Good news if you’re in the market for a graphics card, monitor or solid-state drive. Scan, Overclockers and YoYoTech have slashed some prices and made some bargains happen. Details of the best deals right at this second  after the jump.

Now, to business. over at Scan, you can grab yourself a 1GB XFX HD 6870 black edition for £126.82, or just over £100 if you’re one of those lucky coffee-drinking, sexually liberated European types that don’t need to pay VAT. that deal ends today though, so hot-foot it.

More cash to spend on a GPU? Might I suggest an Asus Matrix GTX 580 Platinum for £395.99? I had a ton of fun overclocking this card beyond the halfway point between GTX 580 and 590, and saving 20 quid on the beast is not to be sniffed at. When does anyone sniff at anything in disapproval?

Overclockers have also cut the price on the OCZ Vertex 2 50GB, now £71.99 It’s a bit of an awkard capacity, 50GB, but if you want a big cache device with for Smart Reponse or use small footprint programs, it’s worth a look. Vertex 2s are still greyhound-fast and the 50GB normally retails for £95.99 over at Overclockers.co.uk

Over to YoYoTech, and some tidy monitor and case deals. the weird and wonderful Cubitek Magic-Cube B210 CB-MA-B210 case (who could forget such a catchy model name?) has been cut to £141, from £177.12. It’s truly modular, offering seperate ‘magic’ cubes for motherboard, optical and storage devices. It’s leftfield. It’s cute. It’s cheap.

Rounding up this week’s bargainous bargains, YoYoTech are also offering the Samsung BX 2440 screen for £181.71, down from £195.39. LED backlit? Check. 24-inch 1080p display? Check. Vertically adjustable? yes sir. Check it out.

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This sexy beast arrived in our office very recently, fresh from the equatorial island where all Dino PCs are genetically engineered. It’s notable because

a) It’s another excellent core i7 2600K-based machine, the chip itself overclocked to 5GHz, and

b) Beneath those glowing grilles lives the GTX 590, NVIDIA’s most powerful graphics card ever. Of all time. Check out the card’s in-depth review here.

Our initial testing has confirmed suspicions that the machine is both punishingly powerful and ferociously fast. What’s more, it can reside next to your leg for £1799, lower than we’d expect for such a box of delights. The 590 is one hot piece of silicon in more ways than one, so there’s some considerable emphasis on cooling. Here are the full specs to cast an eye over:

I7 2600k Overclocked
Corsair H50 Liquid Cooler
Asus GTX 590 3GB Graphics Card
8GB 1600Mhz Blue Corsair Vengeance RAM
Asus P67 Sabertooth Motherboard
Corsair 600T Graphite Case
64GB Crucial SSD
WD Caviar Black 1TB S-ATAIII HDD
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
24x DVDRW Lightscribe
6x Bluray RW
Corsair HX 850W Modular PSU

Keep an eye out for this dangerous new beast at Dino PC’s site.

Here’s Tom Petersen, Director of Technical Marketing at NVIDIA, to tell us all about its latest and possibly greatest graphics card it’s ever made.

Check out the full, in-depth review of Zotac’s GeForce GTX 590.

Not content with throwing our usual bevy of Benchmarks at Nvidia’s successor to the GTS 450, we thought we’d do something a little different with the launch of the GTX 550 Ti. Thus we give you some extra figures in the form of Rift and Crysis 2 multiplayer demo benchmarks. You can find the full review of the GeForce GTX 550 Ti AMP! over on sister site, Tech Radar, but before you leave us to see whether Nvidia’s £129 card is worth throwing your hard earned cash at, take a look at the figures below.

These figures were both taken at 1,680 x 1,050. The Rift results were recorded over a five minute stretch near a minor rift at  Ultra settings, with 8x Aniostropic Filtering and 4x Anti-aliasing. The Crysis 2 results were recorded over a full match of Skyline using the Hardcore settings. Benchmark rig: Core 2 Extreme X9650, 8GB RAM, ASUS Blitz Formula.

