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February
16 - 23,
2000: Archive
Wednesday
- February 23rd
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Tech-Junkie has put together an
extremely amusing article
on how to destroy your computer. They put 4 cases with old
components through torture tests: falling off a 5.5m balcony and
getting shot by various rifles/pistols.
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3DHardware has posted a review
of the Gallant Computer AudioStorm iFS2 flat panel speaker set.
This is one of the cheapest flat panel sets you can get, but you should
really hear them in person before making a purchase, because flat panel
speaker can sound very different from regular cone speakers.
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Sharky Extreme has posted an article
about DVD benchmarking on the PC. They used MadOnion.com's
Video2000 to provide some benchmarks with some of the best video cards
on the market.
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VIA has updated their 4-in-1
chipset driver package to contain support for their KX133 chipset (this
package works with all VIA chipsets). Grab it below:
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Tweak3D has posted a review
of Global WIN's absolutely HUGE VOS32 Pentium II/III Athlon
cooler. Believe me, you have to head over and see the size of this
thing compared to a regular heatsink.
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AllHW has posted a review
of Supermicro's massive SC750-A Full Tower Case. This baby has a ton of
cooling options and enough room to give your pet a warm place to sleep!
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Extreme Hardware has posted a review
of D-Link's DFE-910 5-port Network in a box. I just received this
kit from D-Link as well, and it's amazing. They give you a top
notch 5-port Switch (not hub I must stress!) and 2 great NIC cards with
Wake-On-LAN capability.
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GamePC has posted a review
of Intel's Pentium III Coppermine 650E FC-PGA CPU. They state that
this chip easily hit 800MHz and with extra cooling, you could probably
hit 850MHz+.
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Anand Tech has posted their review
of Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro review. We've already
seen a ton of these, but this reviews has quite a few benchmarks
comparing it to other GeForce cards.
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Ars Technica has posted an article
which compares the Guillemot 3D Prophet and 3D Prophet DDR-DVI.
The price difference is quite large, head over and see if the
performance difference keeps pace.
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Diamond/S3 has released a new Windows 2000 driver for their Viper II
Savage2000 card. This driver is a preliminary version and does not
contain OpenGL nor Direct3D support. Grab it below:
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SystemLogic has posted a review
of karna's Razer Boomslang 1000 DPI mouse. Click on the icon above
to read our review of the Razer Boomslang 2000 mouse.
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Hardware Central has posted
a review
of ActionTek's Call Waiting modem. This 56K modem will allow you to
answer an incoming call while still being on the net. What's he
catch? You only get about 7 seconds to answer the call before it
disconnects you.
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of Alpha's CO-6035MFC Socket-370 cooler. This baby has that
awesome copper insert that is now a trademark of high-end Alpha coolers.
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HardOCP has posted unofficial 3dfx
Voodoo2 Windows 2000 drivers. Click here
to get it.
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Tuesday
- February 22nd
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Anand Tech has posted up a review
of EPoX's brand spanking new, 7KKA VIA KX133 Slot-A motherboard.
Anand only gave a 6/10, head over and find out why.
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Ga'ash Soffer over at Voodoo
Extreme has written up a small article
on the impact that motherboard chipsets have. The chipset world is
a very interesting one, without a good chipset, even a great processor
can be rendered useless.
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CTNews has posted a review
of IBM's 22GXP 13.5GB ATA-66 7200 RPM hard drive. IBM has a great
reputation for hard drives, so head over if you're looking for a new
high-performance drive.
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Hardware-One has posted a
3-way comparison
of Slot-1 to Socket-370 converter cards. They include the MS-6905,
OEM Slocket and Iwill Slocket 2.
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PC Paradox has posted their review
of Matrox's G400 MAX card. They've approached the review from an
upgrader's perspective.
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Guillemot has released new
drivers for their 3D Prophet/3D Prophet DDR-DVI cards. Grab the
one you need below:
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James over at CNewz has sent in a
bunch more news items for today, here they are in case you're
interested:
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro GeForce DDR card.
