We really loved what the first iteration of Sapphire's EDGE-HD mini PC had to offer when checking it out around the time of launch. It was small, light, offered great performance with effortless HD playback and came in at a great price.

Fast forward near on five months later and Sapphire has introduced a revised, updated iteration of the unit, now dubbed the EDGE-HD2. While the unit itself looks much the same, running the same slim dimensions as the first and weighing in at a mere 530 grams, it packs a faster Atom 1.8GHz D525 processor for a start.

Further to the faster CPU, it sports a larger 320GB HDD (vs the 250GB on the original), 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA ION 2 GPU with 512MB VRAM, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, a couple USB 2.0 ports, card reader, D-Sub and HDMI outputs.

iSuppli have come out and said that DDR3 modules will remain the dominant DRAM tech throughout 2011 and flowing right into 2012, 2013 and even into 2014 before DDR 4 arrives in its next-generation glory. DDR3 RAM currently represents 85 to 90-percent of today's DRAM market and that will swell to 94-percent by 2013. But in 2014, iSuppli is predicting that DDR4 will emerge out of the flames of the DRAM market with a 12-percent share, within a year they expect this number to expand to 56-percent leading DDR3 with just 42-percent of the market.

As you can see from the above chart, DDR3 really is the current champion and with 4GB DIMMs available so cheaply these days, it'll be a very hard switch to DDR4 for most people. Keepign in mind that DDR3 launched in 2007, that makes it a seven year life span for DDR3 until it gets some proper competition. Also keep in mind that whilst DDR3 launched in 2007, it was just too expensive for most users to change over to, but we know this has changed considerably over the years. DDR4 will most likely debut at huge prices and eventually fall just like all tech.

Intel's new x86 Atom architecture dubbed 'Cloverview', is set to launch before Windows 8 hits shelves early next year. Intel's Director of Product and Technology Media Relations, Bill Korcos has said the Atom Clover Trail and its Cloverview processor are designed to work with Windows 8 and it will be a "nice one-two chip-software punch."

He didn't give an exact month or quarter launch frame, but rumors of Windows 8 hitting RTM status in April would be a good indication of Intel's launch details. Kircos was clear that the upcoming x86 Atom architecture would power a bunch of new tablets, netbooks, slider devices and more.

Cloverview will be one of Intel Atom's first 32nm-based chips and is intended for tablets, which is great because the shrink is set to reduce power consumption and improve battery life. There is of course the Cedar Trail and Medfield which are prepped for netbooks and phones/tablets respectively. NVIDIA and ARM have some competition against their Kal-El and Cortex A15 products. Can Intel win? We will have to wait and see!

Google+ has been launched today and it is quite the bundle of joy. Included are multiple parts which create one large social networking web of connectivity, social fun and constant information on friends and more specifically the friends you want to know your whereabouts or specific posts.

Included are four major sections, +Circles, +Sparks, +Hangouts, +Mobile. First off +Circles is all about sharing what matters, to those who mean the most to you. Not all relationships and friendships are equal, +Circle allows you to create a "circle" which allows you to add the people you want to it and share what's new or something cool you found online. Instead of going out to all of your friends at once.

+Sparks allows you to strike up a conversation about, well, pretty much anything. Sparks delivers a feed of content from the internet in any topic you want across 40 languages. All you have to do is add your interests and Sparks will find relavant links and info on what you want to look at, again with the right circle of friends.

Futuremark have partnered with MSI once again to kick off their infamous Lords of Overclocking competition for 2011, the largest of its type and acting as a qualifying event for the prestigious MSI MOA 2011 competition in Taipei. The event will see well known overclockers from far and wide across the globe using 3DMark 11 together with an MSI branded graphics card to compete for the title of "Lord of Overclocking" for their region.

The contest will run for 4 weeks, commencing July 4 until August 1st and prizes will be awarded to the top weekly winners in each region (Europe, Asia, Africa and America) as well as prizes going to additional winners chosen at random from all qualifying entries each week. And what a prize pool it is, from the latest top-end graphics cards to motherboards, cases, power supplies and more.

