The world has been waiting for the sequel of the legendary StarCraft for over a decade. While only time will tell whether the novelty will be as popular as the predecessor, the game has already captured minds of almost all gamers in the world. With the release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, a question of possible hardware upgrade arises, and we are going to help you to come up with an answer.

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What do you think, what does the today’s fastest graphics accelerator lack? Of course, it is an efficient and quiet cooling system. The Swiss Arctic Cooling Company solved this problem.

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120Hz panels are definitely still market newcomers - in fact, look no further than Newegg, where there still isn’t a 120Hz category, much less a refresh rate field for drilling down products. The necessity for 120Hz panels arose entirely out of the ongoing 3D obsession across the entire consumer electronics segment, something that remains a difficult sell for many gamers. On a technical level, the necessity for 120Hz arises from the need to drive two discrete 60Hz images - one 60Hz image for each eye. In its current incarnation, consumer 3D technology relies primarily on active shutter glasses - parallax barrier 3D displays are still too expensive, and I’ve yet to see passive polarization methods used outside the movie theatre. But you probably already know most of the 3D story.

Though the 120Hz refresh frequency does make games playable in 3D, there’s another important benefit of using a faster refresh rate - everything looks smoother, and you can now drive up to 120 FPS without tearing. The ASUS VG236H was my first exposure to 120Hz refresh displays that aren’t CRTs, and the difference is about as subtle as a dump truck driving through your living room. I spent the first half hour seriously just dragging windows back and forth across the desktop - from a 120Hz display to a 60Hz, stunned at how smooth and different 120Hz was. Yeah, it’s that different.

If you’re the kind of person that cares about squeezing every last FPS out of your box - regardless of how you feel about 3D - don’t even bother reading the rest of this review, just run, don’t walk, to the store and get this 120Hz display. I’m serious.

ASUS’ VG236H isn’t perfect, like any product there are a few caveats. That aside, honestly, the completely unparalleled level of smoothness on a 120 Hz display has made me hyper attuned to just how flickery 60Hz looks on all the other LCDs I’ve got.

Oh and my initial skepticism about 3D? I’m still shocked about it, but I've completely changed my mind.

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Evolution or revolution? Some say that hardware tessellation is just another PR technology that is not going to bring anything new to the table. Others are convinced that tessellation implementation is as much of a deal as an introduction of high dynamic range lighting. In this article we are going to look at contemporary Tessellation technology supporting applications, in order to determine how much of a difference it makes and how much GPU computing power you have to sacrifice for it.

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