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Overclockin.com has posted a review
of AMK's custom made 18" LAN party case. This baby comes in
flavors between $70 and $185 (CAN), the later including a 300W power
supply and a lot more fans.
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The Tech Report has posted a roundup
of six Athlon golden finger overclocking cards. These things do
cost a bit of money, so you want to make sure you're getting the best
one.
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James over at CNewz sent word of an
interesting piece of news
this morning. MIT has created a 0.05 micron transistor gate with
248nm lithography. Here is a bit from the article:
The 50-nm (0.05-micron) transistor gates were produced by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory in
Lexington, Mass., using DUV 248-nm lithography equipment, said
NumeriTech.
"People have been predicting the end of optical lithography for
several years, saying that it can't extend beyond 100
nanometers," said Y.C. (Buno) Pati, president and chief executive
officer of NumeriTech. "TheMIT Lincoln Laboratory results prove
that with prudent use of phase shifting, optical lithography can be
extended much further than anyone ever thought was possible."
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Monday
- February 21st
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Hardware Central has
written up an interesting article,
in which they state their views on the future of RAM and explain the
contending technologies as well. Who will come out on top? RDRAM
or DDR RAM? or will a new standard emerge?
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Hardware-One has posted a review
of Yamaha's new CRW8424E 8X Write, 4X ReWrite and 24X Read ATAPI CD-RW
drive. Yamaha is one of my favorites when it comes to
burners! Head over and see if they agree.
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Sharky Extreme has posted the
7th
volume of their Private Eye collection. In this volume, they
cover Intel's Developer Forum where Intel showed off a Williamette
running at 1.5GHz. Along the same lines, Thresh's
Firing Squad has posted part
one of their IDF coverage.
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3DWars has posted a comparison
between SCSI and IDE technologies. IDE has made some great strides
over the past couple of years, but then again, so has SCSI and in my
opinion there still is no comparison. SCSI kicks ass!
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of Plextor's PlexWriter 8/4/32A ATAPI CD-ReWriteable drive. Great
performance, top notch reliability and a decent price make this a tough
package to beat.
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SystemLogic has posted a review
of D-Link's DHN-910 10Mbps Phoneline networking kit. D-Link is
really making some great kits these days, and is bringing high-quality
networking to the mainstream.
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iXBT Hardware has posted a review
of the SiS630 chipset. This integrated chipset is in my opinion
good for the garbage. What really pisses me off, is how so many
computer stores will advertise a great deal on a "high-end"
Pentium III system and not tell you what motherboard they are giving
you. Then when you inquire about it, they tell you that this piece
of crap is a fabulous board because it has all these features!
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Well, that's the end of our reading week (sometimes known as spring
break) and what did I get done? A whole lot of nothing. Why
is it that when you plan to get a whole shit load of stuff done, there
just isn't enough time in the day to do it? Oh well, enough of my
complaining :) Anyway, A fellow webmaster sent word of a fairly
new site called Tweak Town.
Head over and check out this site
for Windows 9x tweaking tools/information.
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Saturday
- February 19th
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We haven't seen a review of this great speaker set in quite a
while. Game Forces has posted
a review
of Cambridge Soundworks/Creative Labs FPS2000 Digital 4.1 piece speaker
set. Great sound, great price, what more do you want?
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Maximum3D has posted a review
of Aureal's Vortex2 SQ2500 Quad PCI sound card. If you've been
under a rock for the last six months, this card features a new revision
of the Vortex2 chip and has S/PDIF output and a very nice software
bundle.
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Beyond3D has posted a review
of VideoLogic's Sirocco Crossfire 4.1 speaker set. They gave this
nice looking package a 95% rating!
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted a review
of Plextor's 40X Ultra Wide SCSI CD-ROM drive. The real benefit to
having a SCSI CD-ROM drive is the low CPU utilization which means less
slow-downs in games and other apps.
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Sharky Extreme has written up
an article
on Dell's 64MB SGRAM DDR GeForce card. What will an extra 32MB of
DDR RAM get you? Head over to find out.
