Canon's new top pro DSLR has a lot going for it, the full-frame EOS-1D X can shoot full-res, 18.1-megapixel RAW files at 12 fps, with face-detection AF for each frame, and JPEGS with the mirror locked up at 14 fps (no AF during shooting).

Dual DIGIC 5+

Two new-generation DIGIC 5+ processors, each 17 times more powerful than the DIGIC 4s found in the EOS-1D Mark IV (which, in turn, are 6 times more powerful than the DIGIC IIIs in teh EOS-IDs Mark III), speed camera operation and make it possible to use new higher-performance noise-reduction algorithms, on-the-fly chromatic-aberration correction and an improved video codec.

Rugged, Sealed Body

Like previous 1-series EOS cameras, the EOS-1D X has a rugged magnesium-alloy cover and chassis, with 76 gaskets and seals to keep out moisture and dust. The accessory Speedlite 580EX II, Wireless File Transmitter SFT-E6A and GPS Receiver GP-E1 are also sealed against weather and dust, as are many of the L-series EF lenses. A new Ultrasonic Wave Motion Cleaning system provides more effective sensor-dust removal than previous EOS cameras.

Improved HD Video

The EOS-1D X can do 1920x1080 full HD at 30 and 24 fps (25 fps PAL format), 1280x720 HD at 60 fps (50 PAL) and 640x480 SD at 30 fps (25 PAL). For the first time in a DSLR, you can choose AII-I or IPB compression, and Rec Run or Free Run timecoding-things of interest to serious videographers. You now can record up to 29 minutes 59 seconds per clip, with automatic splitting of longer files. Sound is still mono via a built-in microphone or stereo via an optional external mic, but now you can adjust the audio level while shooting.

New Metering System

The newly developed system in the EOS-1D X features a 100,000-pixel RGB metering sensor and its own dedicated DIGIC 4 processor. The system provides 252 metering zones for general shooting and 35 zones for low light. Intelligent Subject Analysis uses face detection and color recognition for added accuracy. It also includes partial and spot metering (exact area not yet stated), as well as center-weighted average metering.

Viewfinder & LCD

Similar to the EOS 7D's, the EOS-1D X's Intelligent Viewfinder shows 100% of the actual image area, with superimposed LCD display. For live view and video, the 3.2-inch Clear View II external LCD monitor features 1,040,000-dot VGA resolution.

New AF System

A totally new High Density Reticular AF system features 61 points, 41 of them cross-types with lenses of f/4 or faster and 21 cross-types with lenses of f/5.6 or faster (versus no cross types at f/5.6 with previous cameras). There are even five central dual cross-type points for extra precision with lenses of f/2.8 or faster. The 61 points cover 52% of the frame area (vs. 41% for previous EOS-1 cameras), and you can select any one of them manually. A new AI Servo II tracking algorithm promises the best performance yet in an EOS camera. Unfortunately, lost in all this is the ability to autofocus at f/8.

ISO 204,800

The EOS-1D X has a normat ISO range of 100-51,200, settable in 1/2-stop increments, which can be expanded down to ISO 50 and up to an amazing 204,800. That performance blows away the EOS-1Ds Mark III's 5 fps, and even the EOS-1D Mark IV action camera's 10 fps, and also smokes their ISO capabilities (normal range of 100-12,800 and high of 102,400 for the Mark IV, normal range of 100-1600 and high of 3200 for the Mark II). Importantly, image quality is touted to be better than that of either predecessor despite these new capabilities.

Dual CF Slots

The EOS-1D X has two CompactFlash slots, each accepting Type I and Type II cards and compatible with UDMA 7 cards (recommended for high-speed still and video shooting).

Not so long ago, affordable monitors were a case of anything you fancied so long as it was TN. More recently, screens with IPS and VA panels have been coming thick and fast. Hallelujah! The latest member of this new monitor army is Philips Brilliance 241P4QYES.

It supports what Philips calls an AMVA panel. Think of it as the latest iteration of the MVA breed, which in turn is a particular flavor of VA (vertical alignment) LCD panel. That typically means much better colors, contrast and viewing angles. The only slight snag is that the competition among the $318-ish, better-than-TN brigade is hotting up. Dell has been flogging eIPS screens for a while, while BENQ prefers to go with VA tech. Meanwhile, Viewsonic has just launched an IPS-based screen, the VP2365-LED. And it's very, very good indeed.

MVA - brilliant

Specs-wise, the Philips Brilliance 241P4QYES certainly looks promising. The AMVA panel is claimed to be good for 178-degree viewing angles in both planes, 6ms response times and static contrast of 5,000:1.

Factor in the LED backlight and good connectivity, which includes HDMI, DVI and VGA, and you have a very promising package. You even get a fully adjustable stand that lets you rotate the monitor to portrait mode. More predictable is the combination of a 24-inch diagonal and 1,920 x 1,080pixel grid. For PC use we'd prefer the slightly taller 1,920 x 1,200 alternative, but that's asking a lot at this price point.

Philips has also thrown a few image enhancement options into the mix. Not big fan of dynamic contrast, but it's offered here and since it's switchable, everyone wins. The same goes for pixel overdrive, a technology used to improved response times. It's known as Smart response in Philips' parlance, and again it's fully switchable.