Palit has just announced two shiny new graphics cards – TX 550 Ti 1GB and GTX 550 Ti 1GB Sonic. The overclocked Sonic version runs at 10% over the standard card’s 900MHz. Nice though these new versions of the 550 are, its not such a great card to begin with. There are older and faster cards available for about the same money. Thank you chaps, they are very nice, but we still think you are better off with a GTX 460. So there. Review to follow says Dave.

An interesting coincidence for you: the Sun’s distance from the Earth is about 400 times the Moon’s distance, and the Sun’s diameter is about 400 times the Moon’s diameter – exactly the right configuration to cause a perfect total eclipse. It’s almost as unique a thing as the new NVIDIA GTX 570, a graphics card that seems to balance price and performance perfectly. We love it, and you should too.

While you may want the GTX 580, it’s unlikely you’ll want to hand over almost £400 to own its three billion transistors, 1.5GB of memory and chunky 512 shader processors running at 772MHz. The smart money should be falling on the GTX 570. Here’s a card offering up to 80 per cent of the performance for two-thirds of the price.

You still get your three billion transistors, and the best part of 1.3GB of memory, but it’s the loss of a single Stream Multiprocessor that’s the real cost, producing a 480-shader GPU. But the drop in core speed to 732MHz is less of a worry, as we’ll see!

The main dilemma is that there are still a few bargain-priced GTX 480 cards around – at the time of writing Scan.co.uk has the GTX 480 for a mere £155. However, the reduced noise levels and lower power-consumption of the newer card tip the balance. Only the new AMD Radeon 6950 could put you off snatching up one of these cards, and that’s not because it’s faster, but because AMD’s latest card offers incredible value for money at £220.

Its bigger brother the Radeon HD 6970, meanwhile, fails to impress at the same settings, and is pricier too. This is all before we start cranking the clocks on the GTX 570 to see how high they can go. If it’s a good overclocker then it’s another reason to stick a stake in the green ground of NVIDIA. ¤ Neil Mohr

How to overclock the GTX 570
We’re running a standard NVIDIA referenced card; this is good and bad. It’s good because it offers a perfect example of what you can expect from most production cards. A lot of the first generation of cards will borrow from this design wholesale, so they can be knocked out as quickly as possible with slight tweaks to clocks and coolers.

It’s bad because it omits any possible OC tweaks, primarily access to the core voltage and the new power monitoring hardware NVIDIA has introduced on the 5000 range (1).
“What’s this?” we hear you cry. It’s similar to the system AMD introduced on the R5000 range, with the PCB having the temperature and power load on each 12v rail monitored by dedicated integrated circuits.

The idea is the driver can monitor the card under stress conditions and throttle back the clock to return the card to a ‘safe’ power envelope. Importantly, a ‘stress’ condition only applies to apps selected by NVIDIA and so far those are Furmark v1.8 and OverClocking Check Tool (OCCT ).

We find it an odd thing to do but knowing it’s there helps you choose the right software to stress the card. It’s probably only going to really affect nitrogen freaks and as it so far doesn’t affect any games we’re safe and sound. The system is optional, so look for cards that enable you to turn it off if you’re the type of person who seriously overclocks their system.

The base clock for the GTX 570 is made up of a core of 732MHz – a fixed shader clock of double that at 1,464MHz – and a memory clock at 1,900MHz. Interestingly, before we knew the above, Furmark was running stably at upwards of 850MHz but this didn’t fly in any games.

Once we knew, retesting produced a stable overclock at 809MHz for the core and 2002MHz on the memory, bumping the raw clock speeds past those of a full-blown GTX 580! We were a little disappointed in the memory but often this is the case, as it’s usually more sensitive to timings. However it’s still a five per cent increase: put this alongside the more impressive 10 per cent jump in Core speed aka 77MHz and it’s a GTX 580 matching combination.

