February 25 - 28, 1999
Archive

The purpose of Ultra ATA/66 is not for a performance increase to bridge the gap between IDE and SCSI, rather it is to make room for more advancements in the storage industry, there is no point in having a slow bus being the limitation for today's hard disks. The benefits of Ultra ATA/66 will not be seen now, so don't expect to get a huge performance increase over older Ultra ATA/33 drives; however the benefits will surely come around as spin rates get faster and drives grow more efficient, wonder how long it will take before we see 10,000 RPM Ultra ATA/66 drives hit the market…

The Global VEK 12, noisy* but very effective, ranks #1 but not by as much as you might think - The TennMax VIVA PII is not that far behind and a lot quieter. With some better fans and a little more engineering, the TennMax VIVA could rank equal to the VEK 12 and a lot easier on the ears. If TennMax wants to market a superior product, IMHO it won't take much; if it costs $5 more, I'm sure they can get it if the performance is there.

 

LVD stands for Low Voltage Differential. Esentially this is a whole new interface for the SCSI format and provides the following benefits: Increased bus data rates, Increased device connectivity, Increased design flexibility, and Backward compatibility with Ultra SCSI.

 

You heard that right. With some of the designed they've got in the works, it looks like you'll be able to slap in as many cards as your computer allows, and run them dual-monitor, triple monitor, dual-SLI, triple-SLI, quadruple-SLI, or any reasonable combination thereof. Don't even get started on how fair or unfair these will be, I'm not gonna open that can of worms!

 

This technology will allow Metabyte to run graphics cards in a parallel configuration using any existing chip on the market. It will also have the capability to be applied to any future chipset that comes to market. Specifically, the application of this technology to an existing 2D/3D chip set will yield a 40+ percent increase in performance and will double megapixel per second fill rate of a dual card configuration over a single card. A white paper outlining the benefits of this technology in more detail can be found at http://www.wicked3d.com.

Wicked3D has successfully implemented this technology on current 2D/3D AGP and PCI architectures. Presently, demand for this technology has proven overwhelming as a result of unauthorized leaks on the Internet that have lead to customers demanding to pre-order Wicked3D parallel graphics boards. The company is reviewing a number of options to bring its technology to market in the coming months because of the tremendous response of consumers and companies within the industry.

The implementation of this Wicked3D driver technology requires very minor modifications to existing hardware. The process of rendering images from two sources will separate the images being rendered into sections. The driver then sends the render information to the appropriate board so that rendering occurs in parallel on the two boards. Such rendering is still the biggest performance bottleneck performance with current graphics hardware especially at high resolution so this approach provides a big win.

 

Camino's delay, for instance, will obviously mean that PCs equipped with fast Rambus memory won't appear until late in the third quarter. Graphics chipmakers will also see a slowdown in their product releases. These companies are currently preparing graphics chips for AGP 4X, the next version of the high speed graphics port developed by Intel. The ability to take advantage of AGP 4X will only come with Camino, and Camino is no longer a mid-year event. Earlier in the day, graphics vendors said they were expected to released products in June.

 

The AMD K6 family of desktop processors outsold all Intel-based desktop PCs in the U.S. retail market for the first time, according to PC Data's January Retail Hardware Report.

AMD'S K6 line accounted for 43.9 percent of all desktop PC processor unit sales in January. AMD benefited from a strong demand for sub-$1,000 PCs, which made up more than 65 percent of the market in January, the first time this price segment has exceeded 60 percent of overall unit sales.

 

• AGNHardware's Xitel Storm Platinum Review
• 3DGaming's Xitel Storm Platinum Review

 

As well as constant read speeds, the 52x drive is exceptionally quiet compared to other top speed drives on the market. Since the drive maintains a constant rotation speed while reading data, Kenwood doesn't have to rely on techniques like spinning the drive faster, to hep up the transfer rates. Similar cd-rom drives sporting 50x transfer rates actually spin the disc at over 10,000 RPM, which is faster than most hard drives spin at. This incredible rotation speed causes excess noise and heat, among other things, these are eliminated with the True 52x.

