Asus on Monday announced the launch of its P8Z77-V Premium motherboard, the flagship slice of silicon in the P8Z77 Series and, as it happens to be the case, the first Intel certified mainboard to boast a Thunderbolt interface, the company claims. Remember Thunderbolt? It's the previously much hyped high-speed interface from Intel that was supposed to give USB 3.0 a run for its money, though Intel claimed from Day 1 that the two technologies were meant to co-exist and not necessarily compete with each other.

RunCore's latest solid state drive offering is an oxymoron in the tech world, or perhaps the company was being ironic when naming its new SSD line 'InVincible' when 'Impenetrable' might have been a better choice. Naming scheme aside, the neat thing about RunCore's InVincible line is that the drives feature a pair of self-destruction modes, including one that wipes out data by overwriting the entire disk -- otherwise known as zeroing out -- and one that's, um, a bit more permanent.

When we think of Ivy Bridge, we conjure up images of decked out gaming rigs with high-end graphics cards and other burly hardware. And that's all well and good, but Intel's 3rd Generation Core processors are equally suited for IT and business end users, so it was inevitable that the Santa Clara chip maker would strengthen its vPro platforms with its latest and greatest processor technology.

Nvidia today rolled out the welcome mat for the newest addition to its Kepler family, the GeForce GTX 670. The new 670 is "engineered from the same DNA as the recently announced GTX 680," but is a more affordable part with prices starting at $399 for cards built around Nvidia's reference design. And according to Nvidia, the 670 is a full 45 percent faster in gaming performance than the closest competitive product (i.e., AMD's Radeon HD 7950).