Nintendo has a grand PR stunt for the launch of Mario Kart 7 which launches on December 4 on the Nintendo 3DS portable gaming console; real-life replicas of the classic Mario Kart and Luigi Bumble V Kart. Yes, real-life replicas!

The replicas were built by West Coast Customs, who are known for their awesome work on the MTV series "Pimp My Ride." Mario's shiny red go-kart comes complete with its glider attachment for flying. Luigi's go-kart includes a cool rear propeller that's used for underwater navigation. In the below picture is Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America:

The karts will sit on display at the LA Auto Show, November 18-27 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. But, there's a really good thing coming from Gamespot here. A competition for the chance to take one of these bad-ass looking go-karts home! The competition is through GameStop's PowerUp Rewards program, where a PowerUp member must make a purchase or trade in a game at GameStop in the month of December.

With all of the X79 news coming out on the 14th you may have missed the Revisiting the Legend: OCZ Vertex LE article that was posted. Our friends at MyDigitalDiscount.com uncovered a batch of drives in a warehouse and are blowing them out.

TweakTown has teamed up with My Digital Discount to offer a coupon code to get the legend for right around $1 per GB on the 240GB model. The coupon code, TT30off240LE is still in effect but only a few drives remain.

The Vertex LE is one of the fastest SATA II drives ever released and was ahead of it's time. It featured 3Xnm flash with 15K P/E cycles, a rarity these days in a world filled with 25nm flash rated at just 5K P/E cycles. After the coupon you can't find a better deal and the 285MB/s read, 270MB/s write speed is pretty nice too:)

Earlier today we made our way over to the Antec Taipei office where we got given access to an exclusive video preview of the upcoming Eleven Hundred Gaming Series computer case.

The Eleven Hundred is the flagship model in Antec's gaming series of cases which brings with it full E-ATX and XL-ATX motherboard support and support for up to three-way SLI and four-way CrossFireX. It's a stylish looking case which immediately indicates great quality as we have come to expect from Antec cases in the past. It looks just like a typical Antec product with included traditional features we've seen in the past, but it's also mixing in a blend of new features.

On the top of the case is a 200mm exhaust fan with a blue LED and in total the case supports up to nine fans in total for some pretty extreme cooling potential. In the past we've seen Antec including the power and reset buttons towards the front top of their cases, but this time around with the Eleven Hundred they are move to the top front of the case, which is a much better position especially for when the case is sitting on the ground.

The on-going flooding problem in Thailand is only getting worse for the technology industry, with hard drive pricing skyrocketing past what most people would have been able to dream of two weeks ago. People are expecting pricing to rebound soon, but they are wrong, very wrong.

Seagate CEO Stephen Luczo was talking to Bloomberg, where he labels "nonsense" estimates that drive production will return to "pre-flood levels" by next summer. He adds:

If you're just getting over this week's launch of Intel's Sandy Bridge-E CPUs, you might want to hold your breath just a little bit longer. Less than a week since its launch, Sandy Bridge-E is now sounding old with its successor taking shape over at Intel, with a release date for Q4 2012.

That's not the good part, the good part is that according to a leaked internal slide scored at XFastest, Ivy Bridge-E will be compatible with today's Intel X79 platform, and LGA2011 socket. This makes a SB-E upgrade that much better, as 12 months from now you can just buy an Ivy Bridge-E CPU, slot it in and away you go. You might need a BIOS flash to get there, but it makes a SB-E upgrade not so scary.

Ivy Bridge-E will be built on a 22nm silicon fabrication process, and shouldn't be much more than a shrink of SB-E. We could see the shrink allowing some headroom for enabling some of its components that have been locked away for SB-E. The fastest SB-E silicon physically holds 8 cores and 20MB of L3 cache, but the fastest SB-E-based Core processor has just six of those cores, and 15MB L3 cache enabled.

Well, it's finally settled. Rambus was dealt with a pretty big defeat on Wednesday, as a San Francisco jury rejected its claim in a $4 billion antitrust lawsuit against Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor. The IP licensing company lost more than 60-percent of its market value following the ruling, where investors' fear that the company won't be able to sustain its business model.

