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April
1 - 16,
2000: Archive
Sunday
- April 16th
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of the Elitegroup P6BAP-Me VIA Apollo Pro 133 Socket-370 microATX board
and the P6BAP-A+ VIA Apollo Pro 133 Socket-370 ATX board. Head
over and see what they thought of them.
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted a review
of VideoLogic's Sirocco Crossfire 5-piece speaker set. My favorite
part of this set is how they look! In my opinion, they look better
than any other speaker set on the market.
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PCExtremes has posted a review
of Global WIN's huge 120mm case fan. Head over and see how much
air this baby pumps.
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G3D has posted a review
of 3dFxCOOl's BigMoFo-REX-FAN. This is a socket7/370 cooler that uses
the Global WIN FDP32 heatsink, but with a bigger fan!
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Saturday
- April 15th
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Planet Hardware has posted
a couple new monitor reviews. Check them out below:
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Tom's Hardware Guide has
posted a article
which covers a bit of the 2000 roadmaps of Intel and AMD. They
slam Intel quite a bit in this article for not being able to deliver as
of late. I would normally think that this is unfair, but in this
case I agree with them because Intel constantly pointed out that
AMD was never able to deliver, now the tables have turned and we should
feel sorry for them?
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Flipchip.net has posted a review
of Mushkin's High Performance PC-133 128MB Rev.2 SDRAM. Just
because you may see an advertisement for cheap PC-133, it doesn't mean
it's actually any good. I've tried some PC-133 chips that won't
even make it to 140MHz bus speed on my system, whereas my Goldstar
PC-100 SDRAM makes it to 150MHz with only occasional lockups when gaming
(which I'm not even sure is because of the RAM).
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Christopher Hill has updated his great GeForce
FAQ. If you're having a problem with your GeForce based card
or you were just wondering about something, check out this FAQ as it
will most likely contain the information you're looking for.
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In case you're bored on this very nice Saturday (in Toronto at least),
here are a few new items which you may be interested in:
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 40 7200 RPM ATA-66 hard drive. They gave it
a very decent rating of 8/10, if you want a high performance drive, this
seems like a good choice.
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted a review
of GamePC's (yes they make systems too) Raptor system. Head over and see
what this powerhouse can do.
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GamePC has posted a review
of DPT's SmartRAID VI Decade Ultra160 SCSI controller. This is
probably not of interest to most people (including myself) since it
cost's a fortune and is mainly meant for high-end servers.
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I noticed over at 3DChipset that
the newest unofficial leaked drivers from NVIDIA are available.
These new drivers most likely contain bug fixes over 5.13. Grab
them below:
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3D Alpha has posted a review
of Tyan's Trinity 400 VIA Apollo Pro 133A based Slot-1 motherboard. The
price is great, but it is lacking a jumperless design and from what I've
seen it also has slightly lower performance than some other Apollo Pro
133A boards.
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3dfx has posted a new beta
driver for the Voodoo3 2000/3000 PCI/AGP cards. Grab it below:
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Friday
- April 14th
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HardOCP received some SiSoft Sandra
and CPUMark benchmarks
of a supposed AMD Thunderbird processor running at 750MHz. Head
over and check it out.
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3DHardware has posted a review
of Cliff Anderson's BayBus Fan Controller. This device allows you
to turn individual fans inside your computer on or off with a flick of a
switch. When you're working on a document and you need peace and
quiet you can turn off some of your fans and when you want to play those
system-stressing 3D games, you can turn on those extra fans so it won't
freeze in the middle of that multiplayer action.
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FullOn3D has posted an interview
with Eric Boeing of Abit. Nothing really exciting or new here,
it's more like a regular conversation and sharing of opinions.
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Those crazy dudes over at the Tech-Junkie
have gathered together some old laptops and monitors and see how they
could handle gun shots from a variety of pistols and rifle's.
Pretty funny stuff, check out RIP 2 here.
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HardwareCentral has
conducted an interview
with Gary Tarolli (Chief Technical Officer of 3dfx) regarding the next
generation of 3D chips and what features they will have. It's
interesting to see Gary's thoughts on the subject.
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HipHardware has posted a review
of Cambridge Soundworks (Creative Labs) Desktop Theatre 5.1 DTT2500
Digital speaker set. This is a 5.1 channel set and comes with a
Dolby Digital decoder.
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NeoSeeker has posted a review
of Moonsoon's MM-700 flat panel speakers. These are one of the
better flat panel speaker sets you'll find, but they also cost quite a
bit more than most flat panel sets.
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The Tech Report has posted some
benchmarks
comparing the Celeron II and Coppermine Pentium III at the same clock
speeds. Apparently, some people are speculating that the Celeron
II's are throttled to be of lower speed than the Coppermines.
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3DSoundSurge has posted a very
extensive review
of Best Data's Theatrix 5.1 channel PCI sound card. You can also
check out our review here.
