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This seriously well-equipped desktop costs just $325 (plus shipping).

(Credit: TigerDirect)

It's remarkable how much bang for the buck you can get from a PC these days.

For example, if you're looking to replace an aging desktop with something far more powerful, Tech For Less has a refurbished HP Pavilion a6700y quad-core desktop for $325.04. Shipping will run you about $25.

The system offers some mighty impressive specs for the price, starting with an AMD Phenom 9150e quad-core processor. Multitask all you want; it won't break a sweat.

It also comes with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and built-in 802.11b/g (a rare perk in a desktop).

The system runs Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit. I'm sure most users would prefer Windows 7 at this point, but you can always upgrade later--and there's really nothing wrong with Vista as long as it's running on a powerful machine like this one.

The only mediocre spec here is the integrated GeForce 6150SE graphics--fine for everyday computing, but insufficient for high-end gaming and video. At least you can drop in a discrete graphics card later if you feel the need.

Like most refurbished PCs, this one has a 90-day warranty. But, hey, for $325, you can afford to roll the dice a little. And for what it's worth, you can buy a one-year extended warranty for $30.

Not long ago I paid nearly double this price for a system with fairly similar specs. Suffice it to say, this is a helluva deal (check out the stellar user reviews at TigerDirect, where it runs $379.99), one that's hard to pass up if you're in the market for a well-appointed desktop.

Backup deal: It's rare to find deals on Microsoft's new Zune HD, but J&R has a solid one: the 16GB Zune HD for $177 shipped. That's after applying coupon code paypal20 and using PayPal as your payment method.

AMD announced its newest high-end graphics card this morning, the dual-chip ATI Radeon HD 5970. Available today for $599, the new high-end card features two clock speed-reduced Radeon HD 5870 GPUs on a single graphics card.

Based on the Radeon HD 5000-series chip design, the new Radeon HD 5970 card has the same features common to AMD's other new 3D cards, including DirectX 11 support, GPU computing via ATI's Stream technology, as well as support for up to three monitors via a technology AMD calls Eyefinity (the six-monitor card is due out "soon," according to AMD).

AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 5970 dual-chip graphics card.

(Credit: AMD)

Unique to the Radeon HD 5970, AMD has budgeted overclocking headroom into the cooling hardware and unlocked the clock speed multipliers for both the GPU and the graphics memory. Included software will let you overclock the card, and AMD has also included multiple fail-safes to prevent overheating or damage to the card or your system.

Overclocked or otherwise, the Radeon HD 5970 performed well in various review from around the Web, taking over as the fastest graphics card currently available. It trumps Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295 on almost every test we found. This isn't a surprise given that Nvidia's top single-chip card fell to the AMD's single-chip Radeon HD 5870 when it debuted last month, but it's particularly interesting because Nvidia's answer, the DirectX 11-based Fermi, isn't due until at least the first quarter of next year (Nvidia teased a preview of Fermi hardware on its Facebook page today).

You can find reviews of the new Radeon HD 5970 from Anandtech, Hexus, HotHardware, MaximumPC, and PC Perspective , among others.

Update: AMD sent along a clarification of the various issues Nvidia raised regarding AMD's drivers:

"We actually moved our DirectX 9 hardware to a "legacy driver" status back in March 2009, and we were quite open about this move" [[ed: News to us]]. We've been providing updates to this driver on a quarterly basis - ironic considering the fact that we are offering more frequent updates of our "legacy" driver than some companies do of their "current" drivers. In fact we will be posting a new legacy driver in the next few days.

Also, as you probably well know, WDDM1.1 (Windows Display Driver Model) is the driver architecture required to run Windows 7. To meet Microsoft requirements, GPU's must be DirectX10 and later level hardware. As stated on our website, Windows 7 users with DirectX 9 AMD graphics hardware can use the legacy Windows Vista WDDM 1.0 drivers (as it is not possible for DirectX 9 hardware to support the WDDM 1.1 driver requirements)."

