Lucid's HYDRA GPU pairing technology could soon allow PC builders to incorporate multiple video cards that - hear this, ATI and Nvidia - don't have to be identical. What this potentially means, among other things, is that gamers could leverage old hardware instead of just sadly setting it aside, though paired cards must be of the same brand. HYDRA differs functionally from Nvidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire solutions, which split rendering by sectioning off the screen and alternating frames between cards, respectively, by intelligently distributing highly specific rendering tasks between the GPUs. Instead of divvying up all the tasks equally, HYDRA will only send as many polygons or shader calls as each constituent card can handle (see right of the above pic for an example of what one of two cards might be rendering).

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Intel and Nvidia's cold war over the discrete and integrated graphics chipsets that sit inside our computers seems to have at least partially thawed. Nvidia's announced that "it will be bringing the power and performance of its SLI® multi-GPU technology to Intel's upcoming line of Bloomfield CPUs." Upcoming SLI motherboards will have the nForce 200 SLI processor alongside Bloomfield CPUs, and Tylersburg (X58) chipsets, which should come as good news to gamers with top-end gaming PC setups. Nvidia's press release below (including some interesting "customer viewpoints")

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Sure, Nvidia's crashing into the mobile market Intel wants to dominate. And Intel is running into discrete graphics (not to mention ruling with integrated graphics). But you know, it's friendly right? Wrong. It's total war. Nvidia's continuing to hold out licensing SLI support for Intel's boards, notably its next-gen Tylersburg chipset for the Nehalem CPUs. And Intel hasn't yet licensed Nvidia to make an nForce chipset that'll support Nehalem, citing a "disagreement" over the terms. If they don't make nice, gamers will have to pick between having SLI or the latest and greatest Intel processors, meaning they get screwed either way. Man, where's AMD when you need them? [Maximum PC]

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Along with the re-designed and cheaper Satellite notebooks from last week, Toshiba's tossing out a pair of gaming notebooks packing Penryn chips (Core 2 Duo 8300 or 9300) and NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT running in SLI, with HDD configs up to 400GB. Starting at two grand, which isn't bad for "gaming" notebooks, but churning the 8600M GT seems a bit old and busted with 9-series cards right around the corner. Plus, the plain Jane looks aren't going to turn any heads. [Toshiba]

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One of the best arguments for building your own PCs is that you make the decisions regarding parts,which means you don't have to scrap the whole system or buy sub-standard hardware from the manufacturer when it is time to upgrade. This is especially true for gaming rigs. Dell, one of the biggest offenders when it comes to this issue, has announced that proprietary parts like power supplies and motherboards will be a thing of the past.

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The Blacbird 002 by HP looked like the gaming PC to have, with smart design including that aluminium stand. Maximum PC just gave it a 7/10 score for two main reasons: Vista OS hurts its game performance, as does its SLI implementation hacked up to use twin ATI cards...slower ATI cards. Will Smith, EIC, says his top pick is still the XPS, "It's just faster." [MaximumPC]