February 9 - 16, 1999
Archive

• Diamond Monster Sound MX300 Driver (Win9X - version 1.02 Beta - 14.4 MB)

 

Fischer said the estimated clock speed had been tested on Intel's existing 0.25-micron manufacturing process. "And just wait until the 0.18-micron process," he added.

 

A problem with using the Pentium II core on the OverDrive processor was that there would be no way a Pentium Pro user would agree to making an upgrade to a processor whose cache ran at 1/2 clock speed while their aging Pentium Pro ran its L2 cache at full clock speed. Intel worked around this little problem by making the Pentium II OverDrive nothing more than a Pentium II Xeon on a much smaller scale, using the Pentium II's design to place the L2 cache externally off of the CPU, but on a card that would allow it to operate at the same clock speed as the CPU itself. Owners of the Pentium Pro 200 with 1MB of L2 cache may want to think twice before considering this upgrade, as the Pentium II OverDrive is outfitted with 512KB of L2 cache which should be an improvement for most Pentium Pro users as the 256KB processors were quite popular.

 

Finally, the force feedback effects were a mixed bag. At first they were amazing and impressive, but as I used the wheel more, the novelty started to fade off. Luckily, there is a force feedback button on the wheel that lets you turn off the force feedback. Also, the wheel itself is top class, with an ergonomic feel and responsive and realistic controls.

 

Image quality was excellent. The VP150 is capable of up to 1024x768 and true color. With that combination at the maximum refresh rate of 75 Hertz, text was readable down to 6 points. At 5.5 points, the letter "e" became a rectangular dot. On the comparison CRT monitor, the Panasonic S17, the letter "e" looked more like a "c" at 5.5 points. Typical of LCD screens, flicker on the VP150 was non-existent, even at 60 Hertz. 

 

All in all, STB's Desktop TV is an excellent choice for an add-on TV tuner card, offering many excellent features and added extras that will give you all you need for TV on your desktop, FM radio, video conferencing, video and still image capture, and options for utilizing WaveTop's Wavephore, Intel Intercast, or WebTV for Windows at a very affordable price.

 

In testing of the AX6BC we found it to be highly stable. The benchmarks Seem to lag a point or two behind other boards but its stableness is second To none. Compared to other Slot 1/440BX Chipset boards this one seemed To need less reboots and didn’t crash often. A welcome feature missing in Other mobo’s out now. The AX6BC only contains 3 DIMM slots, but has Another model that contains the full 4 slots adding more expandablity. The AX6BC also seemed to take different PC-100 DIMMS with ease. We tried Kingston, LGS, and no-name generic DIMM’s. All worked fine

However, to be honest, we're doubting that's the whole problem. The important thing to look at here is what makes up the current PIII-500. The Katmai (oops, Pentium III, excuse me) was supposed to have all sorts of nifty stuff going for it--a .18-micron manufacturing process and a 64K L1 cache being two biggies. The PIII-500 doesn't have either of those things, and it shows.  With the 500MHz PIII chip, the only substantial advantage over the PII-450 is that extra 50MHz, which, we suspect, is at least partially offset by less aggressive L2 cache timing. These oversights could be remedied with later PIII offerings, but with the current chips, that's where we sit.

The ZM6 motherboard is ABIT's second Socket 370 offering -- the first was the BM6, an Intel BX-chipset-based product. The Intel ZX/100 chipset was used in the ZM6. What differences are there between the BX and ZX chipsets? The primary differences are that the ZX will only support 256Mb of memory (as opposed to the 1-gigabyte limit for the BX), as well as a limit of 4 bus master PCI slots. Other than that there are no differences between the two chipsets. Are those limitations significant? Read on to learn more.

 

To say the least, the Rage 128 boards have everything going for them. The best 32 bit rendering in the industry (very important for future games). The best DVD/MPEG2 decoding technology, built in. 32 MB of local memory (SGRAM or SDRAM). The best quality and compatibility for LCD display technology (important for 1999). You can arguably say that it currently has the best 3D performance available today. It has the most value. Another thing you might not have considered is the compatibility. It has drivers for every platform imaginable. Linux, MacOS, OS/2, all flavors of Windows, even the BeOS has upcoming support.