If you didn't know, the case revolved around allegations that Micron, Hynix and others had engaged in price-fixing to keep Rambus' RDRAM memory technology from gaining widespread adoption. If you remember, Intel used RDRAM with the Pentium III and 820 chipset, as well as the Pentium 4 and 850 chipset. If you remember that, you'll also remember how it was quite expensive at the time and DDR ram was just too much of a bully for RDRAM to take off.

According to Rambus, Micron and Hynix conspired to ensure Rambus memory would be more expensive, and therefore a less attractive option to OEMs. The defendants maintained that it was "design flaws, higher manufacturing costs and other drawbacks associated with RDRAM along with Rambus' business practices" that prevented RDRAM from succeeding.

Good Old Games (GOG) have been a great pillar in the PC community for offering those old games we used to absolutely love and adore, and selling them at a decent price with a no-fuss, DRM-free digital platform which is also set to get that much better.

GOG managing director Guillaume Rambourg revealed at the CD Projekt Red Investor's Day conference in Poland today that their business plans for 2012 and 2013 were to include the addition of not-so-dated games. GOG's goal is to become the number two digital game dealer. Did you notice EA's Origin wasn't even thought of there?

The new venture will include exclusive release opportunities with certain developers, but no names have been mentioned yet. The new initiative will start next year and while the low-priced classics enjoy low pricing, the new service with newer games will of course be a little more expensive. GOG have said they will continue to stick to their guns with DRM-free games and flat prices worldwide. GOG have also guaranteed they'll still bring the classic games that we've come to expect.

Cake smashes at kids birthday parties look so awesome. My daughter turns one in March next year and we're going to have one. I'm so excited. Why didn't Sony do this with the 5-year anniversary of the PS3? A giant PS3 cake and have various devs and management smash it up. I need to work for their PR department, ha. This week is definitely the week of anniversaries and birthdays! First up we had the Xbox's 10-year anniversary, and Intel's 40-year anniversary of their first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. Today, Sony stands on the podium with the PlayStation 3 turning five today.

Five years since the PlayStation 3 launch. I still remember the pre-launch buzz, dual-HDMI, 1080p, this, that. Then it launched and people were selling PS3 consoles on eBay for ridiculous prices, or selling just the empty box and getting suckers to purchase it in the craze of the launch.

The PS3 did launch before this day five years ago, but in Japan. Today marks the release in the US. The PS3 ushered in some truly great things to the gaming world, it pushed forth today's standard for high-definition video, Blu-Ray. It introduced the great Sixaxis controller, introduced Move to the world, 3D is now available on it, great titles such as the Uncharted series and Killzone.

The Australian retail market has always been a funny thing, something available online for say $19.99 (like the t-shirt I'm wearing) is $49.99 here in stores, if not more. It's ridiculous and it seems that even a powerhouse retailer like JB Hi-Fi is feeling that pinch.

Today they very quietly launched an online-only direct sales model, at first just selling DSLR cameras and accessories. These prices won't be offered in-store, with only the online store the only way to take advantage of the super-cheap pricing. The store is dubbed "direct import" and offers DSLR camera, lenses, flashes and grips. Funnily enough, it's undercutting its own bricks and mortar JB Hi-Fi stores in the process.

For example, a Nikon D3100 with a single lens through JB Hi-Fi's online store is $777. The direct import price? $596. This kind of pricing really shows how much price-gouging is done at a wholesale level in Australia.

The WarpDrive has been a really good product for LSI and datacenter owners. The product has been so successful the successor has already been announced and production is ramping up quickly for a Q4 or early Q1 launch. That information has been public for the last month or so, released at IDF.

LSI is already working on an even newer product, one that they don't really want to talk too much about. So without an official name I'm going to designate this one WarpCache.

The LSI MegaRAID controllers have two distinct add-ons. We've covered them both in the past, FastPath, an IOPS accelerator and CacheCade, an HDD cache system fed by solid state drives. By placing an SSD or an array of SSDs in front of the HDDs to hold hot data the data can be read at the pace of SSDs. This also reduces wear on the traditional platter drives as frequently read data is pulled from the much faster SSD cache.With CacheCade 2.0 the SSD cache can write incoming data as well, a large bonus for write intensive apps.