Dell is inspiring artistry with its Studio 15 and Studio 17 laptops, having called upon artist Mike Ming, to express his talent in the form of some 'Special Art Edition' designs.

Powered by Intel Core 2 Duo solutions and touting a starting price of $819, one of the five Special Art Edition offerings, Red Swirl, is seen above.

Palit has gone all out with their new own-design Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition graphics card <Phew!> - The "Dual" in its naming reflects on its unrivaled feature-set such as dual BIOS' and dual fan cooling.

The card sports a "Smart Switch" whereby pressing it on the back of the card and rebooting the PC instantly turbocharges it with a core clockspeed of 775MHz and memory at a whopping 4GHz, up from its usual frequencies of 750MHz core and 3.8GHz memory.

In reference to the recent woes across NVIDIA's latest notebook GPUs, Dell are one of several vendors with notebooks running these defective GPUs. With every intent not to tarnish their loyalty, despite the issue steming at NVIDIA's end, apparently they are offering an extended 12 months warranty as compensation.

Engadget has the scoop.

We analysed reports surrounding Dell's Eee PC challenger, now known as the Dell Inspiron 910, last week.

Gizmodo, has shared some very interesting (internal) documentation pertaining to Dell's offering which, if rumours are to be believed, is set to become available in just a few days time - August 22nd to be precise.

Gainward is throwing its hat into the non-reference HD 4870 ring, further to PowerColor's contribution, which we reported on last week.

According to this report from Expreview, Gainward's own offering will feature, an interesting, dual-BIOS functionality.

During a recent visit to Intel, PCGH managed to capture some very revealing shots of the 45nm powerhouse, fuelling Penryn derivatives of Intel's Core 2 family.

Following its collaboration with memory giant, Micron Technology, Intel is gearing up to unveil SSD solutions with blazing read/write speeds of 240 MB/s and 70 to 170 MB/s respectively, according to this report from TG Daily.

The above image, courtesy of Expreview, adds that Intel's 'Extreme' moniker will find a home with the X25-E, which as expected, boasts the highest performance figures.

At SIGGRAPH 2008, NVIDIA has demonstrated the first GPU-only ray trace in the form of a tech demo. Using the highly intensive ray tracing method soley on a Quadro Plex 2100 D4 with four GPUs, the demo shows a Bugatti Veyron containing up to a whopping two million polygons. There are also many ray traced shadows and reflections displayed in near perfect accuracy; all this at up to 30FPS with a resolution of 1920x1200.

You can view all of the screenshots at PCGamesHardware. The lads at HotHardware have also gone into detail about the benefits of Ray Tracing and how difficult it's been to implement in the past.

OCZ have really revved up the solid state storage market with the introduction of their Core series drives a couple months back, which brought excellent performance at fantastic prices.

Since then, they've kept working on Core to make it even better; thus, today we see the introduction of a new breed dubbed the Core V2 Series.

Where the first units featured read speeds of around 120 to 140ish MB/sec and write speeds of 80 to 95MB/sec, the new V2 series pumps out 170MB/sec and 98MB/sec read and write speeds respectively. Furthermore, we see OCZ's largest capacity SSD drive enter this new series, a 250GB model.

Following on in the footsteps of the Asetek solution we reported on earlier this week, CoolIT Systems has stepped up to the challenge of keeping the thermals of AMD's HD 4870 X2, at bay.

CoolIT's solution, features liquid cooling technology co-developed with Sunnyvale, CA based AMD, and is claimed to aggressively cool the company's R700 behemoth.