One of the bigger fans and aficionado's of graphics technology is Bodar -- Bodar is active in our forums a lot and he spends a lot of money on his gear. He recently built a fantastic PC -- totally overclocked and pimped up with no less than four Radeon HD 5870 1024MB card. This weekend he made a nice little video about his new setup and takes you through a good number of benchmarks and user experiences.

His configuration:

• Radeon HD 5870 1024Mb (x4)
• Xeon 3580 @ 4.72 GHz
• 120GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD
• 6GB Corsair Dominator
• 1500 Watt PSU
• Windows 7

 If you are bored on a Sunday morning, go check out his video and if you like to comment him, please do so in this thread. Nice job Bodar !

Akasa has introduced the Freedom Tower, a new processor cooler for the most recent processors from Intel and AMD. The cooler features a tower heatsink with four nickle plated direct-touch heatpipes, aluminum fins and a 120mm PWM fan with a max airflow of 57.32CFM at a noise level of 27.2dBA. Akasa Freedom Series is designed to unleash the performance of your system. Freedom Tower is a multi platform CPU cooler utilizing four nickel plated copper heatpipes with direct contact technology. The extreme cooling capabilities give you freedom to overclock and white LED 12cm fan with PWM provides ultra quiet performance and subtle illumination. Freedom to overclock is yours.

• Quality materials, classic design and killer looks
• Four nickel plated heatpipes with direct contact technology
• High grade aluminium fins for rapid heat dissipation
• Ultra quiet PWM 12cm white LED fan
  

Sapphire is developing a Radeon HD 5750 with Vapor-X cooler. The HD 5750 Vapor-X includes a uniquely designed cooler utilizing Sapphire

Unigine Corp announced its release of the first DirectX 11 benchmark "Heaven" that is based on its proprietary Unigine engine. The company has already made a name among the overclockers and gaming enthusiasts for uncovering the realm of true GPU capabilities with previously released "Sanctuary" and "Tropics" demos. Their benchmarking capabilities are coupled with striking visual integrity of the refined graphic art.  

"Heaven" benchmark excels at providing the following key features:

• Native support of OpenGL, DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11
• Comprehensive use of tessellation technology
• Advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion)
• Volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm
• Dynamic simulation of changing environment with high physical fidelity
• Interactive experience with fly/walk-through modes
• ATI Eyefinity support

Hardware requirements:

• The Tessellation feature REQUIRES a GPU with DirectX 11 support!
• ATI Radeon HD 2xxx and higher or NVIDIA GeForce 7xxx and higher (recommended: NVIDIA 8800 / AMD 4800 series)
• 256 Mb of video memory

Earlier this month the company has announced full support of DirectX 11 features in its top-notch 3D middleware. Updated Unigine engine supports Windows 7 and has successfully incorporated the groundbreaking DirectX 11 capabilities, including the following core features:

• Hardware tessellation
• DirectCompute
• Shader Model 5.0

Download the benchmark --  click here (135MB).

Or you can watch the YouTube video. We also have a discussion thread open here.

Today we'll look at Gigabyte's offering with their P55 UD5 motherboard. The UD5 features Gigabyte's UD3 suite of features, which include 2oz of copper throughout the PCB, Japanese solid capacitors, low RDS MOSFETs, high-quality ferrite core chokes, and more. The UD5 comes equipped with a modest 12 phase power design. s standard the board has ten USB 2.0 ports and additional USB headers to add another 14 USB ports should you want to.

Extra's can be found in an eSATA ports, Clear CMOS, power and reset micro switches, Optical SPDIF audio output controlled by 8 Channel Realtek AL888S HD Audio. It is one fine motherboard alright !

Check out the full Guru3D article right here.

NZXT expanded its Classic Series of PC cases with the Gamma. This all-black ATX mid-tower intends to provide the essentials of casing the PC of today, while attempting to be creative with its bezel design to the extant possible. It measures 190 X 449 X 508 mm (W x H x D), and weighs 6 kg. The case material is steel, including a dash of meshed steel in the front-panel. The front-panel includes four 5.25" drive bays, audio, USB, and eSATA connectors, and perforated steel to cover the front intake fan.

The interiors are all-black, with seven internal 3.5" drive bays. Apart from openings that help in cable management, the motherboard tray has an opening that makes working with CPU coolers with back-plates easier. The ventilation system provides a lot of room for expansion: a 120 mm intake fan, two side 120 mm fans, a rear 120 mm, and another two 140 or 120 mm fans on top. Ports for water-tubing are included. It is available in Europe, for a price of 39.90 EUR.

Yep that is right .. 25W. AMD will launch a Athlon II X2 260U with a extremely low 25W TDP for OEM in Q4. This will be the first 25W Athlon II X2 based on 45nm Regor. The processors is clocked at 1.8GHz and hasa  2MB cache, comes with support for DDR3 1066 on an AM3 socket. Some faster models will show up after 2010 with revised Regor dual-core.

Athlon II X2 260U will replace 1.8GHz Athlon X2 6850e,which is based on 65nm dual-core with 22W TDP -- Athlon II X2 260U obviously will return better performance.

Meanwhile AMD and NVIDIA have criticized Intel which seems to purposely dragging its feet on this despite of 3.0 controller spec eventually by Intel. The manager explains that Intel teams prefers its own optical cable interface, Light Peak with 10Gbps of transfer speed ,which is expected to show up early next year.

That doesn

Codemasters announces the unveiling of the DirectX 11 edition of Colin McRae: DiRT 2 at a Windows 7 launch event. Codemasters will take advantage of DirectX 11 features to add to the realism of the racing environment.

Hardware tessellation will further improve the appearance of water and other surfaces as well as crowd animations. The performance of Shader Model 5.0 will aid in creating an even richer 3D experience, enhancing key image quality parameters such as depth of field, ambient occlusion and shadows. These DirectX 11 features, and many others, combine to deliver the most exciting and visceral racing experience yet.

DiRT 2's North American release date has now been confirmed to be December 1.

We have two video's for you today - a Gameplay demo and a DX 11 technology demo -- enjoy !

There's a new ATI Catalyst driver out. This is revision 9.10

Official ATI Catalyst WHQL release supporting ATI Radeon HD 5800 series GPUs

• ATI Catalyst 9.10 now includes full GPU support for the award winning ATI HD Radeon 5800 series GPUS!

Super Sample Anti-Aliasing for the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series

• ATI Catalyst 9.10 provides support for a new Anti-Aliasing method on the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series. Users can now experience the high level of anti-aliasing image quality using Super Sampling anti-aliasing while maintaining good performance levels.

Highlights of resolved issues

• Ghostbusters video game no longer flickers between desktop and game play when anti-aliasing is set to 8X and game resolution set to 2560
  

That's right --  ATI 5870X2 aka Hemlock (!) The card is not even released yet but the guys over at Danger Den are already prepping the copper cooling blocks for liquid cooling. Hot off the machines you are looking at the first 5870X2 copper base. 

DD are just waiting for the retail card version to arrive to do the final test fit. Well guess what DD, joing the waiting line ;)