 

By using my trusty Tennmax coolers and the ASUS P5A motherboard, I managed to overclock the K6-III 400 to 450MHz (4.5x100MHz) and the 450 to 500MHz (5.0x100MHz). The best part is that both of them worked at the default voltage of 2.4v, so I didn’t have to increase it. I should say that though the K6-III got rather hot at 500MHz, it was very stable at this frequency. What’s more, the overclocked $284 K6-III 400 gives the Pentium III 450 a run for its money at this setting.  I didn’t go beyond these settings because the processors were unstable when these settings were exceeded- even with 2.5v, it’s the same story, the processors aren’t rock solid. On the other hand, these settings are quite high enough. After all, what’s wrong with 450MHz for a $284 CPU and 500MHz for a $476 CPU?

 

Well sorry for the dirth of posting, we have finished the Chinese New Year here, it lasts about a week.

Updates:

For the BH6, the new upcoming BIOS will give you the manual IRQ steering feature available in the BX6,2. It will be available in about a month.

For the BM6 there is a new BIOS, the BM6JN.EXE It offers support for Socket 370 Celeron CPUs up to 433 Mhz.

There will be a new HOT FAQ! #2

Notice the new Tech support policy, in essence, there will be a percentage of emails that do not get answered, we cannot answer all of them, there are just too many every day, see the policy for more details Finally, the "Auto Detect DIMM/PCI Clk." This feature reduces the occurrence of electromagnetic interference (EMI), the BIOS detects the presence or absence of components in DIMM and PCI slots and turns off system clock generator pulses to empty slots.

 

Spinning 33% faster than 5400rpm drives, this new generation of high-speed EIDE hard disks will provide a major boost in all aspects of hard disk operations. Increased spindle speed means higher platter-to-buffer throughput, a shorter seek time and lower latency. While most 5400rpm drives have seek times of 10.5-12ms and a latency of over 7ms, the new generation 7200rpm drives boast seek times of 9.5ms, latency of around 4ms and a high platter-to-buffer throughput of over 190Mbits/s.

 

• Diamond Monster 3D Driver (Win9X - version 4.10.01.1600 - 1.1 MB)

 

One quick glance at the comarison benchmark and you’ll immediately see what an improvement the 20MHz jump in clock speed makes. At a ratio of approximately 1 MTex/s of fill rate for every MHz of speed, the SGRAM transforms Hercules’s board from a mediocre attempt to an industry-leading product when it comes to single-texture performance. With the Tennmax cooler, I was able to turn up the clock speed 8 more MHz - 3MHz past the S3-rated maximum for the Savage3D - without any display anomalies or stability problems (I could go higher, but image artifacts began to occur above 128MHz). Factor S3TC into the equation, and you have the makings of a real contender here.

 

Hercules has considered the possibility of doing Non-3Dfx based SLI products. Currently, we're working on a number of other enhancements that we're very excited about as well. Stay tuned...

 

Traditionally, one looks to Seagate or IBM to introduce the first of the next-generation units. This time around, however, it's Western Digital that's first out of the gate. The 7200rpm Enterprise WDE18300 is the first low-profile (1") 18.2 gig SCSI drive. Thus, it features a previously unheard of (for SCSI) areal density of 3 gigs per platter. Seek time for the drive squeaks in at just under the 7 millisecond mark, standard for today's SCSI drives. Buffer size seems to be another upped ante in the disk stakes these days, the Enterprise featuring a previously spacious yet ever more commonplace 2 megs. The drive is protected by a standard 5 year warranty.

It has come to my attention that there has been an article posted on Sharky Extreme ( http://www2.sharkyextreme.com/ ) referring to our future plans for a TNT 'SLI' graphics configuration. I have to apologize that this information was made available to Sharky Extreme without authorization from us.

Having said that, we are very excited about this new technology and I look forward to showing you the full monty as soon as possible. While I cannot comment on this technology at this time, on Friday (Feb 26th) I will send you a sneak peek of the official Technology Announcement to be sent to the wire on Monday morning (Mar 1st).

If you have any questions or comments, please respond to press@wicked3d.com.

Best Regards,

Kerry Philpott

National Sales & Marketing Manager
The Wicked3D Board Company
A Division of Metabyte

 

AMD has high hopes for the K7, claiming that it will be the fastest chip available in floating point and integer operations when it is released. That's quite a statement when you are competing with Xeons and Alphas. In addition, the K7 will feature 3D instructions with a 128-bit pipeline, backwards compatible with the 3DNow! instructions, but faster, to give KNI a run for the money.