Don Woligroski

Nvidia is introducing its first 40nm GPUs with DirectX 10.1 support. But the GeForce 210 and GT 220 GPUs aren't the flagships you might expect the company to announce hot on the heels of Radeon HD 5870. Rather, these are entry-level offerings under $80.

With a limited budget and high-resolution gaming in our sights, we spice up this quarter's $1,250 build with as many graphics cards as we can fit into a mid-range chassis. By popular request, this one's an all-AMD build with plenty of horsepower.

Today we're looking at Asus motherboards armed with integrated graphics processors from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia to see which core logic vendor can offer the best Blu-ray playback quality, features, and value for a high-definition HTPC.

Resident Evil is an extremely popular game series involving a small-scale zombie apocalypse. We take a look at how well Resident Evil 5 runs on a couple of different platforms, a number of different graphics cards, and Nvidia's GeForce 3D Vision tech.

In our AGP Radeon HD 4650 review, the old Athlon X2 3800+ system couldn't hack today's games due to a CPU bottleneck. This time, we up the ante with a cheap replacement CPU and overclock to see if we can squeeze more gaming goodness from an older PC.

Gigabyte's new Radeon HD 4650-based R465D2-1GI arrives on the scene, hopefully bringing playable frame rates to old AGP rigs long-forgotten by their gaming owners. We pair the card up to an Athlon X2 3800+ to see if AGP is still viable for budget buyers.

AMD has enhanced one of its most popular integrated graphics chipsets with some compelling new features, creating the 785G. We examine this chipset, compare it to Nvidia's GeForce 8200/9400 and Intel's G45, and test several of its claimed capabilities.

In part two of this series, we'll address some of the issues raised in part one, such as the effect of shared cache between CPU cores, how the number of cores affects multitasking performance, and comparing the Phenom II to the Core 2 Quad.

The debate over whether to go entry-level Core i7 or flagship Phenom II rages on. After his most recent Phenom II system review, Don Woligroski revisits the performance of these two platforms with more tests and gives us an updated take.

The game Prototype lets you feel what it means to wield ultimate power. But what sort of gaming configuration does it take to enjoy this one? We put the title through its paces to see just how much performance a gamer needs to play Prototype smoothly.

Bigfoot Networks has updated its gaming Network Processing Units to support PCI Express connectivity. The new Killer Xeno Pro has a lot of new features, but can it really deliver higher performance for a gamer? We test the new card in order to find out.

Cyberpower sent us a factory-overclocked Phenom II X4 955 system wielding two Radeon HD 4890 cards in CrossFire. We pit the formidable rig against our previous System Builder Marathon Core i7 machine to see if AMD can deliver a viable gaming alternative.

Once we make the jump to Gigabit Ethernet, the expected tenfold increase in network speed doesn't seem to materialize. We'll look at the basics of gigabit networks, what limits their performance, and how we can get the best possible speed out of them.

Dead Space is an excellent sci-fi survival horror title, and one of the few games that Nvidia supports with its new driver's ambient occlusion feature. We put the game through our usual image-quality and performance tests to see what we could learn.

As you know, we’ve changed things up for this System Builder Marathon, squeezing the best components we can into portable Micro-ATX cases. Sure, there were compromises, but the $1,300 enthusiast system turned out to be a gutsy little firecracker.

Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box has made it to the PC a year (finally, a year after its launch). We dig into the graphics hardware required to crank out those awesome-looking visuals and spectacular effects at the best frame rates.

We take a look at a handful of non-reference cards with GeForce heritage: the 9600 GT, the GTS 250, and the GTX 260 from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and Zotac. Read on to find out which cards performed, overclocked, and impressed us the most.

Sure, you can buy a quad-core CPU... but do you need one? Software has come a long way to support multi-threading since the first multi-core CPUs were released, but how much better are four CPU cores than one, two, or three?

Tired of bog-standard reference graphics cards differentiated by nothing but a box? We pit Gigabyte's GV-N250ZL-1GI with Zalman cooling and Asus' EAH4850 MT with adjustable voltages against each other to see if either board stands out.

This month, we build an Intel Core 2 Quad-based system to compare to the previous months' similarly priced Core i7 and Core 2 Duo PCs. Which of the three offers the best bang for the buck?

We look at three premium LCD touch-screen home theater PC cases: the Moneual 972, the SilverStone CW03, and the Thermaltake DH102. Are they well-built HTPC platforms with many options or are they just flashy cases with a pretty face?

We see how far $1,250 gets us when building a new Core i7-based system, and how it compares to last month’s similarly priced Core 2 Duo machine.

AMD recently launched its Radeon 4830 to take on Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GT. With PowerColor and Sapphire flavors in single- and CrossFire-configurations, we pitch the card against factory-overclocked 8800 GTs and see who is left standing.

On this, the second day of our System Builder Marathon, Don turns down the price tag of his mid-range build looking for a sweet spot just above the $1,000 marker. Let's see what sort of hardware he found for it!