As it happens, found it delivered noticeable better response when enabled, without introducing any inverse ghosting or input. As for the other image quality metrics, most are pretty impressive. Colors are rich without being over saturated. Black and white scales both reveal excellent detail, and there's little evidence of color compression. Gradients are rendered impeccably and there's plenty of depth to the contrast.

Less impressive are the viewing angles which can't quite match the best IPS screens. The overall brightness isn't exactly stellar either, leading to slightly dirty looking whites.

While the chassis is very adjustable and well featured, it looks cheap and the USB hub's four ports are inconveniently located on the rear. As good as the image quality is, things are moving fast right now and there are slightly better screens available for similar money.

It's a joy to find yet another great non-TN screen available at this relatively affordable price point though. The main benefits are excellent colors and contrast, and Philips has managed better pixel response than used to seeing from an MVA screen. Impressive.

While the mouse and keyboard on the previous posts are completely new to Corsair, this headset is less of a stretch from its comfort zone.

Its first bite of the headset cherry, the Corsair HS1, was a decent effort. To make its new cans worth buying though, it needs to take the SP2500's sound quality and add comfort, mic clarity, 3D positioning and intuitive controls. No mean feat, and Corsair is aiming high by promising 'audiophile quality' from $88 headset.

50mm drivers have been fitted to avoid distortion and cope with rumbling low-end frequencies, and the earpieces and headband are well padded for comfort, but can the Vengeance 1300 really deliver on all of its promises?

Audiophil-ish

Let's start by saying that using the phrase 'audiophile quality' is a mistake. When you appeal to the most finicky members of a community, you'll always find know-it-alls determined to prove you wrong.

It's like saying 'Hey, Internet! This new thing is as good as The Empire Strikes Back!'

So no, the Vengeance 1300 doesn't offer audiophile quality. The low-end's too exaggerated for that, and it'll never offer better clarity and true frequency response than Audio-Technique's ATH-M50, even with those 50mm drivers.

But a gaming headset doesn't need that kind of quality - most gamers would rather spend their pennies on a GPU than a sound card, and since a headset can only blast out what the sound chip produces, the chances are that this and most similar headsets are wildly overqualified.

Heard no distortion even at frankly dangerous volume levels; it appears no dubstep bassline or BF3 tank fight is too much for the Vengeance 1300. Background noise is deftly cut out too, which is great for maxing out immersion levels or gaming near a construction site.

If you have a 3D soundcard, the Vengeance 1300 will give Creative's SoundBlaster Omega run for its money. Creative's headset is pricier, so that's an impressive feat. It seems Corsair has crammed SP2500 sound quality into these cans after all.

The heavy foam padding cuts out background noise brilliantly, but after 30 minutes of continuous wear the Vengeance 1300 starts to get uncomfortable.

At the sub-$96 price range though, Corsair's sophomore headset is pretty much the cream of the crop. Those gamers looking to save even more pennies will find their basic needs sated by Sony's DR-GA100 set, but they'll be missing out on the Vengeance 1300's great noise-canceling tech and top-drawer sound quality.

For some, a keyboard is just a place to collect all your biscuit crumbs and errant Golder Virginia while you look at the latest funny cat video, but for the serious gamer it's a vital piece of kit. These people are prepared to spend a bit extra cash for a keyboard that's comfortable, responsive and maybe even boasts a few extra controls - and Corsair wants in on that action.

Say hello to the Vengeance K60 keyboard. Like the Vengeance M60 mouse, the K60 is designed with the FPS gamer in mind. Corsair's keyboard is built on a brushed metal chassis and features fantastically clicky Cherry MX red switches for (steady now) fast, smooth action.

The WSAD and 1-5 keys are also rubberised and contoured to maximise your gaming comfort and performance, but you can swap these for normal black keys with a handy tool that's stowed away in the wrist rest, along with the spare keys.

Clickety-clack

What an impression the K60 makes when you first clickety-clack its keys. It's as if every key input you make is part of some crucially important bomb-decoding procedure. Satisfying doesn't cover it - this is the keyboard equivalent of popping bubble-wrap.

Not sure it makes a huge difference to your response times in game, but it certainly makes for a tactile and comfortable gaming session. The contoured A and D keys keep your fingers from staying beyond the movement controls and setting off torches or dropping all your weapons in a moment of spasmodic panic.

The fact the rubberized versions of the WASD keys are red is nullified by the fact that once your fingers have initially located them, that problem's pretty much soted and you can't see the keys anymore, but the 1-5 keys are all the handier for their scarlet livery.

The wrist rest-cum-secret key repository can't be faulted for comfort, and switching the keys in and out in painless.

Outside of a purely gaming application, love the K60's scrolling volume control above the caps/num/scroll lock lights (which are sophisticated white).

It's handy to have such quick and precise volume control without having to fiddle around on your headset. The extra multimedia controls are also welcome, and all this functionality is fitted on a board with the rock-solid build quality you'd expect from both the brand and the price tag.

There are a couple of chinks in the brushed steel armour of the Vengeance K60 though. Firstly - and it's not a biggie - it isn't backlit like more expensive K90 MMO-focused keyboard. FPS gamers play with the lights off sometimes, and it's a feature you might expect in a $143 keyboard, so be warned before you try to search for those funny cat videos with the lights off.

It could also benefit from a few more USB and headset minijacks in its pass-through, but those issues are dwarfed by our worries about the price - it's nearly as much as the K90, which has back lighting and macro keys galore - in fact, at time of writing you can get a K90for less money if you shop around.

