I had fun writing an article on new graphics technology as it affects games. That ran in the August issue of Maximum PC, and is online now at MaximumPC.com. The real bummer is that I had lots of cool screen shots, most of which the magazine ran. But the need to reduce size for both print and online makes them less effective. Still, I think DirectX 11 will have the biggest impact on PC gaming since DX8.

Also up on Maximum PC is a review of Bigfoot’s Killer 2100 network interface card for gamers. It’s an interesting product, in that it works as advertised, reducing lag and ping times… but most people won’t notice any benefit. I’d class it as a luxury product, maybe useful to the 0.5% of gamers who compete online, care about winning and have the insanely fast reflexes to notice the small differences.

More stuff after the jump.

Another Maximum PC review: the MSI R5870 Lightning. It’s one of the latest generation of factory overclocked Radeon HD 5870 cards meant to be tweaked. I find these sorts of cards interesting as engineering exercises, but ultimately too expensive with too little performance gain for most users.

Over at PC World, I wrote an article on painless motherboard upgrades — how to upgrade your motherboard without reinstalling Windows. I’ve also written a number of laptop reviews, including the Micro Express NBL60, a surprisingly good unit from a manufacturer that doesn’t get a lot of buzz. Also at PC World is the Clevo X8100 gaming notebook. Alas, that’s an earlier model, and lacks the new GeForce GTX 480 mobile GPUs.

I also had some fun appearing on a couple of Tekzilla episodes with Patrick Norton. I appeared on Episode 147, where I talk about Puget Systems Serenity quiet gaming system. It’s a reasonably high performance box, but only generates around 20dBA even under load. Patrick and I also go back and forth on how you might mod your system to make it less noisy.

In addition, I got to do a bit on their fifth anniversary show, where I doff my PC hardware cap and put on my geeky photographer hat and talk a bit about Adobe’s Lightroom 3 release.

Last, but not least (and maybe the most fun), was making a guest appearance on Troy Goodfellow’s Three Moves Ahead, a podcast focusing on strategy gaming (mostly PC, but Troy also delves into board games occasionally, and his regulars –Rob Zacny, Julian Murdoch and others — also take on console and handheld strategy games. We talked about the impact technology has had on strategy games.

So that’s what’s been going on inside and outside the basement lab recently. Hope you find it as much fun to read, watch and hear as I had working on them.

Actually, I’ve just been busy. Here’s just a few things I’ve got cooking:

• Radeon HD 5970 performance preview at Maximum PC online
• The eight card roundup I wrote for Maximum PC (print) also went online
• And in a trifecta, my column on the state of AMD also went up at Maximumpc.com
• I just wrapped up a formal book proposal and submitted that (more details if it gets approved)

On a related note, it looks like I’ll be writing a couple of articles a month, plus blogging for Anand Shimpi over at Anandtech. I’m looking forward to that.

More stuff to come here as well, so stay tuned.

That’s not to say it won’t be a busy week. I’ll be posting daily analyses of the goings-on at IDF on Tom’s Hardware, so look for my musings on Intel’s annual lovefest there.

Also, look for my columns on Maximum PC and Hot Hardware later this week. The Maximum PC column dwells what I’d really like to see with multi-touch and multiple displays. The Hot Hardware column talks about audio and cars — particularly what THX is doing with multichannel audio in automobiles.

While we’re talking about Maximum PC, I’ve got an article in the print magazine coming up on AMD’s newest GPU. They may post that review on the Maximum PC web site on the 23rd, so look for it then.

I’l be back next week, with another system build, weird troubleshooting stories and the usual fare.