Stop whatever it is you're doing and run through your office or down the street yelling, 'Ivy Bridge is here! Ivy Bridge is here!' Sure, you'll elicit funny stares as you lap the water cooler and blow by accounting's set of cubicles, but those 'in the know' will understand what all the fuss is about. They'll also be appreciative of the heads up that, finally, Intel's Ivy Bridge launch is official.
It's still a challenge finding one of Nvidia's Kepler infused GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards in stock and ready to ship, but one thing the new GPU series doesn't lack is third-party variation. Nvidia's GPU partners are putting their own stamp on the GTX 680 with custom coolers and, in some cases like the new DirectCU II TOP edition from Asus, custom designed PCBs as well.
Cooler Master today unveiled a new line of power supplies that promise to deliver "world-class" reliability and performance without beating up your savings account. Coming in 475W, 525W, 625W, and 725W configurations, each of Cooler Master's new Extreme 2 PSUs costs less than a C-note; the entry-level model carries an MSRP that's half that much. Oddly enough, Cooler Master doesn't claim any 80 Plus efficiency ratings on any of the new models, though the company insists they're constructed with "higher quality components and process improvements" than what's found on the first generation Extreme Series.
My 
Back in the day (as in, before solid state drives), Western Digital's VelociRaptor line was the cat's meow in terms of high speed storage. Fast and expensive, VelociRaptors were the tool of choice by power users willing to drop a bit of extra coin for better performance. Flash forward to today and you'll find SSDs are the popular option among power users, but just like billionaire InGen CEO John Hammond brought back dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, Western Digital has injected new DNA into its VelociRaptor line and is now shipping its most capacious mutation to date.
If Intel's Ivy Bridge ultimately crumbles, it won't be for lack of vendor support. While the tech world waits for Intel to launch its 3rd generation Core processor family, motherboard makers and system integrators are busy pushing out upgraded platforms that support the upcoming CPUs, everything from big and bad notebooks to little motherboards like Zotac's new Z77-ITX Wi-Fi and H77-ITX Wi-Fi, a pair of Intel 7-series mini ITX boards intended for anyone who wants to pack big performance into a small footprint.
In a perfect world, solid state drives would cost less than mechanical hard drives. Not just the small capacity, low performance SSDs either, but the beefier drives with fast read and write transfer speeds and big IOPS. We don't live in a perfect world, of course, so we have to settle for reasonably priced high performing SSDs, like Kingston's new SandForce-driven HyperX 3K line.
The floodgates have been 
The Mission: Way back in the recession-bound depths of 2009, we skipped our normal balls-to-the-wall Dream Machine build in favor of 
Overclocking a graphics card isn't terribly difficult, and if you're careful, it's not all that dangerous either. But there's always that risk of taking things too far or ending up with components that just don't respond well to faster clockspeeds. Factory overclocked cards get around both problems, and one of the newest on the market is TUL Corporation's PowerColor PCS+ HD7850, a spiffy looking hunk of hardware with a power friendly design.
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