Kingston has been on a it of a roll lately and their latest launch is no different. The company has released a 16GB MicroSDHC Class 10 expansion card which should handle a good chunk of your data storage needs.

As far as speed is concerned you’re looking at a minimum transfer rate of at least 10MB/s which should allow for decent recording and image capturing speeds.

You’ll want to be prepared though as the card will set you back $138USD MSRP. You can also pick up versions of the card packed in with a single SD adapter or miniSD and SD adapters for $139USD and $140USD respectively.

Normally when you go for the low-end of the market you know what you’re in for. You’re looking for some cost savings or power savings by going with chips that aren’t as powerful as the more expensive options but still offer plenty of power for the mundane usage scenarios. There’s still room for tweaking though.

Legit Reviews is all over the EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 video card which chooses to go with DDR3 over the slower DDR2 and pushes clock rates a bit higher as well:

Today, we will be looking at the EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 edition graphics card. This card has a factory overclocked core and shader clock speeds, which should help boost performance over the standard clock speeds of 625MHz and 1360MHz.  The EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 has a core clock speed of 671MHz and a shader clock of 1458MHz. This is just over a 7% clock frequency boost on the GPU, so that should help out performance on the card’s 48 stream processors.

Overall its performance is still underwhelming in games but you don’t need much performance in your office or home theater PCs now do you.

SATA 600 was supposed to make the latest generation of motherboards a better option moving forward due to the faster storage speeds, unfortunately faulty add-on chips has delayed its adoption into chipsets and motherboards. That doesn’t mean you can’t add on your own storage interface though.

The Asus PCIe GEN2 SATA6G expansion card nets you a pair of 6Gb/s ports that will gladly take your current storage drives but is more suited to faster drives of the future. Overclock3D has a look:

Initially it was hoped that all motherboards based on the P55 chipset would include 6G technology but due to the problems with the on-board Marvel controller and PATA devices, this feature was pulled from early releases. Intel now do not have any plans on integrating the technology until 2011 so those holding out for a motherboard with this feature could be in for a long wait.

Now we just need a company brave enough to unleash an SSD capable of making use of such bandwidth. We can handle it.

If you were wondering when the latest, monthly, ATI Catalyst drivers would be released well you had a bit of a wait this month as AMD chose to push them out on Microsoft’s Windows 7 launch date. In the latest 9.10 driver set you can expect quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes as well as support for the newest ATI Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 graphics cards. Unfortunately Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 support didn’t make it in but those cards should see support shortly in the form of a hotfixed driver.

If you’re running a Radeon graphics card earlier than the Radeon HD 2400 series you’ll have to grab the company’s legacy drivers as earlier generations of their graphics chips have been moved to legacy support status.

Here are some quick links to AMD’s download pages:

ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows 7
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows 7 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows Vista
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows Vista 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows XP
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows XP 64-bit

While the ATI Radeon HD 5770 presents a solid mid-range performance gaming experience there is that often overlooked benefit that a multiple GPU environment brings in. Thankfully there are those dedicated enough to test such technology.

Guru3D has tested the Radeon HD 5770 in a three card CrossFireX setup which may seem a bit excessive but the performance benefits are there:

Obviously rendering your games with three GPUs equals a lot of brute horsepower, so big that the rest of the PC might become a bottleneck for your graphics solution. That is however a luxury problem though but as an example, Fallout 3 at 8x AA at 1920×1200 performed as well as a 2-way 5770 setup as the processor (Core i7 @ 3.75 GHz) was literally holding back the GPUs from reaching the stratosphere.

When your gaming performance is held back by such a powerful processor it’s a good problem to have.

As is customary with most technology the best revisions and refinements usually come around at the end of a product’s life, this time around is no different. The XFX Radeon HD 4890 Extreme sports a mild factory stock overclock and, with a bit of prodding, may just hit those high speeds you desire.

HardOCP has a review:

Taking it a step further to see just how much farther we could get, we increased the fan speed from auto to manual and set it at 100%. With this, we ended up with a fantastic clock speed 990MHz on the GPU and 4.68GHz on the memory without any voltage modifications!

Speedy, but you may want to save up a bit more and go for the latest and greatest.

The graphics battle kicks into high gear again with today’s launch of AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. Of course you can expect the usual performance improvements but the chip also sports new power saving features that should tame it when it’s just sitting around idling.

Here’s a collection of links testing the new board:

AMD’s Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs – AnandTech
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Review – bit-tech
AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Review – HardOCP
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One – Hot Hardware
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Graphics Card and AMD Eyefinity Review – PC Perspective
AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 graphics processor – The Tech Report

High end graphics cards usually come with a stock cooler design that is capable of handling the sort of heat the monsters put out, unfortunately they only do enough to maintain GPUs at a safe operating temperature.

Hardware Canucks has a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X video card. It sports an insanely beefy cooling system that should keep things a bit quiet and running cooler:

Sapphire’s HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X has a unique design with a partial-length heatsink covering the area directly above the core and making its way towards the backplate. Meanwhile, the rear portion of the card has a separate heatsink which is used to cool off the hot running VRMs. Its blue PCB makes the whole affair look faintly Gigabyte-esque while the length sticks to the reference 9.5”.

Beefy and svelte, interesting combination they have going on there.

CableCARD is the cable industry’s standard for getting digital content to supported devices such as TVs, and in a few rare cases PCs, instead of having to rely on a large and clunky cable box. Unfortunately the PC option saw very limited usage due to Microsoft only allowing OEM PC builders to create CableCARD compatible computers.

Things have changed with Microsoft’s announcement that Windows 7’s Media Center will be able to natively handle a CableCARD so long as your hardware can decode all of the digital goodness. Here’s a few details:

Microsoft and CableLabs announced that customers will now be able to add digital cable tuners with CableCARD to a Windows 7-based PC with Windows Media Center. A new tool will be provided by Microsoft that assesses the PC’s ability to support the solution. This tool will analyze the customer’s PC and enable digital cable support if the PC meets requirements, opening digital cable options to Windows Media Center customers across the country. Microsoft also announced that, with Windows 7, it has increased the number of TV tuners that can be connected to the PC from two to four per tuner type, thereby allowing customers to simultaneously record or watch as many as four digital cable TV channels.

A great boost to those home theater PC users which should see adoption rates improve quite a bit. Hit the break for the full PR.

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If there’s one thing that’s true of most enthusiast motherboards it’s the fact that they all sport some form of high contrast color combination in order to draw your eye to their product and given how much surface area there is on a board there are plenty of opportunities for them to splash color all around.

EVGA chose a more muted approach with their P55 LE motherboard opting for a nearly all black motherboard which should be a nice option for those aesthetic seekers but it’d be foolish to ignore its other benefits. Hardware Secrets has a review:

EVGA P55 LE has two PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots. These slots are actually connected directly inside the CPU, and this in one of the main new features brought by socket 1156 processors. If only one video card is installed, the main slot will work at x16, but if two video cards are installed the speed drops to x8 on each slot. This is a limitation from the CPU, not from the chipset or the motherboard, since the CPU is the component controlling these slots, as explained. P55 LE supports CrossFire configuration, but not SLI. SLI support on P55-based motherboards will depend on whether the manufacturer licensed this technology from nVidia or not. From the EVGA line-up, only P55 LE does not support SLI, all the other five models do.

A slick board but given the equally flashy designs of memory, CPU coolers, and graphics cards you won’t be seeing much of it buried under all of your hardware…for shame.