How do you make an awesome performing graphics card even better? Why slap on a hardcore liquid cooling solution onto it of course; and this is exactly what CoolIT Systems has done for the newly launched Radeon HD 3870 X2.

The cooling specialists have just announced their third installment of their Reference series line of liquid cooling systems for Radeon graphics cards. Not only does this cooler provide much better overclocking headroom for the card's GPU and memory clocks, but it also trims the monster down substantially whereby it'll only occupy a single PCI slot.

You can read CoolIT's official PR on the new cooler here.

Continuing the Gigabyte update, we've got some motherboards for you and we promise there won't be a lot of talk about DES this time, even though it's a key feature for Gigabyte this time. Only one of the three boards we are going to show you today has anything to do with DES. Although this might not be the most exciting product of the three, it's yet another X48 board, this time the GA-X48-DS5. This isn't quite the final version of the board, as Gigabyte will add a second Ethernet controller to the final revision. This will be a slightly cheaper board with the X48 chipset than the DQ6 series, although with Gigabyte moving the DS5 and now also the DS4 series of boards to become something more of an overclocking platform, it will be interesting to see how they diversify their product range.

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We had the opportunity to visit Gigabyte last week and we thought we'd share some of what we saw and heard with you and to try to let you know a little bit of what to expect from Gigabyte over the next few months. When you think about Gigabyte, you normally think about motherboards and maybe graphics cards, but the company makes so much more and this time we had a chat with some people from G-Style which is the notebook department and Gigazone which is the case, cooling, PSU and display department.

Let's start with the notebook news or rather UMPC and MID's as Gigabyte is looking at releasing some rather interesting devices this year. Gigabyte has been in the notebook market for a couple of years now, but the company hasn't exactly had any headline products, although its first UMPC, the U60 is a rather attractive and interesting device. The U60 will be joined by the M704 later this year and we wrote about it here, although the product page has been taken down for now. The M704 won't replace the U60, it will rather be an addition to the product range.

However, later this year we'll see some Intel based UMPC and MID products from Gigabyte and they'll be rocking the upcoming 1.6GHz Diamondville processor and the Shelton platform. We didn't get too much information on these models, but we were told that the new UMPC model will feature a tablet pc style design with a touch sensitive display. The MID will feature a pull-out keyboard and both devices should have 1024x600 resolution displays. If all goes to plan, then Gigabyte will be showing both devices at CeBIT in Hannover in March.

We just got word from Oliver Baltuch from Futuremark that they have just released a new service on the YouGamers.

The feature allows you to quickly determine which hardware provides the best bang for buck, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Lenovo has leaked some specs on their latest ThinkPad to Gizmodo, dubbing it the "Ultimate ThinkPad X300". This comes a few days after the Macbook Air was released to the public and the leak is intended to keep those few "on the fence" individuals about to embrace the elitist Apple brand, in-check.

Fortunately they were tempered by good sense (or hesitation about expense) and have now got an alternative competing product.

Back over at CHIPHELL in China, one of their forum users has managed to get their hands on a 55nm and DX 10.1 based mid-range Sapphire Radeon HD 3690 graphics card.

AMD has just announced the HD 3650, 3450 and 3470 yesterday which should begin selling very soon if not already but it is so far unclear when the faster HD 3670 and 3690 models will go on sale.

Fudzilla has noticed that Sapphire have set up product pages for their new HD 3450, 3470 and 3650 graphics cards on their website today, but they hadn't posted up any actual pictures of each of the cards.

On the upside, the folks at Fudzilla had since been able to source a couple of pictures of the low-profile 256MB and full-size 512MB HD 3450 graphics cards from Sapphire, both of which are passively cooled making them a well suited low-cost solution for HTPCs.

Though we've just received dissapointing news in regards to AMD's HD 3870 X2 being pushed back another week (it was thought we'd see it officially released tomorrow), the good news is that Chinese website PC Online haven't let this setback stop them from kicking up their review of the card, thus for the first time giving us all a taste of what the card is capable of.

You can check out the full review here, and although it's in chinese the good thing is the benchmark graphs are in english.

Fans of Hi-Def formats Blu-ray and HD-DVD have taken to Petition Online to get their voices heard. Fans of the HD-DVD format have created one to urge Warner back over to their side.

The Blu-ray camp on the other hand weren't going to lay down and do nothing and decided to create a Let HD-DVD Die one.

Intel's upcoming 45nm Core 2 Quad Q9300 processor should quickly become the new chip of choice for many enthusiasts upon its release as it will take over where the Q6600 leaves off; it will be the new entry level quad-core based processor running at 2.5GHz (333x7.5) with 6MB of L2 cache.

German hardware site PCGamesHardware has been given the chance to tinker with an early sample of the Q9300 which they've constructively used the time to compare it to current quad-core processors on the market in a bunch of various performance benchmarks.