 

Planet Hardware has done a review of Intel's Pentium III 500MHz CPU with the new SSE instructions to help speed up 3D applications and other multimedia stuff. Check out this interesting tidbit:

The other main rumors circling around the Pentium III were than it would ship with 64k of Level One cache (compared to 32k for Pentium MMX and Pentium II, 16k for original Pentium's), and that the out the door front side bus speed would be set at 133MHz, both of which Intel failed to deliver on. The Pentium III ships with 32k of L1 cache, and will also run at the standard 100MHz front side bus speed, both of which are no improvement over the Pentium II. Compare this to the AMD K7 chip, which will run at a blistering 200MHz bus speed, and 128k of Level 1 cache, and you've got a losing battle on Intel's part. We'll have to wait and see if the second revisions of the Pentium III can compete with the K7, but it's for sure if they leave the PIII as is, the K7 will smoke it off the road.

I noticed over at Planet Hardware that the DVD audio standard has been finalized. Check out this bit from the EETimes article:

In response to requests from content producers, the Forum's Working Group 4 (WG 4) introduced a lossless coding method last year to transmit limited-transfer-rate, high-frequency audio signals without any loss of the original musical information, enabling the storage of 74 minutes of sound at the highest frequencies.

When using the lowest frequency-CD sound (44.1 kHz, 16 bits, two channels)-one single-layer, single-sided disk can store more than 7 hours of sound.

 

NetExcite has done a review of Matrox's Marvel G200-TV card.  This multi function video card compares to ATi's All-In-Wonder series and does a very good job at all its functions.

Active Win has done a review of the ELSA Erazor II Riva TNT card just as we did.  In their review, they compared it to an STB Velocity 4400 so you can see how well it fares again's STB's offering.   You can check out our review by clicking on the screen above or the link to the right.

PC Magazine has decided to retest the graphics cards they used in a test a few months back.  The reason?  Well it was suspected that the tests boards they were sent may not be the same as the retail boards and the results of their tests may help any certain company gain a lot of design wins.  Check out this bit from the article:

Such was the situation with our fall roundup of graphics accelerators ("Who's the Fastest?", December 1, 1998). We followed up by purchasing the best performers at retail to see how the vendor-supplied cards in our story compared with cards customers could purchase. As we suspected, the new round of testing uncovered some discrepancies with our original data.

 

The Overclocker's Workbench has put together a shoot out between 4 hot motherboards, the MSI the 6163, the ABIT BH6, AOPEN AX6BC rev 2.1 and  the AOPEN AX63. I wonder who came out on top!

Gigabyte has been known as a quality motherboard manufacturer over the years. They make a host of Pentium and Pentium II boards and have earned a good reputation as a company that stands behind their products. Did you also know that they make video cards? Gigabyte actually has a full complement of video cards based on current chip sets from Intel, 3D Labs and now 3Dfx ! The company has always focused on R&D, so it stands to reason that you can expect something a little different than the basic reference design from Gigabyte in the video arena. Behold, the GA-630! Nice integrated cooling fan huh? This card came with 16 MB of SGRAM on board and a well designed 3 pin cooling fan on the heatsink. As a result, this board is very overclocking friendly. Let's run down the rest of the specs...

 

Is it just me, or are Shuttle's motherboard model numbers really confusing?  I keep seeing 681, 661, 6AB, 666 I don't know which is which anymore!  Anyway, Anand Tech has done a review of Shuttle's HOT-661V Apollo Pro Plus Slot 1 motherboard. Check out this bit:

VIA's latest attempt to break into the Slot-1 chipset market is the Apollo Pro Plus, a chipset that is a relative new comer to the game and has earned little support so far. The original Apollo Pro did not fare well in the market place at all, and in an effort to encourage motherboard manufacturers to choose VIA, they made the Apollo Pro Plus. The plus version is functionally identical to the original Apollo Pro, but features a new pin out that makes it easier for motherboard designers to integrate the Apollo Pro Plus into existing Slot-1 motherboard designs based on the Intel i440BX. Shuttle's version is the HOT-661V

 

I noticed over at AGNHardware that Abit has released new BIOS updates for the BX6 and BX6 Revision 2.  Click here for all the goods.

Riva Station has put together a comparison between 3DFX's Banshee and Nvidia's Riva TNT.   Nothing new here, the TNT still edges out the Banshee, but in my opinion both are very good cards and the Banshee being a lot cheaper than the TNT makes it even.

The Register has some interesting news about Intel and their future plans with copper.  According to the article, Intel is not going to use copper interconnects in their chips until they have moved to the 0.13 micron process which will probably be a pretty long time.  Check out the whole article here.

Well we have finally finished up the ELSA Erazor II review.  It took so long because we were extremely busy with essays, tests and assignments coming out of our asses!  Now we have a week off and expect a lot of new stuff, including a new site layout.  In the meantime check out the review!

Montreal, Canada — Matrox Graphics Inc. is proud to announce two new additions to the Matrox MGA-G200 Series of graphics accelerators: Matrox Millennium G200 LE and Matrox Millennium G200 SD 16MB. The introduction of these new graphic solutions offers greater flexibility to system integrators, PC assemblers and end users.