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iXBT Hardware has posted a review
of Gigabyte's GA-6VX7-4X VIA Apollo Pro 133A based Socket-370
motherboard. Looks like a decent board.
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Thursday
- April 13th
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Hardware Zone has posted a review
of Kenwood's TrueX 72X CD-ROM drive. This thing must be so fast,
that a hard drive will have trouble keeping up with it!
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BXBoards has joined the crew and
posted their review
of Abit's new KA7 VIA KX133 based Slot-A Athlon motherboard. It managed
to get a very nice 4.75 out 5 on their scale.
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Thought Shell has posted their
review of
Guillemot's MaxiSound Forissimo PCI audio card. This extremely
potent card uses Yamaha's YMF744 chip which along with Sensaura's API
accelerates EAX and A3D and the card even provides an S/PDIF digital out
all at a great price.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a review
of Matrox's new RT2000. This is the first Real Time video editing
solution that may actually be affordable to regular consumers. If
you're interested in doing some professional quality video editing and
you were waiting for cheaper equipment, you should check this out.
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of Alpha's new FC-PAL35T and the huge ass PEP66T. If money is no
object and you want the best FC-PGA Coppermine heatsinks money can buy,
take a look at these!
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Storage Review has posted a review
of Quantum's new Fireball Plus LM ATA-66 7200 RPM hard drives.
These new models now have a 2MB cache which allows them to perform
beautifully and take the 7200RPM Storage Review Leaderboard slot.
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HardOCP has posted some benchmarks
of a Celeron II 633 running at 1GHz. These new Celerons are crazy
overclockers! On a similar note, they've also posted a review
of PowerLeaps NEO-S370 adapter which lets you run the newer FC-PGA CPU's
(Coppermine PIII's & Celeron II's) on older PPGA Socket-370's.
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The Firing Squad has shared
their experiences
of running one of the new Celeron II 566's on an Abit BH6. They
were able overclock it to 877MHz and compared it to a Celeron 300A
running at 450.
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Anand Tech has also posted a review
of SUMA's Platinum 64MB GeForce DDR card. Can you imagine how much
this thing will cost?
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of AOpen's AX64Pro VIA Apollo Pro 133A based Slot-1 motherboard.
It received an overall rating of 7.5/10 which isn't too bad.
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HotHardware has posted their review
of Abit's new KA7 VIA KX133 based Athlon motherboard. Head over
and see what they thought of it.
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While I was over at Voodoo
Extreme, I also noticed that they've posted up an article
entitled "The 3D Card Industry - April '00." As you
probably already know, this month is going to be a big one in terms of
3D cards with the Voodoo4/5, Rage6 and NV11 & NV15 all coming out.
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Voodoo Extreme has posted a review
of Midiland's S4 7100 5.1 speaker set. For the price, they look
like an extremely good set of speakers. I don't like their style
as much as the 8200's however, but that's only my opinion.
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Tech-Review has posted an article
which explains how the technology behind a hard drive works. If you're
interested, give it a read.
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iXBT Hardware has posted their monthly
hardware news overview in which they cover pretty much everything
that happened in the world of hardware for the month of March.
It's a length article so put on your reading glasses!
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Kincaid over at PCExtremes has
written up an article
in which he started with The Ultimate Hard Drive Cooler but then spiced
it up even more to get the ultimate hard drive cooling solution.
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3D-Unlimited has posted their review
of Diamond's Viper II Savage2000 based board. If the damn drivers would
ever mature, it would actually be a decent product.
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G3D has posted a review
of The Artic Circle Socket-370 cooler. This looks like a slightly
higher end model of the golden orb.
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Wednesday
- April 12th
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Do you want an in-depth review of Abit's KA7? Anand
Tech has the answer, check out their review here.
They gave it an 8.5 which is very good on Anand's scale.
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of MidiLand's high end S4/8200 8 piece speaker system. Check out
the intro:
It seems like only yesterday when we
were taking a look at the Midiland S4 7100 speakers. Three months
after the S4 7100's were announced, the S4 8200's were introduced, and
now, they are shipping. These new gems are an 8-piece system, which
include a Dolby Digital Decoder, 5 satellites, 1 sub, and a remote
control. The system is finished in a slick, metallic colour, which is
quite different from the standard black/PC grey that we are used to.
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GamePC has posted a shootout
between two of the best Athlon boards available, the Abit KA7 and ASUS
K7V, both of which are based on the VIA KX133 chipset. This bit
says it all:
We're split on which board we like better. On the one hand, you've
got the overclocker/gamer friendly, nice compact Abit KA7, but on the
other hand, you've got the better performing, more stable, Asus K7V.
