QUOTE: The GPU is an amazing triumph of technology. Graphics cards allow us to pe rform tasks that would have been impossible before the 3D accelerator came of age. They can spit out lifelike, real-time rendered three-dimensional sc enes millions of pixels in size hundreds of times every second. They can tr anscode video at a much higher framerate than what the video actually plays at. The mere fact that they are able to snappily render modern GUIs, with all their bloat, is fairly incredible. But the best thing of all may be tha t for all this computation, they consume huge amounts of power, spit out eq ually massive amounts of heat, and make enough noise to send your vacuum cl eaner squealing back to its closet!