Ever-helpful Nvidia sent us an e-mail this morning with a few updates regarding Windows 7 and AMD's older 3D cards. Some of AMD's old cards are cut-off from official Windows 7 support altogether, and others are missing out on a few of Windows 7's more-advanced features. Before we accuse AMD of abandoning its customer base, we thought we'd try to track down just how many customers will be affected by this news.

The numbers for the Windows 7 cut-off issue are difficult to track down due to the age of the cards involved. As announced in a support update on its Web site, AMD plans to move its pre-DirectX 10 graphics cards to legacy status. That means AMD will no longer update the software drivers for 3D cards from its Radeon HD 1000 series or older. You can try using the most current Vista-compatible driver for those cards in Windows 7, or try to find a user-made driver, but AMD won't be able to provide you with support.

Lenovo made a handful of new system announcements this morning that mark a change of tactic for the Chinese-owned manufacturer. Both its IdeaCentre B500 all-in-one and its IdeaCentre K300 desktop feature gaming-oriented components, representing a departure for the typically business-focused PC maker.

Lenovo's new IdeaCentre B500 gaming-oriented all-in-one

(Credit: Lenovo)

The sharp-angled IdeaCentre B500 is the most unique of the two desktops announced today. Starting at $649, the B500 comes with a 23-inch, 1,920x1080 display, 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a motion-control remote. Options include an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, as well as a Geforce GTS 250M graphics chip (aka a rebranded Geforce 9800GTX). We know of no other all-in-one with such a capable 3D chip, and while it won't handle Windows 7's new DirectX 11 graphics features, it should let you play most older and current titles at reasonable image quality and frame rates.

Other options for the B500 include typical fare for higher-end all-in-ones, like a Blu-ray drive, a TV tuner, up to 4GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of storage. But based on both the design and the other options, Lenovo is clearly gunning for PC gamers.

The new IdeaCentre K300 desktop could use some more up-to-date specs.

(Credit: Lenovo)

We're surprised it's taken this long for someone to whip up a gaming-oriented all-in-one, and we're glad Lenovo finally took the chance. We're less enthusiastic about the IdeaCentre K300. Pricing for this model starts at $499, but the top-end goes to $1,999. For that price you'd expect at least a Core i5 CPU, but Lenovo looks to have opted for last year's parts bin, going only as high as Core 2 Quad.

We don't want to write this system off completely, especially not having seen one in person. The $499 price tag will likely lure in those charmed by the gaming-style case, and with the right pricing for the various options you might find a way to cobble together a decent configuration for a good price. Options include AMD's last generation's Radeon HD 4000-series graphics cards, up to 8GB of RAM, Blu-ray, and two hard drives in RAID 0, among others.

If you dial the K300 up to the $1,999 top-end, though, you'll be disappointed by the lack of Core i7 or even Core i5 CPUs. We've seen systems for $1,300 or so with Core i7, so the idea of paying $700 more for an older Core 2 Quad chip doesn't sit well. Lenovo also doesn't mention SLI or CrossFire X multigraphics card support, a feature common to better midrange gaming PCs. Offering the dual-chip Radeon HD 4870 X2 card is a reasonable alternative, and it should provide a solid gaming experience. The problem is that it's not the DirectX 11-compatible Radeon HD 5000-series, which AMD launched a few weeks ago to roundly positive reviews. With no Core i5 or Core i7, and last generation's (still-fast) 3D cards, PC gamers willing to spend $1,500 to $2,000 on a new system won't be able to take the K300 seriously.

Update: As Semiaccurate.com's Charlie Demerjian himself informs us, it was actually he who first wrote about Nvidia halting chipset development, albeit in more dire terms, back in August for his old haunt the Inquirer. Link here. Fair enough. We'll still credit Ryan Shrout at PC Perspective for obtaining what we understand to be the first on the record acknowledgment from Nvidia.

Credit PC Perspective for digging out the news that Nvidia has put its NForce chipset development on hiatus. Nvidia will continue to supply the market with current-generation NForce chipsets as necessary, but due to Nvidia's licensing battle with Intel, Nvidia has halted development of new NForce chipsets for both Intel and AMD CPUs.

