As PCs get more powerful and easier to use, the challenges involved with upgrading them have remained about the same. For the novice, a hard drive upgrade can appear downright daunting. For more experienced tinkerers, the upgrade itself may be easy, but it's easier still to overlook factors that could streamline the whole process and better protect both the hardware and the data stored on it.

Advanced Micro Devices has started shipping units of the first low-power Fusion chips for use in consumer laptops and netbooks, a company official said on Tuesday.

Nvidia on Tuesday announced its next-generation graphics processing unit, the GeForce GTX 580, which the company said is its fastest-performing GPU to date.

On Tuesday, Nvidia announced it was going to support x86 processors as a target for CUDA applications. This means that apps that are currently written to support Nvidia's GPU line for compute applications will be able to run on standard x86 CPUs--no GPU needed.

Nvidia's GPU Tech Conference is evolving to have an even stronger emphasis on high performance computing than the past couple of years. Yes, there are token nods towards the consumer side of the business--Cyberlink is at the show, demoing 3D Blu-ray--but that's about it. PNY is here, but showing its Tesla and Quadro based professional solutions.

QUESTION: I want to use touch to control my Windows 7 Home Premium PC. Is it as simple as plugging in a touchscreen display? I'd also like to view a 3D image - will I need a new graphics card?

With the release of the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards, AMD delivers fantastic value for the average PC gamer.