When it comes to real-world results this ends up being a rough 10 per cent increase in frame rates, but the Heaven Benchmark saw the smallest increase and is perhaps the least relevant beyond being a good stress-test, increasing just 3fps. Lost Planet 2 had a solid ten per cent increase moving from 45.5fps to 50.5fps, though the majority of this was within the final benchmark segment jumping 7fps. The same was seen for Just Cause 2.

Among the goodies at CeBIT were the new range of tablets from ASUS. There are four new models: the Eee MeMO, Eee Transformer, Eee Slider and Eee Slate EP121.

There is a choice of three screen sizes and either Windows 7 Home Premium or Google Android operating systems. According to ASUS, “the ground-breaking new range delivers the ultimate experience in computing mobility and flexibility.” So there.

The Eee Slate is designed to be portable, but still run all your full-fat applications. It’ll be powered by an Intel i5 running Windows 7 and sport a 12.1-inch touch-screen with a 1280 x 800 resolution. There also an electronic stylus and an optional Bluetooth keyboard if you insist in being all old school in your typing. The Eee Slate won an innovation award at the 2011 CES.

The Eee Pad Transformer is smaller and more portable. It runs an 10.1-inch touch-screen. It’s being touted as perfect for “people who want to enjoy multimedia on the move”. It runs Android 3.0 HoneyComb OS with the NVIDIA Tegra 2 handling the graphics.

The Eee Pad Slider is supposed to offer the best of both tablet and notebook formats. Similar to the Transformer, it also boats a slide-out keyboard, hence the Slider moniker. Lastly we have the Eee Pad MeMO, the smallest with a 7-inch touch-screen. It also runs Android on a Snapdragon chip. Quite what you do with it is another matter.

UK pricing has yet to be confirmed. The Eee Slate is due to be available online and from selected PC World and Currys stores from early April this year. The Eee Pad Transformer and Slider will be available a little later, around mid April, whilst the Eee MeMO is expected to join the ASUS Eee family the autumn.

Two new cards, but the HD 6950 makes the biggest impression

The two new Cayman GPU powered graphics cards from AMD, the Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6950, are here and everything you thought you knew has changed.

Well, if you thought AMD had delayed its latest round of top-end graphics cards to make them the best around it has anyway.

First expected around October time this year, the Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6950 have been held back for a long time. Long enough for NVIDIA to get in first and extend its lead in the high-end graphics market by releasing the GeForce GTX 580 and GeForce GTX 570 before them.

Sadly neither of the new cards can best NVIDIA’s top pairing, though the Radeon HD 6970 does come close to it. Priced to compete directly with the GTX 570, AMD’s top card does keep pace but on the whole loses out to the NVIDIA card.

The green card also launched at a cheaper price point and we’re sure NVIDIA could drop its pricing to scupper the HD 6970 even more.

The Radeon HD 6950 though is a far more impressive li’l card though. At £220 it’s going up against the GTX 470 and thanks to the fact that architecturally it’s hardly changed from the Radeon HD 6970 is a rather speedy card.

As you can see from the benchmarks below:

As it stands we’ve still got the two NVIDIA cards above the HD 6970, but in terms of the mid-range the HD 6950 makes an incredibly good case for itself.

So one duff card and one rather sterling offering.

UPDATE – All these benchmarks were taken at 2560 x 1600, with 4x anti-aliasing. Our basic test bench remains an Intel Core i7-930 at 2.8GHz, Asus P6X58D-E motherboard and 6GB Corsair DDR3 at 1333MHz. Cheers.

You can read Dave Jame’s full review of both the AMD Radeon HD 6950 and AMD Radeon 6970 on TechRadar.

Also on PC Format: First benchmarks of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 570,  First benchmarks of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580

Reviews of the AMD Radeon HD 6950 and AMD Radeon 6970 elsewhere: Overclock3D, HardOCP