Designed to deliver superior price/performance in 2D, 3D and video applications, the Matrox Millennium G200 LE is a new low cost, non-memory upgradeable, non-multimedia upgradeable graphics card available exclusively to system integrators and PC assemblers in Q1 99.

Matrox Graphics has also released the Millennium G200 SD 16MB for system integration and retail. The first MGA-G200 graphics accelerator designed with 16MB of SDRAM memory, the Matrox Millennium G200 SD 16MB version is multimedia upgradeable and will be available in Q1 99 for $139 US SRP.

 

This will probably be the most anticipated mainboard release of the year, and I'm pleased to report that Abit have made a board, that while not perfect, is probably as good as it is going to get for the Overclocker. BXBoards have been in possession of a pair of BX6-2's for a number of weeks, kindly to us by PCNut. We all noticed stability problems with our boards, although a BIOS update improved most of the issues identified. This review is based on an official review sample supplied to us by Abit. Before the beta-BIOS was supplied, I would have not given any more than 3/5 for stability, but I am pleased to report that the issues I identified and reported to Abit were fixed very quickly. And I am pleased to report that the board is working great now!

The XA100 Plus is currently the absolute fastest Super7 motherboard that I have tested. With the 105 MHz, 110 MHz, and 115 MHz settings, the XA100 Plus can tweak more performance from the K6-2 than any other Super7 motherboards. The K6-3 will not be as dependant upon bus speed for performance, but the added flexiblity of the 105-115 settings will still come in handy when overclocking. If you are a speed freak, the XA100 Plus should be of considerable interest to you.

 

In summary, we have to say that the Storm Platinum indeed fulfilled our very high expectations and then some, this is one of the most potent PC audio solutions to date. And with the addition of those amazing headphones and a reasonable pricetag of just $99.95 you can't go wrong getting one of these hot cakes. On another note I just got word from Xitel that they will soon offer drivers with EAX support which further increase the potential for the Platinum board.

 

At $249.99 (suggested US retail price), the 183MHz Voodoo3 3500 AGP board is expected to deliver up to 8 million triangles and 366 Megatexels per second at resolutions of up to 2,048 by 1,536 pixels. Designed to support the latest digital flat panel displays, the Voodoo3 3500 will include 3Dfx's proprietary flat-panel support, LCDfx. Manufactured by STB Systems, Inc., Voodoo3 3500 will be available in limited quantities for consumers who require flat panel support. Voodoo3 3500 will feature a 350MHz RAMDAC, TV/S-Video Out capabilities as well as a yet undisclosed game bundle featuring best-selling titles. The Voodoo3 3500 will also feature 16 MB of SGRAM.Using the industry standard Quake II time demo benchmark, demo versions of the Voodoo3 product are capable of generating record frame rates of over 106 frames per second at a resolution of 800x600, over 84 frames per second at 1024x768, and a remarkable 35 plus frames per second at 1600x1200.The entire family of Voodoo3 boards are designed to include such advanced features as: single-pass single-cycle multi-texturing for bump mapping and trilinear mip-mapping, dual 32-bit internal rendering, per-pixel mip-mapping, sub-pixel and sub-texel correction, 8-bit palletized textures, programmable exponential fog tables, Gouraud shading, a full 128-bit 2D accelerator, DVD hardware assist, and support for DirectX®, Glide® and OpenGL®.

 

The AOpen AX6BC really is a dream to work with. It has a reassuring solidity about it that is hard to define, but is nevetheless quite tangible. It is forgiving of RAM types and is the first board I have met that will run my Samsung -G8 RAM at CAS2 at 133Mhz. I particularly enjoyed 138Mhz bus speed with my unlocked P2-333 - 3 x 138 is nearly as fast as 4.5 x 100!!

 

Today at Milia, we had a chance to take a look at the performance of a near-final board, running a series of demos including a heavily modified version of Unreal. As the screenshots indicate, the results are most impressive. The huge texture maps (up to 2,000x2,000 pixels) enabled by S3TC give the gaming environment a level of detail that we've simply never seen before, and the various lighting, fog, and reflection effects are mesmerizing. Frame rates were crisp, despite the fact that the test card was running at only 100MHz (the final chip will run at 143MHz). The demo even included some DirectX 7.0 features, including animated texture maps with more than 200 frames of animation. Translucent animated texture maps were also displayed.

 

In fact, the Microworks handled everything we threw at it with great precision and clarity. The satellites produced a wide spectrum of sound that seemed to fill the room. We really have to hand it to Cambridge for making such a great set of computer speakers.

