January 1 - 6, 1999
Archive

It has hardly ever been as easy to give my recommendations as in this graphics card comparison. The only TNT cards that I would buy are the Asus V3400TNT or even better the Asus V3400TNT/TV as well as the Hercules Dynamite TNT. Although those cards are the only two that come without a software bundle, the hardware and usability features speak for themselves. The Asus cards have the best cooling, good drivers, excellent 'overclockability' and the V3400TNT/TV has the best video-out feature and is the only one with video-in feature as well. The Hercules card also comes with very good cooling, the best drivers and a guaranteed 'overclockability' to 98/125 MHz.

The AC313000 presents perhaps the last iteration of WD's aging 3-platter design. Each platter in this 5400rpm drive packs a rather contemporary 4.3 gigs of data (See Areal Density). The drive features a now-standard 9.5 millisecond random seek time. A 512k buffer rounds out the package. The AC313000 is the first drive to hit the market that incorporates the new ATA-66 standard. Proper ATA-66 operation requires an 80-conductor cable along with a motherboard that supports the spec (as of the writing of this article, there aren't many that do). Though it'll eventually become important in allowing future drives to realize their maximum transfer rates, ATA-66 doesn't do much for today's drives. Transfer rates for state-of-the-art ATA drives are hovering right around 15 MB/sec, just high enough to signal the call for ATA-33 (UltraDMA) rates. ATA-66 is a spec for the future, not the present.

 

The Rocket Replicator operates as a stand-alone unit that does not require a connection to a computer to operate. It can also function as an external 8x CD-Recorder that can be used on either a PC or Macintosh.

``In an eight-hour shift, the Rocket Replicator can write more than 50 full CDs,'' said Solomon. ``The Rocket Replicator is ideal for organizations requiring duplication of moderate volumes of discs. Small software companies, sales organizations who want to make copies of presentations or catalogs, musicians for demo discs, educators who want to create teaching materials for use by their students, and others will derive great benefit from the Rocket Replicator,'' Solomon noted.

 

• NOTE: This build will report that it is 3.0.9. This is to "force" a TweakIt Update. This allows TweakIt to remove any settings from the registry that have been left over and may be causing problems. For example, the "Error 13 : Type Mismatch". The final build of TweakIt will be 3.0.8.
• Added option to switch between STRING and DWORD Banshee registry settings. Once I compile a list of which cards use either STRING or DWORD settings, I will link this option directly to the card options. If you are certain that your card uses on or the other settings, please email me with your Banshee information (card, driver version, STRING or DWORD, etc) at Banshee Drivers.
• Added GRXCLOCK and MEMCLOCK (along with GRAPHICSCLOCKING and MEMCLOCKING) for use with some cards.
• Corrected Banshee Clock slider not updating after changing values from the dropdown box.
• Additional detection code for Voodoo 2 settings added
• Fully enabled GAMMA dropdown for selecting Direct3D, Glide or Both

• TweakIt (Win9X - 3.0.9 Build 5 - 817 KB)

 

I'd rate this board right up there along with the Abit BH6 and Soyo SY-6BA+ as the top 3 BX boards you can currently buy. Offering excellent expansion possibilities with its 5 PCI slots, and 4 DIMMs, along with stella stability both at both overclocked and non-overclocked speeds its hard to critise this board. It does cost more than the average board, but it oozes quality from every pore, from the excellent manual to the well thought out board layout. If only Gigabyte could somehow see their way clear to providing the ability to alter the core voltage of the CPU then I think we would have the near perfect overclockers board. Highly recommeded.

