AMD and NVIDIA are the only two companies for most consumers in the discrete video card industry. The two firms are always battling for the superior products in the market place. Over the last few years, NVIDIA has been the more dominant firm in performance, but ATI has scored a few wins, especially with its newer high-end video cards.

Yesterday AMD officially confirmed rumors that were floating around claiming that it would be dropping the price on two of its most popular video cards. Specifically the price is dropping on the Radeon 4850, 4870 512MB, and the 4870 1GB cards.

We’ve been seeing all-in-one PCs more often lately. The latest is this 18.5-incher, the ZX2300 from Gateway, which should be available in Taiwan soon. The system is powered by an AMD Athlon 2650e CPU that runs on Windows XP Home, and supports 1GB RAM and a modest 160GB hard drive. LCD screen resolution is 1366 x 768.

The 18.5-inch display will give you a 16:9 aspect ratio. The ZX2300 also features Wi-Fi, webcam and a 16X LightScribe DVD burner. The PC will sell for about $530. No word on exactly when it will drop, but those in Taiwan will have a first crack at it.

The economy is bad and when the leading CPU maker in the world, Intel, announces that its profits aren’t that great and it will be restructuring to better compete you can bet that the second place chipmaker is on rough times as well.

AMD, said second place chipmaker, announced its Q4 2008 and fiscal 2008 revenues and things don’t look good for the company. AMD posted revenue in Q4 2008 of $1.162 billion, a decrease of 35% from Q3 2008 and 33% percent down from the same quarter of 2007.

I was at CES last week schlepping around the halls looking for something cool. Unfortunately cool was in short supply at this year’s show. One of the things that I did find interesting was the new mobile GPUs that AMD was showing off.

AMD introduced its line of Radeon Mobility 4000 video cards for notebooks that includes the HD 4800, HD 4600, HD 4500 and HD 4300 GPUs. The HD 4800 is the first mobile GPU according to AMD to break the teraflop barrier.

This is one of the coolest, most awesome, most jawdropping PC case mods we’ve seen in awhile. This AMD Phenom PC Case opens up in almost all directions, and looks a lot like a Transformer. It even features a green lighting scheme. Seriously, this thing looks like it’s about to take flight and fight another robot and fill your home with explosions and flying parts.

It’s got a certain classic Cylon look about it too. Look at the picture. Now look at yours. Yeah, now that you’ve seen it, you know what is missing in your life. It was created by Bill Owen, who is a true genius among men. We are not worthy.

I am a big fan of computer hardware and have worked with XFX for several years reviewing NVIDIA video cards they make around the web. The best thing about XFX is that they offer some of the fastest video cards on the market thanks to serious overclocking.

XFX and AMD announced that XFX has become an AMD video card partner. XFX will be bringing ATI HD 4000 series video cards to market in early 2009. This is great news for gamers since XFX offers the best warranty in the industry.

There are still many gamers who have yet to upgrade to Windows Vista. Part of Windows Vista that was most appealing to gamers was DirectX 10 compatibility. DirectX 10 is something you can’t get on Windows XP.

According to AMD when Windows 7 hits market, widely believed to be mid-2009, DirectX 10.1 will be fully supported. According to AMD DirectX 10.1 will be used in the API for the Windows Desktop Manager in Windows 7.

Unless you live under a rock you know that the economy in the U.S. and abroad is taking a beating right now. Despite the slow economy PC sales and shipments have continued to grow. Some research firms attribute the continued growth in part to the shipment of netbook computers.

IDC reported today that CPU shipments for Q3 2008 hit record highs. Worldwide CPU shipments for PCs grew 14% compared to the previous quarter and grew 15.8% over the previous year. The research firm reports that the Atom from Intel contributed significantly to the overall market performance. Even taking the Intel Atom out of the equation IDC reports that the CPU market grew by 8.3% from the previous quarter and 8.7% from the previous year.

ATI is doing better recently with competing with NVIDIA’s video card offerings. ATI’s performance gains have forced NVIDIA to drop prices to compete, which is a good thing for gamers. Today ATI announced its latest video card aimed at games on a budget.

The ATI Radeon HD 4830 was introduced today with a MSRP of under $150. The card is DirectX 10.1 compatible as well. Support for ATI’s Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2.0) is built-in for decoding HD video content and the card supports 7.1-surround sound.

Acer America is out today with news of a new small form desktop designed to serve as an entertainment PC. It is known as the Acer Aspire X1200 and you’ll find it with a starting price of around $450.

The Acer Aspire X1200 is available in three pre-configured options. The PCs in general feature AMD dual-core processors, NVIDIA GeForce 8200 on-board graphics and PCI Express 2.0. The X1200s measure 10.6- x 4- x 14.4-inches, making them easier to integrate into a home entertainment setup.

AMD is going all high-def with a new PC graphics card attached to the ATI brand. It is called the ATI All-In-Wonder HD and you’ll find the price of it set around $200.

The ATI All-In-Wonder HD combines Radeon graphics and Wonder HD tuner technology into one PCI Express 2.0 card. Key features of this new card include HDTV DVR functionality, unified video decoder technology and Windows Vista certification.

NVIDIA and AMD/ATI routinely fight it out in the video card market for dominance and the gamers dollar. Recently NVIDIA has been producing the better performing video cards, but AMD is back with a new family of GPUs selling at low prices that it hopes will grab some of NVIDIA’s market.

AMD announced officially today its Radeon HD 4800 series video cards with 800 processing cores. The HD 4850 carries a retail price of $199 and has a stock GPU speed of 625 MHz. Memory for the card is 512MB of GDDR3. AMD says that the GPU in the card can deliver a teraflop of computing power.

For a while now scientific and engineering projects have been using what are basically computer video cards to get significantly more powerful computer systems than are seen when using traditional CPUs. The performance gains come from the fact that each stream processor on modern video cards can be used like an individual processor core. Rather than only four cores in a CPU, the video card offers in the area of 320 processing cores thanks to the high number of stream processors.

AMD announced its latest FireStream processor called the AMD FireStream 9250. The 9250 is designed to accelerate HPC, mainstream and consumer applications. The 9250 fits into a single PCI slot and consumes under 150W of power and AMD says it has a performance per watt efficiency of up to eight gigaflops per watt.

Windows computer users take for granted for the most part that you can upgrade your video card with ease. That is assuming you didn’t buy a factory built system that uses a small case or proprietary video card design. Mac users on the other hand are traditionally mostly limited to the video card that ships in their Mac system.

AMD announced a new ATI Radeon HD3870 video card that is optimized for use on the Mac, but retains its PC compatibility as well. The card is called the ATI Radeon HD 3870 for Mac & PC Edition. The card has a 256-bit memory interface and has 512MB of GDDR4 and 320 stream processors.

Gateway recently unveiled some new desktop PCs – some of which are new models and the rest of which are revamps of existing PC line ups. These new computers are mostly available now, with prices ranging from around $550 to $3,500.

Gateway specifically updated or added new FX, GT and DX Series models. The one pictured above, for example, is the FX7026. All of these computers offer either Intel or AMD processors and at least one available at retail still has Windows XP. For more details, check out the full press release after the jump.