 

Leaving hard disk controllers behind, the Super South Bridge adds another unique feature to the already extensive support list, USB2. Towards the end of 1998, a few motherboards began popping up that had support for front USB ports, unfortunately using a USB port on the front of your case would require that one be taken off of the back of your case. The addition of USB2 allows for an additional 2 ports to be supported on the motherboard itself, bringing the total supported USB ports to 4 ports (ideally, 2 front and 2 back), and with each port supporting a theoretical maximum of 127 devices, that's a total of 508 devices. Chances are you'll never come close to reaching that limit (there aren't enough USB devices in existence to reach that limit), but it's better to be safe with an unreasonable limit than to begin finding ways to cut down on USB devices.

 

So what's my take on this TNT card? Quite frankly it beats the other TNT boards I've tested in performance and in features. When it comes to performance differences between TNT cards, the margin between any of them is small. What sets this board apart and ahead of the pack in my opinion is it's excellent overclockability. I don't know quite how they do it but ASUS has put together a high quality board here. What they've learned in manufacturing motherboards has obviously carried over to graphics boards. They've learned to make quality products. The boards active cooling doesn't look much different than any other board that offers a fan, but for some reason it provides superb cooling. I don't know if ASUS made it intentional this way or not, but the way they attached the heatsink allows for easy removal. This might be advantageous if you're planning to install your own and maybe better heatsink. The standard one is great though and coupled with the fan on top it actually has a very low profile which might actually allow enough room for an adjacent card in the next slot. A nice touch there.

 

A few weeks ago when I reviewed the first "final version" of the Rage Fury I added some comments on the heat issue which has been discussed on other websites as well. The chip revision on the Fury board is a A21, and ATI has recently sent me an Expert 128 board, also featuring the Rage 128 GL chipset. This board has the newer A22 revision of the chipset which doesn't add anything to the performance, but which has a revised power circuit which causes it to get less hot.

 

• Aureal A3D Driver (Win9X - version 2.04b - 224 KB)

 

Retailing for a steep $199, the Saitek R4 Force Wheel brings together the best of Microsoft's force feedback technology, with a design that is modeled to make your driving experience more realistic.  Instead of 4-6 buttons on the face of the wheel, the R4 Force has 2 face buttons, 2 Formula 1 style paddles on either side of the steering column, and a 2-way shifter on the right of the unit.  The thumb buttons and paddles are well places and easy to reach, but you have to give up two handed control to use the shifter.

 

I have been using the SoftFSB, I enquired the author about the program and he had taught me a way to let it start with windows and auto set the Bus speed everytime it is restarted. Here's what you do . . .

Unzip the SoftFSB program, Start the program AT LEAST ONCE.. That will allow the SoftFSB.ini file to be made. Open the .ini file, On line 6 under the SoftFSB menu, there's a

nExtMode=0
now, change the value to 1 as in
nExtMode=1

Now close the file and restart the SoftFSB.exe file. If you have done all of that correctly, you will now see 2 new buttons under the [ Get FSB ] button. Get your FSB now, and the AUTOO button will be enabled, now config it to your personal liking. I had mine set to a 100MHz bus to make my 300A to a 450MHz

• Download SoftFSB Beta  8 (Win9X - version 1.48 - 40KB)

ELSA has released a new beta driver for the Erazor II TNT card based on the Detonator drivers.  Here is the info and a link to download:

- Implementations for software DVD with ELSAmovie - New WINman (ELSA Settings) integriert - Optimizations for AMD's 3DNow! Technology - Support for Intel's Pentium III Processor

• ELSA Erazor II Beta Driver (Win9X - version 031-0009 - 1.84 MB)

 

• Hercules Dynamite TNT Driver (Win9X - version 0.57.0048 - 2.11 MB)

 

Creative's U.S. subsidiary, Creative Labs Inc., is advertising for a "motherboard brand manager" to manage the "profit and loss of motherboard stand-alone and motherboard kit business for the Americas," according to a job description posted on the web site of Creative Labs, Milpitas, Calif. The job involves developing a product roadmap and pricing strategy.

A spokesman for the company said a motherboard product was "one of these things we're looking into," but that he didn't expect a motherboard division would represent a very significant part of Creative's revenue even if a motherboard division was formed.

 

So what the hell does this tell us?  I dont know what it tells you, but it tell me that the TNT card whips ass when it comes to the Banshee card.   I have seen a few reviews of the card that pumped it up quite a bit, but if you are a Q2 or HL junkie, the Banshee is not the card for you.  Spend the extra cash and get the TNT if you gotta have it today.  We will see what the ATI Rage has yet to bring to the party.