Both boards performed incredibly well in our tests, and neither had
incompatibility problems with any hardware we threw at it. It's
obvious these two companies really put some a lot of R&D time into
these boards. Any gamer would be proud to have one of these
motherboards in their systems, let's just hope the Abit board can gain
some stability with future BIOS upgrades/driver miniports. Kudos to
both companies for raising the bar for the Athlon motherboard market!
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r-age.com has posted an article
which takes a look at Metabyte's recently updated WickedGL drivers for
3dfx Voodoo3 cards. They increase image quality and performance by
a substantial amount, so you should definitely check it out if you have
a Voodoo3. Grab the WickedGL driver here.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a review
of the Palm VII handheld computer. I know absolutely nothing about
these devices, so I won't even comment.
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The Hardware Wizards has
posted a review
of the Northwind GFD Rev 2 Athlon overclocking device. I haven't
personally tried any of these myself, but from the reviews I've seen,
this one looks like the best one.
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SystemLogic has posted an article
which covers their trip to 3dfx Interactive and then it goes into an
in-depth preview of the Voodoo4/5 and VSA-100 chip. Head over and
check it out.
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SpeedGuide.net has posted a review
of LinkSys' Instant GigaDrive. What exactly is this device? Well
it's a 20GB Network drive, Print Server, DHCP Server and 10/100
autosensing network interface all built into one! It will also
cost you quite a bit of money!
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Hardware One has posted a review
of Abit's new VT6X4 VIA Apollo Pro 133A based Slot-1 motherboard.
Unfortunately, they hoped for much more from this board.
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got apex? has posted their review
of ASUS' K7V VIA KX133 based Slot-A motherboard. Just like
everyone else, they seemed to love it. People, if you've been
waiting for a decent Athlon motherboard, well here it is!
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Overclockers Australia has
posted a review
of the Palm Portable keyboard. Seems like an interesting idea, but
doesn't it defeat the whole purpose of the Palmtop? You may as
well get a laptop, that way you'll have a nice big screen to go along
with the keyboard.
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3DSoundSurge has posted a review
of VideoLogic's Sirocco Pro 3-piece speaker set. These do not even
look like computer speakers anymore, they look more like a home theater
set of speakers.
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G3D has posted a review
of IBM's Deskstar 34GXP 13.6GB hard drive. This baby has an 8.5ms
average seek time, 7200 RPM spindle speed and a 2MB cache.
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Tuesday
- April 11th
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3DRage has posted a review
of Gigabyte's GA-G2560 GeForce 256 SDR card. This is just your
average GeForce card, nothing special about it other than the blue PCB.
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Sharky Extreme has posted a review
of Intel's Celeron 600MHz CPU. The 566's and up are all based on
the new Pentium III core, but only have 128KB of cache. Head over
and see how far it overclocks and how it performs compared to other
CPU's.
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Planet Hardware has posted a
review
of Microsoft's Internet Keyboard, I personally have one of these myself
and love it.
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Hot Hardware has posted a review
of Microstar's MS-6309 VIA Apollo Pro 133A based Socket-370
motherboard. This is one of the few boards that is not Slot-1,
which is great if you want to stick in a huge cooler (because it won't
block the DIMM slots like on a Slot-1 board) but it limits you to only
Celerons or the FC-PGA PIII's.
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PCExtremes is giving away AMK's
latest and greatest custom designed case, the AMK-33336H full tower ATX
case with a ton of fans. Head
over and see what you have to do to win it.
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Club Overclocker has posted
a review
of Intel's Pentium III Coppermine 650E FC-PGA CPU. They were able
to get it up to a sweet 816MHz.
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3DAlpha has posted a short review
of Matrox's G400 MAX card. Still a decent card, especially if you
want to have a dual monitor setup.
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Overclockers.co.uk has
posted a review
of Abit's KA7 VIA KX133 based Slot-A Athlon motherboard. With 6
PCI slots, 4 DIMM slots, 6 chip memory buffer and great overclocking capabilities,
this board looks like a winner!
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Monday
- April 10th
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3DHardware has posted a review
of Abit's BE6 II (Rev 2.0) Slot-1 motherboard. This i440BX based
beauty has the HPT366 ATA66 controller and an amazing set of FSB
options.
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Active Hardware has posted a review
of ATI's Rage Fury MAXX 64MB dual Rage 128 Pro based card. It's
not too bad of a card, but it seems like the GeForce has stolen all of
its fame.
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GamePC has posted a review
of Intel's Pentium III Coppermine 850E FC-PGA CPU. If you can
afford it, then by all means grab one of these babies, you aren't going
to find a much better performing CPU. On the other hand, if you're
short on dough, grab a 550 and overclock it to 733 or 825 and it will be
pretty darn close to the 850 for less than half the price.
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Tom's Hardware Guide has
posted a huge roundup
of 21 VIA Apollo Pro 133A based Slot-1 motherboards. I think
they've pretty much captured the entire market on this one. Head
over and see which one(s) they liked best.
