Word on the street is that Nvidia could be launching it’s AMD 7000 series competitor on March 23. A few people in the forums have been discussing upgrading their hardware recently so I figured this would be good news for them. The 600 series by Nvidia will follow AMD in the 28nm GPU class. What’s not known is whether or not Nvidia will release a mid-range card or come out guns blazing with a flagship video card. If they do come out with a flagship card, you can bet it will trump or at the very least give the new AMD 7970 a run for it’s money.

Even if you don’t buy the new 600 series card, a ceiling raise for the product lineup will undoubtedly mean decreasing prices on some of the lower end and middle-tier hardware like the 460, 560 Ti, and hopefully 570 & 580. Keep an eye out for these new cards soon!

According to Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter via Gameranx.com, the next generation of Playstation console is “essentially a PC” in terms of its technological make-up. He writes that Sony and AMD are collaborating on the console’s CPU, moving away from the PS3′s Cell architecture to an x86 processor for the new console. This is good news for PC gamers because it could possibly mean more cross platform games, better PC “ports”, and probably faster console price reductions (considering how quickly the prices in the PC industry drop).

If they’re going to be partnering with AMD we’re likely to find something along the lines of the AMD A4 or AMD A6 inside the machines. These are APUs rather than traditional CPUs. An APU integrates a CPU and a GPU on the same die thus improving data transfer rates between these components while reducing power consumption. They’re not as good as some of the high-end CPUs paired with high-end GPUs, but they get the job done and on a closed-system they can be fully taken advantage of without having to worry about things on a normal everyday PC taking up their fair share of the processing power.

Toss in 2gb or 4gb of RAM, a 320gb HDD (possibly a smaller solid state?), and a blue-ray drive and you could be looking at a $300-$400 system. Personally I’ll be happy if this is the case simply because the games will be written for x86 architecture meaning we’ll see a lot more games end up on the PC that we didn’t get before (ahem, Red Dead Redemption…)

Following up from yesterdays post about CanYouRunIt, I want to show you guys a site that might make building a new PC (in the event your results from CYRI were bad and need an upgrade) a lot easier.

Most computers I’ve built have existed only as wishlists or imaginary shopping carts before hand and I had to keep all the performance expectations in my head going only by reviews of other customers or reviews found by googling. Very rarely do you have a shopping website that lists on a scale the performance differences say between two CPUs or two video cards.

Check out PCPartPicker.com

Included to help you decide on which parts to use are graphs representing price per ghz, price per gb, etc. These can make it easy to see where Solid State drives lie in relation price-wise to traditional mechanical drives, where the Intel processors lie price-wise to the high ghz AMDs, and more.

With current up-to-date prices and information on shipping costs, grand-totals, and possible promotional codes – the site makes it really easy to lay out your build before you buy it. There are also safety measures in place to prevent you from accidently buying incompatible parts. One thing it doesn’t recommend before finishing up your build (that I’ve seen) is thermal paste – as you may or may not want to use the stuff that comes with your aftermarket cooler (if it even comes with any).

Be sure to check out PCPartPicker.com next time you need to build a system!