The newest driver release by NVIDIA brings higher frame rates, fixes for game issues (most notably the corruption in BF3), and new profiles for recent, or upcoming game releases. Take a look below at the benchmarks to get an idea of the improvement in performance the new 295.73 driver brings.

Android 4.0 arrived with quite the hard thud late last year, whilst it looks pretty cool, the Android-based smartphones and tablets just did not adapt quick enough. Most smartphone and tablet makers really dragged their feet, with even flagship products such as the phone that rocks along in my pocket, the Samsung Galaxy S II, not receiving it yet.

A graduate student speaking at the 10th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies this week, said that as NAND flash densities increase, so do issues such as read and write latency and data errors. This is something we've known about for some time, but it appears that that many did not. Researchers tested 45 different NAND flash chips that ranged in size from 72 nanometer (nm) circuitry to 25nm technology. The chips came from six vendors and they found that program speed (write speed) for pages in a flash block suffered dramatic and predictable variations in latency.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told investors during yesterday's earnings call that TSMC is doing fabulously with its 28nm ramp. Yields on 28nm wafers are higher at the same point in the cycle than they were for the 40nm node, but unfortunately not as good as the company was anticipating three months ago.

Probably the hottest question for desktop users is how Ivy Bridge stacks up to Sandy Bridge at the same clock speed.

Luckily we came across some data that indicates that at the same 3.4 GHz clock, Ivy Bridge 22nm tends to work between seven and sixteen percent faster. Intel has compared internally old Sandy Bridge based Core i7 2600 processors with 8MB cache, four cores, eight threads and 3.4GHz and new soon to launch Ivy Bridge based Core i7 3770 clocked at the same 3.4GHz with 8MB cache and four cores and eight treads.

NVIDIA is preparing yet another GTX 560 - this time a salvaged GF114 based graphics card to be branded GeForce GTX 560 SE.

The GTX 560 SE will be at least the 6th member of the desktop GTX 560 family, following GTX 560 Ti, GTX 560, GTX 560 Ti (OEM), GTX 560 (OEM) and GTX 560 Ti 448 Core. Ironically, the GTX 560 SE has much more in common with the OEM GTX 555.

The future is here, and AVADirect is readily expanding its offerings with hardware to prepare for it. For those who need ultimate performance on the go, AVADirect can feed your need for mobile speed with the Clevo P270WM. Based off of the Intel X79 chipset and Sandy Bridge-E processors, end-users can expect performance increases as much as 35-50 percent while keeping current and ahead of the curve for their much needed productivity, efficiency, and entertainment.

EVGA is once again teasing the SR-X motherboard. This photo shows it SR-X in a final stage, equipped with an updated cooling solution made up of four heatsinks (covering VRM areas and chipsets).

Mark Rein from Epic Games is confirming that apparently the new Unreal 4 engine is up and running on at least some of the next generation systems. Rein confirmed during the DICE summit that it was up on next-gen systems, but he can’t confirm which systems those next-gen systems might be.

It is not unusual for Middle Eastern countries to block certain websites that authorities feel pose a political or moral danger. Now, Iran has gone one step further and cut off an entire swathe of the internet.

When one of Iran’s 40 million internet users tries to access any website that uses the common https protocol – and that includes Facebook, Gmail and YouTube – the site does not load, and instead a message appears on the screen.

It reads: “According to computer crime regulations, access to this website is denied.”