Just before the end of each current graphics generation, ASUS puts the cherry on top of it and demonstrates its sheer technological power by presenting a limited-edition card to take the throne of the world’s fastest. This sort of statement may seem too pompous at first, but a look back at cards such as ARES and MARS says enough.

As we predicted in a recent article dealing with AMD’s new graphics cards from the HD 7000 series, after the high-end models were presented, miniature chips would follow, replacing the very popular Juniper-based products. The Juniper GPU “survived” for two Radeon generations, which is mostly due to its unprecedented success, one that’ll be hard to repeat, if there even is the need for such a thing.

“Smart TV”, or in its popular spelling, SmartTV, is something that the leading LCD and plasma manufacturers seem to be emphasising pretty heavily lately, in parallel with the omnipresent 3D technology. Depending on the particular manufacturer, SmartTV entails (wireless) internet and LAN capabilities, playback of a large number of video and audio formats, as well as images, the presence of at least one USB port, and the capability of installing applications from the manufacturer’s online store/database.

Recently, we have devoted much attention to the APU, which is one of the largest inovations that AMD has introduced to the IT industry. Placing a serious graphics system inside a processor is the great success of this company wich dosn't hide their pride about this product, and with a good reason. True, the concept is not new, because Intel has earlier presented almost the same thing, except for the fact that the northbridge is not integrated in their process.

Although we’re a bit disappointed not to have received the new Radeon graphics up to now, we still didn’t have to wait for too long to get one. As usual, this was taken care of by AMD, but chips are obviously in good supply anyway, since we received the first branded model not too long ago too. This is very good news, as a low yield has been mentioned as one of the possible causes of the late presentation of the card and reception of the first actual models, but luckily, that’s not the issue here.

Lenovo is often perceived as a company oriented towards business users, partly due to their IBM history, and partly due to the ThinkPad series. Yet their IdeaPad series devices have been present on the market for some time too, a series oriented to buyers that value capabilities and an attractive price more than the reliability and portability of ThinkPad notebooks. The latest model that’s got into our hands is Y570, a very attractive and powerful notebook replete with new technologies.