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Entech Taiwan has released a
minor update the powerstrip released a couple of days ago. This new
version supports the new Windows 2000 drivers released by 3dfx and ATI,
grab it below:
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Adam over at 3DHardware has
posted an article
on a new type of polymer compound that may take the place of silicon
which is used as a semi-conductor in today's electronic equipment.
Head over and read this very interesting article.
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Hardware News Net has posted an
article
on how to cool an FC-PGA Pentium III 500E and what results you can get
out of it. Of course, this applies to all P3 FC-PGA CPU's, but
they specifically used a 500 in this article.
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iXBT
Hardware seems to be the first to get a crack at Abit's new video
cards. They have posted a review
of Abit's Siluro GT2 TNT2 Ultra card. Seems to be a regular TNT2
Ultra with a few minor additions.
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Friday
- February 18th
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Speedy3D has posted a review
of FIC's KA-11 Slot-1 VIA Apollo Pro 133A based ATX motherboard.
They didn't give it too good of a rating.
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Gamelinks.net has posted the third
part of their guide to building your own gaming machine. This
portion helps you optimized your system and put in the final components.
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t-break has posted a review
of Microstar's MS-6301 i820 based Slot-1 ATX motherboard. This
board does work with SDRAM, but you're performance is going to be worse
than a BX motherboard.
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Joseph sent over an email letting us know that Reactor
Critical has got the new NVIDIA Detonator 3.77 drivers for Windows
9x. If you're having problems with the official released drivers,
or you're just bored, give them a try:
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Andre has let us know that, ASUS has
posted some new beta
drivers for their video cards running under Windows 2000. Grab them
below:
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Anand Tech has posted Report #2
and #3 of Intel's Developer Forum. Check out these very
interesting articles below:
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GamePC has posted a shootout
between 6 NVIDIA GeForce 256 DDR based cards. This article should
really help you decide which DDR card to get, if you were planning on
getting one in the first place :)
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ATI has released new drivers for their
Rage 128/Rage 128 Pro based cards. Grab them below:
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of Everglide's Giganta mouse pad. If you need a really big,
high-quality mouse surface and you like the color blue, check this one
out.
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Creative Labs has joined the onslaught of companies releasing Windows
2000 drivers. These drivers are for the following products:
Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT, 3D Blaster RIVA TNT2 3D Blaster RIVA TNT2
Ultra Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT2 Value (32Mb) 3D Blaster GeForce/3D
Blaster GeForce Pro:
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Hardware Central has
posted an article
on Intel's Willametter processor, the first new processor design since
the Pentium Pro. Can you imagine having one of these in your
system running at 1.5GHz?!?
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Aureal has finally released those 2048
drivers with EAX support as well as a new beta driver for Windows NT. Grab
them below:
Note: I've posted them locally on our server, since
Aureal's is very bogged down.
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PC Stats has posted an article
which tells you what you need to know when buying a heatsink for your
Pentium III Coppermine FC-PGA CPU. Head over and read this
informative article.
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3dfx has released some new NT and
Windows 2000 drivers. Most notable are the Voodoo3 Windows 2000
drivers, as you may already know, the V3 drivers that come with Win2K
suck! Grab them below:
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Overclockin.com has posted the second
part of their RAM roundup. This huge roundup takes a look at
memory sticks from Apacer, Kingston, Memory Man, Mitsubishi, PNY,
Samsung and Siemens in both PC100 and PC133 flavors and even threw up
some benchmarks.
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NVIDIA has slapped up some release
candidate reference drivers for Windows 2000. This driver works
with all RIVA TNT, NVIDIA Vanta, RIVA TNT2 and GeForce 256 based cards:
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SystemLogic has posted a follow-up
to their LiteON FS020 Case review. In this part, they take you
through the steps of modifying this baby for some supercooling action.
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ELSA has released new drivers for
their ERAZOR X and X2 GeForce boards. These drivers are based on
the reference 3.76 drivers. Grab the file below:
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Thursday
- February 17th
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CNewz also sent some over
some news
which they found regarding Intel's i870 chipset. Check out this
bit:
The company will give a preview of its 870 chip set which will
allow OEMs to make symmetric multiprocessing systems with 16 or more
processors. "We want to push our 32- and 64-bit microprocessor
architectures deeper into enterprise business networks," said
Justin Rattner, director of Intel's server architecture labs in
Hillsboro, Ore.
