As you might have read in my earlier post , I received an ATI 5870 video card and I had to nickname it “the beast”, because this sucker is big, and that’s just how I like it.  I’m upgrading from an ATI 4850, which is another fabulous video card, but I’m certainly not going to deny myself the opportunity to try out this latest one. 

If you are interested in all the fancy numbers, you can view the technical specs here , but here are the main features from the ATI site.

• Get unrivalled visual quality and intense gaming performance and for today and tomorrow with support for Microsoft® DirectX® 11
• With ATI Eyefinity technology get the ultimate immersive gaming experience innovative ‘wrap around’ multi-display capabilities
• Tap into the massive parallel processing power of your GPU with ATI Stream technology and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding with incredible speed
• Feel the brute strength of more than 2 teraFLOPS plowing through the most demanding games
• Experience the speed, responsiveness and performance of ultra-high bandwidth GDDR5 memory
• ATI CrossFireX™ technology with multi-GPU support offers advanced scalability

As you can see in the images above, this is obviously a dual-slot card, meaning it’s going to take up two spots on the back of your PC.  This wasn’t a problem for me as I don’t have any other PCI cards installed, but it’s something you need to take into consideration.  Installation was quick, just make sure both slots are free, snap in the card, and hook in the power.  After making sure it was securely in, it was ready to go.  Next step was booting up and installing the latest Catalyst drivers, which is a straightforward installation and I didn’t run into any issues whatsoever.

On the card it has two DVI outputs, an HDMI output, and a DisplayPort output.  In my current setup I have two 22” widescreen monitors hooked up to the DVI ports.  I’m still contemplating on what to do with the HDMI port. Anyways, after the driver installation I had to go into the display properties and easily configure Windows 7 to setup the dual-monitors to display as I want them to which is the main monitor on the right, and the second on the left.

I just installed this a day ago, so I’m going to break it in for a bit, and then follow-up with a review on the performance of the card from a user point of view, not the super technical number crunches you often see. 

Are you ready for the weekend?  I certainly am.  Let me first mention our Impulse fleet on Star Trek Online has a great group of players, and from what I hear everyone has been having a great time playing.  Going forward, we hope to have more groups forming for our Impulse community so Stardockians and our customers can have a chance to play together more often.  Let me know what you think of that idea.

This was without a doubt a super-busy week.  We had a bunch of releases on Impulse, including our beloved Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity, and the Diplomacy expansion.  Check the links below for the list of other releases we had this week.  It’s getting to the point there’s not enough room in this article to list them all.

If you are following the development of Elemental: War of Magic, be sure to take a look at the blogs and developer journals from this week, there have been quite a few and they are all worth the read.

Lets get to the roundup!

News and Articles:

• Impulse Weekly Top 10
• Impulse Video Guided Tour
• Elemental Q&A Update with GameSpot
• Impulse enhances its top 10 list
• Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy – a guided tour
• Elemental: The Tragedy of Procipinee
• Creatures of Elemental: Hordes of the Fallen

New and Updated Releases on Impulse:

• Aveyond - Lord of Twilight
• Aveyond - Gates of Night
• Bungee Jumping Simulator
• Military Life: Tank Simulator
• Tropico 3
• The Path
• Campus
• Supreme Ruler 2020 - Global Crisis
• Sins of a Solar Empire – Diplomacy
• The Sims 3: High End Loft Stuff
• Sins of a Solar Empire Expansion Bundle
• Sins of a Solar Empire – Trinity

Weekend Impulse Buys

The weeks are just flying by, and so ends another glorious week on WinCustomize.  The big news this week was the release of WindowBlinds 7.01, which is really an awesome update.  More textures, MS themepacks appear in the skin list, and more.  Don’t forget you still can grab WB7 while it’s on sale in the Impulse Store. 

Now for this weeks picks!

	My Dirty Valentine by Vampothika Just awesome, perfect for a Valentine’s desktop.
	Aero Station by RedneckDude This caught my eye as it’s a very clean DX theme, and looks really cool when applied.
	Gold Sunset by Ausvet A very subtle, but very beautiful scene which makes for a perfect animated wallpaper.
	Blue Power by PhK-Dan10 This is a minimal wallpaper, but it looks sweet when on a big monitor.
	Armageddon by Xiandi The textures and details in this WindowBlinds skin are immaculate!  Great work on this.
	AR32 by don5318 These Xion skins are something else, fantastic details look stunning.

We created this for a page on the site, but I think it’s very useful so I wanted to share it with others here as well.

Today we are excited to announce the 7.01 update to WindowBlinds from Stardock.  WindowBlinds lets Windows users change the complete look and feel of Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7 by applying one of thousands of skins that are available.  There are all types of skins available to fit nearly every taste, whether it’s a minimal look or a wild and colorful personalization for your desktop.  WindowBlinds 7 also allows you to “skin” Aero so it is easy to make simple changes to the default look of Windows Vista/Windows 7 by applying colors or textures.

