Need a videocard but find yourself cramped for space? Unfortunately for you, many of today's mid-range to high-end graphics cards take up two slots, a necessary evil in order to cool today's increasingly power (and power hungry) GPUs. Fortunately for you, most board partners also like to experiment with their own designs, ditching reference blueprints in favor of their own cooling creations. It was this mindset that led Powercolor to launch the first single-slot Radeon HD 6850 videocard.

AMD today quietly launched a trio of new graphics cards specifically intended for OEM builders, including an entry-level card that you could save up for with nothing more than a paper route. It's the Radeon HD 6450, a budget card priced at about $55 and built around AMD's lower-end Caicos chip with 160 stream processors, a 64-bit memory interface, and support for both GDDR5 and DDR3 memory.

As much as we'd like them to be, videocards aren't always about fun and play, For getting serious work done, you need a graphics card that cares not if it can run Crysis so long as it can compute the pants off of CAD design and other professional applications. That's the kind of thing Nvidia's new Quadro 400 videocard was designed for, and according to Nvidia, designers and engineers can expect up to 10 times better performance compared to a Sandy Bridge-equipped system, and 5 times better performance than the mighty GeForce GTX 580 in select tasks.

Experimenting with beta drivers isn't for the faint of heart, especially when it comes to videocards. After all, this is your pricey GPU we're talking about, and a poorly coded driver can wreak all kinds of havoc, from instability to artifacting, to even overheating if the fan doesn't kick on when it's supposed to. That said, if you're down for playing with pre-release drivers, Nvidia has made available its GeForce 270.51 driver set in beta form.