Thanks to a flood of new arrivals, over the next couple of weeks we’ll be taking a look at a range of GTX 670 and GTX 680 cards from Asus, EVGA, MSI, and Zotac. And to kick things off our first card will be what's perhaps the most unique card among them: EVGA's GeForce GTX 680 Classified, our first fully-custom GTX 680.

In EVGA’s product hierarchy the Classified is their top of the line product, where they typically all-out to make a customized products to scratch the itch of overclockers and premium buyers alike. The GTX 680 Classified in turn is EVGA’s take on an ultra-premium GTX 680, creating a card that is monstrous in virtually every sense of the word. What has EVGA seen fit to do with their fully-custom GTX 680, and does it live up to the hype and the price tag that comes with the Classified name? Let’s find out.

We’ve had plenty of Acer laptops come in for review over the years (along with visits from their close relatives, Gateway). Rarely do we find such laptops reaching for the upper echelons of performance, build quality, design, or features, and yet many people buy Acer products. The reason is pretty straightforward: while they may not be the “best” in any single area, what Acer does well is produce well-equipped laptops that target the value conscious buyers. With their new V3 and V5 lines, Acer once again goes after that familiar territory, and today’s V3-571G packs some decent performance into an updated design that addresses a couple of our previous complaints.

Make no mistake, however: this is still an inexpensive Acer laptop, with quite a few questionable choices made in order to hit a lower price point. Those of you longing for decent quality displays are going to want to look elsewhere, and if you’re looking for a sturdy chassis that eschews glossy plastic you’ll also be disappointed. But while those are some significant and sometimes painful omissions, taken as a whole the V3-571G does plenty of things right. Those of you interested in seeing just how much performance you can grab for under $800 might be in for a surprise—like a quad-core processor and switchable NVIDIA Kepler GPU. Can the new V3 hit the sweet spot, or are the compromises too much to stomach? Read on for our full review.

Two weeks ago NVIDIA formally launched the retail GeForce GT 640, catching up to their OEM and laptop offerings with their first GK107 based video card for the retail desktop market. GT 640 is designed to be NVIDIA’s entry-level Kepler video card, joining several Fermi rebadges as the members of the GT 6xx series. With the enthusiasm behind Intel’s Ivy Bridge in the laptop market and the boost in sales it has provided for NVIDIA’s mobile GPUs, NVIDIA is hoping to accomplish the same thing in the desktop market with GT 640.

Today we’ll finally be taking a look at the GT 640 in action. As is common with entry-level video cards there is no reference design intended for retail sale and NVIDIA isn’t sampling any such card. However, NVIDIA’s partners are stepping up to sample cards to the press. Our sample comes from Zotac, who sent over their single slot based Zotac GeForce GT 640.

Origin PC spoiled the GTX 680M launch party a bit with their announcement of their new EON15-S and EON17-S notebooks this morning, but NVIDIA asked us to avoid discussing the particulars of the new mobile GPU juggernaut until the official NDA time. As you’ve probably guessed, that time is now (or 6PM PDT June 4, 2012 if you’re reading this later). NVIDIA also shared some information on upcoming Ultrabooks, which we’ll get to at the end.

On the high-end notebooks, so far the only Kepler GPU has been a higher clocked GK107, the GTX 660M, but increasing the core clocks will only take you so far. NVIDIA has continued to sell their previous generation GTX 570M and 580M as the GTX 670M and 675M (with a slight increase in core clocks), but clearly there was a hole at the top. Now it's time to plug that hole with the GeForce GTX 680M. Read on for the full specs.

The last time we reviewed an all-in-one from Dell, our impressions were decidedly less than favorable. Dell delivered a polished software experience, but the Inspiron One 2320 we saw had serious issues virtually across the board in terms of both hardware and configuration. As a family appliance (the market typically targeted by all-in-ones), the Inspiron One 2320 was a bust. Yet with the XPS One 27 (along with the impending Inspiron One 20 and Inspiron One 23) they're looking to reverse their fortunes.

Gone are the poor quality screen, awkward stand, and middling connectivity. In their place we find a PLS screen by Samsung, a more ergonomic stand, and all the modern connectivity you could ask for. Better still, the advent of Ivy Bridge and Kepler promise to shore up many of the hardware weaknesses of the last generation of all-in-ones. Read on to find out if the new Dell XPS One makes the grade.

When Alienware announced the Ivy Bridge refresh for its gaming notebook lineup, one model was conspicuously absent. Word filtered out that the smallest member of the range, the 11.6” M11x, would not be refreshed and that Dell was preparing to discontinue the line. For ultramobile gamers, the loss of the M11x is a huge blow, because it was one of the more unique notebooks out there—a near ultraportable with legitimate gaming aspirations, backed up by gaming performance that lit the class standards on fire. It was a truly standout notebook, and it will be sorely missed.

But now, a spiritual successor emerges in the form of Clevo’s W110ER. We have this unit courtesy of Eurocom, who are calling it the Monster 1.0, but other boutiques selling the W110ER include AVADirect, OriginPC, Sager, and XoticPC amongst others. We typically see this with larger notebooks from Clevo and Compal, but it hasn’t been as prominent with smaller notebooks until now, with the exception of some ASUS models from years past.

