EVGA is celebrating its 13th Anniversary and the way we like to do that is by thanking our community and giving away tons of prizes for participating in tons of games. We have so many prizes to giveaway that the list is too long to include here… but they all add up to more than an incredible $70k!

Our 13th Anniversary Grand Prize that will see three lucky winners sent undercover to Florida, USA, for an unforgettable 007 Mission Experience. Each of our Secret Service agents will be swept away in limos, scooped up in helicopters, sent tumbling in stunt planes and thrust through the waves in offshore raceboats.

Western Digital, the world's leader in external storage solutions and maker of the popular WD TV media player family, today unveils its first line of wireless home networking products, designed specifically to accelerate movies, video and gaming, delivering a premium high-definition entertainment experience. With the My Net family of powerful and easy-to-use home networking products, WD debuts its exclusive FasTrack technology that instantly detects entertainment traffic on the network and fast-forwards it to gaming consoles, media players, smart TVs, tablets, smartphones, computers and other Wi-Fi connected devices.

LG Electronics (LG) announced the beta opening of LG Cloud service on May 1 with the aim of providing seamless connectivity and streaming access to all digital content across various electronic devices. Although cloud is today's hottest IT buzzwords, LG Cloud is the first that allows users to manage and consume all types of content on "three screens" which includes Android smartphones, PCs and smart TVs (including but not limited to CINEMA 3D models) without a separate set-top box.

To use the service, users need to download the LG Cloud app from Google Play or LG SmartWorld app store from their Android smartphones, LG SmartWorld store from their LG Smart TVs or the LG Cloud website from their PCs or laptops. LG's Cloud service automatically synchronizes smartphone content with the cloud server and the user's PC and TV. Photos and videos taken with the smartphone can be viewed and streamed to the PC or TV almost instantaneously. Videos edited on a PC can be uploaded to LG Cloud for viewing seconds later on a smartphone. Unlike other cloud services, there's very little waiting or lag time since the content is streamed to the TV, PC or smartphone, not downloaded first.

An alleged marketing video of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680, slated for after launch, got leaked and uploaded to YouTube by an Italian-speaking YouTube user (going by the Italian used in the description). The part that makes it look genuine is it features NVIDIA's VP for Corporate Marketing Ujesh Desai, holding the graphics card, and detailing it. He claims that NVIDIA set out to build the fastest GPU - "and accomplished it." The entire bouquet of new features introduced with the GeForce GTX 680 has been disclosed in the video, to great detail.Watch the video (embedded from YouTube) after the break.

What would you do for an Ultrabook computer? That's the question Intel Corporation asks in Ultrabook Temptations, a series of six light-hearted experiments filmed in four cities across three countries and posted to YouTube today.

Sleek and stylish, Ultrabooks are a new category of computers inspired by Intel. They are the next generation of mobile computing -- thinner, lighter and more responsive than traditional laptops, yet just as powerful and secure.

"People are drawn to Ultrabooks. When you see one, you just want one," said Claudine Pache, digital marketing manager for Intel Australia and New Zealand. "We created the 'Ultrabook Temptations' to see just how far people would go to get their hands on one."

Later this year, Google will adopt a single privacy-policy system for all its services. Some of Google's most popular services, as some might recall, are built from acquisitions of other equally genius start-ups as itself (eg: YouTube), many of these services were allowed to retain the essential part of their old privacy policies. The unified policy, effective March 1, 2012, allows sharing of usage statistics between services, to provide a user experience that's consistent between all its services. It doesn't sound harmful enough, yet it has generated public paranoia that it would, in some way, make Google more invasive on people's privacy than it already is, by, you know...owning YouTube?

Microsoft was quick put on an angel's robe and cash in on this paranoia. In a newspaper ad (first image below is down-scaled, the second is original), Microsoft talked about how Google's One Policy, One Google, One Experience is designed to be invasive to people's privacy, and how it allows Google to connect the dots between everything you do or say, across Google's various services. Fair enough, but what should have concluded as a PSA by Microsoft, ended up in being an advertisement for its own portfolio of services that are "better for users", as they're not as invasive as Google's.A video detailing Google's One Policy update (by Google), follows.