 

The 8/20 is a tray loading drive with an impressive 4MB buffer. This large buffer helps to reduce any potential errors due to data not arriving to the drive fast enough. It has a Fast SCSI-2 interface capable of 10MB/sec. The 8x drive can write data at 1.2MB/sec and has a 170ms access time. It has a maximum read speed of 20x, or 3MB/sec. A small fan is built in to the rear of the drive to help keep the drive cool while operating.

 

Although I cannot see a whole lot of need for a Slotket at this time, that will all change when the Slot 1 version of the Celeron 300A disappears for good. At that time the only way that you will be able to have the popular BH6/BX6 v2 – Celeron 300A combo will be with a Slotket card.

I found myself somewhat impressed with the Winfast S320 from Leadtek.    While this was not the fastest TNT card on the market, it does have some features that make it stand out from the pack.  With a built-in fan, decent TV-Out, and a great bundle for the design professional, the Winfast S320 should feel right at home in most anyone's system.   It should please the business user with it's full bundle and stable drivers while keeping the gamer happy with well established TNT performance.   It will even keep the gadget freak happy with the fan and TV-Out.   All in all the Winfast S320 is a well rounded choice for a 2D/3D board.

 

"The Brick" you mentioned in your voodoo extreme article is actually 4 Single planar Obsidian2 200SBi boards with a hardware 4:1 pixel averaging subsystem linking them together. This feeds into an I/O card for 1024x768 full scene hardware antialiased output at 60Hz. This is housed in our 6U rack mounted Heavy Metal Mercury Graphics Workstation. Total, that's 8 voodoo2 chipsets running in parallel, each with 16MB of texture memory and 8MB of frame buffer. It looks as good as SGI's Onyx Infinite reality....but cheaper.

 

The latest PowerStrip beta adds a powerful and unique new feature which allows you to apply color adjustments in real-time to your primary display card, from within a full-screen "exclusive" DirectX game using the hotkeys of your choice. By default the following hotkeys are pre-defined in the beta, but you can create your own color schemes, assign the hotkeys of your choice to them, and trigger them at will from inside any game.

Ctl+Alt+F1 = reset gamma to default values
Ctl+Alt+F2 = apply Voodoo-equalized color scheme
Ctl+Alt+NumPad Plus = increase gamma by one click
Ctl+Alt+NumPad Minus = decrease gamma by one click

For the purpose of testing, a good example of an exclusive DirectX app is 3Dmark 99 which resets the gamma ramp on initialization, and is immune to every other gamma utility - including dedicated DX6 gamma correction software like 3Deep. Please advise if you run into compatibility problems - and there will be some - with other software

• Powerstrip beta (Win9X/NT - version 2.35.05  - 642KB)

 

Xitel has always been known for it's excellence in audio products, ever since the Storm 3D. It was a great little card that used an Oak chip, that was as good if not better than the original Monster Sound (w/o 4 speakers). With the advent of the Vortex1 chip by Aureal, Xitel was a major player in that market with the Storm VX which, even now, is regarded as the best Vortex1 card you can buy. Now, Aureal has given us the Vortex2. With the Vortex2, Aureal has upped the ante for all audio cards to be looked at. Xitel has again, worked closely with Aureal, and made the Storm Platinum. The Platinum is a card to be benchmarked after, as you will see with the review.

 

As you can see, the Rage128's driver immaturity is clearly apparent. In almost all of the benchmarks, the TNT edges the Rage128 in every category. Though the TNT scores aren't killing the Rage128, its drivers have a ways off before they can perform at the same level. 32-bit performance has been the only boon to the Rage128's 3D performance. Unlike the TNT, the Rage128 suffers much less from the increase from 16- to 32-bit.

 

Though the SuperCharged Beast receives a considerable performance boost from the higher clock and memory interface, in the Quake II "timedemo" benchmark, the performance of the Beast is still fairly far off from the TNT. This is apparently because S3 did not make the OpenGL drivers the focus of the Savage3D.

 

In 3DMark as well, there is no perceivable performance difference from moving to the new drivers on a P3 vs. a P2. With KNI optimizations, you would expect the P3 to experience a greater percentage gain, roughly 15-25% higher than that of an equivalent P2. However, seeing that this is not the case, two possibilities present themselves. One, the new drivers do not take advantage of KNI, or two, 3DMark's execution time is not holed up in the display driver, reducing the impact of such optimizations. There's also a question of support for KNI in the operating system, which was supposed to be implemented in DirectX6.1. Again, if anyone finds significant performance gains on a P3 as opposed to a P2, please let us know.