The results are out for the first round (period from late March thru all of April) in running of the ASUS and TechPowerUp Hardware Giveaway. The giveaway is an ongoing event for users of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, brought to you by ASUS. In each of the three months this giveaway is spread across, we will pick six lucky winners who win some groovy prizes from ASUS. This month's winners and prizes are as follows:

• Jacob from Vietnam wins ASUS ROG Matrix HD 5870 graphics card
• Radek from The Czech Republic wins ASUS ROG Rampage II Extreme motherboard
• Janusz from Poland wins ASUS 23" LCD Screen
• ASUS Blu-Ray DVDROM was won by:
  o Matt from United States
  o Johannes from Germany
  o Daryl from The Philippines

ASUS will contact the following individuals directly and arrange shipping of these prizes. This month's round saw over 40,000 entries. Best of luck for this month's round, if you have already made a submission in this round, you don't need to make a submission again. Being an ongoing contest, winners are picked from an ever-growing pool of submissions. Redundant entries are disqualified. Good Luck for this month's round. Below is a nerdtastic map of where the contest's participants hail from.

Here are some of the first pictures of a "living, breathing" ASUS ROG Ares graphics accelerator. This ASUS' latest creation packs two AMD Cypress GPUs running at 850 MHz (core), 1200 MHz (memory), with twice the amount of memory (2 GB per GPU, 4 GB total). It also packs an enthusiast-grade voltage circuitry that gives it an amount of overclocking headroom, as well as a complex cooling assembly.

At its CeBIT exhibit, ASUS also showed off the card's 3DMark Vantage score in the Extreme preset. The card secured a score of X14416, compared to a typical score of the reference Radeon HD 5970 to be around the X11000 mark. The bench was driven by an Intel Core i7 965 XE processor, ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard, and 6 GB of triple-channel memory. The ROG Ares should be out in a few weeks time. Its price and availability remain a mystery.

A certain enthusiast by the name (or alias) Mo Lan at Expreview.com has come up with a custom unified chipset water-block for the ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard. The block draws inspiration from the industrial design of the board, and features an etched, see-through ROG logo. The block uses a full-coverage design, that covers the X58 northbridge and ICH10R southbridge, while also cooling a small portion of the board's VRM under the memory slots (perhaps the vDIMM) along the way. Expreview plans to thoroughly evaluate this water-block soon.

Update (05/19): One of our readers has pointed out that the cooler design is based on the Koolance MB-ASR2E coupled with Koolance MB-ASR2E DRAM attachment, with a custom top designed by the enthusiast.

The release of the Intel Core i7 has set the overclocking arena abuzz with excitement in anticipation of new world records. Armed with the ASUS ROG Rampage II Extreme motherboard that supports the newest Intel platform, the Japanese overclocking enthusiast duck smashed to the top of the overclocking charts and notched in a world record for Core i7 CPU frequencies. Recording an exceptional score of 5510.09 MHz, duck clearly laid down the gauntlet for future challengers to the throne. A CPU overclocking veteran, duck still holds the world's highest frequency for overclocking a Pentium 4 631 CPU to a staggering 8180.4MHz last year.

The new world record was in no small part thanks to the overclocking-oriented features found on the new Rampage II Extreme motherboard. TweakIt, an easy-to-use joystick-like control on the motherboard, enables overclockers to make real-time changes to their systems' core frequency, voltage and other parameters-even while the benchmark utility is running. At no point does software come into play, as the tweaking is completely hardware-based. With hassle-free tweaking, coupled with real-time LCD poster information such as system frequency, users can implement on-the-fly modifications during CPU tests for extraordinary benchmark scores. The validation can be found here.