce 200 chips into the PCB. Most of the early X58 designs are foregoing the chip for now though. Nvidia did announce recently that Asus, MSI, Gigabyte and DFI as well as EVGA would support SLI.

The cost of the SLI certification for boards without the nForce 200 has been reported to be as high as $30. Recently, however, Expreview.com, reported that Nvidia was charging $5. Nvidia has not verified any of the pricing saying that the cost varied from contract to contract based on the volume and terms set up in each deal. The company did pooh pooh the earlier report of $30 though.

Click through for more details about this newly announced board!

When man first booted the PC, he saw the BIOS screen: a jumble of monochromatic numbers that made about as much sense as the binary language of load lifters. Sadly, not much about the BIOS has changed since the DeLorean and skinny ties were cool. Decades later, in our modern, visual-based world, we’re still greeted with a screen full of text from machines 1,000 times faster than those that were around when the ol’ BIOS was born.

Most PC lightweights simply ignore the BIOS and wait for their OSes to take over. Power users, however, know that the BIOS can be a friendly and rewarding place to go spelunking.

And by spelunking, we mean caving. And by go, we mean hit the jump. 

SSD’s are hot, but how do you mount your new 2.5-inch solid state drive  in a 3.5-inch bay without it looking ghettolicious?

The answer: Use a VelociRaptor’s extruded aluminum shell with Intel’s wicked fast SSD. The result is one a combination even better than peanut butter and chocolate if we may so say our selves.

Does it make sense to do this with a live VelociRaptor? Probably not, but we just happened to have a dead unit and rather than toss it in the garbage, we shucked out the dead drive by removing the four Torqx screws and mounted the Intel X25-M in its place. You can actually do this with a live VelociRaptor but you’ll immediately void the warranty on the drive. Does an SSD need all that aluminum to keep it cool? The answer is no, but it sure looks cool, right?

 Let’s face it, the only real difference between a mobile workstation and gaming notebook has been the sticker and GPU drivers. Lenovo’s ground-breaking W700 changes that with a slew of features that truly make it worthy of being called a workstation notebook. But it’s not just about the W700’s 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme Q9300 quad core or its Quadro FX 3700M with 1GB frame buffer alone.

We've already had some hands-on time with Bloomfield, Intel's high-end Nehalem part (officially named Core i7). But we know that not everyone's going to make the jump on board this new platform when it's released later this year. Bloomfield pricing hasn't been announced yet, but we expect it to be in the high-end enthusiast range -- ie. only affordable for price un-conscious buyers.

For mainstream system builders, Intel's solution will be Lynnfield, a socket 1160 CPU that'll have its own motherboard configuration. Lynnfield processors will be incompatible with X58 motherboards sporting socket 1366 -- though Intel assured us that they won't phase out the Bloomfield platform once Lynnfield is released in Q1 of next year (unlike what happened with AMD's socket 940 platform). Another difference: Lynnfield's motherboard will run two-channel DDR 3 memory, as opposed to the highly-touted tri-channel setup in Bloomfield.

We were lucky enough to snap up a few spy shots of an early Lynnfield motherboard, shown below:

Can you spot the differences between a Lynnfield and Bloomfield motherboard? Take a closer look after the jump. 

How the world turns. Mention overclocking ten years ago at IDF and a Pinkerton would escort you off the show floor to a room where three Intel engineers would beat you with old Pentium Pro motherboards. Today, Intel is actually actively promoting overclocking, but big blue is calling it Turbo Mode.

Turbo Mode is just one of the several groundbreaking features in Nehalem, but it’s also certainly one of the most head-turning. But how exactly does it work and how do you control it? Walk with us as we decode Intel’s Turbo Mode, show you how you’ll set it up in the BIOS (with first photos), and tell you what you should expect from your next heatsink.

Want to take a look at the Nehalem BIOS? Of course you do. 

IBuypower’s Gamer Paladin 990 is a strange beast. After we completed our testing, we were left wondering just what iBuypower was trying to accomplish with its half exotic, half midrange rig.

Take, for example, the videocard situation. The machine sports a pair of Nvidia’s newest GPUs, but not the company’s top-end offering, the GeForce GTX 280. Instead, iBuypower uses a pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 260s. If these GeForce cards weren’t midrange when they were first released, they certainly are now, as Nvidia has taken a blowtorch to prices to keep the GTX 260 competitive with ATI’s Radeon HD 4870.

Full review after the thing.

If you don’t just like Gigabit ports—you love them— Gigabyte’s GA-EP45-DQ6 is the motherboard for you. This mobo has four Gigabit ports that can be teamed together for one seriously fat-ass network connection.

Elsewhere, the board is typical Gigabyte; it includes surface-mounted buttons and the most clearly marked USB and FireWire ports we’ve ever seen. So if you nuke your USB drive because you plugged the USB connector into a FireWire header, it’s your own fault, brother.

Hit the jump for the rest of the review

If you still get warm and fuzzy thinking about those James Garner and Mariette Hartley Polaroid commercials, it’s time to let go of the past. Traditional film is barely hanging on, and Polaroid has completely ceased production of instant film.

