Daily Reviews Summary 03/06/12

Windows 8 CP cracked 1 million downloads shortly after launching last Wednesday and I'm sure many of you have tried it already. Whether you went with a dual-boot, upgrade, clean install or virtual machine, if you're coming from Windows 7 you'll notice significant changes immediately, while others may not be as obvious.

With change comes good and bad -- at least until you learn some tricks that get you back up to speed. Without further ado, here's a shortlist of Windows 8 shortcuts and useful quick tricks I've gathered thus far.

Not quite a year after Intel released Sandy Bridge with the new LGA-1155 platform they upped the performance bar again. This time around, the Sandy Bridge-E LGA-2011 platform is bigger, faster, and represents the top-of-the-line for consumer computing. Intel "Extreme Edition" processors have always brought out the best that the company has to offer, but the Extreme moniker isn't limited to the performance. The price of Extreme Edition CPUs generally matches, with the highest end of these clocking in near $1000. The LGA-2011 platform offers a lot in terms of performance computing, besides just the Extreme Edition CPUs, though. You also get a full 40 PCI-E lanes and quad-channel memory compatibility. So what about those of us that don't need a $1000 CPU, but we still want to use three or four GPUs to their full potential? For that, we have the Intel i7-3820 3.6GHz CPU. In this article, Benchmark Reviews goes under the hood of the littlest Sandy Bridge-E processor.

This is a Radeon HD 7870 Overclock Guide. We'll overclock based on a mild voltage tweak. By doing so we drive the R7870 into R7900 series performance. All you need is some free software and a little time to precisely determine and pinpoint your maximum yet stable overclock. Check out the full article right here