The 870 chip set will use a cache coherent link called a scalability
port, which will allow OEMs to attach multiple four-way SMP processors
into larger, more powerful systems with distributed system memory. The
chip set is targeted at the next-generation 32-bit "Foster"
processors expected to ship late this year and the 64-bit
"McKinley" processors which will ship next year.
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CNewz sent word of some
interesting news. The QDR (Quad Data Rate) Consortium has completed the
specs for the new QDR SRAM standard. Too bad we couldn't use this
stuff as our main system memory! It will most likely be used for
Routers and Switches. Check out the rest of the article here.
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Gamewire has posted a review
of Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro GeForce 256 DDR card.
This is one of the cheapest DDR cards you can find, because it doesn't
come with a whole lot of extras like other cards do.
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Since Windows 2000 is of much interest to many of you, here is a very
extensive 20 page review
from ActiveWin to help you decide
if you want to get it or not. I personally love it, the only time
it's ever crashed on me in the last year of beta testing it, is when I
wrote a really terrible piece of code that sucked memory like there was
no tomorrow :) Other than that, it's been rock solid and so fun to
use.
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted a review
of AMD's latest processor, the Athlon 850MHz. It's nice to see all
the benchmarks and all, but who in their right mind would put down the
money for one of these bad boys, when you could simply buy a 650 for
MUCH cheaper and probably get 850 or higher anyway.
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Eric over at Fast Graphics
has posted a huge roundup
of 6 of the most popular MP3 portable players on the market. For
those of you thinking of making this expensive purchase, checking out
this article should be very helpful.
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Sharky Extreme has also
posted a review
of ASUS' V6800 Deluxe GeForce 256 DDR card. This card has DDR
performance, plus a whole bunch of extras not found on other DDR
cards. Head over and see if these extra features are worth the
extra money.
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Sharky Extreme has posted a review
of FIC's KW15 Slot-1 and Socket-370 motherboard which is based Intel's
I810e chipset. A pretty decent board because you've got the choice
between Slot-1 or Socket-370 and it's got 5 PCI slots but only 2 DIMM
slots.
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HardOCP has posted a review
of Global WIN's FKP32 Socket-370 cooler. Look's like they've
really put a lot of effort into this new design. Head over and see
how it performs.
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Here are a few new downloads to which you may want to play with.
First we have the new IomegaWare 2.2.1 (Zip/Jaz/Clik) software for
Windows 2000 which adds a bunch of functionality and extra things you
can do with your removable disks. Secondly, I noticed over at 3DChipset,
that Creative Labs has released a new version of their AGPWizard.
This program lets you tweak AGP settings on your Creative Labs video
card. Finally we have a utility called GeTune, which allows you to
tweak driver settings with both the NVidia reference drivers and OEM
drivers. Grab them below:
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Beyond3D has posted a follow-up to
their article
on benchmarking with Hardware T&L (found on the GeForce and
Savage2000) using 3DMark 2000. In case you have have not heard
about this, the debate is about 3DMark 2000's method of testing T&L
performance. They chose to default to their own T&L routines
instead of those found in DirectX 7. Also, the GeForce has been
giving out some very low results with a certain amount of hardware
lights turned on, etc. Head over and see what new info they bring to the
table.