The dispute over the terms of Nvidia's license to make chipsets for Intel processors began last year prior to the launch of Intel's first batch of Core i7 processors. Each company has filed suit against the other, although the most recent reports on the conflict had Nvidia moving forward with a Core i7-compatible chipset.

Having only announced its new Fermi graphics chip architecture, Nvidia lags behind AMD in introducing a next-generation graphics product. AMD has already launched its Windows 7-ready Radeon HD 5800-series graphics cards, based on an updated version of its RV770 chip design. Combine AMD beating Nvidia to market with Intel's impending Larrabee discrete graphics product due out next year, as well as combined CPU/GPU designs in the works from both Intel and AMD, and it's easy to suggest that Nvidia now finds itself in a difficult competitive position.

Arguing against that assessment is the fact that Nvidia has worked actively the past few years to expand its business beyond its traditional desktop products. It has spent a lot of time and effort emphasizing its graphics chips for both high-level computing via its CUDA technology, as well as refocusing its GeForce 9300 and 9400 mobile chips with the Ion moniker to help them stand out in the ever-expanding Netbook market. Nvidia also has invested heavily in developing and marketing its Tegra graphics chip family for handheld and mobile devices. None of those strategies guarantees success for Nvidia, but it's also clear that Nvidia has taken steps to expand its interests beyond the desktop products with which we're most familiar.

(Credit: Nvidia)

We wish we could provide you with information like clock speeds, shipping dates, and prices for 3D cards using Nvidia's new graphics architecture, code-named "Fermi." Instead, all we've been able to garner from the various reports around the Web from Nvidia's preview event is that Nvidia is pushing the parallel computing capabilities of its new chip harder than ever.

If you really want to get into the dirty architectural details, Anandtech, PC Perspective, and the Tech Report each have multipage stories that dig into the information Nvidia unveiled so far. From a gaming perspective, the most significant features Nvidia mentioned are that Fermi will indeed support DirectX 11, and that it will use GDDR5 memory. Those features answer two of AMD's most obvious advantages with its new Radeon HD 5800-series cards, but Nvidia hasn't provided information on availability, which remains AMD's most important edge.

Gaming was not the primary topic of the day with Fermi, however. Instead Nvidia focused most heavily on its CUDA GPU computing technology as it relates to its Tesla, enterprise-class product family. AnandTech reports that Nvidia cited one bragging point about a company using its previous generation GT200 chips to migrate "a cluster of 2000 servers to 32 Tesla S1070s, bringing total costs down from $8M to $400K, and total power from 1200kW down to 45kW." Nvidia hasn't mentioned clock speed figures for Fermi, so we can't predict its performance just yet, but as PC Perspective reports, Fermi "is made up of 3.0 billion transistors and features 512 CUDA processing cores organized into 16 streaming multiprocessors of 32 cores each." That's more than twice the core count in the 240-core GT200, so expectations are reasonably high.

In addition to more cores, Nvidia has also added support for the C++ programming language to Fermi. That should increase its appeal to programmers, many of whom have found GPU-targeted software development difficult. And of course in addition to CUDA, Fermi will also support Microsoft's DirectCompute and the open standard OpenCL GPU computing standards.

Other features for Fermi abound, and we encourage those interested to delve in with the enthusiasts sites that attended Nvidia's preview event. We expect information on the consumer-level products that emerge from Fermi won't be too far off either, so stay tuned for more in the coming weeks and months.

What you might not know (or conceivably care about), is that ahead of almost every single product launch by AMD, Nvidia's notoriously aggressive PR department sends around an e-mail to reviewers challenging the presumed benefits of its competitor's products. We usually ignore these e-mails, not least because they tend to arrive during the flurry of testing and the forming of our own opinions for the review of the product in question.

We've often thought it might be mildly interesting to publish one of Nvidia's e-mails as an example of aggressive tech marketing (or something), but we always felt it would be of limited reader interest. The reviewers at enthusiast site TweakTown found a better approach to Nvidia's take on the announcement two days ago of AMD's Radeon HD 5800-series graphics cards. Rather than simply post Nvidia's e-mail, why not send it off to AMD's PR department for a rebuttal?

