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February
9 - 15,
2000: Archive
Tuesday
- February 15th
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SystemLogic has posted a review
of the LiteON FS020 Full Tower ATX case. This is one really large
case, and has some very good cooling options.
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Anand Tech has posted the first
part of their Intel Developer Forum coverage. In this part
they take a look at the new CPU's Intel is working on, namely the
Williamette and Timna processors. Check out this tidbit:
One of the
biggest features of the Willamette is its ability to run the Integer
ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) at twice the clock speed of the
CPU. This means that on a 1.5GHz Willamette, the Integer ALU is
actually running at 3.0GHz. For games this won’t increase
performance by a large amount due to their largely floating point
oriented performance dependency however in business applications and
other applications that are primarily integer performance dependent
the Willamette will truly excel.
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According to this
article over at CNet News.com,
Intel demonstrated an Williamette CPU running at 1.5GHz. The
article doesn't state whether it needed special cooling or anything like
that, but it did state that we won't see these in systems for quite some
time.
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FullOn3D has posted a review
of Everglide's Giganta mouse pad. They even compare it to the the
Ratpadz mouse pad.
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Tweak3D has posted a Windows
9x/Millennium Tweak guide. This guide gives you some good tips
on how you can speed up the good old Win9X core for maximum
performance. By the way, Millennium is the next version of the
Window 9x. It is officially called Windows ME (Millennium
Edition).
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BXBoards has posted a review
of EPoX's brand new EP-7KXA Slot-A Athlon motherboard which is based on
the highly anticipated VIA KX133 chipset! Head over and see how
this board performed.
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3DHardware has posted a review
of Pioneer's 10X ATAPI DVD-ROM drive. It received an overall grade
of A-, which is quite good. I have the 6X drive and love it.
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GASource has posted their review
of Guillemot/Hercules' 3D Prophet DDR-DVI card. If you want a quality
made GeForce DDR card, this is it. This bit says it all:
There isn't anything really bad that I could say about this card.
About the only downside to the card is that it comes with a hefty
price tag. The amazing thing is that it is one of the cheapest DDR
boards on the market (after the rebate of course). If you are in the
market for the fastest video card available, then look no further. It
may not be the most feature packed card on the market but it does what
it does, very well.
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Active Hardware has posted a review
of Soltek's SL-02A+ Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter card. This card
does work with the Coppermine FC-PGA CPU's.
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3DSpotlight has posted their review
of Aureal's excellent Vortex2 SQ2500 Quad speaker, PCI sound card.
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Gamelinks.net has posted the second
part of their guide on building your own gaming machine. This part
focuses on putting all the chosen hardware components together.
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Extreme Hardware has posted a review
of Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live X-Gamer. A good package, at a
good price and it comes with some very decent full-version games!
This makes for a great upgrade, if you need a new sound card.
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iXBT Hardware has posted a review
of Diamond's Viper II Savage2000 based card. As usual, they have some
great benchmarks comparing it to a GeForce SDR and DDR, and an ATI Rage
Fury MAXX.
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Ga'ash Soffer has thrown up his predictions of what we'll see from each
of the big 3D accelerator manufacturers in coming months.
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I noticed over at 3DFiles.com that
a new version of the S3Tweak utility has been released. This works
with the entire S3 Savage line of chips. Grab it below:
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted an interesting article
which compares the chipsets available for the Pentium III and Athlon
platforms. They examine how they differ in features and
performance.
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Sharky Extreme has posted an interview
with the boys at Bitboys Oy regarding their Glaze3D project. How
it's coming along, what features it will have, when the hell we're going
to see some silicon .. stuff like that.
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MadOnion.com has released a new benchmarking program called Video 2000. GPU3D
has posted an article
which explains what exactly it does and HotHardware
has already posted some results
using the program. You can grab it yourself right here.
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Monday
- February 14th
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Anand Tech with their brand new,
very nice looking layout has posted an Athlon
850MHz review. This review has benchmarks using shipping
motherboards with VIA's KX133 chipset, head over and check out those
numbers!
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted an interview
they conducted with Peter Wicher, Director of Product Marking at
3dfx. Head over, if you're interested in what's going on at 3dfx.
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3DRage has posted a GeForce
tweak guide. As if the card alone doesn't provide enough
power! Head over to learn how to squeeze the most out of your
GeForce.
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Real World Technologies has
posted an article
which takes a look at the age old debate of RISC (Reduced Instruction
Set Computing) vs. CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing). The
article is very well written and has a ton of information on the topic.
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Joan sent me an email letting us know that this
site has some Windows 2000 drivers for S3's Savage3D, Savage4 and
Trio3D. Grab them below:
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The Tech Zone has also posted an article
which directly compares Logitech's Cordless Mouseman to Microsoft's
Intellimouse Explorer. Should be an interesting battle.