Corsair has a pretty impressive pedigree in a number of fields. The company started out producing L2 cache modules, and is still the go-to guy for performance RAM such as the Vengeance and Dominator DDR3 ranges. In recent times we've seen speaker systems, power supplies, PC chassis and USB flash drives all bearing the Corsair name, and by large it's a mark of the highest quality.

Peripherals are the next step - high-end devices for the gamer who's prepared to pay a little more for a rugged build and enhanced usability. The Vengeance M60 FPS gaming mouse is a prime example of that - premium cmponents, eight-button functionality, and extras like adjustable DPI buttons and the mega-low DPI 'sniper' button that's becoming standard for gaming rodents.

The specs are impressive, but can Corsair really pull of a flawless debut into the gaming mouse market with the M60? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer is yes.

R.A.T. race

There are two mice in Corsair's fledling range. The M90 caters for the MMO gamer's needs, and as such sports 15 programmable buttons. The M60 sets its sights square and true on the first-person shooter aficionado, for whom split seconds and DPI figures are everything. Even teh grouchiest CS:S gamer will be happy with its performance.

The jury's still out on whether DPI really makes a huge difference, but the M60's adjustable polling rage, high tracking speed and low-friction PTFE pads make for a noticeably smooth experience. If you're still hung up on that DPI comment, it's 100 dots higher than the previous darling of the rodent world, Mad Catz's Cyborg R.A.T.7.

This is mouse that lots of clever people have sat and thought about for a long time - that much is evident in its eronomic design.

The sniper button fels well-placed enough that you'd actually use it, and the thumb rest blends perfectly into your mouse mat. Having spent some time using the M60, it turns out to be comfortable in all but the most improbable hand position, which is worth thinking about if you're such a pro that you've analysed your own grip. Show off.

You don't have to be Fatally to want adjustable weightin thoug, and that's not quite on the menu - although you can make it lighter by removing the ones present. It's clear that most of the money has been spent on its remarkable build quality, but it does mean that it loses ground to the similarly-priced R.A.T.5 here, which is adjustable by weight. For a debut, the Vengeance M60 mouse is incredible. It's hard to pick fault with it if you're a FPS gamer. Primarily, you want a comfortable mouse that doesn't have a ton of buttons you'll keep pressing accidently, and you'll want it at a fair price. Corsair ticks all those boxes with confidence.

The adjustable DPI and sniper button are useful additions in a layout that otherwise shows restraint, and it feels like it could survive a nuclear blast. It is missing out on adjustable weights and a free-rolling wheel, but the low price eases those concers considerably.

Intel Core i7 3820 extreme CPU

This is a bit more like it - a bit more with in the reach of us mere mortals. It's a Sandy Bridge E CPU that doesn't cost the same amount as a complete PCs.

Intel, with even less of a fanfare than that which accompanied the muted launch of the Sandy Bridge E platform, has now unleashed the quad-core iteration of its top-end chips. This is the Intel Core i7 3820.

Before this, the cheapest Sandy Bridge E chip was the $714 to 784 Core i7 3930K, with the crazy expensive $1,270 Core i7 3960X taking its place at the top of the Intel extreme CPU tech tree. Both those parts are full-blooded hex-core chips, with the hyperthreading technology enabling 12 threads of processing power - but they're not really hex-core chips at all. The i7 3930K and i7 3960X both have octo-core server chips with a couple of cores disabled to fit into the desktop segment.

The cynic would say Sandy Bridge E represents a great opportunity for Intel to sell broken Xeons to the desktop crowd for a tidy profit. Intel obviously refutes this, making the case that the consumer would rather have higher clockspeeds over those extra cores, and it needed to sacrifice two cores to hit the 3.3GHz speed of the top chip. However, with the imminent release of E5 Xeons, Intel has managed to hit 3.1GHz with a Sandy Bridge E-based server chip designed for the LGA 2011 socket. Suspicious.

So what about the Core i7 3820? Is this hug processor the same, is it really carrying four dead cores in its innards? If so it's a bit ghoulish.

New die, thanks

Thankfully no, the Intel Core i7 3820 isn't just another eight-core chip with half of its goodness turned off. The i7 3820 is a different die entirely compared with its bigger brothers. And they most definitely are bigger - by around a billion of the wee 32nm transistors, in fact.

That still gives the i7 3820 a huge 1.27 billion transistors in its make up. That means it's still bigger than the previous generation's Gulftown hex-core CPUs, the entire Sandy Bridge lineup and even AMD's chunky chips. The extreme CPU die is rattling around in that massive LGA 2011 package, being over 100m square smaller than the die size of the other two Sandy Bridge E processors.

There is one other key difference between this straight Core i7 3820 and the X- and K- suffixed extreme CPUs from Intel, and that's the unlocked nature of the other chips. This processor has a partially locked multiplier that limits it to 43x compared to the 57x multiplier offered by both the other Sandy Bridge E chips, plus the top-end K-series i7 and i5 CPUs of the plain Sandy Bridge range.

The key battle for the Intel Core i7 3820 is the head-to-head with the Core i7 2700K, the top Sandy Bridge extreme CPU. At $413, they're both priced in the same ballpark (or stadium if you prefer) and the 3.6GHz compared to the 2700K's 3.5GHz, they are both around the same sort of the clockspeed.