Analysts from all over the world are questioning Google's new privacy settings being implemented on March 1. Google is going to be tying its services closer together then before by allowing the privacy setting to be shared across services.

By doing this It will also be able to implement a new search for registered users. Google has stated,"If you're signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries, or tailor your search results, based on the interests you've expressed in Google+, Gmail and YouTube" the firm said.

Critics like the UK's Information Commissioner's Office warned that any changes must be communicated to users. They are quoted as saying, "It is important that technology companies, such as Google, are aware of the privacy concerns that exist when behavioral advertising is used to target particular content at individuals. Failure to inform users about changes may not only lead to a loss of trust in the company, but could also mean that they are failing to comply with the requirements of the Data Protection Act," it warned.

The highly controversial SOPA & PIPA bills currently being rushed through Congress by Big Media are encountering ever more opposition from minor and major players alike, such as Google. Now gog.com, owned by parent company CD Projekt RED, has come out against these bills too and are one of many games companies to do so. They address the questions of "will it work?" and "will it stop piracy?" with the answers being sort-of and no.

That Dodgy Intel Ivy Bridge DX11 'demo' at CES 2012 (UPDATED)

Word has been flying round the internet about Intel's dodgy Ivy Bridge DX11 'demo'. Intel's Mooly Eden, VP, PC Client Group was attempting to demonstrate a racing game on a prototype laptop - 'ultrabook' - fitted with an upcoming 22 nm Ivy Bridge processor with a racing wheel attached and allegedly rendering DX11 graphics. However, as is very apparent at the start, it's actually a video, because the control panel for the free VLC video player pops up for a few seconds. Eden then 'drives' a car and after a few seconds puts up one hand and then the other, because as he says "they are driving it from backstage". However, there was no one driving the game "backstage", as it was just a video and Eden doesn't say anything about this at any point in the presentation.

This gives conspiracy theorists lots of ammunition, as perhaps the game was actually played on a high powered desktop PC with NVIDIA or AMD discrete graphics cards? What game was it? Eden doesn't say. "IB can't really do these graphics!" they cry and so on. Sure, man 'didn't' go to the moon, either... However, we believe that while yes, there was a bit of deception going on, it was nothing more than a white(ish) lie. Why? Because Ivy Bridge comes out in April and people aren't going to forget this demo. They will immediately put IBs DX11 graphics to the test with similar games and if it doesn't deliver, Intel will have a lot of egg on its face. Here's what Intel had to say about this demo in an official statement:

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

Acer America Corp., the number one provider of 3D displays worldwide(1), today introduced the Acer HR274H, a 27-inch 3D monitor featuring new advances in 3D technology. Featuring Acer's innovative chip-based solution, the new monitor can convert any 2D content to 3D, allowing anyone to watch their favorite movies, videos, photos and games in 3D.

With crystal clear 1920 x 1080 resolution, it is the ideal monitor for advanced 1080p full HD gaming on a PC, Blu-ray Disc console gaming, widescreen movie playback and multimedia and productivity applications.

When webpages weren't much more than text and images peppered with hyperlinks, and when animated elements were limited to slideshow-like animations by Compuserve GIF, Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash) transformed the web, making it visually engaging. Even PCs with first-generation Pentium processors and 56K internet connections had access to a much superior internet experience thanks to Flash. According to Adobe's own statistics, over 90% of internet-enabled PCs have the Flash Player browser plugin installed. Apparently the "open/free everything" proponents want the world to get rid of the Flash plugin. Why? Because it's not "open", not all platforms can use it, and it poses security hazards.

Brandishing an extremely original name, "Occupy Flash" calls itself to be a "movement to rid the world of Flash Player plugin," because "Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn't work on most mobile devices. It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology." Occupy Flash argues that with HTML5, Flash is redundant and "free". Not quite; people don't pay for Flash Player plugins, those who create Flash content do, for the Adobe Flash software. It's not like a transition to HTML5 is going to change that equation much. People still won't have to pay to be able to consume public HTML5 content, while those creating it will still need to use proprietary software to create quality content, it's just that they'll end up with more vendors to sell them that.