 

• K6-2 CXT Core Video Mem Optimizer (version 0.5 - 6.6KB)

 

• TNT Tweak Guide
• TNT Cooling Guide/Comparison
• Voodoo2 Overclocking Guide

 

The ELSA Erazor II has become a very popular option for prospective Riva TNT buyers. The main fact is that it is the only Riva TNT to include SGRAM instead of the slower SDRAM on the other video cards using Riva TNT chips out there. With the inclusion of SGRAM, theoretically this TNT can clock its memory from the default 110MHz to 125MHz. Also the Elsa Erazor II comes with a heatsink and "FAN" which is missing in most Riva TNTs as well. So is this enough to make the Elsa Erazor II the fastest Riva TNT on block. Read on.

 

The differences between Hercules TNT card compared to the others are not that numerous, but significant. Architecture design and AGP problems with the earlier cards have been addressed by Hercules, and they have added a nice active cooling unit, (for all you overclockers) as well as slightly faster SDram. Impressive even more is that on almost every benchmark graph that I have seen, the Hercules card performs slightly higher than on most of the other nVidia Riva TNT cards available at this time. Stability is said to be the best so far of any TNT card. Let us see what I think.

 

• Compaq Introduces Home-Networked Internet PC's (Techweb)
• Diamond Multimedia HomeFree Phoneline Press Release

 

Installation as a USB device was a piece of cake; we can't stress enough how convenient USB peripherals are. Calibration was also free of any hassles. Flying the unfriendly skies of Falcon 4.0 with the Gamestick was enjoyable, but those used to meatier sticks such as the CH Combatstick or even a ThrustMaster Top Gun will find that the Gamestick's thin shaft takes a little getting used to.

 

After some delay, the world's leading chipmaker plans to unveil 450-MHz versions of its high-performance Xeon. The new processors will incorporate as much as 2MB of secondary (or L2) cache, special high-speed memory that keeps the chips fed with data and instructions.

The new Xeon chip's core remains the same as that used in an ordinary Pentium II, but its cache runs at the same clock speed as the chip, instead of half as fast. Also, while a Pentium II comes with 512K of cache and can accommodate systems with two processors, the Xeon will come with 512K, 1MB or 2MB of secondary cache and can be used in one-, two-, and powerful four-processor servers.

 

• ASUS V3400TNT (Win9X - 1.02 - 4.77 MB)
• ASUS V3400TNT (WinNT4 - 1.02 - 493 KB)

 

The 400-MHz K6-2 now costs $158 in 1,000 lot quantities, the same as a 400-MHz Celeron and less than half the price of a $353 400-MHz Pentium II. The 380-MHz K6-2, meanwhile, was cut to $135 in volume and the 366-MHz was dropped to $123. Retail prices are slightly higher.

Although the prices are the same, the K6-2 offers more technology than the Celeron, added Allen. AMD's chips, for instance, come with a system bus running as fast as 100 MHz. The system bus, which serves as the main conduit between the processor and main memory, runs at 66 MHz on the Celeron and won't likely move to 100 MHz until 2000, Intel executives said today. K6-2 processors also come with 3D Now instructions, which improve performance of some graphics applications. "You are getting considerably more," Allen said.

 

Creative did have one ace in the hole: 125MHz SGRAM.  Almost the entire gaming community is participating in overclocking in some way or another.   Test results shown below were all collected with a default memory clock of 100MHz, and so therefore show a very narrow gap between the 3D Blaster Banshee and the competition.   While it would be unfair to compare a Banshee with SDRAM @ 100MHz to the 3D Blaster Banshee with SGRAM @ 125MHz, clocking the card to 125MHz can only increase the performance and widen the gap between it and the other Banshee based boards.  I noticed anywhere between 5-15% increases in performance in the games I play with the card clocked at 125MHz, and the card ran them all perfectly, without image corruption.   The SGRAM on this board makes if very stable at higher memory clock speeds, and gives the 3D Blaster Banshee a definite advantage over Banshee based boards with SDRAM.