Raw performance

Predictably, things are quite close in terms of raw performance - but not identical. The Intel Core i7 2700K actually still maintains a lead at stock clocks over the Sandy Bridge E Core i7 3820. In single-threaded performance the 2700K is actually quicker than even the i7 3830K.

Thanks to the BCLK strap, the Sandy Bridge E chips are able to withstand a good tweaking of the base clock. The base clock is still limited to 100MHz, 125MHz, 166MHz and 250MHz, but it does give you some leeway.

In overclocking stakes, the partially locked multiplier doesn't do it a lot of harm. With a decent motherboard you should be able to get up to the same sort of overclocking performance as the i7 2700K - around 4.7GHz - but no more.

Head-to-head

So the Intel Core i7 3820 performs at around the same sort of levels as the top-end standard Sandy Bridge. This chip is supposed to be the serious enthusiast platform for Intel's desktop faithful, but the more mainstream, soon-to-be-replaced Sandy Bridge setup is just as good at the quad-core level.

There will be instances where the i7 3820 and X79 combo will be beneficial, for example, for the offline 3D rendering workstation or other serious productivity tasks that don't necessarily require heavy multi-threading. But that's a corner of an already miniscule niche.

The low price of the i7 3820 is pleasing though, and means that if you want to build an excellent workstation, you can pick up a reasonably priced processor now and then splash the serious cash on a hex-core CPU if you can afford, or actually need, the extra cores at a later date. But you have to ask yourself if you really need the extra memory support or PCIe 3.0 tech.

AMD has blinked first and has released its new graphics card architecture just before Nvidia. So here it is, the Southern Island AMD Radeon HD 7970 and, for the time being, it's the fastest graphics card around.

It's a brave move by AMD to bring out a radically different graphics design spec, compared with its previous vector processors, just after it brought us a brand new CPU architecture. Especially given the depressing failure of the AMD FX chips.

We've seen little bits from AMD about its new architecture - the plainly named Graphics Core Next - before, but now it's humming away in test bench and throwing pixels and polygons around high-res screens without a care in the world.

Well, maybe the AMD Radeon HD 7970 does have some cause for concern considering Nvidia is set to launch its newest graphics card architecture, code-named Kepler, by the spring.

It could also explain why the timing of this release is so odd. AMD decided to effectively launch the AMD Radeon HD 7970 just three days before Christmas, a notorious deadspot in technology news.

Speaking with AMD's partners, though, found they weren't allowed to release overclocked graphics card until a while after launch, so all AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card with new stickers.

That means much of their thunder was stolen by the pre-Christmas unveiling. And even thunder remained was quickly silenced by the festive period.

So, like a cabinet minister in a time of crisis, was AMD trying to bury the launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7970?

Maybe it realises the market for $791 graphics card is absolutely minute. Maybe the forthcoming Radeon HD 7950 is the card that it wants to really concentrate on. Maybe it just wanted to make sure us tech journos had to work right up to Christmas.

Whatever the real reason for this staggered launch, it's time we took a proper look at what makes the AMD Radeon HD 7970 tick.

Make-up

In terms of its actual make-up, it's a fairly different beast to the previous Cayman GPU-powered HD 6970.

This graphics card represents a new direction in GPU tech for AMID as well as a new production process and GPU technologies.

In terms of firsts, AMD has them all pretty much nailed with the AMD Radeon HD 7970. It's the first GPU to be built with miniscule 28nm transistors, the first DirectX 11.1 graphics card and first of official PCI Express 3.0 component too.

Of those, the one of real interest is the 28nm die shrink that comes with this new Tahiti core. The Tahiti GPU is going to be the chip powering the top-end cards and that in turn is built on the new Graphics Core Next architecture.

The whole HD 7000 series also goes by the name of Southern Islands, hence the Tahiti tag.

That die-shrink means that it can jam more components into a smaller chip footprint, and that should mean more power to you.

And compared to the number of 40nm transistors in the Radeon HD 6970 - a paltry 2.6 billion - AMD it has done a good job of squeezing more into the AMD Radeon HD 7970. This graphics card has 4.3 billion transistors in the GPU itself. That is a frightening number - and AMD has plenty more of those for the AMD Radeon HD 7970.

AMD's claimed compute performance for the Tahiti XT GPU inside the AMD Radeon HD 7970 is one such number. At 3.79 TFLOPs there is some impressive number crunching capabilities buried inside this chip. All it needs is the software to take advantage of it.

  Graphics Card represents a new direction in GPU Tech for AMD

The compute performance has been the driving factor in the change from Northern Islands to Southern Islands, and fom the traditional vector style processor to the scalar processor that makes up this new GPU.

Previously AMD had focused most of its silicon towards the goal of making a card specifically for graphical processing, leaving the more ephemeral notion of general purpose GPU computing to Nvidia its CUDA cores.

So it put all its eggs in the four-way vector processor architecture basket. Essentially that meant sorting out single instructions into batches before firing them down the GPU pipelines. It was a much more elegant solution and for doing fixed graphical processing it was incredibly efficient. The resulting HD 4xxx thru 6xxx series cards were great pixel pushers at impressively lower power requirements than their peers.

Now, though, AMD wants a slice of the GPU pie and as such has shifted to a similar scalar architecture to that used by long-time rivals Nvidia.