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Entechtaiwan has released a
new version of their popular video card/monitor tweaking utility,
Powerstrip. They've all released a new version of PCIList. Here is
the info and links to download:
PowerStrip
2.64 (641kb) is now available for downloading, with improved
Windows 2000 support for those of you who have, within a couple of
hours after the official release of the new OS, grown tired of waiting
for updated drivers and utilities from your board manufacturer. Direct
hardware support - including clock controls, custom refresh rates,
gamma correction and screen adjustment - is available for all
supported chips, and driver switches (vsync etc.) are now implemented
for 3dfx, 3dlabs, ATI, and NVidia (OpenGL only). For Windows 9x/ME
users, this is the first release of the PowerStrip to include desktop
icon management, along with a more efficient multi-threaded
application launcher. Also, visual controls are now provided for AGP
configuration: transfer rate can be safely changed, and sidebanding
and fast writes can be enabled, on-the-fly without restarting Windows
or mucking around in the registry. As well, PCIList
(161kb) - a free little AGP and PCI diagnostic utility for Windows
9x/ME - has been updated to Version 2.01, fixing a problem with
phantom devices.
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Ace's Hardware has posted a
very good article
on Intel's upcoming Wiliametter processor. If you want to know all
the intricacies of this bad boy, head over and read this article.
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ELSA has released
ERAZOR III drivers for Windows 2000. Today is the official launch
day for Windows 2000, so expect quite a few IHV's to release drivers for
their products today or in the next little while. Grab the driver
below:
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Hardware Central has
posted a review
of SMC's Tiger 1000 NIC card. This is the first review of a card
that is based on the new 1000Mbps Ethernet standard. Goodbye Cat 5
cable! You need fibre optic cable now!
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of PowerChips PowerCharger Athlon overclocking card.
Unfortunately, this is another one that has quite a hefty price tag.
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Wednesday
- February 16th
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3DWars has posted their second
article on extreme cooling (the first
article explored water cooling). In this article, they took a
Peltier element, an Alpha P3125 and together, they were able to get
700MHz out of a P3 500 with a very minimal increase in heat.
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Gamewire has posted a review
of Hewlett Packard's 9100i 8X Write, 4X ReWrite and 32X Read ATAPI CD-RW
drive. Performance is great, reliability is high and price is also
good, so if you're in the market for a CD Burner, take a good look at
this one.
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GXS has gotten hold of a
new Savage2000 reference driver which is slightly newer than the one
Diamond has posted on their site. It seems that the Savage2000
will be used in a board from Sparkle. Grab the driver below:
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Tech-Review has posted an overview
of Intel's upcoming Williamette processor. This is the first new
processor design from Intel, since the Pentium Pro was released.
Here is a bit from the article on it's new features:
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Support for Willamette System bus (400 MHz data bus)
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Integer ALU clocked at twice the CPU frequency
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Higher bandwidth for instruction fetches than the Intel P6 family
of processors
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Execution Trace Cache
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Hyper Pipelined Technology
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Advanced Transfer Cache
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Compatibility with existing IA-32 applications and operating
systems
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3DSpotlight has posted an guide
which tells you how you can tweak your sound card and speakers to get
the best performance out of them. There's quite a few good tips in
this article.
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Hardware Central has posted
a review
of Tyan's Trinity 400 S1854 Slot-a VIA Apollo Pro 133A based
motherboard. This is one of the best Apollo Pro 133A boards you
can get and with the new revision and BIOS update, it is quite speedy.
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3DSoundSurge has posted a review
of Altec Lansing's ACS56 Powerplay Plus 4.1 piece speaker system.
These are a step up from the ACS54's and feature more powerful speakers
and a better subwoofer all for a great price.
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of Alpha's P7125 Athlon cooler. This is one heck of an awesome
cooler, but $50 is quite a bit to spend on a cooler. Here is a bit
from the review:
The Alpha P7125 is the highest performing Athlon cooler you can buy
at this time. However it's also one of the most expensive coolers you
can buy. With a price tag of $48.99, it's more than twice the cost of
an AMK CO-P701. Is it worth it? That's up to you. In my case I got an
extra 75Mhz for $31.75 over the cost of the CO-P701. While the P7125
is mainly intended as an Athlon cooler it will work perfectly fine on
an old Pentium II. Athlons and PII's use the same mounting system. You
will get the advantage of a copper base plate if you a P7125 for your
PII instead of just a P125.
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The Tech Report has posted a review
of Antec's KS-188 Full Tower ATX case. Looking to build a server,
or just want a huge case for all those fans, then head on over and see
if this one is any good.
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