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Digital Clips has posted
their review
of ASUS's K7V KX133 based Slot-A motherboard. You know it kicks
ass, so just go out and buy one!
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Tech Review has posted a review
of the PJB-100 5GB, yes you read correctly 5GB portable MP3
player. You would never have to erase a song, you could just keep
adding to your library!
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Tweak3D has posted an article
which explains how exactly 3D audio works. Especially when it's only
coming from 2 speakers in some cases. This a very well written and
informative article, so be sure to read it.
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While I was over at Thresh's place,
I also noticed that they've posted an article
which takes a look at the overclocking possibilities of the Celeron
566MHz. This is the new Celeron with the Coppermine core but only
128KB of cache. They got it to overclock to 901MHz, but it barely
outperforms a Coppermine 650.
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted a review
of the Athlon board that is likely to become very popular, the ASUS
K7V. This board is based on VIA's KX133 chipset and has the ASUS
name to back it up.
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3DSpotlight has updated their
Voodoo3 tweak guide with the latest and greatest tweaks. The
Voodoo3 is aging quite nicely now, but still performs reasonably
well. Head over and see if you can squeeze a bit more out of it.
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Razerzone has released a new set
of drivers for their Razer Boomslang mice. If you have one of
these mice, you'll want to grab these updated drivers. They work
on Windows 2000 as well. Grab it below:
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of AMK's LAN-0334 ATX Mid Tower Case. It must be pretty bad
because they only gave it a rating of 4/10.
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Dan's Data has posted a review
of Sony's VPLPX1 and VPLVW10HT LCD projectors. Unless you're a
high ranking traveling executive, I would have no idea why you would
want to spend the money on one of these. They are interesting
nonetheless.
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The Tech Zone has gone on one of
their overclocking frenzies again. This time they've taken you on
a tour of
their Project 850. They started out with an Athlon 500 and
explained their process of turning it into an 850MHz Athlon. Not
only is this system fast, but it has a huge monitor, awesome video card
and a whole slew of other stuff which most of us could only dream of.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a review
of MidiLand's ADS-2000 fully compatible Dolby Digital (AC-3) decoder
with multiple inputs and outputs. The box costs $99 and is
supposed to compliment MidiLand's 5.1 piece speaker systems such as the
S4/7100's.
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Looks like SDRAM isn't dead yet. According to this bit of news
that electric.com sent over, VIA
is planning to support DDR266 SDRAM in their upcoming products.
Here is a bit from the press
release:
VIA Technologies, Inc., today announced it has selected Double Data
Rate (DDR266) SDRAM as the memory technology that will follow its
successful PC133 for future PC chipsets. DDR266 supported VIA chipsets
will be targeted across the PC Market at servers, desktop systems,
Value PCs and mobiles. Established on the existing SDRAM industry
infrastructure, DDR266 is a rational high performance and
cost-efficient solution that allows easy adoption for memory vendors,
OEMs and system integrators. In cooperation with key memory suppliers
including Micron, Samsung, Hyundai, Infineon, Hitachi, NEC,
Mitsubishi, Nanya, Toshiba and others, VIA is proactively
participating in every stage of the engineering development of the
DDR266 device and PC2100 memory module technology to ensure that VIA's
DDR chipset is compliant with current JEDEC DDR SDRAM standards.
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ThoughShell has posted a review
of Abit's new VIA Apollo Pro 133A based Slot-1 motherboard, the
VT6X4. I have no idea why such a new board would still have two
ISA slots and unfortunately it only has SoftMenu II instead of III.
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3D-Unlimited has posted a review
of D-Link's DSB-C300 webcam. Head over and see if any good,
especially with quite a few webcams out there from the big boys like
Creative Labs and Logitech.
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Chip Testers has updated their ChipWatch
page. This is actually a low price hardware guide that
takes into account vendor shipping costs. Pretty cool stuff.
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3DGameForce has posted a preview
of 3dfx's much anticipated Voodoo4/5 series of cards. The only
real intriguing ones are the 5500 and 6000 in my opinion because
of the crazy fillrates, hopefully they'll be as good as they sound.
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It's about time we finally got our FTP access back!! Don't ask me
what the hell happened, because I have no idea myself. If I find
out from the system adminstrator, I'll let you guys know. I'm so
sorry for those of you who visited and had to use other sites for your
daily news feed, I'm truly sorry.
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Wednesday
- April 5th
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On Friday afternoon, we lost FTP access into the Fresh3D Server.
Unfortunately, this problem has not been fixed yet, which is why I
haven't been able to make any updates all week. Apparently, the
system administrator is out of town right now which is why I can't get
him to fix the problem. I'm very sorry for the trouble this has
caused and ask that you please bear with us. I'm trying to get the
problem resolved so we can get back to daily updates.
Mike
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