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of the 2CoolPC Plus cooling system. This interesting device uses a
fairly powerful fan to channel air around the CPU area of the
case. Apparently, it works very well.
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CPUReview has posted an extensive
review of ASUS's
K7M Slot-A ATX Athlon motherboard. Bill noted a few annoying
problems, but when it came down to it, the board performed very well.
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Overclockin.com has posted a review
of AMK's CO-AMK-2X60 heatsink/fan combo. This Pentium III cooler
has a huge Xeon heatsink with a couple of large fans mounted on it.
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Dan's Data has posted an excellent
step-by-step guide on
how to build a basic computer using Intel's CA810E. The principle
is the same with pretty much all motherboards. If you've ever
wanted to try building you're own system, this guide should help you get
started.
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Joseph Foley has notified us that Creative
Labs has released 3.68 drivers. I'm assuming these will work
with the 3D Blaster TNT, TNT2 and GeForce/GeForce Pro. Grab it
below:
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3DHardware has written up a very
interesting article
on C3D's FMD-ROM clear disc. This CD-ROM sized disc can hold
140GB!! They also look at C3D's other innovations, such as the the
ClearCard and ClearCube's. Very scary stuff.
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Saturday
- February 12th
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Aureal has posted a brand new A3D
driver on their site. I'm assuming this driver has support for
A3D 3.0. As soon as the 2048 drivers are available we'll have the
full package. This executable will work with all Vortex cards,
grab it below:
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Exxtreme3D has posted a review
of Kensington's VideoCAM. Overall 2.5 out of 5 rating, which means
that you should probably be looking elsewhere for a camera for you're
system.
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Hot Hardware has posted a review
of CDI's Alaska Cool-Case. Not only does this thing have a ton of
fans and cooling solutions built-in, but it also looks very stylish too!
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Anand Tech has thrown up a review
of Iwill's WS133-N i810E based Slot-1 ATX motherboard. Sometimes,
the i810E looks like a better solution than the i820, what is this world
coming to?
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The guys over at Tech-Junkie
had the opportunity to visit VideoLogic's offices in the UK.
They've got some interesting information in this article,
with some bits on VideoLogic's upcoming PowerVR3 chip.
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3D-Unlimited has posted a review
of Quantum's Fireball KX 27.3GB 7200 RPM ATA-66 hard drive.
Sporting a 512KB buffer and an 8.5ms average seek time, this baby is the
next best thing besides SCSI. If only the buffer was a tad
bigger.
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FastMHz has posted a review
of the Ultra Thin Hard Disk Cooler. This device looks quite interesting
actually, head over and see how it performs.
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Friday
- February 11th
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of Gigabyte's entry into the GeForce market, the GA-GF2560 SDRAM
card. Head over and see how it compares to the rest.
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As you may have already heard, AMD has announced
that their Athlon 850MHz CPU three days earlier than expected.
Here are the first set of reviews of the new 850MHz monster:
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Reverend over at the
Pulpit has posted an 8 page review
of NVIDIA's Quadro 64MB DDR card. Do you want to play some games
and have some crazy power for 3D graphics creation? Have a look at
this card.
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Hardware Central has posted
their coverage
of 1GHz+ processors being shown off at the International Solid State
Circuits Conference. They've covered Intel's and IBM's goods, but
not AMD.
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The Tech Report has taken
ComputerNerd's POW!er K7 Pro overclocked Athlon 500 to 750MHz system out
for a spin and has put it against an 800MHz Athlon evaluation system
from AMD. How did the Nerd box perform? Head over and check
it out.
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SystemLogic has posted an article
which takes a look at Transmeta's Crusoe bad boy. While they don't have
an actual chip to test out yet, they have provided most of the
information you can find.
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John over at Hardware News Net
has let us know that he's posted an article
which takes a look at the overclocking problems, solutions and results
of a PIII 500E and 550E. Here is a bit from the article:
This article contains the results from overclocking 4 PIII 500Es
and 2 PIII 550Es with 2 Celeron 300As thrown in the middle of it all.
One of the PIII 500E CPUs discussed in this article was tested here at
Hardware News Net. The others are the overclocking results of CPUs
that some of our readers sent in to us in response to our "Overclocking
4 PIII 500Es" article. We discuss the problems that the users
had in overclocking their systems and what they did to try and solve
the problems. Thanks to everybody that has responded to the original
article and shared their results.
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Ironwolf sent word that there are new leaked NVIDIA beta drivers
floating around. Beware, if you use the CoolBits=3 option, it will not
work in this version. Grab them below:
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Thursday
- February 10th
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Ace's Hardware has posted the second
part of their Ultimate 3D Video Deathmatch. In this well
written article, they take a look at the overclocking capabilities, DVD
playback and image quality of those same 9 cards they looked at in the first
part.
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Dan's Data has posted a review
of Sony's VPL-CS1 ultra-portable LCD projector. Need to do
presentations away from the board room? Take a look at this
device.
