The good: Most cost-efficient chip on the market; low power consumption makes it cooler, quieter, and easy to use in smaller PC designs.

The bad: Chipset politics between Intel and graphics card vendors hurt gamers, who now have to pick an Intel board for ATI's CrossFire or an Nvidia board for SLI cards.

The bottom line: Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 offers the best price-to-performance ratio we've seen in a desktop chip. For half the cost of AMD's top-of-the-line chip, you get identical if not superior performance and better power efficiency. AMD surprised us last year with its completely dominant dual-core chips, but Intel regains the crown with Core 2 Duo.
Review: AMD, you've had a good run.

Intel announced its line of Core 2 Duo desktop CPUs today. If you're buying a new computer or building one of your own, you would be wise to see that it has one of Intel's new dual-core chips in it. The Core 2 Duo chips are not only the fastest desktop chips on the market, but also the most cost effective and among the most power efficient. About the only people these new chips aren't good for are the folks at AMD, who can claim the desktop CPU crown no
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AMD, you've had a good run.

Intel announced its line of Core 2 Duo desktop CPUs today. If you're buying a new computer or building one of your own, you would be wise to see that it has one of Intel's new dual-core chips in it. The Core 2 Duo chips are not only the fastest desktop chips on the market, but also the most cost effective and among the most power efficient. About the only people these new chips aren't good for are the folks at AMD, who can claim the desktop CPU crown no longer.

We've given the full review treatment to two of the five Core 2 Duo chips. You can read about the flagship $999 Core 2 Extreme X6800 here and the entire Core 2 Duo series here. In this review, we examine the next chip down, the $530 2.67GHz Core 2 Duo E6700. While the Extreme X6800 chip might be the fastest in the new lineup, we find the E6700 the most compelling for its price-performance ratio. For just about half the cost of AMD's flagship, the $1,031 Athlon 64 FX-62, the Core 2 Duo E6700 gives you nearly identical, if not faster performance, depending on the application.

As we outlined in a blog post a month ago, the Core 2 Duo represents a new era for Intel. It's the first desktop chip family that doesn't use the NetBurst architecture, which has been the template for every design since the Pentium 4. Instead, the Core 2 Duo uses what's called the Core architecture (not to be confused with Intel's Core Duo and Core Solo laptop chips, released this past January). The advances in the Core architecture explain why even though the Core 2 Duo chips have lower clock speeds, they're faster than the older dual-core Pentium D 900 series chips. The Core 2 Extreme X6800 chip, the Core 2 Duo E6700, and the $316 Core 2 E6600 represent the top tier of Intel's new line, and in addition to the broader Core architecture similarities, they all have 4MB of unified L2 cache. The lower end of the Core 2 Duo line, composed of the $224 E6400 and the $183 E6300, have a 2MB unified L2 cache.

We won't belabor each point here, since the blog post already spells them out, but the key is that it's not simply one feature that gives the Core 2 Duo chips their strength, but rather it's a host of design improvements across the chip and the way it transports data that improves performance. And out test results bear this out.

On our gaming, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Photoshop tests, the E6700 was second only to the Extreme X6800 chip. Compared to the 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-62, the E6700 was a full 60 frames per second faster on Half-Life 2, it finished our Microsoft Office test 20 seconds ahead, and it won on the Photoshop test by 39 seconds. On our iTunes and multitasking tests, the E6700 trailed the FX-62 by only 2 and 3 seconds, respectively. In other words, with the Core 2 Duo E6700 in your system, you'll play games more smoothly, get work done faster, and in general enjoy a better computing experience than with the best from AMD--and for less dough.