Visit TweakTown to find the interview and its own analysis. We'll concede that even TweakTown's approach might not make this behind-the-scenes view the most insightful tech news of the day. Hopefully, you'll at least find that it provides an interesting back-and-forth between the two major players in the 3D graphics card market on a few of the issues at hand in their category.

Now we just need to figure out what to do with Nvidia's weekly "nTeresting" propaganda/news round-up e-mail, other than autoforwarding it to the junk folder.

Alienware announced refreshes to both the design and the technology of its high-end Area-51 and Aurora gaming desktops. A new angular look replaces the familiar rounded alien-head shape of the old models, and features such as motorized air vents and specialized hard-drive layout give Alienware some unique selling points. Alienware is also the previously unnamed OEM that purchased the first batch of AMD's Radeon HD 5800 cards, so other system vendors can blame Dell/Alienware for their short supply and delayed order shipping.

Essentially, Alienware has two systems to announce today: the full tower Area-51 and the micro-ATX-based Aurora. Each system also has a more expensive ALX edition that features liquid cooling, a wider array of case lighting, and other tweaks.

The vents on the top of the new Alienware cases open up automatically when the internal temperatures get too hot.

(Credit: Alienware)

The most interesting feature of the new case that's common to the Area 51 and the Aurora is the motorized air vents that Alienware calls its Active Venting louver system. As Alienware describes it, when the temperature inside the case reaches a certain level, the fins on the top of the case will open up automatically to increase its airflow. We have a hunch Alienware doesn't mind the theatrics of this venting system, either.

Unfortunately, missing from the images Alienware gave us is an image of the Area 51's hard-drive array. Rather than inserting the drives into main cavity, Alienware has carved out a series of six flat-lying drive bays on the opposite side of the Area 51. The benefits of this design are more apparent than the venting system, in that it lets you add more internal storage than you could normally, allows for easy drive installation, and also frees up room for airflow inside the main case compartment. No other vendor that we know of offers such a design.

Update: Reviews from Anandtech, HardOCP, HotHardware, MaximumPC, and PC Perspective are all live. Nvidia's dual-chip GeForce GTX 295 card outperforms the Radeon HD 5870 on most tests by a noticeable margin, so AMD can't claim that the Radeon HD 5870 is the fastest single-card solution. The good news is that new Radeon does outperform Nvidia's best single-chip card, the GeForce GTX 285. The dual-chip GTX 295 is also a $499 card with no DirectX 11 support. The Radeon HD 5870 goes for a more reasonable $379.

AMD introduced its ATI Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850 desktop graphics cards Tuesday evening, beating rival Nvidia to the marketplace with the first DirectX 11-capable products. As DirectX 11 is the Windows 7 version of Microsoft's code for linking up hardware with, among other things, 3D game software, winning the race to launch is a significant boon to AMD's efforts to market its new cards. It also ensures that even if few games will actually use DirectX 11 at launch, Microsoft can claim that the graphics hardware is ready to support one of the major new features of its new OS.

Expect a whole family of Radeon HD 5000 series cards to come to market over the next few months, but for now we get two cards, the $399 Radeon HD 5870 and the $250 Radeon HD 5850. AMD says it plans to ship 500,000 chips in the fourth quarter, but it also anticipates high demand will strain retail supplies during the first few weeks after launch. On the system builder side, AMD said that one large OEM has claimed the majority of the first round of Radeon 5800s, so the cards will also be scarce from other system builders, at least early on.

AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics card.

(Credit: AMD)

Dropping its chip manufacturing process from 55 nanometers to 40 nanometers in the Radeon HD 5800 series has let AMD ramp up the speeds and feeds of its new chips impressively over those of the Radeon HD 4800 series. The transistor count in particular has jumped from 956 million on the old design to 2.15 billion in the new model. AMD also claims an uptick from 1.2 teraflops of processing power to between 2.09 and 2.72 in the each of the new cards.