The current display technology standard for most PCs and TVs is LCD nowadays. However, LCD technology has significant and well known drawbacks, such as limited viewing angles, poor colours, motion blur and input lag. These problems cause some people to swear by and hold on to the old and now obsolete CRT monitors, as it had none of these problems (it did however, have lots of others). There are various types of LCD technology in mainstream use today which attempt to address these shortcomings, but none fix them all. For example, TN displays are cheap to buy, relatively fast which reduces motion smear and input lag, but at the expense of viewing angle and colour accuracy, making them suitable for fast gaming and animation. Meanwhile, IPS displays have the opposite characteristics, making them suitable for professional photographic work, where accurate colours and vibrant pictures are essential.

Well, this looks different to your standard gaming offering. Warco, short for "war correspondent", is a game that's a first person shooter, but without a gun. Instead, you play journalist Jesse DeMarco thrust into the middle of battle, armed only with your wits and your trusty video camera, who is tasked with documenting the horrors of war. You then have to edit your footage into a compelling news story, ranging from all-action shootouts to quiet moments, as you discuss the events of the day with your fellow journalists. This appears to be more a trainer for how to be a war correspondent than a game, as it's the brainchild of Tony Maniaty, an Australian journalist who has reported from regions like East Timor and post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers announced today 4 new QPKG add-on applications and 3 updates to the original QPKGs for its NAS customers. These QPKGs give users a versatile NAS covering their need from web applications such as Gallery, to media servers and download utilities consisting of PS3 Media Server, pyLoad, and Transmission. These applications improve a QNAP NAS by enabling it not only as a pure storage server, but also a powerful yet energy-efficient downloading machine, multimedia sharing center to game consoles with transcoding capability, IP TV streaming, online photo sharing server, and an all purposed web server with advanced manageability.

QNAP's QPKG applications are free to download and convenient for end users to install. "The QPKG platform is a great feature for users to explore unlimited possibilities of what a QNAP NAS is capable of," said James Wu, Product Manager of QNAP. "With over 20 QPKG apps now available to help create and manage databases, run websites, implement ecommerce, enjoy multimedia files, and much more". QNAP strives to stay ahead of consumer needs by providing innovated add-ons to make today's data-heavy society a more user friendly world.

Gateway today unveils new models in its Gateway NV Series line of notebook PCs with the latest AMD processors, including new models in AMD's Vision Technology line, which deliver enhanced performance capabilities for mobile computing.

The flagship model of the new line is the Gateway NV51B05u, which features an AMD E-Series processor E-350 with Vision Technology and ATI Radeon HD 6310 graphics to deliver heightened performance in a value-based notebook.

Rovi Corporation today unveiled Roxio Game Capture and Roxio PC Game Capture, two affordably priced products that offer a straightforward way for gamers to quickly and easily capture and share PC and console game play videos.

In-product tutorials help everyone get set up quickly and immediately begin to capture and showcase their latest campaigns, adventures, ball skills, and race sequences. Gamers may use the products to post their high scores, tips & tricks, game reviews, or even a feature-length movie, or Machinima, based on game play footage. See the products in action here.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, AMD launched a new class of accelerated processor that combines more compute capabilities than any processor in the history of computing. The AMD Fusion Family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) incorporate - in a single die design - multi-core CPU (x86) technology, a powerful DirectX 11-capable discrete-level graphics and parallel processing engine, a dedicated high-definition video acceleration block, and a high-speed bus that speeds data across the differing types of processor cores within the design. New generations of desktop, notebook and HD netbooks are now available based on AMD Fusion APUs at affordable price points. Tablets and embedded designs based on AMD Fusion APUs are expected be available later in Q1 2011. The new range of products features include stutter-free HD video playback, breakthroughs in computational horsepower to handle the most demanding applications, DirectX 11-capable graphics and all-day battery life.