In early 2010 Nvidia released their GTX 400 series of graphics cards for the hardcore gamers out there. However, just six months later they released the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, the first model in the 500 series and the new flagship graphics card for this outstanding company. Much like the 480, this model uses DirectX 11 and has a single GPU. Most of the primary features that affect the 3D rendering and speed were updated to meet today's standards and the reality is that the GTX 580 is one of the fastest and best-performing graphics cards on the market. Because of this it received our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award for overall power and performance.
The memory in this graphics card is GDDR5, which is the new standard for any card that wants to compete with other high-end gaming hardware. The memory bus width did not change from the 480 model and stayed at 384-bits, which should still do just fine compared to most graphics cards on the market today. An amazing 192.4 bandwidth was added which comes very close to dual-GPU cards.
One of the main areas that Nvidia focuses on with their graphics cards is tessellation. This technology basically allows complex, intricate images such as clothing, water and fire to render faster. Things that have a lot of moving parts such as hair or grass are much harder to render because there are thousands or even millions of objects that have to move according the wind or the movement of an object. Tessellation makes it possible for each blade of grass or flame in a fire to act like it would if you were to see it in real life. This technology is always improving and will always be a huge since games will continue to become more lifelike and even more detailed.
The ability to run multiple screens at the same time is another thing that most gamers and game developers need. This graphics card only allows for three displays which is enough for most gamers out there but will fall short for those developing the games of the future.

The flagship of the ATI Radeon 5000 series is the ATI Radeon HD 5970. This card is quite the performance beast. Many have benchmarked this card alongside other top performers and it reigns supreme. We rated this card higher than the others because of its overall superiority. Even with the recent release of Nvidia’s 500 series card, it has stood its ground. Nvidia may have another 500 series graphics card up their sleeve to challenge the 5970, but for now Radeon product has no equal which is why it recieved our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award.
Having a dual core graphics card essentially means that you have a CrossfireX (dual card) system, but in this case, like the GTX 295, it’s all in one card. With this one card, almost every attribute is doubled. A good example of this is the core clock speed, which is 725 x 2MHz, theoretically giving you 1450MHz. For this reason the 5970 has quite an impressive set of GPU and memory specs.
There are a total of 3200 stream processors in this card, which gives it an acceleration edge over the competition. With a setup like this, you have fill rates of 46.4GPs (gigapixels) and 116GTs (gigatexels or texture pixels) to help get your FPS (frames per second) up, giving you a smooth gaming and video rendering experience.
There is a 2GB capacity on this card, which should ease your RAM usage and provide some extra speed. More and more, less RAM is necessary on the motherboard if you have a good graphics card. If that's the case, then it'll probably be more than gamers and video rendering employees who get the nice graphics cards like the Radeon HD 5970.
Sitting on the GPUs is a large aluminum heat sink made up of 36 fins. It is roughly half the size of the card. The heat sink helps cool not only the GPUs but also the built-in memory. It's designed this way for efficiency, especially with the help of the highly heat-conductive copper plate on the bottom.
The 75x20mm fan draws the heat off the heat sink and pushes it out through the back of the card. The fan operates relatively quietly with a low 42 watt idle consumption rate. While gaming, the fan will pick up the pace and can use up to 294 watts, but even at full rotation, it doesn't put out any kind of intolerable jet-engine sounds. Some other cards have had issues with load noise while under a load, but that shouldn't be a big deal with the 5970.
Concealing the heat sink, fan and the rest of the graphics card is the recognizable Radeon HD 5870 design. AMD probably went with this setup because it helps protect the card very well. It is fairly similar to the housing that Nvidia has been using for a while now.
The 5970 is a beefy graphics card and requires a fair amount of energy. To power it, AMD added a 6-pin and 8-pin pair of PCI Express power connectors. Previous dual-GPU graphics cards have used the same setup. Dual 6-pin connectors have been the most common standard for single GPUs, but it seems the additional GPU requires a little more. It's important to know this so you make sure to get a compatible power supply.

There is a lot to graphics cards, but we've managed to break them down and define the key aspects so you can find the one that works for you. They broke down into the following categories.
If you put all of these things together, you get phenomenal graphics cards such as the ATI Radeon 5970, GeForce GTX 580 and GeForce GTX 480. Unfortunately most cards excel in one or two areas and fall short in another so there isn’t really a perfect one. We'll help you find the one that meets your expectations and fits in your budget. The better the card, the more it’ll cost, but the results can be well worth it.