That means it's going for a more brute force approach, which involves having a large number of simple processors in an array, giving them each one thing to work on at a time until all the instructions have been completed.

The Graphics Core Next architecture is built of Compute Units, which are similar to Nvidia's streaming microprocessors it introduced with the Fermi architecture.

The Tahiti XT GPU in the HD 7970 is built up of 32 of these Compute Unites, which are essentially self-contained processors that can act independently of the whole.

Inside are four vector units, and in each of those are 16 unified shaders, stream processors or Radeon Cores - depending on who you talk to. That means in the full Tahiti XT you'll find 2,048 shaders and, compared to the 1,536 shaders of the HD 6970, that's a fair mark up.

You're looking at a 30 percent improvement over the NVIDIA GTX 580

It's this combination of four-way vector processing and scalar architecture that AMD hopes will push its Tahiti-based GPUs to the top of the graphics card pile.

Though it's not just the number of Compute Units that makes the difference in performance terms - the actual coe clock of the Radeon HD 7970 is far higher than previous cards too. At 925MHz out of the box, it's a chunk faster that the 880MHz of the Radeon HD 6970.

AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card Performance

Now we come to the crunch - the performance of this brand new slice of graphical silicon goodness. It's quick. Well, pretty quick.

The HD 7970 beats the Nvidia GTX 580 hands down when it comes to raw graphics-chomping, pixel-pushing, polygon-smashing performance. In all the gaming benchmarks the HD 7970 has the Nvidia card in second place, especially when you look at the demanding Heaven 2.5 and Crysis 2 benchmarks. With both those benchmarks you're looking at aroung a 30 percent improvement over the Nvidia GTX 580

Those are the best case scenarios, though, since the performance benefits in the other titles are much less pronounced, sitting between 13 percent and 20 percent frame rate improvements.

When it comes to the previous generation - the venerable Cayman-powered HD 6970 - things look more impressive. The HD 7970 posts a 65 percent improvement over the older card in the tessellation-heavy Heaven 2.5 benchmark. That's the highest performance increase, but at worst it's around 25 percent faster.

This is all before you start waving the overclocking stick around. And boy, does this chip overclock. In fact, ran into the limits of the AMD OverDrive software rather than the limits of the hardware itself. Pushed the card all the way up to 1,125MHz on the core clock and 1,575MHz on the memory clock.

With those numbers the performance increase over the GTX 580 and HD 6970 are way more pronounced, with the HD 7970 beating the previous generation by up to 80 percent. When overclocked too it gives the previous generation of dual-GPU cards, the GTX 590 and HD 6990, a good run for their money. The GTX 590 had the highest score of 33fps while the HD 7970 come in just behind 32fps. The HD 6990 actually lags behind it with 29fps.

It's not just all about the raw performance figures though, because AMD has made a lot of effort with the power requirements of the Radeon HD 7970, especially when running in idle mode and with the screen off. The ZeroCore Power technology means when the screen turns off and the machine goes into the 'long idle' state - where the computer is still running but there is nothing being updated on the screen, so the panel goes to sleep - there is only a single chip on the card that's still running.

That chip is there just to tell the computer there is still a card in the PCI slot and not to worry. The rest of the graphics card turns off completely, even the fan.

Lottery winner?

We've accounted for the architecture and performance of the AMD Radeon HD 7970, but there is one thing we haven't covered - the price. This is a key element of the graphics card battle and in the case of the HD 7970 may well be the thing that truly buries it. At approximately $791 it's, quite frankly, a ridiculously priced card.

It may well be the fastest single-GPU card currently available, but there is still little justification for the price. Apart from the fact that a chip with 4.3 billion transistors, running on a new production process, is going to be rather expensive to manufacture.

There's also the question of whether you really need the levels of graphical performance the HD 7970 offers. There are very few of out there running a monitor capable of the eye-watering resolutions of 2560 x 1600, so realistically a 1920 x 1080 resolution is going to be more likely. At that resolution the excellent $578 Nvidia GTX 580 is all the card you're going to need.

How much, we wonder, is the forthcoming dual-GPU version going to cost? $1,108? It's a shame, because if the card had come out at the same sort of price as AMD originally tagged the HD 6970 with it would have had a far better reception.

There are some good points about the HD 7970 the pricing cannot diminish however, and that's because they will be rolled out across the Tahiti line. That's the impressive ZeroCore Power tech. Being able to shut the GPU down almost completely when idle is a great feat of engineering, made doubly so when you bring in CrossFire setups.

When in CrossFire mode all the GPUs will be in use when you're gaming, but when you drop down to 2D desktop mode all GPUs bar the main card attached to the display, will shut down, fan and all.

That's impressive and means when you're using your monster rig in general computing tasks you're not going to require your own private Sellafield to power it.

The overclocking potential of the HD 7970 is likewise impressive. Well managed a huge overclock, which made question why it wasn't rated as the first 1GHz GPU out of the box. Got the answer from AMD's director of product management for discrete graphics, Zvika Greenstein, at a tech insight event for the Graphics Core Next products. "One of the things enthusiasts like to do with our cards is overclock them. They pay a premium for that," said Greenstein. "We can position the HD 7970 as the fastest graphics card in the market at the reference clocks, so we though that we might as well leave it to the end users."