What’s new in WindowBlinds 7.01:

• Microsoft themepacks now appear as sub-styles of Aero, and can be applied
• New guided tour on first run
• More textures added
• Explorer backgrounds page now shows the textures from the textures page too
• Many other minor tweaks
• Modified Aero entry added to skin list. 

WindowBlinds 7 users can now update via Impulse.  WindowBlinds 7 is part of the Object Desktop suite of desktop enhancements, and can be purchased stand-alone for $19.95.  More information and a free trial can be downloaded from www.windowblinds.net.

Another week is wrapped up, this one being the first week in February.  It started off great with the release of Star Trek Online, which we also formed an Impulse fleet where community members are invited to join us play.  Check the article links below for more on that!  We also had lots of Sins of a Solar Empire related news this past week including a gameplay video of Diplomacy, and more info on the coming releases of Diplomacy and Sins: Trinity.

Enough chit-chat, lets get to this weeks roundup!

News and Articles to check out:

• A Look at Upcoming Games on Impulse
• Elemental Beta 1-G plans
• Gameplay Example: Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity
• Elemental February Status Report
• Join the Impulse Fleet!
• Pictures of our visit with ObjectDock 2
• Life at Stardock – the happiest place in the world
• Atari Adds New Titles to Stardock's Impulse Platform

New and Updated Releases on Impulse:

• Star Trek Online
• Sherlock Holmes Versus Arsene Lupin
• Sherlock Holmes - Nemesis
• Frontline: Fields of Thunder
• Fire Flower
• Sherlock Holmes - The Awakened
• Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper
• Purrfect Pet Shop
• Tales of Bingwood
• Evochron Legends
• Satisfashion

Weekend Impulse Buys

Oh where has this week gone to?  This was a long week, but a pretty good one.  In case you didn’t see the WC news this week, WindowBlinds is approaching 16 million downloads on Download.com, and the My Dirty Valentine community project was completed.  I really can’t enough how much I enjoy seeing the community coming together with projects like this.

Now for this weeks picks!

	Robotic Defense by theAVMAN One of my new favorite CursorFX themes.  The animation is fantastic!
	Scenic Waterfall by amitsaran Waterfalls have always been popular .dreams, and this is another one to add.
	Magik! by OutdoorPictures The images he takes are amazing, and make really beautiful logons.
	When You Are In Love by vlad Perfect wallpaper for Valentines Day.
	Retro Plus by madcat21 This is a bold and creative WindowBlinds skin.  Great job!
	Corsair by essorant Another winner from essorant.  It’s a clean and sleek WindowBlinds skin, and can be personalized with the textures option in WB.

This month the ObjectDock 2 beta is scheduled to begin. I got to visit with it today and took some pictures of the trip.

End of the first month of the year is just days away!  January was a great month for Impulse, and for gaming in general.  Mass Effect 2 was released this past week, and response to it has been spectacular to say the least.  This week wasn’t all about ME2 though, as the pre-orders for the upcoming Battlefield: Bad Company 2 opened along with the beta.

Of course any Star Trek fan should be ready as the head-start weekend opens today for Star Trek Online, available to anyone who pre-ordered.  Keep an eye out for me patrolling the Regulus Sector.

Lets take a look at what else was going on this week!

Articles to check out:

• The Spells beta is coming
• Applying Skins/Themes with WindowBlinds 7
• Elemental, one of the most Promising Games of 2010
• Stardock at GDC 2010
• The iPad: Not living up the the hype
• Spells & Magic
• Impulse Weekly Top 10
  

New Releases on Impulse:

• Mass Effect 2
• SHMUP
• KrissX
• Battlefield 2 Bad Company Limited Edition (pre-order)
• KeepSafe 2.01
• Grand Ages Rome
• M.U.D. TV - Mad, Ugly, Dirty Television
• Death to Spies Gold
  

Weekend Impulse Buys:

Another week is just about over, and looking through WinCustomize I see the Valentine’s Day Community Suite is coming along rather nicely.  More on that soon though.  Now that we are closing out the month, the first one of 2010, skinning started off slow because of the long holidays, but has gradually picked up over the past couple of weeks.  I’m confident this year is going to rock!

Now for this weeks picks!

	Gridlok DX by RedNeckDude This is a DX theme to compliment the Master skin from MikeB314.  As always, a great design that stays true to the original.
	Chrome and Black Glass by Decon4 A really cool icon set with the darker glass look.  Great job!
	Frosted – Creek Side  in Winter by Philly0381 Philly0381 has together a fantastic suite with skins from Mirsguy and CarGuy1.  Definitely check it out.
	ecological illus pastel by I.R. Brainiac It’s simply a beautiful wallpaper.  Download it.
	Atmospheric Red by teddybearcholla Great design, and perfect use of color.  Fantastic.
	Mica by PurrBall This is an update to an old favorite, and it’s now been updated to work with Win7.