Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is out to kick some ass this holiday shopping season by socking the competition with a one-two combo that consists of a new performance-enhanced Catalyst driver package (version 12.11) and some really sweet game bundles. As part of the Never Settle Game Bundle, you can receive up to three games for free, plus get a coupon for 20 percent off Medal of Honor Warfighter with the purchase of select graphics cards. Ready for the best part?

While the future of Ultrabooks might be in question, there's no doubt that manufacturers are trending towards thinner, lighter, and more powerful machines, and that has peripheral and component makers all vying a piece of the pie. Enter Mushkin, which just announced a line of slim 7mm solid state drives intended for Ultrabooks. In addition to their slim profile, Mushkin's new Chronos Deluxe SSDs sport performance-oriented SandForce controllers and SATA 6Gbps interfaces.

Asus, the top motherboard maker ahead of Gigabyte, may be looking to further strengthen its position by acquiring ASRock, the third largest player in the mobo business. It's an interesting development, not just because it would combine the world's first and third largest motherboard entities, but because it would be the second time Asus has owned ASRock. A quick history lesson is in order here.

It's not really fair to pit an enterprise grade PCIe solid state drive (SSD) against a typical consumer grade model sporting a SATA interface, like Samsung's 840 Series announced earlier today, but that doesn't mean we're any less impressed with the fact that RunCore's new Kylin III SSD manages 3 million random read IOPS and 1.4 million random write IOPS. It's safe to say it can run Crysis, and anything else you throw at it, though it's really meant to tackle workstation tasks that include database chores, web servers, analytic engines, and anything involved with high performance computing servers in general.