 

• ATI RAGE PRO TURBO OpenGL ICD (Win9X - 5.35b57g Beta - 2.9MB)
• ATI RAGE PRO TURBO OpenGL ICD (Win9X - 5.40x09w RC - 2.9MB)

• Yahoo: Intel Unveils Faster Celeron Chips; Cuts Prices
• News.com: Intel's New Chip Sparks PC Market
• Techweb: Intel Introduces Celeron PC Chips

3DGW: Heretic 2 is supposed to have some kickin' A3D 2.0 support in the near future. Is it going to sound better than Half Life? If so, what can we expect?

David: Hahah, well I don't want to slam one game to hype another, but I will say that we were all really impressed with the way the Heretic II A3D 2.0 support came out.  The consensus from many people here was that it was the best 3D positioning they had ever heard in a game, and that included people who used to work for Crystal River, the ones who had pioneered the 3D audio processes we use.

 

Besides the fact that their products are continuously being replaced by newer, upgraded devices, the sheer number of add-on card vendors is making it increasingly difficult for companies to differentiate themselves. (3Dfx alone sells chips to nearly 30 customers.) In such a market, pricing becomes the chief competitive weapon.

For example, add-on cards based on 3Dfx's Voodoo Banshee 2D/3D graphics chip debuted in June at $150, but a month later had fallen to just $89 as a raft of competitors weighed in.

Exacerbating the overcrowded market scenario for smaller suppliers is the fact that large card companies often receive higher-volume discounts, and have the resources to write proprietary driver software and market the cards widely. But even the card makers with their own drivers are often bested by chip suppliers with superior software.

 

So in the end, is the "White Box" Montego II worth the $99? First off, to the end-user, the differences between the Vortex and the Vortex II are fairly subtle at the current time. Even new mainstream games such as Half-Life that "support" A3D do not fully support A3D 2.0 yet. The price of this version of the Montego II is also much too high for only the crippled 2-speaker card, drivers and Turtle Beach's "entertainment suite". For the same price, you could get Diamonds 4-speaker MX300 Vortex II based card. So whats the bottom line? If you are really desperate to get your hands on a Vortex II based card, but the Diamond MX300, or else you may want to wait for the full version of the Montego II.

I guess so! :)

Can a multiprocessor system be overclocked? Absolutely. However the difficulty of overclocking a system increases when you have a multiprocessor system, since you must take into consideration that not all of the processors in the system may be able to cope with the overclocked speed. Supermicro's dual processor BX boards do allow for overclocking through the use of increased Front Side Bus speeds (112MHz on their BX/GX boards), and the Soyo board that AnandTech used in the tests allowed for overclocking through the use of the 75MHz FSB setting. The Dual Pentium II 300 system overclocked fine to 338MHz using the 75MHz FSB, however if you're planning for your system to be used without a single crash, you may want to avoid the thought of overclocking entirely.

 

After donning my lab coat, I parked my girlfriend, who has never played Half-Life (FPSes make her hurl), in front of my computer.  I slapped my pimpy 70's headphones on her, and blindfolded her.  Be quiet you pervs.  Then I proceeded to move around in the game, with God mode engaged, and ask her where the helicopter was 15 times.  She gave responses like "ahead and to the left," "behind me and right above me," or "up and a little to the lef..." uhh never mind.  Out of 15 tries, she was correct 12 times.   You do the math.

 

Giving verdicts tend to be very hard, but this time it was easy. This is with a high degree of probability, the best CD-ROM drive on the market. It has an increadible transfer rate but still it rotates with only a speed equivalent to around 12X. It is stable and reliable. Has the best of two worlds. Imagine what they can do with a drive using the technology but spins at 20X? That has yet to be seen.

 

The unit were looking at today is called the "KryoTech Cool K6-2 500MHz Workstation". Propelled by an AMD K6-2 400MHz CPU that's been cooled to a chilly -40 Celsius and subsequently overclocked by Kryotech to 500MHz, the Cool K6-2 500 offers performance that's superior to anything in AMD's stock lineup.

