AMD is wrapping up their 40 year anniversary party, and they are finishing it up in a big way. Previously, AMD gave away some processors and graphic cards. This time, they are giving away some consoles.

A while back I went to a fun overclocking event held by AMD, where there was a lot of vapor, some exploding burritos, and some overclocking that got tantalizingly close to 7GHz. It was just an arbitrary number, and they broke a bunch of other records, but they couldn’t quite hit that last target. But a few months and I can only guess how much liquid helium later, they nailed it.

Water cooling is where it’s at, currently. Any gamer will tell you that keeping your PC cool is critical for making sure you computer runs smoothly and effectively. The issue is, it’s a pain in the butt to set up. It looks like Cool IT intends to help us with that problem.

Not content to sit back and let Intel have all the ultra low voltage fun, AMD’s low voltage Congo platform is apparently due in the coming weeks – late October or early November, according to DigiTimes.

Some day, I too will have three identical monitors for gaming purposes. It’ll have to be in my game cave once I retire as an eccentric millionaire, though. Don’t have room for it here. That’s probably a good thing, though, since I also don’t have the money required, and besides that there are still a few quirks to be worked out. Not to mention the fact that the best games are barely playable on current hardware, since you have to run them at resolutions like 7680×1600.

Do you remember the days when video cards were only as large as your hand? I personally remember installing a TNT2 — and at the time, I thought that was big. Now you’ve got dual-GPU monsters like the just-leaked 5870 X2 coming out which, in addition to taking up two PCI-e slots and requiring a secondary power source, are nearly a full foot long. Not that you’d be buying one unless you’re rich as Croesus and have a case as long as the Nile, but no matter what you’d have to choose your motherboard carefully, since not everyone designed the layout planning on accommodating a damn sub sandwich.

AMD just revealed a processor for their “Mainstream Desktop Platform” that will be going for less than a bill. There are cheap processors out there already, but this is a full-featured, quad-core 45nm part, not some cut-rate piece of garbage. Sure, the Athlon II X4 620 isn’t going to set any speed records, but it’s part of the excellent AMD ecosystem. Paired with a similarly low-cost video card, you’ve got a really low-cost machine that’s capable of HD playback, upscaling, and all the stuff that were pie in the sky for budget setups not too long ago.

Those of you who run multiple monitors know the freedom it gives as well as the pain of configuration. While I’ve arrived at a sort of compromise with NView in how my desktops work, I wouldn’t say it was particularly easy (and sometimes the backgrounds freak out). AMD’s new DirectX 11 cards are shipping with a tool called Eyefinity, which allows multiple monitor setups to be handled natively as “Single Large Surfaces,” appearing as a single display to the OS.

The best part is: only one GPU required.

I know, you like posts with pictures in them. Well, too bad! AMD’s new ultrathin platform isn’t quite ready for its close-up yet. If you remember last year, they introduced the dv2 with HP as the first entry in their ultrathin platform, and I liked pretty much everything but the trackpad and the fact that it came with Vista.

The new ultrathins are going to be better, faster, stronger… and more expensive. I find that disappointing because the $750 price point on the dv2 (and major lead over all Atom-based netbooks) made it easy to recommend — who knows if I’ll be able to do the same with the next generation.

AMD is sort of becoming the Mac of PC hardware. That is to say, they perform well, but in the end want it to be about a final user experience, not a piecemeal selection of parts and capabilities. In this spirit of simplicity, they’re shifting the bulk of their merchandising over from Turion and X4 and all that to three labels under the brand name “Vision.”

It reminds me of when they simplified their gaming line under “Game!” On that note, it’s not clear what the fate of Game! was, but it doesn’t seem to be present in the current lineup. It’s more of a desktop thing, really, so I’m not surprised either way.

While I was sliding down bannisters and having -160° alcohol poured on my hands, the AMD camera crew and the overclockers we were all there to see were putting together an honest-to-god documentation of the event.

I forgot to post it a few weeks ago when it came out, so it’s not exactly breaking news, but if you’re interested in how these guys did their incredible overclocks using exotic cooling materials, there’s a lot more info here than in our little film.

AMD CEO Dirk Meyer recently revealed that his “company is currently developing a platform that features lower-power, smaller-sizes, more complete functionality, and a cheaper price than Intel’s Atom for netbooks,” according to DigiTimes. Sounds great. The fact that AMD owns ATI should make for an awesome mish-mash of processors and graphics. So let’s start rolling these things out, eh?

Whoops, not so fast. The platform won’t be ready until next year.

Don’t count AMD as being out. In response to the ever growing netbook/small laptop market, AMD has announced their new CPU “Congo”, along with putting it into the updated HP Dv2 which is coming out on June 10th. We liked the original Dv2 — however, adding a little more grunt to it with the improved AMD processor can only be a good thing.

Last week AMD invited CrunchGear down to Austin to check out an overclocking event they were holding, at which many, many liters of liquid nitrogen and the much colder liquid helium would be consumed by thirsty processors.

They asked us, however, not to video the entire event, since they’d have their official video coming out shortly and some of the technology being used was still in development. No problem, we said, we’ll just dip our pulled-pork tacos in the spare liquid nitrogen.