We are excited to once again bring the world's most talented overclockers together for our annual Lords of Overclocking competition," said Jukka Mäkinen, Futuremark CEO. "With great prizes on offer from some of the most recognized names in PC performance it promises to be a closely fought contest."

If you're in the market for an outrageously fast notebook for gaming and the current top dog choices of mobile GPUs from both the green and red teams weren't impressive enough to meet your expectations, hold onto your seats folks, for notebooks equipped with a new GPU weapon are on the immediate horizon thanks to the launch of NVIDIA's new mobile GPU today; the GTX 580M.

With previous GTX-500M series GPUs not up to par in the performance stakes with the previous gen GTX-480M, this new model from NVIDIA comes much welcomed and looks to boast some very impressive performance, well overshading the aforementioned 480M.

Specs wise, the GPU runs at a clock speed of 1240MHz and a memory clock of up to 1500MHz. It houses 384 CUDA cores and up to 2GB of 256-bit 96GB/s GDDR5 memory.

While PCI-E 2.0 has been more than kind enough to us since its inception in early 2007 with its gobs of available bandwidth on tap, looking over 4 years beyond and now PCI-E 3.0 is becoming the talk of the town.

While it's been said that current gen high-end video cards can be used to their maximum potential on existing PCI-E 2.0/.1 equipped boards, PCI-E 3.0 gives far more headroom for future super bandwidth hungry graphics cards inevitably to come, boasting a bit rate that effectively "doubles" PCI-E 2.0 at 8GT/s.

On that note, it's been rumoured that the benefits of PCI-E 3.0 could be utilized for some folks straight off the bat, providing you are lucky enough to have one of those super duper PCI-E based SSD solutions, such as one of these monsters from OCZ.

As promised Crytek have released the "DX11 Ultra Upgrade" patch for Crysis 2 and also the high-resolution texture pack is now available. The update intros DX11 as well as graphical improvements to not only the DX11 version of the game, but the stock DX9 version. There are three packs available, patch 1.9 enables DX11 support but there will be separate downloads on top of patch 1.9 in the form of "DirectX 11 Ultra Upgrade," DX11 Tessellation Pack," and "High Res Textures."

The DX11 patches will obviously give higher-fidelity visuals, but the patch also includes graphical and performance improvements under DX9. After the patch 1.9 is installed, DX9 users will gain real-time local reflections and contacts shadows. DX11-based gamers will gain hardware tessellation, parallax occlusion mapping along with various shadow, water, particle, depth of field and motion blur enhancements.

Patch 1.9 also includes over twelve gameplay tweaks as well as multiplayer bug fixes.

Following nearly 2 months of worldwide security mayhem which began with the breach and temporary (but painfully long) closure of Sony's PlayStation network, the hacker group responsible, "LulzSec" has indicated that it finally plans to withdraw its aggressive hacking antics and disband.

This group has certainly made quite a shattering impact in performing several high-profile security breaches and DoS attacks against the likes of Sony as mentioned, Nintendo and even the US Senate and FBI. Their hacking adventures have resulted in company costs well into the 10s of millions.

Having done wonders for their own egos and making sure they don't push it too far by ending up in a court room, it appears their intensive hacking spree has ended, with the announcement "After 50 days of mayhem, the LulzSec boat has apparently sailed its final hacking voyage" accompanied by a torrent named '50 Days of Lulz' posted on Pirate Bay; the contents of which had a mass of sensitive information including 550,000+ user details for the Battlefield Heroes Beta which were apparently provided ''to selflessly entertain others'. That torrent has now been removed from the site.

Alongside the likes of ASUS, MSI and ECS, ASRock have also launched their first Llano optimized A75 chipset motherboards ahead of the official APU launch in just a few days.

The particular boards ASRock have first let out the gate include their top-of-the-line option in the A75 Extreme6, as well as the A75 Pro4 (also a full ATX sized board) and three mATX boards in the A75 Pro4-M, A75M and A75M-HVS.

All boards of course carry support for FM1 APUs, have two or four DDR3-1866 RAM slots, and between five and eight SATA 6.0 Gbps ports depending on the board. All boards carry four USB 3.0 ports (boasting ASRock's XFast USB technology) with the exception of the Extreme6 which has six ports. Both D-Sub and HDMI outputs are resident on all models.