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The Raptr game-themed messaging and database service announced two big milestones this week. The company has raised an additional $15 million in venture capital funding. So far Raptr has raised a total of $27 million via a number of venture capital organizations.

At the same time Raptr announced it has now registered over 6 million registered users for the service. The company, formed in 2007 by Dennis Fong (who also co-founded the Xfire game messaging service) not only allows gamers to chat in-game with friends across various messaging services it also allows your friend to see what games you are playing (including Steam and Xfire users for PC gamers). Raptr also tracks game playing trends for various media sites.

Xfire, the game-themed messaging and social networking service, has changed hands in a very surprising deal that was made public late on Monday night. Titan Gaming, a relatively new company, has purchased Xfire from Viacom subsidiary MTV Networks. Xfire was founded in 2002 and slowly grew its user base for its chat messaging service. It now claims to have over 16 million registered users. In 2006 MTV bought Xfire for over $100 million. Details of how much Titan Gaming paid for Xfire this week have not been made public.

According to a statement on the Xfire web site, "Titan will be taking on the Xfire name, with a focus towards ongoing innovation in the gaming space. The Xfire services will continue uninterrupted for its users. Xfire redefined how gamers communicate, Titan intends to build upon this tradition and utilize the Xfire platform to help gaming companies better engage their users. We look forward to continuing and expanding upon the Xfire service." Titan Gaming, according to its own official web site, has been around since 2006 and has been developing technology for "skill-based matchmaking, tournaments and points or cash competitions."

Are you ready for yet another free-to-play first person shooter game? YNK Interactive thinks you are which is why they are launching the open beta for their entry in the genre, K.O.S. - Secret Operations, beginning on Tuesday, January 12 at 9 pm Eastern standard time.

If you happen to join the beta within its first three hours of going live you will be rewarded with a Red Bull Mask in-game item. This item won't be made available after the three hour time period is over. The game uses Valve's Source Engine as its graphical base and will be bundled with the Xfire messaging client. There's no word yet on when the game will officially launch.

Last year we did a feature on GamerDNA, a then new social networking web site made specifically for gamers. At the time we felt that the efforts showed lots of promise. Today GamerDNA announced a revamp of their web site that adds a number of new features for gamers to check out.

The new version still allows players to tie in their game interests with friends via using networks like Xfire and Steam. New features include a new personal homepage for your account. The Spotlight feature is up on top which shows things like new games that might interest the player via their past game activities. It also has things like community uploaded game screenshots, game videos based on your interest and more.

Below Spotlight is the Gamer Current which shows message posts made by your GamerDNA friends and to the right you can see what games your friends have been playing. You can also check out individual profiles of your friends which gives you more info on the games he or she plays and more. You can check out a YouTube video which goes into more detail on the new features after the jump.

The Xfire game oriented messaging service remains one of the most popular of its type around. Today Xfire announced an all new feature for its service: Xfire Pro Voice. It's a new free voice chat service that will allow up to 50 people to chat at once. This is part of the regular Xfire program and not a separate app.

The Xfire web site states that all the voice chat servers are hosted by the company for free. Xfire Pro Voice has "crystal clear, high quality sound" to hear the rants and raves of your clanmates and team members. It also offers admins features such as being able to ban or kick out people they don't want as well as easy room navigation.

So, the curtain is finally up on the Phenom II, and folks seem to be pleasantly surprised by what the green arrow group have pulled out of their collective hats, especially with the Black Edition X3 (model 720), which is aimed solidly at our enthusiast-flavored selves. The BE is the unlocked version, which means we can tinker with both the multiplier and the FSB to find the sweetest spot to hang our performance hats, and is a welcomed throwback to the old days when both chip manufacturers didn't try to dictate what their consumers did with our toys.

Fogey Check: Anyone else remember the pencil trick? Anyone ever do it? BI lacked the deft and delicate touch to succeed in his attempts, but it wasn't for lack of trying. Just another failed DEX check....

It's a growing trend among PC software for gamers. GotGame was the first to release their version of an in-game web browser, followed closely by Valve who introduced similar features via Steam. Now the Xfire gaming messenger software has added their own in-game web browser feature into their latest update.

Xfire claims the new feature won't be a drain on your PC's performance, saying it is "speedy and low impact." The browser has features like tabs and is intergrated with Xfire's chat program. Not every game can support the new feature, howevers so make sure yours does before using it. Also the browser doesn't currently support Quicktime or Windows Media Player-supported videos.

Our sister site Massively has been working with the social gaming network web site GamerDNA to compile data on players and their activities in PC games with an emphasis on MMO titles. The result is a new feature on Massively that shows the trends in player interest in various MMOs over the past year. According to their data (they used the gamer messager-chat service Xfire as their base) the last six months of 2008 shows that Call of Duty 4, Counter-Strike: Source, Guild Wars, and of course World of Warcraft were always in the top 10 list of games played by PC games.

If you enjoy pouring over stats than this feature has it in spades. According to their data, the launch last September of Warhammer Online took players away from Age of Conan both otherwise had little impact on the MMO scene. Head over to Massively to read up more about their findings.

With the impending deployment of a new calendar (why, hello Miss January), a young gamer's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of higher resolutions, better anti-aliasing levels, and new DX10.1 effects. But something is knocking the luster off the lust faster than dropping Aunt Edna's fruitcake in your lap. Jacking up a single setting is dropping your framerate to a crawl, even with the latest drivers hot off ATI or Nvidia's server.

You've got multiple CPU cores and a fistful of dollarsRAM, and things still aren't remaining as smooth and speedy as you'd like? In short, is stuffing another video card in your box the way to achieve Nirvana? Chances are, if you're already sporting a rig with the aforementioned goodies, a multi-GPU setup is about the only way to get a performance bump. The question becomes, is throwing another couple hundred dollars at the problem worth it?

Getting people together to chat about games is nothing new but the co-founder of the Xfire game messaging client believes he has a new solution that will cross both PC and console platforms. Raptr is the new company from Dennis "Thresh" Fong, the former pro gamer who co-founded Xfire which was later sold to Viacom for a whopping $102 million.

According to a press release we were sent, a gamer who signes up for Raptr will let his friends know he is playing a game on the PC, Mac and Xbox 360 along with Flash based and Facebook games. There's also some PS3 and Wii games that support Raptr as well. Facebook, Twitter and other applications will alert friends to what you are playing as well. It can also automatically download patches for some games. Raptr has released a PC beta client and even Mac user can download an alpha client.