The W110ER spec sheet actually reads like a pipe dream, something that you would come up with if things like thermal limits didn’t exist. The performance-class GPU is present and accounted for—Clevo ships every W110ER whitebook with a Kepler-based GT 650M (2GB DDR3, 384 CUDA cores, Optimus). But the most impressive thing here is that the W110ER has support for Intel’s new IVB 35W quad-core CPUs. Yeah seriously, a quad-core 11.6” notebook. Just to refresh your memory, the M11x made use of Intel’s low voltage dual-core parts, so this is a significant step up in CPU performance. It’s a ridiculous amount of performance stuffed into a tiny notebook. Interested? Read on.

We’re here at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2012, where NVIDIA is holding their semi-annual professional developers conference. There’s been a great deal announced that will take a few days to completely go over, but for now we wanted to start on the product side with NVIDIA’s major product announcements.  With the launch of GK104 back in March NVIDIA is now ready to start rolling out some of their professional productions, and while the next generation of Quadro is not yet ready, Tesla is another matter. This brings us to our first part of our GTC coverage: the next generation of Tesla cards, Tesla K10 and Tesla K20.

In a typical high-end GPU launch we’ll see the process take place in phases over a couple of months if not longer. The new GPU will be launched in the form of one or two single-GPU cards, with additional cards coming to market in the following months and culminating in the launch of a dual-GPU behemoth. This is the typical process as it allows manufacturers and board partners time to increase production, stockpile chips, and work on custom designs.

But this year things aren’t so typical. GK104 wasn’t the typical high-end GPU from NVIDIA, and neither it seems is there anything typical about its launch.

NVIDIA has not been wasting any time in getting their complete GK104 based product lineup out the door. Just 6 weeks after the launch of the GeForce GTX 680, NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 690, their dual-GK104 monster. Now only a week after that NVIDIA is at it again, launching the GK104 based GeForce GTX 670 this morning.

Like its predecessors, GTX 670 will fill in the obligatory role as a cheaper, slower, and less power-hungry version of NVIDIA’s leading video card. This is a process that allows NVIDIA to not only put otherwise underperforming GPUs to use, but to satisfy buyers at lower price points at the same time. Throughout this entire process the trick to successfully launching any second-tier card is to try to balance performance, prices, and yields, and as we’ll see NVIDIA has managed to turn all of the knobs just right to launch a very strong product.

In an unusual move, NVIDIA took the opportunity earlier this week to announce a new 600 series video card before they would be shipping it. Based on a pair of Kepler GK104 GPUs, the GeForce GTX 690 would be NVIDIA’s new flagship dual-GPU video card. And by all metrics it would be a doozy.

Packing a pair of high clocked, fully enabled GK104 GPUs, NVIDIA was targeting GTX 680 SLI performance in a single card, the kind dual-GPU card we haven’t seen in quite some time. GTX 690 would be a no compromise card – quieter and less power hungry than GTX 680 SLI, as fast as GTX 680 in single-GPU performance, and as fast as GTX 680 SLI in multi-GPU performance. And at $999 it would be the most expensive GeForce card yet.

After the announcement and based on the specs it was clear that GTX 690 had the potential, but could NVIDIA really pull this off? They could, and they did. Now let’s see how they did it.

As we mentioned back on Monday, NVIDIA was going to be making some kind of GeForce announcement this evening at the NVIDA Gaming Festival 2012 in Shanghai, China. NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has just finished his speech, announcing NVIDIA’s next ultra-premium video card, the GeForce GTX 690.

Launching later this week, the GeForce GTX 690 will be NVIDIA’s new dual-GPU flagship video card, complementing their existing single-GPU GeForce GTX 680. Equipped with a pair of fully enabled GK104 GPUs, NVIDIA is shooting for GTX 680 SLI performance on a single card, and with GTX 690 they just might get there. We won’t be publishing our review until Thursday, but in the meantime let’s take a look at what we know so far about the GTX 690.

It was only a month-and-a-half ago that we were able to test the iBUYPOWER Erebus GT, a boutique desktop with a custom water-cooling loop at a very compelling price for what you got. Yet in the intervening period the computing landscape has actually changed fairly drastically, with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 coming to market and Intel releasing the Ivy Bridge-based Core i7-3000 series processors. Our previous review unit focused more on value proposition with a single AMD Radeon HD 7970 handling graphics duties, but the one we have on hand today is a true war machine.

We've covered Ivy Bridge extensively up to its launch and exhaustively this week, with a breakdown of the architecture and performance, analysis of its overclocking potential, testing in an HTPC environment, benching the notebook version, and even a vendor discussion and Q&A with ASUS of the Z77 platform that accompanies it. Today we have a firsthand look at how Ivy Bridge is going to handle and overclock in the field courtesy of an updated Erebus GT from iBUYPOWER, along with our first taste of a pair of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards in SLI runing on the platform.