In essence, AMD didn't need to push the silicon, since it's going to rely on the actual board manufacturers to that themselves. And they'll in turn charge end-users a premium for it.

The price may well be the thing that truly buries the HD 7970

If Nvidia's card is even more expensive than the HD 7970 then this card may start to look like good value. More likely the second tier Tahiti-powered card will be the card that is to recommend. Unfortunately the release of the HD 7950, for reasons unknown, has been knocked back a month. The cynic in me wants to say AMD is trying to squeeze as many sales out of this card as it can before the cheaper HD 7950 cannibalises them.

So again, it's another wait-and-see release - wait for Nvidia's Kepler card and see how much cheaper the HD 7950 is compared to this pricly ol' bast.

Is DICE's latest iteration of the Battle Field 3 franchise a beautiful, yet incredibly destructive, walk in the park, or does it get lost in the tall grass of overarching ambition?

A helicopter just buzzed over my head, thirty feet above the ground. It's moving quickly, skirting around a hill, firing its main guns at an enemy i can't see. I stop running and just stare at it. I do this a lot in Battle Field 3. The game's multiplayer makes me want to stop, sit and watch the chaos happening on screen. On its best maps - such as the 64-player Caspian Border - every pixel flickers with battle.

I'll climb to a rooftop and just freeze. In this distance, smoke stacks rise from a burning forest. In the air above me, jet fighter planes twirl, chased by artillery. On the ground below, an M1 Abrams tank has smashed through the lower floors of the building. I'll spot a glimmer from a hillside 300 meters away and I'll know its lenses flare from a sniper as he readies himself to kill me.

If someone had told me fifteen years ago that this is what online gaming would be, I wouldn't have believed them. Battle Field games have always been grand, ridiculous, futuristic designs. Wouldn't it be cool if death match had vehicles? Wouldn't it be cool if it wasn't death match, but teams, and squads, and objectives? Wouldn't it be cool if there were tanks and jeeps and helicopters and fighter planes? Wouldn't it be cool if the maps were enormous and buildings could collapse?

Yes, it would. Yes, it is. No other modern combat shooter provides the feeling of playing Battle Field 3, when you watch a chopper fly over and wonder where he's going. It's the feeling of living a war movie in miniature, with you as its director and star.
Battle Field 3's single player though is not a move. It's a waterslide with pictures scrawled on the insides. It's a ten-hour long exercise in contractual obligation; here are the multiple protagonists, here are the vehicle sections, here is the terrorist intrigue and appropriate level of moral grittiness. It's an under cooked potboiler. Or, if you like, it's the world's most expensive audition tape for the job of development the next Modern Warfare game.

Battle Field 3 One long corridor

You play Sergeant Blackburn, who starts the game by leaping on to the roof of a moving train, kicking in the back window and then shooting his way through each carriage helpfully filled with terrorists.

The game never gets any less on-rails. At the end of the train, we're taken back eight hours. Blackburn is being interrogated by two government agents. He's telling then tales of his adventures in Tehran, fighting the PLR, and you play each of his missions in turn. If, however, he were to tell his story accurately it would go something like this: "I shot a man, and then I shot ten men, and then I got shot and my eyes felt like they had jam on them, so I hid behind a wall for a bit and then i felt fine, and then  I shot three more men, and then i threw a grenade into the next room, and then i shot six hundred more men, and then i realised that they were infinitely respawning."

When you find the right weapon, and in moments where the level design is particularly solid, all the shooting is fine. The guns feel punchy and responsive, and enemies mostly go down with just a couple of shots. A section set in Paris, in the middle of the game, is as good as it gets. But too often making your way from area to area, from cover to cover, feels like a dismal slog through uneven checkpoints. Death can be an instant affair, and you'll play through the same three or four rooms again and again until you crack the one area that's giving you trouble.

The government agents never flinch at the ridiculous, super-soldier adventure either, but instead play good-cop/bad cop and occasionally interject with their own anecdotes. "What about Lt. Jennifer Coleby Hawkins?" asks one. "Hawkins? Never heard of her," says Blackburn. You then leap in to her story; she's a jet co-pilot, and it's one of the most beautiful looking on-rails gun sections I've ever played, and one of the least interactive bits of game. At its end, after you've fired all your rockets, launched all your flares and bombed some targets with the expected black-and-white bomb-o-cam, it cuts back to the room. "Nice story," says Blackburn. "But i don't see how it's relevant."

It's not relevant, and Hawkins is never mentioned again. Battle Field 3 is so desperate to hold your attention that it throws new experiences at the screen without them being relevant to the story.

To its credit, the experiences never reaches the manipulative, frothing madness of the latter Call of Duty games, but it never aims higher than providing a pretty looking slideshow, either. The fighter plane section is beautiful, but you're merely the game's co-pilot, along for the ride. The tank section might put you in the driver's seat, but only so you can be the game's taxi driver. You survive an earthquake, rappel down a building, and skydive from a plane, but in every instance, you're a puppet going where you're told so game can show you the next razzle-dazzle animation.

Bored yet?

If someone had told me fifteen years ago that this is what single player games would be like, i wouldn't have believed them. It would have been a too depressing prospect.

The co-operative mode isn't much better, either. It provides six unique missions specifically designed to be played with a friend, but they serve as a kind of hardcore mode, and each is much harder than the regular single player. I found them more frustrating than fun.