But Polaroid hasn’t abandoned its interest in prints. The company is trying to rekindle the instant-print picture industry with its new Polaroid PoGo portable printer. This 4.75”x2.75”x1” device is the first to use Zink Imaging’s Zero Ink paper. Instead of shooting dots of ink onto a piece of paper, the PoGo uses a thermal head to heat up tiny crystals embedded in each sheet of paper.

Sounds rad, eh? Find out the skinny after the jump.

Gateway struck a nerve with its original low-cost FX P-series notebook, which gave gamers an affordable way to get good frame rates from a portable PC. The company applied the same formula to its new P-7811 FX and again comes up with a winning combination of hardware that’s sure to please budget-minded gamers.

Read on after the jump!

Canary Wireless was the first out with a usable Wi-Fi network spotter. We say usable because we’ve seen all manner of gimmicky, useless devices that couldn’t spot a Wi-Fi network if they were hit by a semi full of them.

Thankfully, Canary's second-generation Hot Spotter is quite a capable beast.

Full review after the jump!

Some days, we almost miss Toshiba’s signature battleship gray notebook PCs—the latest look for the company’s long-running Satellite series is just a bit too much. After a few hours of use, our Satellite P305-S8825 was covered with fingerprints. And that was with clean paws! If you like snacking on Pringles while surfing the web, this rig will look as hygienic as the sneeze guard at a Baskin-Robbins after a class of third-graders has visited.

It’s the worst kept secret in the industry: Intel’s next-generation Penryn killer, codenamed Nehalem is just around the corner. We’ve been seeing leaked benchmarks based on early silicon for months, and Nehalem’s Wikipedia page is already packed with unconfirmed specifications. All indications – and this is with more optimizations to come, mind you – is that Nehalem may be a bad mother worthy of having Isaac Hayes pound out a theme song for it.

OK, we get it. It’s going to be fast, but just how difficult is it to build a Nehalem rig? What are the catches? Will the new motherboard and socket require some silly new BTX form factor? To find out, we convinced one of our hardware contacts (who’ll remain unnamed) to let us into its lab so we could finally get our hands on the new chip. There, we were provided with the desktop version of Nehalem – called Bloomfield – and an Intel D58XSO “Smackover” board.

 Read on to see how we built the Nehalem rig, and what surprises we encountered along the way!

We’ve been calling Intel’s next-generation CPU family code-named Nehalem a Penryn-killer because, sadly, AMD’s best and brightest have hardly been that. For those who haven’t sifted the sands of the Internet, and picked the brains of OEM’s and hardware vendors for every detail of Intel’s next-gen microarchitecture, here’s your quick primer on Nehalem that’ll make you big man on campus at the next geekfest.

How Many Cores?

Most Nehalem’s will be native quad-core with all four compute cores on the same physical die. Intel says that the design of Nehalem will also let the company build an eight-core version, codenamed Beckton, for servers. Intel also hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a multi-chip version so could perhaps see a double-die Beckton with 16 cores as well.

HyperThreading Returns

An improved version of HyperThreading will find its way into the core of Nehalem. This improved simultaneous multi-threading, or SMT, will let the OS see a quad-core chip as eight cores. Although some still debate its merit, the implementation of HT in the Pentium 4 generally added 15 percent more performance in multi-threaded applications.

Read on to find out more about Intel's Nehalem.

Think a 30-inch monitor at 2560x1600 resolution is amazing? Then you haven’t seen Merdian’s 810 Reference Video System that gives you a 4096 x 2160 projected image for the low price of $185,000. But we have.

We got to touch and see the 810 up close and personal last week in a private demonstration held at Dolby Laboratories headquarters. Why Dolby? The company has a famous 90-seat theater in its main building in San Francisco that’s actually nicer than most small screens at the multiplex. And how does this monster of a projector perform? Read on to find out!

 Click through to read our impressions of the 810 Reference Video System

There’s a civil war brewing within the PC: Intel says the CPU is the head honcho while Nvidia argues that the GPU is boss. With its Deluge-i A2, Puget shows whose side it’s taking in this debate. This budget gaming box spends big on the videocard but skimps on the processor.

Did they side with the right team? Find out after the jump

You can change CPU sockets, dump PCI, and jettison legacy ports all day long, but nothing, absolutely nothing, pisses people off like moving to a new type of RAM. Luckily, there’s a fallback: dual-format RAM motherboards such as MSI’s P35 Combo Platinum board.

Hit the jump to read our review of this dual-format monster.

I still own a vintage Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera but feeding it was expensive then and now nigh impossible thanks to the end of instant film. Polaroid’s POGO portable printer brings back some of the fun I had with the SX-70. This pocket printer is the first to use Zero Imaging’s Zero Ink paper that does away with ink in favor of billions of embedded crystals in the 2x3 sheets of paper.

Hook your PictBridge-enabled digital camera up to the POGO via a Type A USB cable and let the fun begin. Once the camera has finished chewing on the image, it will take about 30 seconds to print out. The POGO will print full bleed to the tiny pieces of paper and the adhesive back lets you stick ‘em anywhere. Fun, right?

Hit the jump for more impressions and a gallery of sticky photos.

If you want AMD performance without the cost, MSI’s K9A2 Platinum might be the ticket. It’s a bare-bones yet performance-oriented board for Phenom procs that boasts no fewer than four x16 physical PCI-E 2.0 slots, as well as support for eSATA and SAS drives and loads more features than you'd expect from a board of this price.

Hit the jump for the full review!