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"Finally, now the meat of the systems are starting to come out," Maximum PC reader I Jedi exhaled in the comments of our earlier article about the new Biostar TZ77XE4 Motherboard. If he only knew how right he was: since the Biostar news went live, a bevy of companies have announced new 7-series-supporting mobos of their own, including ASRock, MSI and Gigabyte.
If those spiffy new Kepler-based GTX 680 graphics cards do in fact end up hitting the streets tomorrow, as has been widely rumored, enterprising overclockers will no doubt be looking to tweak their new hardware to even higher levels of performance. Boosting core frequencies should be a cinch for owners of MSI-brand GTX 680s; the company joined forces with Guru3D to release a new Beta version of its Afterburner overclocking utility, complete with support for Kepler GPUs.
Another day, another pair of new AMD Radeon HD graphics cards. Didn't we just say that yesterday? In another fine example of how quickly things move in today's age, several companies unleashed a smorgasbord of new AMD Radeon cards today and made our previous statements obsolete. How many cards constitute a smorgasbord? Seven, by our count, and the good news is that most of the new releases are higher-end models.
Who knew netbooks would prove so resilient? By all means, the growing popularity and falling prices of tablet PCs along with the rollout of Intel's Ultrabook bandwagon could have spelled doom for the netbook form factor. But along comes Cedar Trail and suddenly there's renewed interest in these pint-sized notebooks, at least for one more generation anyway. MSI, one of the driving forces in the netbook category, just unveiled its new Wind U180 for 2012.
We've run across a fair number of gaming notebook announcements from MSI during the past year, and that's not a fluke. According to Senior Vice President of MSI, Henry Lu, there's a bigger profit margin in gaming laptops, and so that's where there the bulk of its focus goes towards regarding its notebook business. Considering some of the models we've seen, we're totally fine with that.
When it rains gaming notebooks, it apparently pours gaming notebooks. The Razer Blade is due any time now, just yesterday we told you that the MSI GT685 launched, and as it turns out, MSI has launched yet another laptop; the GT783. It’s 17.3-inch screen holds an almost 2-inch advantage over the GT685, and MSI put the extra real estate to good use, stocking the GT783 with a Core i7-2670QM, a GeFore GTX 580M with 2GB of VRAM, and a lot of other goodies.
Vin Diesel and the Fast and the Furious movie franchise helped popularize tricked out Civics and other modded imports, and maybe it was only a matter of time before it became vogue to sell motherboards sporting over-the-top eye candy. MSI continues with the aggressive motherboard theme that's become all the rage lately, but a peek at the company's new Big Bang XPower II mobo is all it takes to understand there's a serious board underneath all the fluff.
For whatever reason, we envision the "god of war" being bigger than 15.6 inches, but let's not fault MSI for being excited about its new GT685 gaming laptop and calling it such. With a traditional screen size in tow, the GT685 has the chops to be a desktop replacement, and could even be a desktop killer depending on how it's spec'd out. Let's have a look at what it brings to the table.
All-in-one (AIO) PCs are quickly becoming a dime a dozen with little to separate one Sandy Bridge or Fusion model from the next. Credit MSI with finding a way to differentiate its new Wind Top AE2071 model from the rest by supposedly being the first in the industry to use an LED panel. Combined with MSI's "unique energy-saving technology," power consumption is reduced by 30 percent compared to conventional CCFL panels, MSI claims.