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Hardware-One has posted a review
of Sony's G500 21" flat CRT monitor-o-love. Damn, what I
would give to get one of these! :)
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Planet GeForce has posted a review
of Absolute Multimedia's Outrageous 3D GeForce DDR card. This is
probably the cheapest DDR card you can get, but there is no software
bundle.
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Active Hardware has joined the
legions and posted a review
of Iwill's Slocket II Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter card. For
those of you planning to get an FC-PGA Pentium III, this converter card
will support it.
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GamePC has posted a roundup
of PC133 SDRAM sticks. The contenders include: EMS, Corsair,
Crucial and Infineon.
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Anand Tech has posted their review
of D-Link's new DHN-910 10Mbps phone line networking kit. This is
one of the first phone line kits that is rated at 10Mbps. Phone
line networking used to be limited to 1Mbps.
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Storage Review has posted a review
of Seagate's Cheetah 36LP. This is Seagate's 4th generation 10,000
RPM SCSI hard drive that sports a 4MB buffer, 5.2ms access time and the
Ultra160/m SCSI interface.
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3dfx has released new reference
drivers for Banshee based cards. Check out all the fixes here and
grab it below:
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted a comparison
between Diamond/S3's Viper II Savage2000 based card and NVIDIA's GeForce
256 SDRAM card. The GeForce won most tests, but the Viper II
wasn't too far behind.
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GamePC has posted the first review
I've seen of Soyo's K7AIA Slot-A Athlon motherboard which is based on
AMD's Irongate chipset. Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot
of overclocking options on this board. Here is a bit from the
review:
As the graphs show above, enabling SuperBypass does give quite a
nice performance boost. The Soyo does beat out the Gigabyte, when both
boards have SuperBypass disabled, but both boards still get thoroughly
wooped by Asus's custom designed K7M. We're happy to see that even
being based on a reference design, Soyo somehow managed to tweak
performance to get slightly higher benchmarks. While the Asus offers
slightly higher performance, it's widely known that the K7M has small
bugs that still haven't been worked out that can jeopardize system
stability, whereas the Soyo is rock solid.
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FastMHz has posted their review
of Creative Labs Annihilator Pro GeForce DDR card. This is the North
American version of the CL GeForce Pro card, they are the same exact
card.
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Gamers Depot has posted a review
of AOpen's AX6C-L i820 based ATX motherboard which uses RDRAM.
AOpen make's very solid boards, so if you're looking for an i820 board,
take a good look at this one.
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CPUReview has posted a review
of 3DLabs Oxygen VX1 workstation class graphics card. If you're into
creating 3D graphics and you're budget is rather low, you may want to
check out this card.
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3D GameForce has posted a review
of Creative Labs/Cambridge Soundworks Desktop Theatre 5.1 and compared
it to Altec Lansing's ACS48 3-piece speaker system. The good old
ACS48's could not be beat in sound quality and power, but if you want a
decent surround sound setup, the Desktop Theatre 5.1 is an inexpensive
way to get it.
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Wednesday
- February 9th
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3dfx has released new drivers for
their V3500 TV cards. There's a ton of fixes in this one, so if
you want to see them, click here. Otherwise, grab it below:
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These guys never rest. But I have to hand it to them for putting
together one hell of a review/hardware information database. Here
are Anand's latest reviews:
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t-Break has posted a review
of Cambridge Soundworks/Creative Labs Desktop Theatre DTT2500 Digital
5.1 piece speaker set. It also comes with it's own separate
amp/Dolby Digital decoder.
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Active Hardware has posted a review
of Intel's Pentium III Coppermine 500E FC-PGA coupled with FIC's KW15
i810E based motherboard. I would stick with my good old BX board,
but it'll still do the job!
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Tech-Junkie has posted a review
of Creative Labs GeForce Pro DDR card. Head over and see
what they thought of it, if you're planning to buy one.
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Hot Hardware has posted a review
of ATI's Xpert 2000 Pro card. This card is based upon their own
Rage 128 Pro chip and comes with 16/32MB of memory for a price of $99.
Not too bad I'd say.
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HardOCP has thrown up a third
set of tests which show how well hardware Transform and Lighting
works on NVIDIA's GeForce 256. They used Test Drive 6 again, but
made a few additional observations which are very interesting.
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SystemLogic has posted a review
of 3DCool's Dual Overkill P3 cooler. This one looks a lot like
Vantec's P3-D5030 cooler.
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Hardware Central has posted
a review
of MSI's BXMaster Slot-1 i440BX based ATX motherboard. This board
has 6 PCI slots, 4 DIMM slots and a Promise ATA66 controller chip as
well as a ton of overclocking options.
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3DSpotlight has posted an article
which has some good CD & DVD ROM optimization tips. Head on over and
give it a read.
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of AMK's CO-701 Athlon Cooler. According to them, this baby will
get an Athlon 500 to 800MHz!
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