If you want your games to be games, don't play Battle Field 3's campaign. Play the multiplayer instead, where the spectacle is far grander, more exhilarating and more cinematic for being entirely under your control. It makes you want to sit back and watch.

But you can't. Your friend just blew up the last M-COM station in the area and the defenders are falling back. You need to move up fast, so you sprint towards the cliff edge, jump and begin to free fall, and open your parachute at the last possible second. It's a moment that happens to you in the single player, but here you get to do it all by yourself. It's like graduating to big boy school.

If you've played Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the last game in series, the multiplayer will mostly be familiar. The most visible and talked about change is the new jets, returning for the first time since Battlefield 2. They shouldn't make a big difference, but they do. You'll spend only a fraction of your time piloting them - they spawn at base, but it's first come, first served, and you'll be lucky to get there before everyone else.

You can be my wingman

Jet are ineffective against ground units, meaning that pilots are almost playing an entirely different game to everyone else, but the spectacle they add completely changes the way battles feel, turning small skirmishes in to all-our war. They're constant fixture in the skies above the maps that include them, and after playing Caspian Border and the others, the smaller maps feel like they're missing something.

The multiplayer is at its best on the larger, or at least more open maps. I've rolled across Tehran Highway in a tank, levelling buildings and capturing bases in Conquest mode. I've rattled across Operation Firestorm in a jeep with a friend riding shotgun, and swerved as enemy jets have dive bombed us. I've bailed out of helicopters hundreds of feet in the air and parachuted on to enemy sniper's nest atop cranes.

Unfortunately, not enough of the maps are large an open, and too many force everyone in to the same choke point, halting all progression for ten minutes until one team gets a lucky surge. Operation Metro is the worst offender, but Grand Bazaar and others do the same.

The other major change since Bad Company 2 is classes together, under the Assault name. It's still my favourite class in the game, and the progression system is much faster this time at unlocking those precious defibrillators.

That progression system still won't be fast enough for some, though, especially players who are used to the fast pace of Call of Duty's temporary killstreak bonuses. You'll earn unlocks and ribbons in every round of Battlefield 3: from gathered experience points; your kills for each weapon; or for performing helpful actions, such as reviving your teammates, but the unlocks are paced to compel players still enormously rewarding in the early stages to get, say, an M-COM Defender ribbon at the end of a match, or a new scope for your primary weapons. But the best unlocks in the game don't come for a long time, and it'll take an aeon if you want to get the best goods for all four classes.

All of your stats and progress are tracked on Battlelog, a website which acts as Battle Field 3's social network, server browser and menu. It is brilliant, bizarre and broken.

If it's broke, fix it

I love that it tracks everything I do in game, form individual weapon accuracy, to how many kills, to my wins and losses. Sometimes it's fun to watch numbers tick up. But i have no idea why it had to be the game's server browser and menu, and why those things aren't part of Origin. When a website is down for maintenance, i don't want to have to switch Origin in to offline mode to launch the single player campaign. When i want to change servers, i dont' necessarily want to close the game down and open a web browser.

For all its similarities to the previous games in the series, and for all its technical faults, Battle Field 3's multiplayer is still fresh and exciting enough to justify playing the game. There's no other game out there that can provide the same chaotic spectacle, or feeling of lying in the grass, watching a battle roll towards you form the horizon. Buy it when it's been patched.

The quest for flawless SSD performance: will it ever succeed? One thing's for sure, intriguing but frustrating new problems seem to bubble up just as fast as existing issues are flattened out. The question is, therefore, how big a step in the right direction is the new Corsair Force GT 120GB?

On paper, it's state of the art. For starters, it packs 120GB of synchronous flash memory. More expensive than the asynchronous alternative, one of its main supposed advantages involves performance in incompressible data transfers.

We'll come to the details presently, but the key factoid here is that incompressible data is perhaps the greatest weakness of what might just be the best SSD controller on the planet, the SandForce SF-2281. And that just so happens to be the controller found in the Corsair Force GT 120GB. So that's one problem sorted. Well, maybe.

As it happens, the SF-2281 has a few other foibles. But like we said, despite several years of progress and honing, flawless SSD performance remains an ambition, not a reality. Like most current SSDs, the Corsair Force GT supports the Windows 7 TRIM command and therefore shouldn't suffer from chronic performance degradation over time. Another performance hurdle ostensible vaulted, then.>

It also packs the SATA 6Gbps I/O interface. That matters because SSD performance is now outstripping the bandwidth provided by SATA 3Gbps. The Corsair Force GT's 555MB/s peak read and 515MB/s peak write performance is certainly way beyond the theoretical capacity of SATA 3Gbps.

The only sligt snag is that the Force GT is not alone. Several other drive makers, including OCZ, Patriot, Kingston and others offer similar SandForce-based, SATA 6Gbps-capable technology. Then there are several much-improved drives based on non-SandForce controller, including Crucial's M4 drive. Much will thus depend on pricing and Corsair's fine-tuning efforts.

Synching sand

The new Corsair Force GT 120GB has plenty of competition and one of its most obvious foes is Corsair's own Force 3. After all, it too has the SandForce SF-2281 controller and 120GB on NAND flash memory.

It all comes down to a single missing letter 'a' for the Force GT. We speak of the great synchronous vs asynchronous memory debate. The simplest way to appreciate the difference between the two is to view them as SRAM and DDR RAM, the latter in both cases offering two data tranfer per cycle to the former's one.