 

I would buy my dad the Sidewinder. He would just plug it in, and it would work. I'd buy my son the RS Force, because I can still hear their laughter as the wheel nudges and spins them through Monster Truck Madness. They like mud, and they could use it on their Nintendo 64 if they bought a $25 add-on cartridge. And I will buy myself the Wingman.

These three controllers provide such a varying set of features that ideally, I'd like to have all three of them set up for the family. But I'm the only one who gets to play on the Wingman.

 

For testing purposes, we limited our overclocking experiments to bus frequency overclocking, from 66 to 100Mhz. This allowed us to push our Celeron 366 at a toasty 550 MHz, not unheard of for current Pentium II or Celeron processors, but definitely in the top echelon of the performance scale. According to the hardware monitoring circuitry on the motherboard, the Celeron never exceeded 49 degrees Celsius while operating at 366Mhz, or 53 degrees while clocked at 550Mhz. These measurements were taken on a motherboard test bed without a case in a fairly warm room (ambient temperature 26 degrees C), so as always your mileage may vary.

Wow, 550 sounds very sweet!!

• New in 2.08: Justin stops smoking crack to fix the high CPU consumption in 2.07.
• New in 2.07: Stupid VC++ 6 bugfix (caused preferences crashes on some systems)
• Experimental Gapless Playback (a.k.a. continuous playback) support via new output plug-in.
• Improved CDDB support.
• New info-on-demand reading mode. Faster for HUGE playlists.
• New bar analyzer mode for built-in visualization. Rocks!
• Better directory and drive adding support (you can add a whole audio CD by typing the drive letter, i.e. 'd:\')
• Added SHOUTcast title reading to Nitrane. Improved HTTP streaming (non-blocking)
• Made http:// optional in URL location for you lazies out there.
• Built with VisC++6, faster and smaller than previous Winamps.

• Winamp (Win9X - 2.08 - 521 KB)

Now, here’s the stunner. The chips containing the first set of symbols were the ones that all performed and nearly all required no voltage increase. The second set of symbols were the dogs. I decided to pull out the CPU’s I’d had in the past that hadn’t performed and, sure enough, they all had the second symbol, regardless of production week! For additional verification, I borrowed a half-dozen of variety two from my local distributor, and these were weaklings also.

 

While I have never heard of such a thing as a heat dissipating circuit board, Creative Labs claims the Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT has this feature. Could those light green squares be those heat dissipating parts of the PCB? I don't know and because Creative doesn't think I rate a reply, we won't know for now. In any case, if the Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT does indeed have a heat dissipating circuit board, then it would certainly be an added advantage for overclockers.

 

Thanks to 125MHz SGRAM, the Victory II is one of the faster Banshee boards out there. With Elsa generally on top of driver and bios updates, it is hard to go wrong with the Victory II if you're looking for a Banshee board. Even with its added benefits, the Victory II is not priced significantly different from other Banshee's out there, making it pretty hard to resist.

3DNow! covers 3D/Gaming very well and also DVD decoding. Special features like 3DNow! are nice but they require unique software support which takes time, effort, and of course applicable software.   For 3DNow!/KNI, applicable suggests that the software must spend a lot of it's time running code that can be parallelized (is that a word?) due to the SIMD nature. 3DNow! is very useful and you will see an even stronger support effort from AMD and the industry in 99.   (which will be impressive given how well things went this year... many analysts doubted AMD's 3DNow!...)

If I had to describe AMD's near-term technology strategy, I would say "BRUTE FORCE using hardware to run existing/upcoming software faster" (as it is written--no mods necessary).   If you look what we're doing with K6-3, we added a big chunk of L2 cache that buys you a considerable gain in performance at the same clockspeed.

With K7, you've seen the specs; we've beefed everything up.  It's a monster.

That said, when you combine the brute force of the upcoming CPUs with the elegance of 3DNow!, performance levels in 99 are going to be a very cool thing. Gaming/PC geeks like myself will very happy.

Happy new year!   99 is going to rock!
Keith