Lenovo today announced the Lenovo Skylight, the first ARM-based smartbook based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset platform. Skylight harnesses the best of smartphones and netbooks to create a new mobile consumer device. With a stunningly sleek and slim design, all day battery life, robust wireless connectivity and custom interface with live web gadgets, Skylight is designed to transform the mobile Internet experience. The Skylight smartbook connects with AT&T 3G mobile broadband service in the U.S.

"The web has become the window to the world for more and more people, helping them connect with friends and family across town or thousands of miles away," said Peter Gaucher, executive director, Mobile Internet Product Management, Lenovo. "Skylight combines the long battery life and connectivity of a smartphone with the full web browsing and multimedia experience of a netbook to create one of the first devices in this developing smartbook category. Consumers want choices. They can now choose from a full portfolio of Lenovo mobile consumer devices including netbooks, smartbooks and laptops."

Today's students and young professionals need a versatile notebook that can serve as their workhorse by day and entertainment center at night. The new Dell Studio 14z powered by the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor provides a perfect blend of performance and portability with graphics support for gaming, HD video, and creative self-expression.

The GeForce 9400M in the Dell Studio 14z delivers up to five times faster graphics performance than Centrino 2 notebooks to accelerate image editing, video playback, and video conversion. With vReveal, the Studio 14z can fix grainy, shaky video twice as fast as comparable notebooks, and then let you upload the video to YouTube in minutes.

Today's users want an always-connected device for social media applications such as Facebook and YouTube, as well as great multimedia performance for recording and watching HD movies and videos on the go.

NVIDIA Corporation, the inventor of the graphics processor, today introduced a new platform, based on the NVIDIA Tegra 600 Series computer-on-a-chip that enables a $99, always-on, always-connected HD mobile internet device (MID) that can go days between battery charges.

This platform will enable OEMs to quickly build and bring to market devices that carriers can offer for as low as $99 -bringing broadband connectivity and all of the Web's HD content to the masses.

Google has launched what is essentially a mobile internet cafe called the Internet Bus, to go around India providing poorer people, experience and education in using the internet. Using a high speed connection via what appears to be satellite, the vehicle has the words "Explore the World of the Internet" along the sides, it has not been cheaply done either. The whole vehicle appears to be a custom build, with large flat screen monitors, custom stands and lots of pretty lights. It has been said by the source, that the amount of people in India who are officially below the poverty line, is nearly as much as the total population of the USA. A video advertisement has also surfaced on YouTube, which you can find here.

YouTube, the site that's everywhere around us for one reason or another, is finally widescreen ready. The first thing you'll notice when you enter YouTube today will be the new widescreen look of all uploaded videos and the slightly bigger aspect of the site. This highly anticipated widescreen update comes to replace the older 4:3 look of all videos. Now viewers can enjoy playing 16:9 videos in fullscreen. The site's width is also expanded to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos. The YouTube team also claims that all 4:3 videos will play just fine regardless of the new aspect ratio.

Thermaltake uploaded today a video on YouTube showcasing its upcoming BigTyp14 Pro CPU cooler, which is due out next month. The cooler, successor to the popular BigTyp 120VX, features six copper heatpipes and 69 aluminium fins on each side as cooling surface. There's also a top mounted VR controlled blue LED 140mm fan with a low noise output of 16dBA. BigTyp14 Pro uses a universal clip that supports most of current sockets. Thermaltake expects the BigTyp14 Pro to arrive sometime next month, but pricing is yet to be confirmed. Take a look at the teaser clip here.

It seems that America and the United Kingdom aren't the only countries caught in a sudden desire to become authoritarian. Pakistan is blocking websites that they feel either will pervert their citizens culturally or politically. YouTube recently made the list for both reasons. There's plenty of sketchy X-rated material on the website, and it's cousin, X-tube. However, it's more likely than not that YouTube was blocked in Pakistan due to political footage. To be precise, someone managed to sneak proof of election fraud, in video form, onto YouTube. Pakistan obviously doesn't want anybody to see this, so they bury the video. When it comes bouncing back later, Pakistan got mad and completely blocked out the site.