Synchoronous NAND memory shifts data on both the rise and fall parts of the signal wave. You might think that double data rate makes synchronous flash twice as fast. Actually, in extreme cases it's better than that. Asynchronous memory is limited to 50MB/s per channel compared to either 133MB/s or 200MB/s for the two most prevalent synchronous flash implementations.

However, the real-world performance gap is rarely, if ever, that yawning. To understand why, it's worth taking a look at the SandForce SF-2281 controller. It packs eight memory channels and kick out a maximum overall data transfer of 400MB/s with asynchronous memory.

However, the SF-2281's party trick involves compressing data long before it needs to be written to the flash memory chips. And that means the 50MB/s limitation can be sedestepped. At this point, however, things get a bit complecated. Some data types are made of incompressible data.

In fact, many of the largest and most data-intensive files, such as music, images and video, are stored in pre-compressed - and therefore incompressible as fas as teh SSD controller in concerned - formats. All of which means the Force GT's synchronous memory ought to give it a performance advantage to justify the price premium.

Magic bullet?

Whatever SSD you go for, it ain't gonna be cheap. In the context of SandForce-powered drives, you could argue that there's no point in risking a false economy courtesy of a cheaper model with asynchronous memory. Better to spend that little bit more for the full synchronous treatment.

As the bencmarks demonstrate, the extra $54 or so for the Corsair Force GT over the mostly Force 3 does buy you more performance. Okay, the peak read and write scores of 557MB/s and 518MB/s aren't a huge step forwared. But then we weren't expecting that.

No, much more dramatic is how the Force GT lifts performance in the AS SSD incompressible data read test from just 204MB/s to fully 503MB/s. Result, you might say.

However things are slightly less salubrious in the incompressible data write benchmark. The Force GT does have the edge. But at 164MB/s to 142MB/s it's not a dramatic improvement. It's similar story in the random access test. Again, the extra $65 doesn't buy you a big chunk of extra performance.

What's more, the competition in the form of drives powered by the Marvell 9174 controller, such as teh Crucial M4, hose the Force GT when it comes to incompressibel writes. They're pretty much in the same ballpark of random access, too. Still, what really matters is real-world thoughput, not synthetic tests and the Force GT delivers some solid numbers in application tests. It absolutely trashes the Force 3 and Crucial M4 in game install bencmarks.

But what about the performance of two Force GT's in striped RAID 0 config? Well, the magic 1GB/s for both sequential reads and writes is attainable. You'll get close to 1GB/s for incompressible reads, too. What you won't get is all-round performance that reflects those massive peak numbers. On the synthetic side, teh AS SSD benchmark reveals that 4k random access is barely boosted when you pair drives up. Similarly, app performance doesn't exactly explode.

So, are there any downsides? Well, the big problem is TRIM support for RAID setups, it's been addressed by Intel on the chipset side recently. But still waiting for an update for Windows 7. At this stage, we don't expect anything before Windows 8 appears and even then it might mean an upgrade to 8 rather than a patch for Windows 7.

We had plenty of good things to say about the Vertex 3 when it stormed onto the SSD market earlier last year. You only have to look at its read/write figures to see why. Quite simply, the Vertex 3 manged to harness the power of the Sandforce SF-2281 controller to the greatest extent. Like any SF-2281 controlled SSD it did take time performing incompressible writes (write speeds reporting at less than half that of reads), but 4K random read performance and real-world tasks, such as Windows boot times had us singing high praise for the Vertex 3.

Benchmark figures and even observable desktop performance don't tell the whole story though. Along with other manufacturers who had issues with the latest SandForce controller, OCZ's Vertex 3 suffered from some reliability issues too. Mind you, OCZ estimates that only two thirds of a percent of Vertex 3s experienced reliability problems, specifically BSOD when running Windows 7, but any SSD bearing the marks of unreliability is going to be avoided.

After discovering some bizarre activities caused by a certain SATA command, OCZ and the controller's manufacturer SandForce released a firmware update that appears to have stamped out the issue. It slows down timings associated with that naughty SATA command, which means no more, but inevitable also slightly slower performance.

Now OCZ has resolved the problem, it's keen to build a dependable drive that gets near the vanilla Vertex 3's performances for everyone. Architecturally, the only difference is in type of  NAND used: the Vertex 3 uses Intel 25nm NAND, whereas this new Max IOPS edition employs Toshiba (Toggle) 32nm NAND. The difference between the two comes down to the capacity on each NAND die leading to more chips for the 8 channel SF-2281 controller to access per cycle.

More IOPs please

The performance advantage here is interleaving. With more NAND channels to access, the controller can send more read requests per cycle, increasing IOPS (inputs/outputs per second).

Random 4K write IOPS increase nominally from the original Vertex 3's 60K IOPS to 65K. However, 4K random reads weigh in at 55K IOPS, significantly more than the original Vertex 3's 40K.

You're probably sick of large numbers and the acronym IOPS by now though, so what does it all mean? It means the Max IOPS deals with incompressible data better than its predecessor. Good. It doesn't match the Vertex 3's initial sequential performance. Fine. For the extra cash you're spending on the new Max IOPs edition you don't really get a whole heap of extra speed, but the improvements to the incompressible performance and reliability could well be worth the extra outlay. A good choice for a reliable boot drive.